“Brain and brain! What is ‘brain’?”
Can it be that everybody’s brain is hardwired for politics? Jonah Goldberg is skeptical:
Now it’s probably true that on average, there are subtle differences between conservatives and liberals when it comes to cognition. But you don’t have to be “anti-science” to see how the scientists are wildly overreaching from the data. Indeed, there’s a huge definitional problem. Conservatives resist growth of the state, but that’s not the same thing as resisting change. After all, capitalism is among the most powerful agents of change in human history, and conservatives are the ones defending it. Meanwhile, liberals are downright reactionary about preserving the Great Society and New Deal.
A famous study asserts that communist revolutionaries Josef Stalin and Fidel Castro were political conservatives because they resisted change once in power. If your algorithmic whirligig spits out the finding that Stalin, the global leader of communism for two decades, and Castro, the global dashboard saint of recrudescent left-wing asininity, are “politically conservative,” it’s time to take the gadget out to a field and smash it with baseball bats like the printer in the movie “Office Space.”
— Jonah Goldberg, “Comparing the Right and Left Brain”, The Washington Times, May 2, 2012
“Long ties to Marxism, socialism” — Surely not!
The campaign slogan for the incumbent administration includes the normally innocent word
“Forward.” But there appear to be sinister overtones:
Many Communist and radical publications and entities throughout the 19th and 20th centuries had the name “Forward!” or its foreign cognates. Wikipedia has an entire section called “Forward (generic name of socialist publications).”
“The name Forward carries a special meaning in socialist political terminology. It has been frequently used as a name for socialist, communist and other left-wing newspapers and publications,” the online encyclopedia explains.
The slogan “Forward!” reflected the conviction of European Marxists and radicals that their movements reflected the march of history, which would move forward past capitalism and into socialism and communism.
Hate crime? What hate crime?
Political correctness can get you killed — and even stuffed down the memory hole — in 21st-century America:
As Norfolk, Va., home of the world’s largest naval base, continues to be embroiled in racial controversy, the editor [Denis Finley] of the city’s newspaper [The Virginian-Pilot] is firing back at critics who claim his agency buried or covered up an attack by a mob of black teenagers against two of his white reporters two weeks [!] ago.
… As WND reported yesterday, the couple was pummeled at a stoplight the night of April 14 by dozens of black teens, and the newspaper had no mention of the incident for two weeks, despite the fact the victims, Dave Forster and Marjon Rostami, are both news reporters for the paper.
… “This is wrong on so many levels,” adds Robert Fogle of Portsmouth, Va. “The Pilot in not reporting the story has proven itself not to be a media outlet, but a tabloid. Gone are the days that there was a journalistic code of ethics to report the news, not be the news, and let the reader decide. The police in their reaction proved that they have forgotten that theirs is a duty to protect and serve, not cop an attitude while intimidating the victim. And, as is par for the course, the leadership, or lack of leadership, at the police department closed ranks and provided an excuse for the incompetent actions of the officers. Lastly, city leadership, that will surely fail their citizens in not demanding an investigation, and holding the police accountable for failure and dereliction of duty.”
… The Virginian-Pilot has a tie to President Obama, as its publisher since 2008, Maurice Jones, was nominated by Obama and recently confirmed by the U.S. Senate to be deputy secretary of HUD, the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
He was expected to start his new job in Washington on April 16, meaning he was still officially the Pilot’s publisher through the weekend of the Norfolk mob attack.
— Joe Kovacks, “Norfolk Paper Fires Back in Black-Mob Attack”, WND, May 3, 2012