This is NPR!
The White Supremacy of being Black.
You can't make this stuff up; it defies parody.
NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro asks Cristina Beltran, professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University, about the phenomenon of "multi-racial whiteness."
Extra credit question:
What kind of course is conducted by a "professor of social and cultural analysis" and who takes that kind of course?
I think I see where racism is born, nurtured and flowers in full bloom.
An NPR listener said the senator's passing marked "the end of civility in the U.S. Congress." Yes, indeed. Who among us does not mourn the lost "civility" of the 1987 Supreme Court hearings? Considering the nomination of Judge Bork, Ted Kennedy rose on the Senate floor and announced that "Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit down at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution."
Whoa! "Liberals" (in the debased contemporary American sense of the term) would have reason to find Borkian jurisprudence uncongenial but to suggest the judge and former solicitor-general favored resegregation of lunch counters is a slander not merely vile but so preposterous that, like his explanation for Chappaquiddick, only a Kennedy could get away with it. If you had to identify a single speech that marked "the end of civility" in American politics, that's a shoo-in. And in fact setting a new moral standard in which a drunken adulterer's appetites can cause a woman's death and he pays no price is also an end to civility.
If a towering giant cares so much about humanity in general, why get hung up on his carelessness with humans in particular? For Kennedy's comrades, the cost was worth it. For the rest of us, it was a high price to pay. And, for Ted himself, who knows? He buried three brothers, and as many nephews, and, as the years took their toll, it looked sometimes as if the only Kennedy son to grow old had had to grow old for all of them. Did he truly believe, as surely as Melissa Lafsky & Co do, that his indispensability to the republic trumped all else? That Camelot – that "fleeting wisp of glory," that "one brief shining moment" – must run forever, even if "How To Handle A Woman" gets dropped from the score. The senator's actions in the hours and days after emerging from that pond tell us something ugly about Kennedy the man. That he got away with it tells us something ugly about American public life.
As NPR's Board of Directors meet in Washington, D.C., this week, the network finds itself confronted by a series of dispiriting developments: a CEO on medical leave; a chief news executive forced out over sexual harassment allegations; the sudden resignation of a board chairman; fresh complaints over inappropriate behavior by colleagues; and a network roiled by tensions over the treatment of its female workers.
You should be suspicious of all men who engage in “ardent promotion of gender equality” in public settings.
I decided to venture out from my overwhelmingly Democratic neighborhood and engage Republicans where they live, work and pray. For an entire year, I embedded myself with the other side, standing in pit row at a NASCAR race, hanging out at Tea Party meetings and sitting in on Steve Bannon’s radio show.
I found an America far different from the one depicted in the press and imagined by presidents (“cling to guns or religion”) and presidential candidates (“basket of deplorables”) alike.
I spent many Sundays in evangelical churches and hung out with 15,000 evangelical youth at the Urbana conference. I wasn’t sure what to expect among thousands of college-age evangelicals, but I certainly didn’t expect the intense discussion of racial equity and refugee issues — how to help them, not how to keep them out — but that is what I got.
None of my new hunting partners fit the lazy caricature of the angry NRA member.
I also spent time in depressed areas of Kentucky and Ohio with workers who felt that their concerns had long fallen on deaf ears and were looking for every opportunity to protest a government and political and media establishment that had left them behind.
Some may take pleasure in the discomfort of the media, but it is not a good situation for the country to have the media in disrepute and under constant attack. Virtually every significant leader of this nation, from Jefferson on down, has recognized the critical role of an independent press to the orderly functioning of democracy. We should all be worried that more than 65 percent of voters think there is a lot of fake news in the mainstream media and that our major media institutions are seen as creating, not combatting, our growing partisan divide.Some of this loss of reputation stems from effective demagoguery from the right and the left, as well as from our demagogue-in-chief, but the attacks wouldn’t be so successful if our media institutions hadn’t failed us as well.None of this justifies the attacks from President Trump, which are terribly inappropriate coming from the head of government.
You can’t cover America from the Acela corridor, and the media need to get out and be part of the conversations that take place in churches and community centers and town halls.
Plenty have noted that by firing James Damore over a memo in which he criticized Google as “an ideological echo chamber,” the company just proved him right.In fact, plenty of people who seem to think they’re defending Google are doing just the opposite. NPR, for example, talked to a former Google software engineer who claimed that some women stayed home from work Monday because they were so upset over the memo.
 |
| A former Google software engineer says some women at the company skipped work today, upset by the leaked memo. n.pr/2hF4y0G |
You complain about “fake news,” but you, more than anyone and anything, have contributed to that phenomenon with your constant failure to report objectively, your inability to report on the story without sticking your political dick into it, your outright contempt for your audiences, and your intentional and sometimes malicious obfuscation. These egregious misdeeds are well-documented. Your inability to accurately report the story without snark or subjective garbage has made you something to be derided. The public trust in what you dish out is at an all time low.Are you really surprised that people seek out other sources of information? And are you really shocked when they begin to believe whatever they’re fed – even by ignorant, uninformed bloggers with their own agendas – as long as it’s not through you? Is it any wonder that any number of fake, misleading, biased sites have popped up to fill the void? You suck at your job, so someone else has to do it – no matter how poorly!You twist words. You omit critical information. You conceal your own opinions in a torrent of word salad, and try and mask it as factual reporting. You obfuscate. You insert inflammatory language into a straight news report to elicit a certain reaction.Take this current example from NPR. From the very title and first paragraph, not only do we know what the writer feels on the topic of Trump extending a program to afford veterans an opportunity to seek health care from private doctors, but we can also see how said writer tries to shape the reader’s opinion on the topic!
Trump Extends Troubled VA Program That Pays Private Doctors
Yeah, let’s make private doctors seem like a negative, dirty phrase, instead of an opportunity to choose for those who have made significant sacrifices for our country, and are now stuck in a broken, corrupt VA system.It’s a fix that hasn’t fixed much, but the troubled Veterans Choice program has been extended anyway.Hasn’t fixed much, according to whom? The author, who quite obviously hates it that veterans have a choice, and is taking the opportunity to slam the administration?
Veterans Choice is designed to allow veterans who have waited more than 30 days for an appointment at a VA facility, or who live more than 40 miles from one, instead to get care from private providers who then bill the VA. But it has been plagued with problems. Many vets complain that Choice actually makes getting care more difficult and time-consuming, and some health care providers have dropped out due to slow payments or administrative hassles.
“Plagued with problems.” Because that’s not inflammatory language or anything!“Many vets complain.” How many? I checked a Facebook page for Veterans’ complaints about the program itself. There were fewer than 20 since March, 2016. A January 2017 IG report detailed some of the problems investigators found with the program, including VC’s inadequate network of providers (I’m guessing due to the VA having 90 days to implement choice, which for a government bureaucracy is daunting, to say the least), and lack of strong oversight into payments for participating providers.While, NPR derps about “many vets complaining,” it doesn’t provide actual numbers, nor does it note that only 13 percent of eligible veterans actually took advantage of the program, according to the IG report!By omitting contextual information and using obviously inflammatory language to obliquely condemn the Trump Administration for having extended the program, the NPR undermined its own credibility in a transparent attempt to influence reader opinion on the issue.
A liberal journalist who has moderated forums hosted by the Clinton Global Initiative offered a brutal takedown of the organization, describing it as “creepy,” “disgusting” and “gross.”Adam Davidson, who hosts a show for NPR and has written for New York Magazine, also said during an appearance on Slate’s “Political Gabfest” podcast this week, that the Bill and Hillary Clinton-controlled group’s events are “all about buying access.”And later in the podcast, he said that the Clinton Foundation has made the Clintons “beholden to scumbags.”
INSKEEP: Though Dolezal did not settle on a single reason why she identified as black, the case does create an opportunity to examine how many of us think about race. We're going to talk about this with Gene Demby of NPR's Code Switch team. He's in our studios. Hi, Gene....DEMBY: Yeah. And, you know, the details of the story are sort of weird, and there's a man-bites-dog thing happening here, and, you know, her biological parents say that she's been deceiving the public and the NAACP by posing as a black woman. Her adopted brothers say that she asked them some years ago not to blow her cover. Even when she was at Howard University, a historically black college, she unsuccessfully sued the university for discriminating against her because she's white. So, you know, there's questions about, you know, her background, but, you know, this story sort of raises larger questions about the way we think about race and the way we think of identity.
So, I'm driving to the range yesterday while listening to NPR, as one does, and The Diane Rehm Show is discussing the Garland, Texas incident. There's a guest or two fighting a valiant rear-guard action for the First Amendment, trying to explain to the hostess that it even protects people's right to be icky and Republican.
Then they opened the lines for callers and I very nearly drove into the ditch, yelling at the radio and gnawing on the steering wheel in impotent frustration:"Welcome back, I'm Indira Lakshmanan, sitting in for Diane Rehm. We're talking about the Texas attack, ISIS, and the limits of free speech. I'm gonna read a post that we got here, an email from Jean, who says that if someone published cartoons of women, LGBTs, blacks, or a dozen other protected groups, wouldn't they be prosecuted as hate speech? And why does offense of anti-Islamic speech get a pass in the name of free speech?"Jean you ignorant slut, do you know what they call it when people publish "cartoons of women, LGBTs, blacks, or a dozen other protected groups"? They call it the internet....
Seriously, yesterday's Diane Rehm Show was the scariest thing I've heard on the radio since I listened to Mystery Theater on a battery operated boom box sleeping out in a friend's treehouse when I was twelve. It used to be that if there was one thing you could at least count on liberals for, it was a vigorous defense of free speech; it's a cause that has found the ACLU in bed with the NRA on at least one occasion I can think of. This new turn is... chilling.
Amid all the charges and countercharges in Washington over the government shutdown, there is at least one common theme: Barack Obama’s various charges always lead to a dead end. They are chaos, and chaos is hard to understand, much less refute.By that I mean when the president takes up a line of argument against his opponents, it cannot really be taken seriously — not just because it is usually not factual, but also because it always contradicts positions that Obama himself has taken earlier or things he has previously asserted. Whom to believe — Obama 1.0, Obama 2.0, or Obama 3.0?When the president derides the idea of shutting down the government over the debt ceiling, we almost automatically assume that he himself tried to do just that when as a senator he voted against the Bush administration request in 2006, when the debt was about $6 trillion less than it is now.When the president blasts the Republicans for trying to subvert the “settled law” of Obamacare, we trust that Obama himself had earlier done precisely that when he unilaterally subverted his own legislation — by quite illegally discarding the employer mandate provision of Obamacare. At least the Republicans tried to revise elements of Obamacare through existing legislative protocols; the president preferred executive fiat to nullify a settled law.When the president deplores the lack of bipartisanship and the lockstep Republican effort to defund Obamacare, we remember that the president steamrolled the legislation through the Congress without a single Republican vote.When the president laments the loss of civility and reminds the public that he uses “calm” rhetoric during the impasse, we know he has accused his opponents of being on an “ideological crusade” and of being hostage takers and blackmailers who have “a gun held to the head of the American people,” while his top media adviser Dan Pfeiffer has said that they had “a bomb strapped to their chest.”When the president insists that the Republican effort to hold up the budget is unprecedented, we automatically deduce that, in fact, the action has many precedents, and on frequent prior occasions was a favored ploy of Democrats to gain leverage over Republican administrations.In short, whenever the president prefaces a sweeping statement with one of his many emphatics — “make no mistake about it,” “I’m not making this up,” “in point of fact,” “let me be perfectly clear” — we know that the reverse is always true. For Obama, how something is said matters far more than what is said.
I never thought the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case deserved nearly the attention it got. But reasonable people can disagree about that. What strikes me as unconscionable, however, is the way the supposedly objective media have not only sensationalized a tragedy but at times appear to deliberately bend the facts to fit a desired story line. Maybe it started with the use of pictures of a younger Martin or with the sudden embrace of the term "white Hispanic" to describe Zimmerman in order to more easily paint him as a racist....Any hope that the editorializing would end with the trial was naive. National Public Radio recently profiled Sybrina Fulton, Martin's mother. In response to the tragedy and the trial, Fulton has become a civil rights activist, NPR reported.It was a deferential piece, and understandably so. Who wants to add to the woman's pain? But there's a difference between deference and advocacy. In a speech to the National Urban League, Fulton said her son was killed "all because of a law, a law that has prevented the person who shot and killed my son to be held accountable and to pay for this awful crime."And how did NPR's Greg Allen put that statement in context? He told listeners: "Fulton is one of many pushing for a repeal of Florida's 'stand your ground' law." He noted that sit-ins have been staged but that the Florida governor remains "unmoved." And that was it....But that is an airy justification for the media to treat the law as if it were central to the whole controversy. Is it conceivable that NPR would let, say, a gun rights activist's wildly tendentious interpretation of a law stand without some explanation or context? Why should opponents of "stand your ground" laws get different treatment?I think part of the answer is that the media and civil rights groups want a consolation prize. They didn't get the verdict -- or the story line -- they wanted. But they need to get something positive out of this. I certainly understand why Trayvon Martin's family feels that way. I fail to see why the media should so eagerly oblige.
NPR recently moved from Chinatown into its new 400,000 square-foot home on North Capitol, and they’re excited about it. Eager to show off the new facility, the organization offered a tour to members of the media Tuesday morning, starting with breakfast from their in-house chefs, along with some talking points from CEO Gary Knell, who outlined some impressive features of the space.
The tour continued through the wellness center, which is capable of simple medical procedures, the fitness center, which is staffed by a trainer, and the cafe, which utilizes the same catering company as Google. The cafe was named by a contest in which employees submitted more than 200 ideas. The winning name, Sound Bites, was entered by Stamberg, further marking her legacy at NPR and the new facility.
Given that these folks are all sucking on the public teat, they should have named that cafe "Free Lunch".
Gobbells Gormet eatery.
Programming our troops overseas get as their choices when they listen to AM Radio broadcasts overseas:AFN Powernet Schedule:Here for instance is Tuesday thru Friday:(Tuesday thru Friday)0000 NPR Market Place0030 NPR All Things Considered0400 ESPN Game Night (Monday)0400 ESPN Sports Center Tonight (Tuesday – Friday)0600 AFN Morning NewsWatch0900 NPR From the Top (Monday)0900 NPR Talk of the Nation (Tuesday-Friday)1000 NPR On the Media (Monday)1000 NPR Fresh Air (Tuesday-Friday)1000 AFN OpenLine (as scheduled covering NPR)1100 NPR All Things Considered1300 ESPN Mike & Mike in the Morning1600 AFN Afternoon NewsWatch1800 AP News1802 AFN NewsWatch Update1805 Yahoo Sports1806 Rush Limbaugh (Conservative)1900 AP News (2 Minutes)1902 AFN NewsWatch Update1905 Yahoo Sports1906 Doug Stephan (Call-in interviews – Variety)2000 Jim Rome (Sports Talk}2100 AP News (2 Minutes)2102 AFN NewsWatch Update2105 Yahoo Sports2106 Ed Schulz (Liberal)2200 NPR All Things Considered
The thinking as we’re reporting is that this is a domestic extremist attack. And officials are leaning that way largely because of the timing of the attack.April is a big month for anti-government and right wing individuals. There’s the Columbine anniversary. There’s Hitler’s birthday. There’s the Oklahoma City bombing. The assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco.
It's not just NPR but all the rest of the Democrat/Liberal hive. Listen to NPR and the term "right wing" is invariably used to describe something of which they disapprove. I would like someone to do a search of NPR and find the term "left wing" to describe something of which they disapprove.Earlier this week, NPR’s counterterrorism correspondent Dina Temple-Raston drew justifiable outrage from conservatives for engaging in the following on air speculation about the Boston Marathon bombing:The thinking, as we’ve been reporting, is that this is a domestic or extremist attack. Again, this is not because – this has got to be this because officials can’t get away from this idea of timing. April is a big month for anti-government, right-wing folks. There’s the Columbine anniversary. There’s Hitler’s birthday. There’s the Oklahoma City bombing. There’s the assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco. And these are all rallying points for these kinds of extremist groups.
Levine has turned a game into an Aristotelian tragedy and used the model of great tragic heroes."Whether it's Hamlet or Oedipus, there's a notion of greatness to them," Levine says, "and a notion of what would've / could've [been]. And what's so painful about them is how wrong they went and how right they could have gone."
The game opens in 1912. Two mysterious people bring you by rowboat in the pouring rain to an empty lighthouse on an island off the coast of Maine. .... your task is to rescue Elizabeth from the city of Columbia and return her to New York. ... As you make your way up the inside steps of its tower, there are portents of what's to come: religious music and signs with messages like "Of thy sins shall I wash thee." That phrase evokes an ornery response from DeWitt, "Good luck with that, pal." ...... But everything is laden with clues of a darker story that will bring this floating city to earth. There are preachers and statues of historical American leaders."This city is run by a prophet figure who created a new religion that worships the Founding Fathers of the United States," Levine says. He describes their religion as "a mixture of Christianity and a sort of Founder worship."
In one scene, you're directed towards a raffle in front of a stage. You take a baseball from a basket with the number 77. You win! The curtain opens to reveal the prize — you're offered the chance to be the first to throw a baseball at a captive interracial couple.And you have to make the choice to throw the ball at the couple or to throw the ball at the announcer. But here's the tricky part. If you throw the ball at the announcer, you will be revealed as a traitor and it may compromise your mission to find Elizabeth.
Here, today, the narrative from the neo-Stalinist progressives is that constitutionalists are racial supremacists and paranoid freaks; the Founding Fathers are their false idols; and the founding documents are their fetish. Religion is both their opiate and their cocaine, the thing that simultaneously dulls them into an intellectual stupor and turns them into evangelical zealots bent on demanding obeisance. Taken together, this toxic blend of hateful ignorance makes these slack-jawed clingers to their guns and their religion exceedingly dangerous to “sensible” people who want to live in a “community” wherein “common sense” laws — not the hoary edicts of dead white patriarchal slave owners — hold sway. Rational, cultured, intellectual people want to live in a land that looks forward, to progress, not backward, to a time of tri-cornered hats and oppression of the Other.Jeff is right, that is the narrative, in crude comic-book/video-game form. Exactly aimed at the "low information" voter.
Finally I am making the point, one that Jeff Goldstein has made repeatedly, that those who control the language and the culture eventually control the country. The control of the culture is accomplished through movies and the mass media, but also via comedians, comic books and things as stupid as video games. So, yeah, it’s a big effing deal.
- Putting on a story about a violent video game in the wake of revelations that the Sandy Hook killer was a violent video game enthusiast.
- Pretending that this particular video game - or any video game - is in the same league as Hamlet and Oedipus.
My post — and its critique — wasn’t aimed at Bioshock per se. It was, I thought I made clear, aimed at how NPR (and Levine, as presented) were presenting “Bioshock Infinite” — and then using that presentation of its themes (whether fairly or unfairly) to connect those themes outlined to high art, namely, the cartoonish portrayal of Founding Father worshippers.Bloom seems to be the kind of "Conservative" who is happy to live in a world where reality is shaped by the Left and he's allowed to live in it as long as he doesn't put up much of a squawk. He probably considers Dr. Ben Carson an embarrassment.
I went on to note that this is part of a larger effort by the left to peddle this very cultural narrative, so for my purposes, whether NPR misrepresented “Bioshock Infinite” or the Bioshock franchise or Levine or art is relevant only inasmuch as it makes my broader point about the efforts of the left to frame conservatism and to work its narrative into the wider culture. That is, “Bioshock Infinite’s” deeper story structure wasn’t a concern; how the game was being described and added to the cultural noise surrounding Constitution fetishists was.
I should have thought someone claiming a heightened grasp of subtext would have understood that. But then, maybe I just overshot. Or maybe Mr Bloom didn’t pause long enough to consider that perhaps we hoary old embarrassments have the ability to do nuance, too — and that in his rush to separate himself from the “extremist” kind of conservatives like me, he has accomplished his mission, but only by dint of showing that he’s more eager to be accepted by the literati than he is to is to give the benefit of the doubt to conservative writers who have been at this quite a while and have a track record of being more than mere hysterics who rhapsodize to the dullards who still read him.
