You may boil down your beliefs to a series of ideas, but odds are that every lesson you ever learned came at the end of a story, either one you lived or one you watched unfold. All great religions are taught to us as stories. Every great journalistic exposé came in the form of a story.Much like great novels, which, Goldberg earlier informed us, are "inherently conservative."
We evolved to learn through stories. We may as well be called homo relator, or storytelling man.What's Latin for "bullshit"? Goldberg then tells us that while the things conservatives believe are ideas and the revealed word of the living Reagan, everything believed by liberals is just a bunch of stories (maybe fairy stories, har har why you gettin offended), including those so-called "studies" by so-called "scientists" with their "environmentalist" Gaia myths about how pollution is bad for you. ("If science could settle, man would never learn to fly or read by electric light," puffs Goldberg. Wait'll you stupid eggheads see the money he'll make on his fart-powered Cheeto-stuffing machine!)
Another example:
For much of the summer, large numbers of Americans insisted that the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., was one kind of story. It was a tale of institutional racism in which the police are the villains and young African-American men the innocent victims. This was the storyline many in the media wanted, and it was one they were determined to get.
Now, as a grand jury goes about prying fact from fiction, the story is falling apart as a matter of legal reality. But you can be sure the story will live on for decades to come. That’s in no small part because......of centuries of actual African-American experience?
... because many decent Americans have locked themselves into the belief that the heroic chapter of the civil-rights movement can never end. The story must go on so they can continue to cast themselves as the heroes.Gotta love that "decent" -- when you're telling black people they're just playing the victim, Goldberg seems to think, throw in a nice word and no one can complain.
• I see Rod Dreher has identified a new liberal-who-hates-liberals-which-proves-liberals-suck. I thought Mickey Kaus had that market cornered. For half the column Dreher quotes the guy copiously, then tells us he read somewheres about another guy, "a white man who had grown up in a hardscrabble way... and he was expected to deprecate himself and apologize for his Straight White Male Privilege," so see, it's all true. The very best part of this plea for you-other-guys to be tolerant:
It’s not that I believe conservatives are free of these things; it’s that in my own world, it’s usually the liberals who behave this way.Also he doesn't seem to get Woody Allen jokes.
• Oh God, Ross Douthat drew the short straw at Dracula's castle and thumbsucks over why liberals have a lot of newspapers and TV shows while he's stuck with Fox News. Allow me to synopsize his three possible reasons:
- Liberals are "open-minded" and conservatives are "conformist sheep." Ha ha, as if!
- The only people who read The New Yorker and junk like that are arty-farties and other members of the "liberal clerisy" who live on welfare/Soros checks, while "well-educated and well-informed conservatives are often businessmen" who "treat their media consumption mostly as a source of information rather than identity," so there. Plus liberals can waste their time reading about foreigners and operas because they don't have any children to beat.
- Damn liberal media!
• If someone told me years ago that one day a big-time wingnut hack would be denouncing appeals for calm during a public health emergency and telling people science is bullshit -- well, actually, I would have believed it; I've always been pretty cynical.
I suppose Doughbob could have also used the standard "many otherwise reasonable Americans", but the intern had arrived with his bagel and two syllables was all he could manage.
ReplyDeleteWhat an amazingly content-free column. Cripes.
ReplyDeleteAlthough there's this gem from the comments:
HBealeJr
I was born in 1956. So, I was raised in a Cold War world. It was
"Us" vs "Them". "We" won. Today we fight an internal cold war. It is
still "Us" vs "Them". Only now the "Them" is american too.
Howard Beale would have kicked the living shit out of you, you little snot.
I'm going to give Jonah the benefit of the doubt and assume he wrote this before the story that the story was falling apart began to fall apart.
ReplyDeleteThe story must go on so they can continue to cast themselves as the heroes.
ReplyDeleteI guess he's now Boy Philosopher Jonah Goldberg. Here's an excerpt from the top-rated comment to this latest excretion (by someone who is himself a contributor to NRO):
ReplyDeleteAnd if you want to know how a country becomes mad enough to, say, TWICE elect such a feckless leftist ambulant psychological basket case as the Corpseman, just ponder the depressing fact that at least 90 percent of our cretinized voters have exactly zero knowledge of anything that occurred in their country or in the outside world before they themselves were born. If then, and if that few.
He then goes on to scream how it's time for us pro-American Americans to take back the culture.
It would seem that the right-wing have one of the really great whoppers stories to tell: "We are the real Americans, so fuck you America."
corpseman?
ReplyDeleteYes, of course it's just those liberals with their moralistic, self-serving "stories". Not to mention the cray-cray conspiracy theories.
ReplyDeleteI also love how Jonah second-guesses Victor Hugo, who wrote better shopping lists than Doughbob writes columns.
ReplyDelete"Population control" ain't going too well, it seems.
ReplyDeletemore like victor WHOgo, amirite!?
ReplyDeleteAh, right, this thing. If Doughy Pantload weren't the sort of fellow who seems positively allergic to doing the most cursory research, he might have picked up on that. Having lived in St. Louis for a brief period in the late eighties, it was pretty obvious even then that the Post-Dispatch had a certain, ah, bias.
ReplyDeletepositively allergic to doing the most cursory research
ReplyDeleteOr the most cursory writing.
More like Victor HugObama, farrrt!
ReplyDelete~
Hey, the commenter has a point ... about 2000-2008. Presumably "leftist" is in there because he confused the handedness of George W. Bush and his father.
ReplyDeletecorpseman?Again, it makes sense. George W. Bush produced an absolute fuckload of corpses, through negligence at home and war under false pretenses abroad. Hence, "the Corpseman."
Victor HugObola, hurr hurr hurr
ReplyDelete"What the hell does that even mean?"
"Shut up, libtard!"
Yeah, that caught my eye, too. I think it's a reference to the time Obama pronounced/may have pronounced "corps" with the s. They can't let go, can they? Caribou Barbie was speechifying about "bitter clingers" the other day.
ReplyDeleteGoldberg then tells us that while the things conservatives believe are ideasOh, certainly. Monstrously evil and/or fucking stupid ideas, but ideas all the same.
ReplyDelete"If science could settle, man would never learn to fly or read by electric light,"And if your tribe had been ascendant back in the day, we wouldn't have ended up with either, because the Bible doesn't describe how to build airplanes and light bulbs.
It's all just stories. Like your mom used to read to you. Little Red Riding Hood has as much factual equivalence as any peer-reviewed paper published in Nature.
ReplyDeleteThey can't let go, can they? Caribou Barbie was speechifying about "bitter clingers" the other day.The only way that could be more ironic would be if she were literally clutching a firearm at the time.
ReplyDeleteI get it. Only "great"novels are conservative; the shitty ones are liberal, like the Grapes of Wrath. Seeking validation by naming things "conservative" ("conservative" R&R songs for Christ's sake!) seems desperate; It's a feature at NR.
ReplyDeleteThe story must go on so they can continue to cast themselves as the heroes.
ReplyDeleteNah. The story goes on because skinheads and their Republican allies are insufferable shit.
https://rurritable.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/skinheads.jpg
Everyone knows the real heroes are the brave men who write stories about gay Nazis!
ReplyDeleteAnd when I say write, I mean do the grueling work of asking other people to do the work and then copying their comments into a document.
Actually, I wish the news media could get away from the habit of storytelling. I don't really like this kind of process: first create a narrative, then maybe gather a few facts that fit that narrative, and ignore the facts that don't.
ReplyDeleteThat's not news; it's perception management. I want to be informed, not manipulated. "News story" shouldn't even be a phrase. I'd like much, much more distance between the words "news" and "story."
The ironic thing (and I'd point it out over there if I wasn't sure "Dagny" wouldn't just censor it) is that the whole concept of "news story" is likely a consequence of treating news as a profitable entertainment product instead of journalism, where subjects being reported on need a hook, a plot line, a climax and a suitable resolution. Which is a consequence of treating everything in our culture as a money-making proposition, which is a consequence of late capitalism.
ReplyDeleteSo fuck you, Jonah, it's ultimately your own goddamn fault.
Shit, the fucking opening sentence:
ReplyDeleteThere is an enormous amount of whining these days about our ideological debates.
Well, you're the expert, Jonah. Later, he rolls out the corpse of Michael Crichton, because having some bestsellers must mean your stories have more pure masculine essence in them or something:
“If you look carefully,” Michael Crichton once observed, “you see that
environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of
traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.”
Wanna know what else maps perfectly onto traditional beliefs? Fucking Atlas Shrugged, Jonah. It's got a savior, the elect who get saved, and the damned who are sent directly to hell. You might think that someone who decided to write an entire fucking column about story might have put thirty seconds worth of thought into thinking about what makes a story (protagonist, antagonist, conflict, resolution) but who the fuck am I kidding? If I got paid what he gets paid to turn out that kind of shit, I'd be perfectly happy with putting in my forty-five minutes of keyboard-whacking every day.
thirty seconds worth of thought
ReplyDeleteThirty-one seconds more than Jonah can be bothered with.
You spelled HugObola wrong.
ReplyDeleteI think that's exactly right; the "news story" has all too often become just another commercial product, bought and sold and marketed like any other commodity.
ReplyDeleteJournalism, on the other hand, should serve the public good. It's a completely different incentive structure.
Okay, I see what Jonah's going for here. There are several books out there about man-as-storyteller, and most likely Jonah read one of them (or, let's not kid ourselves, skimmed the description on its Amazon page and decided he could wring a column out of it). There is some validity to the notion that media is driven by narratives rather than cold fact. Lots of people have written about that - shit, I've written about that. While Jonah is approaching this with the usual juvenile smugness, it's been around to have a proper pedigree, and he does an adequate job of laying it all out.
ReplyDeleteSo how does Jonah fuck it up? Well, the same way that many, many fucked up the term "tribalism." Tribalism is a legitimate term that is used by political hacks across the spectrum as a kind of curse, a way to dismiss an argument without having to address it. It's always used in an accusatory sense, with an unspoken assumption: "All of you are simple-minded tribalists, but we're better than that. We don't do those things." And, of course, the response is "No you're not and yes you do," immediately met by howls of rage from the people who totally aren't in a tribe.
Well, Jonah's trying to do the same thing, except he's trying to come up with a term that hasn't been tainted by liberal cooties (and you're a little late, by the way). But he's using it in the same way - to dismiss arguments without having to address them. He puts three "stories" on display - the shooting of Michael Brown, something about John Kerry and Israel, and those filthy Gaia-worshipping scientists who insist that there's a difference between weather and climate. Any half-competent low-traffic blogger would address these points, but Jonah is busy, deadline, etc. So he just uses his new toy to write them off. See? Easy.
But I've got news for you, jackass - that shit cuts both ways. If our side is telling stories, so is yours. The story about how Michael Brown was a big blackety black thug who attacked a police car in a drug-fueled rage. The one where the Arabs are wearing the black hats and the Israelis are wearing the white hats, and that's all you need to know. The tale about how environmentalists are really just following the example of Stalin, who as we all know was a deep Green. The difference is that your stories are stupid. Some writers spend months and years doing research in pursuit of authenticity, whereas some scrawl fanfiction that they force their friends to read. Guess which one you are, Jonah.
I religion founded on Goldberg principles would have invented advanced Cheeto based technology by now that we humans today could only have dreamed of. Interns of course, would have done most of the groundbreaking work.
ReplyDelete[Alternate joke-vote for your favorite]
ReplyDelete"Grapes of Wrath" is not a novel, it's a "How To Manual"
his fart-powered Cheeto-stuffing machine
ReplyDeleteI'm scared to wonder where the Cheetos get stuffed.
...just ponder the depressing fact that at least 90 percent of our cretinized voters have exactly zero knowledge of anything that occurred in their country or in the outside world before they themselves were born.
ReplyDeleteAh yes, the classic "everyone is stupid except for me" melody. You can tell how legitimately accomplished someone is by the number of years past the age of 17 they continue to use such a simplistic, juvenile argument.
I agree that the current media is too enamored of hooky narratives, but there's only so far you can get away from that.
ReplyDeleteYou can't escape subjectivity. Tell a person to sit and write down everything that happens in a room for 10 minutes and you'll still end up with a series of observations filtered through their experiences and prejudices. Narrowing those facts down to what's important to report -- and you do want that, unless you want "John Boehner gave this speech: [whole speech]. He was wearing a red tie" -- is also going to be a subjective process, and is going to require context.
Humanity developed the scientific method to help force an objective structure on our subjective observation and reasoning, and that took an extraordinary amount of work. Even in "hard" sciences, where many of your observations are measurements. There's no easy way to apply the scientific method to politics.
In any case, when people talk about how journalists should ask questions and challenge the official story and not just be stenographers -- "real journalism", I mean -- what they're asking for is a more subjective journalism.
It DOES cut both ways, and everybody tells stories. I get that.
ReplyDeleteAesop told fables and Jesus told parables, each trying to describe how the world works the way they see it. We'd all be much poorer if there weren't such things. It's a way to try to make sense of the world, which often seems senseless.
But reporters of fact should be careful to keep an arm's length away from storytelling, and consumers of news should maintain a healthy skepticism whenever a news reporter starts sounding like "Let me tell you a story..."
Richard Feynman once wrote about something that happened to him as a child that illustrates this. His parents weren't especially religious, but they wanted to send him off to get some religious education anyway, just so he'd have the choice to accept it or reject it himself.
While there, his instructor told a story about some figure from Biblical times (I don't remember the name) who died while silently praying to God. The instructor began to tell the students what was in that prayer, and young Mr. Feynman became upset.
He wanted to know how anybody KNEW what was in that silent prayer? How could anybody know if that person died right after praying, and never told anybody? He was told "it's just a story. We use this story to explain a larger point."
Young Mr. Feynman was crying when he got home. He never wanted to go back to hear stories like that again. Why make up things when you're trying to relate facts? That's what he didn't understand.
In 'apart' the word it together, but means separated, while in 'a part' the letters are separated, but it means together.
ReplyDeleteIt blows your mind.
Okay, it's 2006. A liberal protestor reads off a list of war dead, trying to stay solemn but secretly wanting to scream in anger at the misdeeds of the tyrant-in-chief. All of a sudden, he drops the list, cracks open his pocket book of Bushisms, and reads a couple of humdingers from the 2000 election season. He finishes the one about putting food on your family, drops the book, picks up the list, and resumes where he stopped.
ReplyDeleteThat would have been really weird, right? If he made a habit of it - mixing up his rants with jokes that by then were not just old but completely irrelevant - you'd start to wonder if he meant any of it. And yet wingnuts do it every single day and no one thinks it's odd.
Why are they called 'buildings' when they are completed? Shouldn't they be called 'builts'?
ReplyDeleteA couple years ago I commented once in a while at NRO. Not anything inflammatory, just making points and comments. I was told by more than one person words to the effect of "Leave us alone, why can't we just have a place of our own?" as if the thought of me even reading their crap was too much to bear. Now I only ever read about NRO when Roy points out something.
ReplyDeleteOrwell points out in Homage to Catalonia that there is no subjective journalism - you have a viewpoint you write from, no matter how hard you try. The point is to be as honest as possible while acknowledging that.
ReplyDeleteWhy do we drive on a... oh, you know the drill.
ReplyDeleteThe difference between history and propaganda is which one you heard first.
ReplyDeleteThat's not ground.
ReplyDeleteAw, c'mon, man... what red blooded wingnut doesn't feel a surge of atavistic pride when a TV ad for Northrup-Grumman comes on featuring an F-35 cruising above the clouds, or for that matter, an Air Force recruitment ad featuring a transformer-like transport plane, which does not actually exist, filled with doctors and nurses flying out to help the underprivileged. Stories featuring American military might just reach right into the American Heartland!
ReplyDeleteThe addiction to storytelling is especially prevalent and doubly repugnant when it comes to political coverage, which is now dominated by witless pundits blathering away, predicting outcomes based on nothing more than how they "feel," or how many lawn signs for one candidate or another they happened to drive by on the way to work.
ReplyDeleteJeebus, what the hell is going on over at the Times that they gave Douchehat column space? Cal Thomas asked for too much money or something?
ReplyDeleteYou have to love, though, how he manages to be totally unconscious of the fact that his argument invalidates itself - Liberals get their news from many sources, conservatives only one, therefore somehow the media is all lefty-wefty - but he then goes on and lists all kinds of conservative media.
Mayyyyyybeeee it's a matter of deep pockets at FAUX being able to maintain a shitty news channel in spite of its shittiness... naw, must be the Liberal Media Conspiracy.
That's a good point about the Scientific Method. Finding out what the truth is does require a certain discipline; it doesn't just come naturally. Confirmation bias is an easy trap to fall into.
ReplyDeleteI just wish our newspeople made more of an effort.
Well, Texas Congressvermin Blake Farenthold did his best to stoke the distrust of the government with his
ReplyDelete"Every outbreak novel or zombie movie you see starts
with somebody from the government sitting in front of panel like this
saying there’s nothing to worry about."
story. I guess zombie movies are inherently conservative.
That way is too hard, requires people with a particular skill set and creates issues that can't be covered between boner pill commercials.
ReplyDeleteFor some reason, the name "David Brooks" springs to mind...
ReplyDelete"I just wish our newspeople made more of an effort."
ReplyDeleteNo argument there!
"bagels"
ReplyDelete"You know nothing of my work" -- George Romero
ReplyDeleteWhat fun is an auto-da-fe when attendance is optional? You can't burn anyone at the stake, you have to make sure all the fruit that gets tossed at the penitents doesn't have sharp edges or pits, you need to organize kid-friendly distractions and rent loads of porta-potties...
ReplyDeleteReally, every Douthat column can be distilled to This place would be so much better if His Holiness the Pope, God's Instrument on Earth, could crush all you insolent worms. Which isn't a real good seller, these days. You do have give that Harvard degree some credit, even if he won't: he obviously learned something about putting a fresh coat of paint on an ugly idea.
Michael Crichton, huh? I know what Jonah means... I read 'Rising Sun' years ago, and I'm still afraid that the Japanese will completely take over America.
ReplyDeleteGive him a break man! Do you know how brutal those deadlines are?!
ReplyDeleteYou know how it is - after Bloody Bill Kristol, the Times needed someone safe. If all you know of Douthat is Privilege - the book in which he honed his "in sorrow, not in anger" moderate conservative persona - then he might seem like a perfect fit. All you have to do is ignore everything else he ever said or wrote.
ReplyDeleteIt's not fair! We won the war!
ReplyDeleteI woke up thinking HugObola because of our hive mind.
ReplyDeleteI only heard that "57 states" thing once, but I took it as a deliberate exaggeration--Obama joking about the constant campaign travel. Am I wrong?
ReplyDeleteIt was 57 cities or districts or something to that effect, he just slipped up and said "states" instead. If you think this is bad, some of the nuttier of wingnuts insist that this was proof that he was a Sekrit Muslin.
ReplyDeleteDouhat: Were I a media mogul, though, I would see still this moderately right-of-center zone as a fruitful space for experimentation:
ReplyDeleteThis is after he wrote about Newsmax's attempt to buy Newsweek an example of an opportunity to have a "moderately" right-of-center publication. It's the density of bizarro world assumptions that continue to baffle me about "conservative intellectuals" like Douhat. Does he really not understand that newspapers across the country are mostly "right of center"? The Washington Post, for example, in both it's slavish editorial pages and in its mostly neutered news sections reliably parrot military industrial themes. The cable networks run the gamut from Joe Scarsborough to Bill O'Reilly, with outliers like Rachael Maddow. The absolute glut of bullshit factory magazines, including the absolutely and historically right of center Time along with the rest of the money-losing vanity publications for idiots like Ross Douhat are thick on the ground. Then he mentions the monkey houses farther to the right. The dumbest part about it is that not only are there tons and tons of "center-right" media, the moguls he wants to invest in more ALREADY DO. Who are these people?
Yes, and I stopped watching TV news about 10 years ago for just this reason. I forget what the specific political issue in my city was, but I watched for a couple of nights to learn more about it because there was a vote coming up. And the local news spent 12 seconds on it (not exaggerating), showing footage of some official shaking hands. "So and so spoke in wherever today." Meanwhile, they dedicated 3-5 minutes each to a motel murder where they'd already collared a suspect, and to a disturbance where a guy crashed a car and punched someone and was caught. THOSE stories warranted reporters on the scene, specific retracings of where the suspect ran and how he was cornered, interviews with witnesses and officials. All of zero utility to democracy. The shit I had to vote on, that might affect my life? TWELVE SECONDS.
ReplyDeleteSo TV news does not serve the public good. Maybe it did when Cronkite was around, but during my adult awareness it has only damaged the public good.
"If science could settle, man would never learn to fly or read by electric light,"
ReplyDeleteSez guy using a computer and writing on the internet.
Yeah, it's amazing to look back at the level of hysteria in some quarters back then. To hear them tell it, building cost and fuel efficient cars could only be an evil plot to destroy America!
ReplyDeleteAnd I haven't read the book, but the "Rising Sun" movie had an almost Goldbergian ignorance of it's subject. Being somebody's Kohai is not the same thing as being their prison bitch, Mr. Crichton.
"a white man who had grown up in a hardscrabble way... and he was
ReplyDeleteexpected to deprecate himself and apologize for his Straight White Male
Privilege,"Well, Rod, you could always have directed him to a relevant John Scalzi post about straight white males and their uphill struggle.
Chricton wrote some good fiction, Jurassic Park is pretty good. The one about 13th century England ( I kept hearing sad trombones in my head when I was reading it) and Rising Sun and the anti-environmentalist one were NOT good.
ReplyDelete"Hey, baby, I want to respect you, really respect you, all night long."
ReplyDeleteHe has the family name for babbling to uphold. Rude Pundit did him over good and proper just this week.
ReplyDelete"But science is never settled, because science is the craft of unsettling what we know at any given moment."
ReplyDeleteJonah,
Not arbitrary "unsettling".
You would be well served to understand concepts like
empiricism, probability, and limits before you shit on your keyboard and hit "send" again.
You'd save a fortune in peripherals.
It's a carefree holiday story!
ReplyDeleteI feel the spirit of Steve Wright is with us today.
ReplyDeleteAs he pondered this terrible state of affairs I wonder if he got hung up on the fact that he's well-paid to spew his outmoded religious bigotry from a platform widely denounced by his kind as the epitome of liberal propaganda?
ReplyDeleteGoldberg holds that conservatives--whose world view begins with the story of the Fall and Original Sin, continues on through the fable of the Invisible Hand, pauses to deplore the legendary Welfare Queen, genuflects before fables about the Moral Hazards inherent in social programs, and harkens back nostalgically to Tales of the Founding Fathers--are NOT prisoners of story, but rather are ruled by "facts."
ReplyDeleteThis is beyond delusional. Has he ever watched Fox News? For that matter, has he ever read National Review? Is he aware of how saturated in falsehood the administration of Little Boots was? Talk about "not even wrong."
But then, why not? Goldberg's the guy who cleans up after the elephants in the circus parade and fancies he works in "show business."
you need to organize kid-friendly distractions
ReplyDeleteGuards! Please be careful with your halberds! We don't want to puncture the Bouncy Castle!
"this glorious caliphate of ours, from sea to shining sea"
ReplyDelete"well-educated and well-informed conservatives are often businessmen" who "treat their media consumption mostly as a source of information rather than identity,"
ReplyDeleteI too am not enjoying Opposite Day, Ross.
Were I a media mogul, though, I would see still this moderately right-of-center zone as a fruitful space for experimentation
ReplyDeleteDidn't Ross' prior fruitful space for experimentation end with him losing an erection and blaming feminism?
"If only we had a voice!" boomed a million megaphones.
ReplyDeleteThere were 57 Democratic state primaries in 2008. Florida and Michigan (?) each had two (a caucus and a regular primary), plus Guam, American Samoa, US Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and Americans abroad.
ReplyDeleteI still regularly see Republicans trotting it out as proof that Obama is too stupid to know how many states there are in the US, probably because he smoked crack. This is often accompanied by some kind of crack about John Kerry's wife, heir to the Heinz fortune. It is literally the stupidest thing in the history of the internet not named "gamergate".
Yeah, that's his job description alright. Well put!
ReplyDeleteThey're a masturbation aide AND a nutritious breakfast!
ReplyDelete"There is an enormous amount of whining these days about our ideological debates. Here's mine."
ReplyDeleteAlso, You may boil down your beliefs to a series of ideas, but odds are that
every lesson you ever learned came at the end of a story, either one you
lived or one you watched unfold.
Stories you actually lived: ain't myth-behaving.
Yeah yeah, needs work.
Wait "well-educated and well-informed conservatives"? What? Is this like Mythology 101 here?
ReplyDeleteNot bad though tigrismus. The cymbal shot has got to be a bit crisper.
ReplyDeleteYou may be confusing Chricton with Ken Folliet. Chricton's books take one or two interesting, but untested or thoroughly researched, ideas and make 'em into a potboiler suspense story. Folliet does that too, and writes well-researched novels.
ReplyDeleteSeems all the conservative writers shun research. That makes sense, even minimal research shows all their "ideas" and "beliefs" and yes, "Values", are wrong.
ReplyDeleteFish don't realize they're under water.
ReplyDeleteIn the few zombie/apocalyptic movies & books I've read, the government is usually trying very hard to stop the plague/meteor/volcano, or rescue the victims.
ReplyDeleteI liked it when Alex Pareene described wingnut gasbags getting huffy and puffy with their self-presumed high intellectualism as "chimps with monocles."
ReplyDeleteTV serves its Billionaire Owners 'good'.
ReplyDeleteYou'd think they would approach the concept of narrative with a little more caution. But self awareness has never been their strong suit. Narratives get popular because they affirm our opinions. Not because they are true. Ever been on a little league team of scrappy underdogs? I was. I think we won two games all season. Ever seen a rich kid well on his (or her) way to failure given a high profile second chance? They don't pull a Henry IV, they pull a George Bush Junior. Redemption stories are powerfully attractive because they flatter underdogs. But the triumph of underdogs is the exception, not the rule. Otherwise every ancient Levantine army would have been nothing but 14 year old kids armed with a sling and a bag of rocks, instead of a collection of the biggest guys they could find armed with armor and spears. Narratives flatter our search for cause and effect. They don't reflect reality except in the simplest cases. Any situation more complex than a bedtime story can be interpreted in multiple often contradictory ways. Consider how both slave owners and abolitionists claimed moral authority by citing the bible.
ReplyDeleteSo thanks for the warning J-dawg, but since the side that twice created separate CIA departments to produce their desired narrative from "The Russians are dangerous well-armed psychopaths dedicated to the invasion and destruction of the USA" in the 1970s to "Saddam Hussein has an active chemical weapons program" in 2003, Democrats and liberals may not be the ones with a narrative problem. We don't subscribe to fairy tales like the voodoo economics, we aren't running around in terror from the handful of ebola cases that have made it to US shores, we're not claiming that the 'war on coal' is a real thing. We're not watching the coastal cities of the eastern seaboard sink under ever higher tide and claiming that global warming isn't real. So yes, J-dawg, you have identified that there is a narrative gap. The question of which team's narrative more closely resembles objective reality, has been asked and answered and it isn't the side with elephants on their jerseys
uh-oh.
ReplyDeleteI find most of Rand's characters to be shambling, mindless zombies.
ReplyDeleteI hear they can make your head explode, like happened to Mikey.
ReplyDeleteYeah... usually it's conservatives describing liberals as "The Intelligentsia" and intending the description as a slur. Thomas Sowell (B.S. Harvard, M.S. Columbia, PhD University of Chicago) is one of the foremost practitioners of this form of intellectual jiujitsu while presenting himself as just another salt-o-the-earth regular guy... who happens to inhabit the stables of the Hoover Institution as an endowed conservative shill.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of cray-cray conspiracy theories, I've been hanging out over at Raw Story because Russell Brand said something about the government being behind 9/11 and I knew the Troofers would be coming out of the woodwork. The lulz did not disappoint; I am evidently a tool of our Zionist masters, as well as a complacent idiot, a shill, and a troll. And I have a potty mouth!
ReplyDeleteThe thing is that even if you say "he was discussing primaries, not states" they will nod and say ok and then go right back to yukking it up ove rit because even if its not a thing he did say, its obviously the kind of thing he would say.
ReplyDeleteWell doesn't this contradict Jonah's point which is that liberals know too much history and can't forget?
ReplyDeleteIt really is projection all the way down. We've been pointing out that all the Teahadist Cosplay and Christianist hysteria about the end times and the demonic possession of entire blocks of cities was nothing more than--well: cosplay and hysteria and an attempt to bring meaning to lives that are empty of meaning.
ReplyDeleteYup, I completely gave up watching any news, local or national, years ago and I am by far better educated about the areas of politics, history, and social phenomenon than I would have been if I'd kept watching that shit. At this point, certainly for local politics and economics, if its on your tv at all its either definitionally unimportant or has already blown up, decayed, and is over and you are seeing the news people try to decorate the corpse to obscure the real killers. I'm thinking of enormous boondoggles, bankruptcies, thefts and corruption scandals which are never covered at all while citizens could do anything about them.
ReplyDeleteAll great religions are taught to us as stories
ReplyDeleteIs this supposed to be a point in favour of the Power of Narrative?
I am not sure whom he is trying to please there, with the benignly above-the-fray ecumenism. Most of his readers know that there is only one great religion and all the others are cults and false gods.
hush, you!
ReplyDeleteYou've got to be amazed (and by amazed, I obviously mean "nauseated") by the way they're just taking every trope we came up with about Bush for the previous eight years and applying them to Obama, regardless of how inaccurate they are.
ReplyDeleteGoddamnit, Rusty.
ReplyDeleteawwwwww, it seems to be drying up.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite part has to be the assclown shopping the "dancing Jews" story; when you click through his link (or watch the YouTube video) it turns out to be a load of Bircher anti-Semitic codswallop, surprise surprise.
I wonder if Sissy is finally embarrassed for having endorsed his candidacy. If not, she should be, nephew of hers or not.
ReplyDeletewhen I became a man, I put away childish things
ReplyDeleteOther than my PS3, because, dude.
See, I was wondering what you stuff Cheetos with.
ReplyDeletewhen I became a man, I put away childish things
ReplyDeleteHow many stories were between this one and his "A Real-Life Contagion?" I wonder? Maybe a fellow reader can go look while I stare vacantly into space and imagine how Star Fleet could use weaponized flatus.
Well, it's conservatism at its finest--they even steal the cultural artifacts they need for self-validation. And, it's so easy to do. Les Miserables becomes a conservative's novel if one sees Inspector Javert as the hero and maintains that the book is about law and order.
ReplyDeleteIt's wrong, and it's downright stupid, but that never stopped a conservative from usurping whatever cultural bits they think will draw the masses to their "ideas."
Cheese, obviously!
ReplyDeleteHey, it's a great Blu-Ray player. Besides, there's The Last of Us.
ReplyDeleteThe difference being, that they spent 8 years getting worked up into a froth everytime we made a joke whereas we pretty much just look at it as a sign of their complete lack of originality.
ReplyDeleteI get Woody Allen jokes!
ReplyDelete"A Christmas Carol" is the horror story about a small businessman brainwashed into becoming a socialist by evil Leftist ghosts.
ReplyDeleteweaponized flatus
ReplyDeleteDO NOT WANT.
Toe or Frumunda?
ReplyDeleteEEEWWWW EEEEEEWWWW EEEEEEWWWWWW
ReplyDeleteNo, silly. Good Real Americans use Velveeta.
ReplyDeleteGood Real Americans use Velveeta.
ReplyDeleteFor all kinds of purposes!
I'll give Jonah one thing: even his conscience wouldn't let him just type "reality". He had to say "legal reality", which means nothing more than that the guy is going to get away with it.
ReplyDeleteThat guy Dreher linked to just goes on and on and ON. It's exhausting. Not that I totally disagree with everything he says, but man, editing is your friend.
ReplyDeleteI do think once you get to this point:
People have been studying “belief congruence theory” – the idea that differences in beliefs are more important than demographic factors in forming in-groups and outgroups – for decades.
It's time to put the breaks on, pull your essay over to the side of the road, and think hard about what you just said.
Listen for an involuntary "No duh" emanating from your throat.
So people tend to agree with people who agree with them and disagree with those who disagree with them?
Groundbreaking.
I also really hate the genre of article I call "liberal handwringing". You know, when some guy at Slate writes about "Oh, isn't it ironic that we liberals hate global warming but we still buy luxury SUVs?"
No, fuck you, I don't own a car. I take the bus everywhere and today it was raining. Either ditch your fucking SUV or decide that it's necessary to you and stop fucking whining.
In the same way, I have conservative friends. If you don't, then either go to a tractor pull or a NASCAR race or wherever the fuck you think conservatives hang out and make some friends, or decide that your neighbor who voted for Romney doesn't share enough interests to be more than a casual friendly acquaintance.
Shit or get off the pot. Don't try to drag the rest of us into your neuroses.
thumbsucks over why liberals have a lot of newspapers and TV shows while he's stuck with Fox News.
ReplyDelete"Weeh! Liberals are making me eat this shit sandwich!" [Omf, nomf]
On the one hand, hilarious. On the other, at least he isn't writing about sex.
Win + Win.
Hemingway's message to the tribe: "Hey we didn't get dozens of new Ebola cases in Dallas like we hoped, so the panic thing isn't gonna work. Switch to plan B, namely (1) blast the liberal media for creating our panic and (2) have a sad about not being able to trust government competence and honesty any more because Obama."
ReplyDelete"Remember last time? We thought it popped but it was just Jonah."
ReplyDelete"Weeh! Liberals are making me eat this shit sandwich!" [Omf, nomf]
ReplyDeleteWe REALLY HATE IT when you do that! Oh, it makes us SO MAD! It's so OFFENSIVE!
Here, have another. On me. (not literally)
It's time to put the brakes on
ReplyDelete#pedant #grammar_grouch
you.
ReplyDeleteNewsmax's attempt to buy Newsweek an example of an opportunity to have a "moderately" right-of-center publication
ReplyDeleteYeah, and how long would THAT have lasted?
Probably as long as it takes for Jonah's tighty whiteys to get a permanent skidmark.
Reminds me of the This Modern World strip from 1995 or so; with a picture of the proliferation of conservative blabberers with Limbaugh up front saying something on the lines of "Why, conservatives can hardly get a voice in edgewise!"
ReplyDelete"Who won-a Seconda World War, you so smart?"
ReplyDeleteI hate to mention it, but this isn't anything new. Last night I watched Hitchcock's "Foreign Correspondent," made in 1940, in which the hero (Joel McCrea) spends most of the movie insisting that he's there to "get the story" -- the "story" of World War II breaking out -- and nothing else.
ReplyDelete(Btw I'd always heard the film was a classic, but we gave up about half an hour before the end because it was hopelessly lame, although I still like McCrea).
Link?
ReplyDelete"Park and Lock It! Not Responsible!"
ReplyDeleteSlight difference - Jonah PRODUCES the shit.
ReplyDeleteIn a just world, yelling that would be the only job Jonah would ever get.
ReplyDelete¯\_(ツ)_/¯
ReplyDeleteWe may as well be called homo relator, or storytelling man.
ReplyDeleteWell, the Right these days could fairly be called Meltdown Man, if you want to get into fantasy taxonomy....
For me, the best part of that Hemingway article is that all-around conspiracy nut Alec Rawls, who has added Ebola expert to his resume, shows up in the comments.
ReplyDelete(Tbogg fans will remember Rawls from the greatest comment thread in the history of the internet, preserved at http://web.archive.org/web/20060113065943/http://tbogg.blogspot.com/2006/01/lunacy-abounds-nuts.html)
90 percent of our cretinized voters
ReplyDeleteYeah, they're yours all right. Say, you *do* know the etymology of "Cretin", right? No? Oops...
all-around conspiracy nut Alec Rawls
ReplyDeleteLink isn't working, but wasn't that Crazy Flight 93 Memorial Islamic Crescent Guy?
We had some fun with him, we did.
In my defense, that's a spelling error, not a grammar error.
ReplyDelete#now_who's_the_pedant?
Everyone knows the real heroes are the brave men who write stories about gay Nazis!
ReplyDeleteIndeed!
linky: http://web.archive.org/web/20060113065943/http://tbogg.blogspot.com/2006/01/lunacy-abounds-nuts.html
ReplyDeleteMr Brooks sliced and diced \
ReplyDeletethanks! well worth clicking on.
ReplyDeleteHe's confusing the idea of the science behind global warming being settled with the idea of all of science being settled and done forever, isn't he? The latter is something no liberal has ever said. Plenty of conservatives had, but that's what happens when you see your mission as being standing athwart history shouting "It was better when we were going in the other direction!"
ReplyDeleteI've always wondered what the LA Times thinks it's getting for its money. Well, upon reflection . . .
ReplyDeletePolitical analysis and white-collar crime are hard. Cop dramas are easy. Plus: eyeballs.
ReplyDelete...when I became a man, I put away childish things
ReplyDeleteLike an idiotic belief in an all powerful yet unseen sky-grampa who'll kill you if you don't bow down to him because he loves you that much.
Apparenly open carry of semi-automatic weapons in your local supermarket or big-box store helps, too.
ReplyDelete"What?" cries Jonah's intern. "And give up journalism?!"
ReplyDeleteAlso, NO POINTY HELMETS.
ReplyDeletehttp://4.bp.blogspot.com/-S7iuh-bVhOw/T8RRalMrtxI/AAAAAAAAENo/ELDmzMDr3XA/s1600/jubol.jpg
That was no zombie movie, that was a tape of the last Republican National Convention!
ReplyDeleteOkay, it's no The 39 Steps but dude, y'all missed the best part! No spoilers but I'll just say "flying boat" and "storm-tossed seas".
ReplyDeleteMe, I'm still working out the semiotics of the image that heads her article. First thought - "MBA Douchebro berates a nerd"? Second thought - guy on the right strikes me as the very exemplar of a College Republican while Cringing Glasses Guy could be Chris Hayes via Stockshots. I haz a confusion...
ReplyDeleteOh, you and your proper use of hyperlinks.
ReplyDeleteThe interns would have done the groundbreaking work, while Jonah would have stuck his specialty of windbreaking.
ReplyDelete"We built this!"--Gov. Mary Fallin
ReplyDeleteThere are entire magazines aimed at the "buyer/decision-maker market" for military hardware. I'm working up an article right now on bomb release units for such a publication.
ReplyDeleteI'll take issue with the notion that "real journalism" devolves into subjective journalism. It doesn't have to. But it does so because of timid or lazy ill-informed practitioners.
ReplyDeleteKrugman stated the classic formulation of modern journalism: "Shape of Earth--Views Differ." You see this written in various ways every day. Candidate A says Candidate B is a tax-n-spend liberal. Candidate B says he's not. {next paragraph}. Candidate B says Candidate A wants to starve little children. Candidate A says that's not true. {next paragraph}. And on and on.
The reporter here is dutifully stating the accusations, and providing for rebuttal from the opposing team. This is what they teach you J-school, and it leaves the reader less informed at the end of the article. Few modern journalists engage in the next step of the process, which would give you articles more like this:
Candidate A says Candidate B is a tax-n-spend liberal. Candidate B says he's not. Looking over Candidate B's record in the state legislature shows that he has actually voted against most spending measures. He has introduced bills calling for stricter auditing standards for current farm-bill programs . . .{next paragraph} Candidate B says Candidate A wants to starve little children. Candidate A says that's not true. However, Candidate A has said on numerous occasions that she would eliminate the free school lunch program. She also advocates putting a one-year limit on SNAP eligibility, and has repeatedly called for children of single mothers to be made wards of the state and placed in workhouses.
It's extremely rare that you get pieces written like that.
I dunno... I thought that 'Pirate Latitudes' and 'Timeline' (14th century France) were two of his best, especially the part where the billionaire tech mogul baddie escapes in his time machine and ends up back in France as the Black Death is taking hold.
ReplyDeleteOk, and maybe just because lear is still on my mind but doesnt jonah's observation about how its narrative all the way down just boil down to "nothing comes from nothing" and maybe a jumped up you say potato/i say potahto?
ReplyDeleteI have seen the incriminating video, It appears that he started to say he had been to all 50 states and then realized mid word that he had campaigned in only 47 and so it came out "I have been to all fift-fff-seven states." That or, fun fact, there are 57 states and/or territories in the U.S. of A.. Clearly a special prosecutor should be appointed to resolve the matter once and for all.
ReplyDelete(I read "Rising Sun" too, and it convinced me, finally, that Michael Crichton couldn't write.)
ReplyDelete"Dawn of the Dead" is a cautionary tale about what happens when government doesn't institute travel bans from West Africa or seal the Mexican border.
ReplyDeleteYes. Your first example I call "tennis". (Which is why so much of what people call "optics" nowadays is one or the other players trying to hit the ball before it leaves the other "player's" racket.)
ReplyDeleteActually, we just fast-forwarded thru that bit. My husband hates "chaos at sea" movies!
ReplyDelete(Even money that "Person County Republicans" ancestors probably owned slaves.)
ReplyDelete4, 5, 6, 7
ReplyDeleteAll the Cretins go to heaven
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ymeuOz0hZU
Interesting. I read "The Man in the High Castle" and the I Ching tells me this has already happened
ReplyDeleteWhat do you THINK makes up the warhead of a photo torpedo?
ReplyDeleteOr maybe I have that wrong. Maybe Kirk was always saying, "Set Phasers to stunk!"
I am soooooooooooooo stealing this.
ReplyDeleteGosh, have I touched the sweat or saliva of someone who has Ebola? I
ReplyDeletedon’t think so. On the other hand, I did just ride public transportation
and take airplanes, where who knows what bodily fluids are caked on
every door, railing, seat and lap table.
I think maybe someone might have been thinking about this entirely too much.
photo torpedo
ReplyDeleteFull frontal selfies of K-Lo, obviously.
usually it's conservatives describing liberals as "The Intelligentsia" and intending the description as a slur.
ReplyDeleteIndeed. I've never understood how that's supposed to work.
"I think we need to carefully consider the most likely transmission modes of this disease before we even consider drafting policies, because doing things without sufficient data and forethought could actually make the situation much worse."
"Oh, you're just one of this intelligentsias, aren't you? Well, my sister's boyfriend's brother's uncle graduated high school and works for a local driveway sealer, and he says we should just build a giant plastic dome. So there!"
My best typo yet! and a great comeback. (My eyes! Gah!)
ReplyDeleteI think the only way they can be sure is to taste every surface before they touch it.
ReplyDeleteHey conservatives!
ReplyDeleteWhat Derelict said. That would make me SO MAD! SO OFFENDED! GRRRR! It would be so POLITICALLY INCORRECT.
A few of them. A lot of the old slaveholding families infucked themselves out of existence, some of them leaving their names (and likely some genetic material) in the descendants of their former slaves. Those old names, the Cunninghams, Torains, Hughes, and McGheehees are still around and figure prominently on democratic voter lists.
ReplyDeleteI knew some white descendants of the Mcgheehees who'd been saddled by the death of the patriarch with an enormous failing plantation in the 1840's. The will refused the women the ability to sell it, and it hung on as an albatross in the family for another couple of generations. The last Mcgheehee who owned the place purchased it from her mother for a pittance. It's the only plantation house I've seen close up. They're basically an early version of McMansion, but with extra horror.
I still hate to see them go, mainly because they weren't only slave built, but in many cases slave-designed. It's still a mystery to me how they got all that green lumber to dry in the frame without buckling.
it's a misunderstanding https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTE219tLouM
ReplyDeleteHey Aimai, saw Chomsky last night, he name dropped your grandfather.
ReplyDelete"the story of Culture11, the would-be conservative Slate, is in certain ways a cautionary tale ...."
ReplyDeleteThe one where you grow hair on your palms, to be precise.
yeah he is def on the opposite side of the battle lines from terry pratchett who has talked abt human beings as being defined by the stories we tell FOR GOOD BUT ALSO FOR BAD for many many years now
ReplyDelete& includes religion as one class of stories
& the prejudicial stories to be countered by stories of justice & maturity
but jonah doesnt grasp that he is in the 'burn the old woman she must be a witch' bunch of stories . . .
That's sweet--I hope! I mean I hope it was a nice reference. Where were you? My neck of the woods?
ReplyDeleteNRO and all those commenting sites definitely have a feeling of encircled wagons and flop sweat--kind of like the gamer/mra sites before they discovered they could dox and issue rape threats--the fatwas of the right wing.
ReplyDeleteThat essay writer is a LessWrong poster. The style is hard to miss- very long, kinda OCD, navel gazing, philosofizzing, uses pointless correlation coefficients, nerd social reference frame. And wrong.
ReplyDeleteSlate and Salon seem to have a regular feature they should call The Illiberal/Kook/Outlier Liberal or The Left-liberal Sellout.
Damn! That crescent story. In those days I frequented the Whistlestoppers political forum and the righties went all argle blargle about that. It was so ludicrous that all one could do was point and laugh but they were deadly serious. Even the Snopes entry about it all being in their fevered imaginations could not dent their 9 11 stiffies.
ReplyDeleteWeird ass people.
OT - there's a heartbreaking story here about a nurse who went to Sierra Leone with Doctors Without Borders to treat ebola - and was treated like a criminal on her return.
ReplyDeleteThat's bad enough... but the comments, fuck me Agnes the comments... it's like every hateful thuggish nativist FAUX watcher rolled into one mango-shitfest. I only got through ten or so comments before I had to bail.
That's some choice racism right there. I also like the picture of Christians who oppose caring for the sick and helping the poor.
ReplyDeleteHartford, CT-Mark Twain House. A friend had a ticket and couldn't go so he gave it to me.
ReplyDeleteThe context was (early 70's) critics of Israeli policy. Something like "Everyone was called an anti-semite except me and Izzy Stone who were diagnosed with the psychological condition of self hating Jew."
I read some of those comments (shudder). I guess volunteering to care for poor dying children makes the baby supply side Jesus cry.
ReplyDeleteSee, I read that originally as mocking folks who use "you're playing the race card" as a way to show that I need never pay attention to anything they ever say again. I think it works better, actually, and I wonder if this is has been a case of Person County Republicans Poe-ing themselves.
ReplyDeleteBack in high school, I never missed an issue of Aviation Week and Space Technology. I kept asking my mom for a V-22 Osprey, but alas, she said no.
ReplyDeleteIt's a pretty amazing aircraft. I've had one buzz over head perhaps 100 feet away while doing some work out at Kirtland AFB.
ReplyDeleteIf you could afford AWST in high school, you had a much better paying job than I did!
Hey! When he writes the cursor is right there!
ReplyDeleteSchool libraries with leftover pre-Prop 13 budgets for the win.
ReplyDelete"Scott Alexander" has to use a pen name because all his liberal friends would hunt him down if they knew he was saying nice things about the conservatives he doesn't know. Right. Personally my bullshit detector goes off when I read someone saying "I threw that liberal dinner party and now I feel bad about it."
ReplyDeletebecause having some bestsellers must mean your stories have more pure masculine essence in them or something:
ReplyDeleteI don't want to know what Jonah leaves between the pages of his books.