EMMYdiocracy
Mediocracy is a situation which can occur in a democracy in which mediocre people prevail. The society is then subordinated to a quasi-egalitarian ideology in which words and ideas are redefined by mediocre people, to be convenient for mediocre people. Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a frequent critic of mediocracy in contemporary Western countries. || This where the tag cloud goes if the tag cloud loads:
Popular conservative columnist and National Review writer John Derbyshire topped all of his previous racistscreeds (and sexistrants) today by posting a long breakdown of all of the important lessons he has taught his children about race — and he’s outdone his own racism with this one.
Derbyshire wrote the column in the third person, as a list of lessons to his kids about race. The lessons are his response to “the talk” that black parents have with their children — conversations they are forced to have because of real, persistentracism. After spending a few minutes bemoaning that he can’t say a racist slur (“What you must call ‘the ‘N’ word’ is used freely among blacks but is taboo to nonblacks”) and opining on the hostility he believes all black people feel toward white people like himself (though he says he isn’t white before calling himself white several times), he cuts to the heart of his lessons for his children:
(10a) Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally.
(10b) Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.
(10c) If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date (neglect of that one got me the closest I have ever gotten to death by gunshot).
(10d) Do not attend events likely to draw a lot of blacks.
(10e) If you are at some public event at which the number of blacks suddenly swells, leave as quickly as possible.
(10f) Do not settle in a district or municipality run by black politicians.
(10g) Before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character much more carefully than you would a white.
(10h) Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.
(10i) If accosted by a strange black in the street, smile and say something polite but keep moving.
(11) The mean intelligence of blacks is much lower than for whites. The least intelligent ten percent of whites have IQs below 81; forty percent of blacks have IQs that low. Only one black in six is more intelligent than the average white; five whites out of six are more intelligent than the average black. These differences show in every test of general cognitive ability that anyone, of any race or nationality, has yet been able to devise. They are reflected in countless everyday situations. “Life is an IQ test.”
While they are not included in the quote above, Derbyshire peppers the post with links to news stories of crimes, a few random videos, and his own columns. The only “fact” included in the entire piece (and just a small image, at that) is from the offensive book The Bell Curve. Every other hateful, racist claim is based on a one-off story or his own foregone conclusions.
What the holy fuck did I just read?
The modern GOP.
(via paxamericana)
Conservatives losing trust in science, study finds
An increase in the politicization of science since 1974 has led conservatives to challenge science as a credible source of information.Meanwhile, science has never had trust in conservatives.
Next on Fox and Friends: RoboCop and how privatization of the police force drastically increases efficiency of capturing dirty black Muslim Jew socialist terrorists.
“In light of tomorrow’s premier of Prometheus, let’s revisit Ridley Scott’s classic Alien, a rousing film about the potential of scientific progress without needless government intrusion.”
- Sean Hannity, June 7, 2012
From Conservative Teen Magazine
Context here.
And I guess here.
“Click through and you find that Reagan’s argument has two parts.
1) Black unemployment fell during the Reagan years.
2) In his personal interactions, Reagan was colorblind.
That’s basically it. But black unemployment fell during other presidencies. Other presidents managed to avoid being racists. (Not you, Woodrow Wilson.) The “really, though, black voters should naturally vote Republican” genre is large, and once you get past Thomas Sowell it’s not too rigorous.”
Conservatives trying to appropriate the Hunger Games are just hilarious to me because, ignoring the story for a minute, it’s probably going to be one of the highest grossing films of all time, a perfect example of the “Hollywood elite, liberal media.” It features Woody Harrelson, vilified this very week for being involved with HBO’s Game Change. This should theoretically poison the Hunger Games well in and of itself. With three more movies on the way, it’s going to be a part of the American zeitgeist for the next half decade at least. So they have to jump in front of the train; if they don’t try to co-opt the series, its massive following betrays the message that right-wingers are on the righteous and popular side of the culture war.
I don’t know if it’s completely appropriate, but I’m reminded of this quote from Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism:
“The followers of Ur-Fascism must also be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.”
For what it’s worth, I read the series mostly as a libertarian-socialist text, but that’s probably just me projecting.
