Quote (IceMage @ Sep 5 2020 12:07pm)
Pretty good write up.
This on the "Fiery but mostly peaceful" headline:
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This may have supplanted “Fake but accurate” as the perfect encapsulation of the media’s reluctance to report news it finds inconvenient.
It doesn’t matter if it’s technically accurate in some sense. The message it conveys is that you shouldn’t really pay attention to the inferno behind the reporter, because that would be unfair to the protestors or Joe Biden. Think of it this way: how often do reporters covering local fires emphasize, “Most of the buildings in this city aren’t burning right now”?
There are some 800,000 police officers in the United States. Way more than 93 percent of them have never unjustly shot a black person, or any person. And yet, how often has the media uncritically allowed politicians and activists to say some variant of “it’s open season” on black men in this country? How often have they asserted it themselves?
Furthermore...
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I’m not trying to minimize the problem of police abuse, but why is there no check—no modicum of journalistic truth-squadding and basic skepticism—when people say these kinds of things? Whenever right-wingers talk with such rhetorical ridiculousness, there’s plenty of pushback. When Donald Trump says, falsely, that Portland is “ablaze,” the fact checkers hie to their firepoles and slide down to correct the record. And that’s fine by me. He’s the president and therefore deserves more fact-checking than pretty much anyone else. But the sheer numbers of people who say wildly irresponsible and untrue things on the other side of the cultural and political divide adds up over time to collective malpractice that’s every bit as significant
I really like this part
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For my entire adult life, the most damning criticism of the left has boiled down to their approach to both politics and culture: “You will be made to care.” About 25 years ago, the left decided that tolerance was no longer good enough. You had to celebrate whatever they celebrated and hate whatever they hated. “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem” is the single most totalitarian idea in wide circulation in American life. There are no safe harbors. No room for dissenting speech. No allowance for different passions, concerns, or pleasures. Compliance or Cancellation is the rule. That’s the fascistic spirit animating those jackwads demanding that people having a quiet dinner must raise their fist in solidarity with them.
This post was edited by ofthevoid on Sep 5 2020 11:26am