. James Rainey in today’s Los Angeles Times offers a mostly on-target piece on how the MSM tends to simplify in stupid mystification new social phenomena the news media have neither the patience nor insight to examine incisively. Way to go, Rainey. Rainey’s focus is on similar treatment of the Tea Parties and Occupy Wall […]
Occupy Wall Street vs The Tea Parties
. There is enough oversimplification in MSM political commentary about American political movements and tendencies – their origins, motives, and acts – to swirl perpetually down a drain of ignorance, but I don’t have quite that much time today. The opposition of the title above is certainly a current, favored topic of pundits. As it […]
The Hope of Occupy Wall Street
. I don’t mean by that title the hope of those who have organized the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. In some respects that isn’t clear, in others all too clear. The people behind the effort – Anonymous “hacktivists” and other left-libertarians and anarchists – are people with whom I share no allegiance. I was disdainful of “occupation” […]
Obama and the Vision Thing
. The big news of the weekend – bigger than the rise of Pizza Pie Guy in the John Birch Society’s GOP’s hot-air-balloon derby – is the growing rebellion against Wall Street. Occupy Wall Street may have been organized by the vanguard of diffuse, unfocused anarchy-romancing antiestablishmentarians railing against “the system,” but they have been […]
How We Lived on It (42) – Anti-Semitism, the Ur-Hatred
I’ve been thinking since I wrote “The Uncanny John Mearsheimer,” in which I by the way proposed Jewish anti-Semitism and black-for-white passing as Ur forms of the uncanny, that anti-Semitism is one of the Ur forms of hatred – the group form. Hatred of the other, expressed as demonization, is a primal emotion. In the […]