Responding to recent articles
Bill Carpenter writes:
I miss one day of reading VFR, and find there are too many great articles to respond to.
Canada: the bilingual idiocy is inescapable. The street sign are bi-lingual, leading to idiocies like Rue Wellington Road or Pont Napoleon Bridge. A stop sign will be crowded with both Stop and Arret. An extra large sign is needed to accommodate University of Toronto/Universite de Toronto. Such redundancy is totally unnecessary because anyone with an IQ of 80 could understand enough of the “other” language to read such signs. It is just about the French getting back at the English for … everything.
Joe Wilson: I see three alternatives. (1) He is a partisan hack who advocates any position handed to him by party leaders. That is a legitimate role in the party system, though a price may be paid for flagrant inconsistency. (2) He is an opportunist who advocates whatever he believes will help his career. Ditto. (3) He has realized that mass Mexican immigration is devastating this country and should not be encouraged by government giveaways.
Black columnists: I may be stupid, but I see no difference in intelligence or logic between the Courtland Milloy column and a column by Paul Krugman or Joe Klein. Writing leftist propaganda involves logical leaps and dissembling goals and assumptions. Two columnists may vary in the degree to which they consciously do these things compared to merely parroting attitudes learned from others, but the difference is minimal if you consider how much a Maureen Dowd simply parrots herself. In short, I don’t see an inferiority in liberal black columnists. In general writing liberal propaganda makes one disingenuous and stupid.
The Courtland Milloy column is really more logical and straightforward than most liberal columns in its undissembled presentation of vulgarity, hypersensitivity, and infantile resentment as supposedly legitimate black postures towards whites. White editors may use this to try to cow white readers into truckling to black resentment, but it probably only works on the liberal readers who are already cowed.
LA replies:
It would be a worthwhile exercise to take some sample articles by angry white leftist columnists such Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd and by black columists such as Courtland Milloy and Errol Louis (of the New York Daily News) and try to make a point by point comparison of their cognitive and reasoning level.
Kathlene M. writes:
I have a nomination for a liberal white “journalist” who is probably worse than any black journalist with a lesser degree. That “journalist” is someone we’ve discussed before: the Berkeley-educated Mark Morford of SFGate.com. Morford used to write for the print edition of the San Francisco Chronicle but angered enough readers to have his column removed there. He remains on the SFGate site, ready to expose his Berkeley education as the over-priced joke it was. (His Berkeley degree reinforces my opinion that I do not want to send my kids there someday.)
Here’s a sample of the opening paragraph to one of Morford’s latest columns:
“In my more subdued moments of delighting in the pathos and adulterous whinings of incalculable greasy right-wing politicians, I oft wonder at the threshold, the limit, if there is some sort of karmic boundary that will eventually snap and recoil and strike them all down on the spot, some sort of grand tsunami of wayward justice that will sweep them all to the great Thai brothel in the sky after one too many gay lovers, meth addictions, adulterous affairs, teen boy fetishes comes to light and the world says, you know what? Enough of you. Back to the primordial slop you go.” (From his article: “Spank me, then let’s do lunch;” 9/11/09)
LA replies:
Morford shows ridiculous bias, unconstrained negativity, cosmic animus. But he doesn’t sound stupid. Being hellaciously bent is not the same thing as being cognitively challenged.
Kathlene M. replies:
True. It’s clear he isn’t stupid. His convoluted over-descriptive style attempts to show how intelligent he is, but ends up having the opposite effect to some readers. He’s like the professorial boor at parties who tries to prove how superior he is to all around him, snorting at the common conversations around him. Sometimes I think simplicity in writing is much more effective. The SFGate editors choose to keep Morford because his writing caters to the liberal uber-intelligentsia here in the SF Bay Area who fancy themselves more sophisticated than most.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 18, 2009 11:15 AM | Send