Seldom Balanced – Usually Fair
From PZ Myers:
Last week, Mary Beard was getting sneered at because she agreed that the Roman Empire was ethnically diverse, and that — gasp, shock horror — there were brown people living in ancient Britain. She’s still getting sneered at, of course, because one thing racists really hate is being told their prejudices aren’t empirical facts. But at least the silly contretemps stirred up some excellent responses.
From Blue in the Bluegrass:
Yep, that’s the word from our wonderful media and our perfect 45th president. Because that’s what “I condemn violence on both sides” really means.
Wondering why a few conservative friends are less than impressed.
From Julian Sanchez:
Public discussion of the FBI’s ongoing investigation into Russian influence on the 2016 election is dominated by the question of collusion: Were senior members of the Trump campaign knowing collaborators in the Russian government’s campaign to undermine Hillary Clinton’s candidacy? My own view is that we’re unlikely to get any truly conclusive evidence of this—but also that it’s a mistake to treat it as the only important question for an investigation to answer.
From Green Eagle:
I am interested in the large number of commentators that are so quick to compare the right wing terrorist who drove his car into a group of peaceful protesters this weekend, to the several associates of ISIS who have done the same thing in the last couple of years. Nobody seems to have enough memory, however, to make the following obvious comment:
You know, just about anyone on earth can get their hands on a car or a truck, and drive it into a crowd. It’s not high tech terrorism.
From Neil Bamforth at MadMikesAmerica:
The British people have, or more accurately, had for many decades been best known for, if nothing else, their ‘stiff upper lip’. The saying ‘stiff upper lip’ referred to the British ability to remain stoic in adversity. WWII was, possibly, the time when the British stoical stiff upper lip was most to the fore.
The British stiff upper lip was admired across the globe. Sometimes in amazement at quite how much the British could tolerate whilst remaining polite and calm and sometimes in the belief that the British were clearly mad as hatters.
Both perceptions probably held a reasonable degree of truth but it mattered not ultimately.
The British would, at all times, regardless of trials and tragedies, regardless of pain and suffering and regardless of insults and grievous setbacks always remain in the face of all adversity calm and composed and behave like gentlemen. It was acknowledged that British women as well were more than capable of ‘the stiff upper lip’ in times of crisis.
‘The stiff upper lip’ was quintessential to being British.
Then came Princess Diana.
From Infidel753:
Sometimes it’s hard to know where to start. Neo-Nazis instigating murderous violence is not, in itself, terribly surprising. It comes with the territory of the ideology with which they’ve chosen to associate themselves. People who aren’t violent probably don’t become neo-Nazis in the first place.
What immediately struck me about the attack that killed Heather Heyer and injured many others was that ramming a car into a crowd of people is an established jihadist tactic — they’ve used it several times in Britain and France, and nobody had any hesitation in labeling those incidents as terrorism. The driver in this case may even have gotten the idea from reading about those attacks in the news.
The circumstances fueling our neo-Nazi, Confederate-revivalist, and militant Christian Right movements also resemble those fueling jihadism. In both cases a culturally-conservative society (the USA outside its urban cores, the Middle East) has for decades seen a massive influx of liberal ideas eroding the dominance of a traditional monoculture, challenging that monoculture’s deepest taboos, and shifting the entire society towards cultural pluralism. In both cases, reactionaries angry and frightened at that loss of dominance are trying to re-assert it by embracing extremist ideology and militance against cultural change. The demand is, put everything back the way it was before — before blacks and women and gays started getting uppity, before anti-Semitism became unacceptable in polite society. Back when our belief system was dominant and no one dared question it.
Next, Trump and his “many, many sides” blithering.
Wondering why a few conservative friends are less than impressed.
From John Scalzi at Whatever:
Denouncing Nazis and the KKK and violent white supremacists by those names should not be a difficult thing for a president to do, particularly when those groups are the instigators and proximate cause of violence in an American city, and one of their number has rammed his car through a group of counter-protestors, killing one and injuring dozens more. This is a moral gimme — something so obvious and clear and easy that a president should almost not get credit for it, any more than he should get credit for putting on pants before he goes to have a press conference.
And yet this president — our president, the current President of the United States — couldn’t manage it. The best he could manage was to fumble through a condemnation of “many sides,” as if those protesting the Nazis and the KKK and the violent white supremacists had equal culpability for the events of the day. He couldn’t manage this moral gimme, and when his apparatchiks were given an opportunity to take a mulligan on it, they doubled down instead.
From The Borowitz Report:
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Vice-President Mike Pence is seriously considering running for President in 1820, various sources confirmed over the weekend.
According to several prominent Republican donors, Pence is already laying the groundwork for such a campaign, outlining what he believes are the most serious challenges facing 1820 America.
In a conference call with donors last week, Pence reportedly said that, as President, his No. 1 priority would be to repeal and replace the Bill of Rights.