No Idea What They're Talking About
Julian Sanchez is very well-versed in the PATRIOT act, and national security law generally. He’s also one of a depressingly small number of writers who never writes stuff he doesn’t believe. Below he methodically explains how FOX News misinforms its viewers about the debate over reforms to the law. Note that in this example, the network’s inaccuracies effectively make its audience unnecessarily frightened about national security — and that as a result they’re likely to oppose measures that safeguard the civil rights of citizens. On this issue, it’s the conservative media that is propagandizing “against freedom,” as they say at the Tea Parties.
Also see him fisk Dick Morris and Eileen McGann:
Seriously, it’s one thing to be wrong on an issue, or even to make an error or two in the course of a column. It’s quite another to purport to inform people about a topic without doing the kind of elementary research you’d expect from a half-bright high-schooler turning in a homework assignment. Aren’t any of the site’s visitors even a little offended by this level of brazen contempt for the audience?
Aren’t any of the site’s visitors even a little offended by this level of brazen contempt for the audience?
lol, no!
I’ll help you out Connor.
Consider what 40 years of memetic selection for individuals either too IQ-challenged or too uneducated to understand theory of evolution has done to the conservative base.
A kind of inverse social darwinism (heh) or selection for stupid.
And given that GOP leadership is essentially enslaved (double heh) to the religious (mormon/evangelical christian) base they can only run religious candidates (1 mormon and two evangelical xians) on a platform of evangelical doctrine (LIFE!, chattel slavery of women and children, homophobia, racism, jesus-love and neocon intervensionism as a sort of militarized missionarianism).
The GOP is now the party of Low-IQ Religious White People.
You’re as dead as the dinosaurs, but the tiny little brains in your hips don’t know it yet.
— matoko_chan · Oct 6, 07:14 PM · #
It is critically important to protect civil liberties even if we are at war — it’s these types of excuses, protecting the nation, that justify all sorts of individual rights violations. What we have worth fighting for should never be violated by us, or it’s no longer worth fighting for.
— mike farmer · Oct 6, 08:05 PM · #
Factual inaccuracies on TV? The horror! Next thing, they’ll have factual inaccuracies in newspapers. Thank God Friedersdorf is on the case.
— y81 · Oct 6, 08:20 PM · #
matoko, forgive me, but i can’t help but interpret your oversimplification of the GOP as a slightly more loquacious but equally non-substantive argument of the caliber discussed on Conor’s post.
you’ve especially got it wrong characterizing the GOP base as predominantly “mormon”. my recollection is that the last mormon presidential candidate had an exceptionally difficult time gaining the acceptance of the GOP base. at least acknowledge that nuance and i may be willing to listen to you.
— mpb · Oct 6, 08:29 PM · #
lol….i can ack that.
But I didn’t say predominately mormon…i said predominately evangelical protestant/xian.
Exit polls had % evangelicals at 50% of the GOP in 2008.
My hypothesis is that the percentage is higher.
mpb….could the GOP front a candidate at this point that is openly secular?
and….Glenn Beck is a mormon.
His 912 Project is largely informed by the pamphlets of Cleon Skousen, a mormon crank conspiracy theorist too nuts even for the LDS.
— matoko_chan · Oct 6, 08:48 PM · #
My hypothesis is that the percentage is higher…..NOW.
— matoko_chan · Oct 6, 08:51 PM · #
“could the GOP front a candidate at this point that is openly secular?”
could the democrats? or maybe the better question is would they?
i think you, me, conor, and sanchez are probably all in agreement that the rhetoric characterizing the national conversation have achieved dangerous levels of misinformation and dis ingenuity. my point is that if 50+% of the GOP are susceptible to this type of persuasion, you, the democrats, and everyone have to live with it just as much as the GOP does. i’m glad that people like Conor are trying to have this conversation, and simply declaring the GOP dead and pointing in glee ignores the fact that we’re all stuck with the corpse.
— mpb · Oct 6, 09:10 PM · #
mpb you can see a Skousen pamphlet here.
Just mouse over the token black “college student” lower left.
— matoko_chan · Oct 6, 09:15 PM · #
we’ll only be stuck with the corpse for a bit, mpb.
I dont think a purely white christian party can survive in America in the 21st century.
I’d love to see Conor and Manzi and Larison and Reihan and, shoot, even Douthat escape their babylonian captivity to the theocons, but it ain’t gonna happen is it?
Burn it down and start over.
— matoko_chan · Oct 6, 09:20 PM · #
Alternatively devolve into a noxious hive of fascists like the Christian Democrat Party.
It’s your choice.
I don’t see anyone trying to explain that Beck is very bad juju except Conor, and he just gets fragged by the purity spiral.
— matoko_chan · Oct 6, 09:23 PM · #
More than 50% of the GOP are apparently permeable to birtherism.
what does that say about their IQ?
— matoko_chan · Oct 6, 09:27 PM · #
Matoko,
Quite apart from the substance of what you say, your tactic of commenting again and again in succession, so that the comments thread has multiple posts written by you without anyone else conversing between them, is utterly destructive of a good comments section.
I’ve told you this before on multiple occasions, but you’ve ignored it. So I’ve got to ask you to stop commenting on my posts.
— Conor Friedersdorf · Oct 6, 09:43 PM · #
matoko—um…i give up. you tell me!
look, matoko—i don’t need an education on skousen or birthers or the average IQ of the GOP faithful, which i seriously doubt is any less than the average IQ of the general population. i’m sorry to disappointed, but i’m not going to engage in any short-sighted “my party is better than your party” arguments.
rather, i’ll continue to support Conor in his posts of this nature, since i think it behooves us all to attempt to reframe the national conversation. as i alluded before, GOP or not, we’re all stuck with each other…
— mpb · Oct 6, 09:44 PM · #
“so that the comments thread has multiple posts written by you without anyone else conversing between them, is utterly destructive of a good comments section.”
Whoops, I did this on another post yesterday — I will not do it again.
— mike farmer · Oct 6, 10:12 PM · #
Matoko –
There is Frum, The Next Right, Charles Murray, writers at both Taki’s Magazine and The American Conservative, probably even VDare – you name it. Tons of anti-Beck stuff all over the internet from the right. Plus Jonah Goldberg’s in his corner (sort of), with friends like that . . .
Conor gets “fragged” for being a hollow man whose prose is always excessively (often implicitly) self-referential. Breitbart is right that Conor wants in part to be known and trusted (“trust who I trust – here’s J. Sanchez”) as a kind of biographer (see the parts of the “advice column” posts where he gives those knowing glosses of other American Scene writers, and that post where he did a kid-with-baseball-cards division of his friends according to appropriate book reviews). It is an interesting style, one worth following as it relates to the media. He has certainly done a number on The American Scene.
— T. Sifert · Oct 6, 10:20 PM · #
Conor, it’s not like it’s hard to simply skip over makoto, not least because her writing style is immediately distinctive. The webpage format promotes that.
My intent isn’t to defend makoto, since I skip her posts. But some ways back in commenting on your stuff she decided to cheer the brutal torture and murder of civilian contractors, and while I am not sure I would let that kind of thing sit on any website over which I exert control, I was willing to say, whatever, TAS favors free speech in this way. But if you think on the other hand makoto gets a pass for shit like that, and then gets delistable for freakishly and stupidly repeat posting because somehow that is crappy conversation, that’s totally nonsensical to the point of being dumb.
— Sanjay · Oct 6, 11:40 PM · #
But Sanjay I just said Blackwater probably deserved it just as much as Menchaca/Tucker did.
Aren’t you going to yell at me for defaming american soldiers as well as american contractors?
— matoko_chan · Oct 7, 02:02 AM · #
The Stratocaster and chessboard in the background are nice touches.
— Tony Comstock · Oct 8, 12:34 AM · #