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| Ralph Harris, Architect of Thatcherism | Rees-Mogg on Ralph Harris |
Don't Blame MSM For Gloom and Doom
by Christopher Chantrill
October 20, 2006 at 9:23 am
IF YOU WONDER why the mainstream media isn’t shooting off the fireworks about a record close above 12,000 on the Dow, you probably think that it is all about Bush hatred.
But Dean Barnett reminds us that there is another good reason.
For most Americans who work in most industries, the economy is chugging along quite nicely, thank you very much. But if you happen to work at a legacy media outpost, the good ship prosperity has left the harbor without you. Newsrooms across America are cutting staff and not giving raises. Circulation numbers (and ratings) continue to decline with no floor yet in sight. It’s understandable enough that if you work in the media, even if you happen not to be a raging-leftist-borderline-socialist, you’re probably having trouble perceiving that the rest of the country is enjoying prosperous times.
Like they say: A recession is when your neighbor loses his job; a depression is when you lose your job.
Jeff Jacoby, he relates, thinks that the legacy media
powers that be in their clumsy efforts to fix things resemble a group of ink-stained Herbert Hoovers.
Take the example of The New York Times.
The product the New York Times gives away for free on the web is actually superior to the dead tree version you have to lay out your hard earned cash to purchase; the virtual edition is updated with headlines throughout the day and the maniacal rantings of Paul Krugman and company are kept safely behind a subscription-only firewall.
Thank goodness for that. And, of course, just yesterday The New York Times reported 39 percent lower profits.
As if on cue, a bunch of Democratic pols led by Sen Edward Kennedy (D-MA), wrote to the publisher of the New York Times Co. urging him to “resist pressures to cut staff and other resources” at the ailing Boston Globe.
Meanwhile Google announced record profits and its stock soared into the stratosphere.
The times they are a-changing.
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
US Life in 1842
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Socialism equals Animism
Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists
conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Religion, Property, and Family
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Physics, Religion, and Psychology
Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Never Trust Experts
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”
Mutual Aid
In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society
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