Deducing From What Isn’t Reported

There are a couple of things we can deduce from what the national press is not reporting about the killing of Arkansas Democratic Party Chairman Bill Gwatney:

  1. The killer has no particular ties to the Republican Party or any other right-wing political organization. How do we know this? Because that is without question what the national media went looking for before the corpse had cooled, desperately hoping they’d hit. If they’d found anything, they’d be screaming it from the rooftops now.

  2. The killer has no particular ties to the Democratic Party’s activist left or any other left-wing political organization. How do we know this? Because that is without question the second thing the national media went looking for, desperately hoping they’d miss. If they’d found anything, Gwatney’s death would be a non-story now.

Just another note in a series that probably should have included “How much sooner would the Hunter affair have been broken if John Edwards were a Republican?” Of course, such questions almost answer themselves.

39 comments

  1. It’s still possible that the killer might not be an official member of the Republican party, but perhaps a devoted listener of conservative talk radio or viewer of Fox News.

  2. >It’s still possible that the killer might not be an official member of the Republican party, but perhaps a devoted listener of conservative talk radio or viewer of Fox News.

    Anything is possible, but only some things are actually true.

  3. While I agree that the media is slanted to the FAR left, I think that there are times that right-wingers get too obsessed with the fact. Just for the record, your post here is not so much an example of that; but the bottom line is that while the media is villainous, we need to get out of the habit of treating it as if it were the ONLY villain.

    For instance, you have a number of far leftists who have done abominable things. A group of Democrats in 2004 at an Edwards rally attacked the four-year-old daughter of a lone GOP protester. A worthless POS ran a Mexican woman off the road, knowing that her child was inside, because she had a Bush ’04 bumper sticker. George Soros’s ACT knowingly hired child molesters, with the implicit deal, “Get out the Kerry vote when Mom and Dad are at home, have a good time when they aren’t.” These people are utterly vile subhuman garbage.

    And what is the typical right-wing response? “If this were a Republican doing this the media would be all over it.” Or to paraphrase, “Stop beating me up, please, you big mean tough Democrats.”

    The problem when Communists do these wicked acts is not that the media is unfairly keeping the Republican Party from using the backlash to its advantage.

    The problem, rather, IS THAT THESE COCKROACHES DO THESE THINGS IN THE FIRST PLACE.

    Perhaps a certain small group of decent people can deal with the media bias, just as a certain group of soldiers engage in PsyOps. But that should never be our main thrust.

    Our main thrust should be to deal ruthless and horrible justice to the pigs who do these things.

    The Kos Kids are more demonic than Putin or Ahmadinejad ever were, and they are neck and neck with al Qaeda. Like it or not, at some point there will have to be a reckoning with these monsters, so that they will pay for their crimes and will never, ever do them again.

  4. It’s difficult for me to take the temperature of your media from over here, but I hear accusations of bias from both sides. How widely-covered was the McCain bigamy story?

  5. Miles:

    Not at all, as far as I know. If “over here” is in the civilized world, you’ll probably find American media to be profoundly right-wing, having lent tacit support to the illegal war in Iraq among other things. There are certain exceptions (like Keith Olbermann).

  6. I have to shake my head when I hear accusations of “media bias.” Everyone thinks the media is biased against their own pet issues. I find that most mainstream news organizations in the United States promote a middle-of-the-road ideology.

  7. I think the question should be “How much sooner would the Hunter affair have been broken if related stories had not originally appeared in the National Enquirer, some years ago?”

    And the MSM is disappointing in many ways, but its anti-right-wing bias is *not* one of them. Its lack of balls in reporting on (for instance) the Justice department scandals, Kerry’s being smeared, and illegal wire-tapping are just as much of a problem as its slowing down coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  8. >Sorry for the trolling, it’s just that this “civilized world” terminology pissed me off a bit.

    I’m used to this crap from Europeans. Their crime rates are skyrocketing, their immigrant areas are no-go zones for police in less than platoon strength, long-term structural unemployment is at levels that would cause panic in the U.S., they’re in demographic collapse, and they’ve been relying on the U.S. presence to stabilize their backyard since WWII. But they’re “civilized”, yeah. I’m sure that will comfort them a lot when the lights go out.

  9. I find it astonishing that some people think Fox News is not biased to the right or that virtually every other news outlet is somewhat to extremely biased to the left. If you can’t see the bias in almost every news organization, then you’re probably drinking their Kool Aid. What sets Fox apart is they’re all alone on one side and they’ve managed to corner the market. Everybody else is knocking each others brains out for a share of the left-wing market. Nobody’s competing against Fox; hence, they win.

  10. Sorry.

    I considered using “the civilized world outside the U.S.”, but I thought the implied statement that Miles was not an American was obvious so I left it out. What I was getting at was that most of the rest of the First World considers American media to be profoundly right-wing, as compared to, say, subjects of a fascistic banana-republic dictator who might react favorably to the relative openness in American media.

  11. >most of the rest of the First World considers American media to be profoundly right-wing

    Yes. This would be the the same “rest of the world” that is now beginning to see the bill come due for decades of soft socialism. Maybe if they’d been a bit more profoundly “right-wing” themselves, there’d actually be some prospect of a future in which the main actors aren’t third-world immigrants squatting in the ruins of what used to be called civilization, eh? Rural Japan and Italy and the whole eastern half of Germany are already depopulating because there are no children, and the rest of the soi-disant “First World” other than the U.S. is not far behind on the curve of decline. Nice going!

  12. >Maybe if they’d been a bit more profoundly “right-wing” themselves, there’d actually be some prospect of a future in which the main actors aren’t third-world immigrants squatting in the ruins of what used to be called civilization, eh? Rural Japan and Italy and the whole eastern half of Germany are already depopulating because there are no children, and the rest of the soi-disant “First World” other than the U.S. is not far behind on the curve of decline.

    What exactly would be wrong with a future Europe full of third-world immigrants? 19th century immigration from the German-speaking world and Ireland (not exactly first-world at the time) turned out pretty well for the US, didn’t it? I mean, considering the plurality of us here in the States are descended from those poverty-stricken wretches.

    And in one hundred years, perhaps most of us will be descended from Mexicans. Will life suddenly start sucking?

  13. >What exactly would be wrong with a future Europe full of third-world immigrants?

    Nothing at all. If you assimilate them — which Europe is not doing.

    My point in the above is that the overarching collectivist/multiculturalist belief system that Europeans now consider diagnostic of “civilization” and think Americans regressive for not sharing is a road to cultural and demographic suicide — and not a long road either.

  14. I certainly wouldn’t call Fox News “right wing.” I don’t consider them to be evenhandedly apolitical, either, as is implied by the “fair and balanced” trademark, but if you define “right wing” as “significantly more conservative than the American center, ” they aren’t right wing at all. The political philosophy they espouse is basically at the right end of Rockefeller Republicanism, essentially Nixon Republicanism without the wiretapping.

    They are probably more right wing than the average American on the Iraq War–although their position here is essentially that of a Nixon Republican who has kept informed on the war.

    On gun control, they are considerably to the left of the American center. Tony Snow, when employed by Fox News, actually said once during the late 1990’s (and I paraphrase because I am operating off my imperfect memory) that Republicans couldn’t change things without being elected, and that being elected entailed accepting some moderate amount of gun control. (Actually, had the GOP followed his advice–and they almost did, except for the S&W boycott–the GOP would almost certainly have been rejected by the American people overwhelmingly).

    Furthermore, they frequently present Richard Morris supporter of gun control and an Iraq bugout, as an unbiased analyst of politics. By doing so, they actually provide more of a leftward tilt than they do when they showcase open lefties like Alan Colmes, because they make his definitely far-left views seem mainstream.

    Having said that, I am thankful that we have one Rockefeller Republican news channel. The truth is out here on the Net, but many people never see it. The mere fact that Fox is a little bit to the right of ABCCBSNBCPBSNPRNYTLAT makes it that much more likely to be right. It also forces the hand of ABCCBSNBCPBSNPRNYTLAT, since they are forced to admit outright lies when Fox reports them. Apparently this exposure of the truth is a problem for Jeff Read, who wants to shut them down.

  15. >[At Fox] they aren’t right wing at all.

    This is true. I’m constantly amazed by my naive urban-yuppie friends’ belief that Fox is extremely right-wing — the only way you can believe that is never to have had extended contact with real conservatives. My observations, and national voting patterns, bear out the previous poster’s contention that Fox is actually near the center of the American political spectrum.

    (New readers may be well served by a reminder that I’m a radical free-market anarchist, which is ninety degrees off that spectrum in a skew direction. I’m therefore pretty well equipped for objectivity, in that both ends look like stupid statist thuggery to me and I don’t have a side in their fight.)

  16. Fox News isn’t right-wing, but just persistently play to the lowest common denominator, like USA Today, Daily Mail, and National Enquirer rolled into one. They weren’t always like that, either; it seems like the inflection point of their decline was the day they hired Geraldo Rivera.

  17. Shenpen — I’d read the comments to that post you linked to, comparing US and European crime rates. The statistical comparison doesn’t really bear up when most ‘violent crime’ in the UK involves no injury to anyone (mainly verbal threats and petty arguments). I can’t think of a good way to factor out different definitions of crime and reporting variance, apart from cases of murder, where reporting and (well, I’d hope!) definition were fairly concrete.

    I intuitively disagree with a lot of the speculation about Europe’s imminent decline, but then I would. My prediction would be that I could find similar cases of economic migration comparable to Eastern Germany in the Americas, as well as “no-go” areas in the US (I’d pick Compton in LA as one

    I guess my question would be: rather than cherry-picking existing statistics to fit the story of islamofascists bringing down europe from within, what would be a good *future* statistical predictor? What do you expect to be a giveaway statistical event in the future that shows it’s all going to be “third-world immigrants squatting in the ruins of what used to be called civilization” within a lifetime?

  18. Jeff: I’m in the UK. Whether that’s part of the civilized world or not is up to you… Europe’s not nearly as violent, day-to-day, as Eric seems to think, but if you’re worried about WAVES of MUSLIMS immigrating and OMFG BREEDING then I can see how it would make you uneasy to live here. However, I would advise those commenters who think that the US MSM has a far-left bias to have a look at some European media outlets and see what actual left-wing media looks like. The Socialist Worker and Morning Star should be a good starting point. Note that they’re not considered mainstream papers (for a centre-left, mainstream UK paper, try the Guardian), but they are widely available. Continental mainstream media tends to be somewhat to the left of UK media.

  19. I’d rather live in the US than in the UK. It may be true that I’m more likely to get killed here, although I’m skeptical of that too. (Most of the figures have been gamed by gun control groups. For instance, they pulled their figures on “shooting deaths” from the initial police reports, without looking at how many of those actually were proven in a court of law).

    However, I am far more secure in my own home than in the UK, home of the “hot burglary.” I will never have to sit in terror and watch low-life scum rape my wife and children as I sit in terror, disarmed. (Incidentally, I seem to recall that per capita rape is higher in the UK. Good thing the women aren’t getting killed, isn’t it?)

  20. >However, I am far more secure in my own home than in the UK, home of the “hot burglary.” I will never have to sit in terror and watch low-life scum rape my wife and children as I sit in terror, disarmed. (Incidentally, I seem to recall that per capita rape is higher in the UK. Good thing the women aren’t getting killed, isn’t it?)

    http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_rap_percap-crime-rapes-per-capita

    Wrong. And BTW, if you’d like to live in a nation safe from burglary, try Saudi Arabia or Yemen. And hey, Georgia looks pretty safe too. (46/54!)

    http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_bur_percap-crime-burglaries-per-capita

  21. Ken: if Matt’s figures (and the result of some quick Googling) are to be believed, hot burglaries are around six times more common in the UK than they are in the US (burglaries twice as common, hot burglaries make up around 45% of the total in the UK and around 15% in the US). While that’s a significant increase, we’re still talking pretty small numbers. I for one have no problem sleeping unafraid and unarmed in my house on the edge of one of my city’s most deprived areas.

  22. Danny,

    “What do you expect to be a giveaway statistical event in the future that shows it’s all going to be “third-world immigrants squatting in the ruins of what used to be called civilization” within a lifetime?”

    Actually I don’t really believe that. I think it will be the usual mixture of white, brown and black folks squatting in the ruins of what used to be a civilization. The average below-than-middle class white guy here (West Midlands, UK) is amazingly retarded, uncultured, uneducated, and unmannered, and the blacks too. Even the middle class shows signs of decadency – when it’s considered not the least unusal for a 40 years old engineer to have neither serious hobbies nor family, and be interested in nothing else but soccer and playing on the Xbox, and getting pissed up (blind drunk) with his mates, I think there is a serious WTF in the culture.

    In fact within the current situation the ones I have the most respect for amongst lower-than-middle-class people is certain Indian immigrant groups, mostly the Sikhs and Hindus. They are living a lifestyle that still resembles civilization, for example, judging from the contents of shopping carts, they are mostly the only group within the lower-than-middle-class who actually do cook, which means they probably have meals around a table as a family and not just guzzling down microwaved shit before the TV. (Two of the three houses I lived in doesn’t have a dinner table, everybody eats before the TV.)

    OK these are minor things, but I think they will grow into major issues – when the little customs and habits that maintain the fabric of society break down, violent chaos is the usual long-term result.

    The Muslims might take over, but there won’t be much left for them to take over I think. Shit, I think many of them DO want to assimiliate, it’s just that there isn’t much left for them to assimilate into. I mean what’s the point in assimilating into a culture that stopped being proud of itself?

    As for your question, I think birth rates are good predictor of history – think Kosovo. And I can’t tell you now what I would choose as a good statistical prediction but probably I would choose something from the recent past of Kosovo after studying the situation a bit. But, I repeat, right now I see Islam as a significant, but smaller problem than the breakdown of society in general.

    (As for me, in half a year I’m moving to Austria. That country managed to stay sane, mostly. The main reason is the Proporz, the practice of grand coalitions: the Left was rarely left out from government, but rarely governed alone either. When they are in opposition, they tend to get crazy and when governing alone they tend to do a lot of damage because they are crazy. If they always have some amount of executive power, they tend to get constantly sobered up by reality, by the results of their actions, and thus don’t do much damage.)

  23. Miles,

    I think our experience might be different because you live in the best part of the UK and I live in the worst. Silly me – how can one so stupid to settle down in an area that was an industrial heartland but most of industry is gone now? Post-industrial equals crappy when it comes to cities. In fact if I would stay I’d move up North – either Scotland or at least something like York. A visit to Edinburgh felt like going back to civilization – how reassuring it is to be among people who don’t wear tracksuits, aren’t morbidly obese and speak with an unusual, but articulated accent , as opposed to the Brummie drawl, and the streets aren’t covered with vomit on Sunday mornings.

  24. Shenpen: I too live in a post-industrial city, namely Glasgow: I haven’t spent much time in Birmingham, so I can’t say how they compare. Glasgow has its share of drunks and lowlifes (and the accent can be hard to follow), but I find it has enough pleasant parts and people to more than balance them out. But yes, Edinburgh’s nice :-)

    Anyway, I’m sorry to hear you haven’t enjoyed your time in the UK: hopefully you’ll like Austria better.

  25. What do you expect to be a giveaway statistical event in the future that shows it’s all going to be “third-world immigrants squatting in the ruins of what used to be called civilization” within a lifetime?

    Well, that’s an interesting question, and I’m afraid I can’t think of any bright-line tests right now. But I think it’s also interesting to consider the dual question: “what giveaway event in the future would show that the US economy is on the verge of collapse?” – many Europeans believe this to be the case. A candidate might be a switch to oil being denominated in Euros, or perhaps a US military defeat in Iran (though let’s hope we don’t get that far, eh?).

  26. Miles,

    “what giveaway event in the future would show that the US economy is on the verge of collapse?”

    I’d bet it’d be something along the lines of public debt and money supply.

  27. > I’d bet it’d be something along the lines of public debt and money supply.

    The treasury defaulting on T-bills would be one pretty sure sign. But with the gold window closed, that’ll probably never happen because they can just run the printing presses as much as necessary to avoid it.

  28. I actually spent some time crunching real GDP stats last night, which on first sight would bear out what I imagine a lot of people here think, which is that Euro and US GDP matched each other fairly well until around 1982, when US GDP grabbed a slow but consistent lead. What I find fascinating from those who would present either of the extreme positions (“US as right-wing lunatic theocracy heading for disastrous decline”/”Europe as wimpy liberal ivory tower of Eloi, heading for decaent self-extinction”), is that both states have been ahistorically stable for decades taken as a whole, and matched — in terms of general happiness of their inhabitants and well-being of their economies. Local zones, like Ireland, Colorado, Spain, Detroit and East Germany, feature noticeable collapses and successes, but they seem to average out in the face of easy internal movement.

    The very fact that we’re having this drawn-out argument, as opposed to disagreeing whether, say, Africa continues to be fucked, or China will grow, indicates to me that rather than being absolute and obvious polar oopposites, both Europe and the US are barely different at all. Narcissism of small differences, to quote the patron saint of such flamewars, Freud.

  29. > most of the rest of the First World considers American media to be profoundly right-wing

    As someone who has lived in parts of the rest of the First World, I will assert that this sentence is BS.

    CNN, which is the face of American media to most, falls right in line with the soft socialist claptrap espoused by most of the state-owned/subsidized media over there. In fact, I seem to recall that CNN Europe is biased so as to co-exist with Euro beliefs.

  30. >Euro and US GDP matched each other fairly well until around 1982, when US GDP grabbed a slow but consistent lead.

    That was a quarter century ago, and coincided almost exactly with end of the long boom brought about by the Industrial Revolution and the beginning of today’s European demographic collapse. See my previous post Demographics and the Dustbin of History for extended discussion of why the latter point is especially significant.

    >The very fact that we’re having this drawn-out argument

    …is contingent on it not being 2030 yet. That is, barring some historically unprecedented miracle, about the time the population collapse will seriously drop Europe in the crapper (though the smart people will have bailed out a decade sooner). Meanwhile, the U.S.’s population will continue to rise until at least 2050. The divergence between these curves may be the single most important fact about the geopolitics of the next fifty years.

  31. I can understand the grim fatalistic appearance of demographic change, but I doubt it’s a good indicator that far forward. Too many memories of fatalistic descriptions of overpopulation in the seventies.

    How about we try and bring forward these predictions to try and see what you and I really think? Right now, I’d be very happy to be pay an ounce of gold, payable on Jan. 1st 2030, to you if the GDP PPP per capita of European Union is half or less of the GDP PPP per capita of the United States, if you’ll pay me the same if the situation is reversed. I am also willing to negotiate the terms of the wager: that’s what revealed preferences are all about. If you can suggest a bet that would pay out earlier than 2030, that would be good: while I fully intend to live forever, I’d like to be able to bank my winnings a little before then :)

  32. >I am also willing to negotiate the terms of the wager: that’s what revealed preferences are all about. If you can suggest a bet that would pay out earlier than 2030,

    I’m thinking about it. I too would prefer a bet with a shorter deadline on it.

    BTW, in March I offered a bet on my favorite mailing list that over the following 12 months to March 2009 global average temperature would continue to track the direction of solar activity (falling) rather than CO2 level (rising); bet to be off if the solar minimum ends because that would mean the two supposed climate drivers were pushing in the same direction again. I offered to match any reasonable stake. Nobody has stepped up yet.

  33. “I offered a bet on my favorite mailing list that over the following 12 months to March 2009 global average temperature would continue to track the direction of solar activity (falling) rather than CO2 level (rising)”

    Interesting – are you using this?

    http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998/to:2009/offset:-0.146/plot/gistemp/from:1998/to:2009/offset:-0.238/plot/esrl-co2/from:1998/to:2009/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1998/to:2009

    If yes have you found a setup that shows this stuff in a meaningful way?

  34. Eric: while I’m not a climate scientist, it strikes me that you may have picked a timeframe that biases the experiment towards your side. Nobody’s claiming that solar activity has no impact on global temperature, as far as I’m aware, but that doesn’t preclude CO2 levels having a long-term effect. An analogy, from dieting: the change in the readout on your bathroom scales from one day to the next depends mostly on how much food and liquid is in your stomach, but the change in the readout over a couple of months depends mostly on the calorific content of that food and your activity levels.

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