Katie McDonough, of Salon, offers up an excellent example of why objectivity, distance and reasoning are superior to emotion and passion – at least if you are concerned with being right – when analyzing current events and policy.  Yesterday, Ms. McDonough penned an article on Salon titled “It makes me really depressed”: From UVA to Cosby, the rape denial playbook that won’t go away.  Sadly, and embarrassingly for Ms. McDonough, her article turns out to be a perfect example of someone seeing only what she wants to see and disregarding evidence that might be contrary to a pre-determined position.

Ms. McDonough was upset that Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone article on rape had been questioned by a number of journalists who found issues with the journalistic standards used in writing the article and questioned the veracity of some of the claims.  These articles did not claim that the article was false, but merely that there were questions that should have been answered that weren’t.  However, for Ms. McDonough, the questioners are to blame because, in her view, their questioning detracts from the central idea of the piece – that rape on campus is a problem.

That Ms. McDonough thinks that examining the truth of a story is a problem is, sadly, reflective of a leftist mindset that cares less about truth than about “ideas.”  It’s a bit reminiscent of 1984 – the truth is malleable; all that matters is what people believe.  For Ms. McDonough, the Salon story is about rape on campus and it matters less that the underlying facts are correct than that attention is being brought to an issue she feels needs to be addressed.  However, sacrificing the truth on the alter of expediency has a price – and that price is that you wind up with egg on your face when you make heroes out of liars, cheats or just plain flawed people.  (I would say just ask Al Sharpton, but given his prominence in city politics and at the White House these days I would just be damaging my own point).

And so we come to the reckoning.  Rolling Stone has just retracted the story because “there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced.”  Ms. McDonough probably doesn’t care, since she cares more about the cause than the truth, but for those who are not blinded by personal feelings, this revelation makes a mockery out of much that is contained in the article.

Also in the same article, unfortunately for Ms. McDonough, she chose to attack the people who have cast doubt Lena Dunham’s account of being raped.  Once again, for McDonough, the questioning of the alleged facts should be outside the bounds of inquiry because it only serves to detract from the larger point that rape is a problem.

There is no way to talk about rape and escape this kind of interrogation, this questioning of character and motives and bias. How many of the people calling foul on this report as a matter of journalistic ethics in investigative reporting were also attacking Lena Dunham for including a chapter in her memoir about being raped while at college. Dunham used a pseudonym for her rapist in that personal essay, but she was still accused of lying — and ruining a man’s life.

The problem for McDonough is that, once again, the facts do matter.  It is possible that Dunham’s account is accurate.  However, an investigation by Breitbart was unable to confirm many of the claims that Dunham made.  McDonough may not think that is a problem, but for some of us false accusations of rape (or any other serious crime) are a big deal.  For one, it hurts the person who is accused and is innocent.  More broadly, for people interested in truth – as opposed to just being interested in political ideology – it is offensive to create issues and drive narratives based on lies, even if the cause is worthy.

Brian Beutler has a horrendous piece in the New Republic today.  I just want to focus briefly on the article’s title because it is so poorly written.  The title is:

Obama Just Lost the Battle for the Senate. It’s Time He Waged War for Real.

Somebody at the New Republic, perhaps Beutler himself, needs a remedial English course that explains metaphors, or else Beutler is calling for a very extreme response to last night’s elections.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejZC5r5wS64

From the New Republic:

Let’s not beat around the bush here: The authorities in New York clearly lied in their press conference last night about Craig Spencer, the New York physician who contracted Ebola while volunteering for Doctors Without Borders in Guinea.

Noam Scheiber is okay with the lying because it served a higher purpose.  The problem is that if officials constantly lie, even for our good, eventually they will no longer be believed at all.  The damage is incremental, but accumulates until there is no faith left.

There is a long piece in the Boston Globe Magazine from October 1 by Alexandria Neason about Common Core titled “Are teachers really ready for the Common Core?”  Whether Common Core is a good idea or a bad one, I don’t know enough to know, yet.  (Although, from what I have read so far, it looks pretty bad, at least in practice).  But what caught my eye in this article has nothing to do with Common Core:

More than 40 states, Washington, D.C., and four territories voluntarily adopted the standards, which were created by education experts with assistance from teachers. Massachusetts already had high standards after major bipartisan school reforms in 1993. Nearly half of the state’s fourth-graders are proficient on National Assessment of Educational Progress reading tests, and 55 percent of eighth-graders earn proficient scores on math tests — the highest rates in the country. But because teachers here are still no closer to closing the achievement gap between wealthy and poor students than educators elsewhere, the state adopted the Common Core standards in 2010. [emphasis added]

Think about this.  Only half of the most well-educated students in the country, at an aggregate state level, are considered proficient.  This speaks to a systemic failure of culture, parenting and teaching far more profound than anything a common set of standards can hope to fix.

Joan Walsh doesn’t like Americans for Shared Prosperity’s new ad, which features a woman talking to the camera about how she is in a bad relationship, where she was promised all sorts of great things that turned out to be lies. The woman, it becomes clear, is referring to Barrack Obama. Walsh is offended by the ad and likens it to Todd Akin, but in dissecting the ad and listing what she hates, she reveals so much more about herself than the ad.

To start, she claims it diminishes Obama by making “[o]ur first black president is just another pair of pants, a smooth-talking liar who let us down. But hell, he is kind of cute, which is obviously why he won the women’s vote over John McCain and Mitt Romney.” Walsh is correct that the ad diminishes Obama – that is one of its purposes. It is, after all, a political attack ad. But it is Walsh who decides that there is some sort of racial component to the ad when she chooses to insert Obama’s race into her description of how it diminishes the president. If the ad were about Bill Clinton, would she have said “our 42^nd white president?” Why is race even relevant in this discussion?

Walsh’s racial projections don’t stop there. She says the ad targets “[c]ollege-educated and unmarried women voters who may or may not be white.  (Barack’s soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend could be Latina.)” How nefarious! The video depicts a woman who “may be” Latina. While I am sure that the ad’s producers carefully chose the subject of the video, why does Walsh need to inject race into her criticism? She could simply have said “The ad is clearly targeting the most loyal Democratic constituency: College-educated and unmarried women voters.” The fact they may or may not be white is a tautology.

My favorite reveal, however, is Walsh’s penultimate paragraph, where she writes: “[n]ow that the ad has aired, and reaction has been almost universally scathing in the media (beyond the confines of sad Erick Erickson’s deeply sexist RedState.com), have any of its backers had second thoughts?” If one follows those links, the person is taken to just two articles, one in Vox (linked twice) and one in The Wire. However, neither article in any way backs up Walsh’s assertion that the reaction has been “almost universally scathing.” The Vox article only describes the video, states where it is airing and traces who made the video and who paid for it. Not only is it not scathing, it doesn’t even rise to the level of mildly perturbed. As for The Wire article, it isn’t particularly scathing, either. It quotes two people as saying the ad brings to mind an abusive relationship.

That Walsh sees racism everywhere is no surprise, after all, her book is called “What’s the Matter With White People: Finding Our Way in the Next America.” That she sees confirmation of her views in articles which say no such thing shows that her bias is so profound that there is no subject which is not wholly subsumed by her political affiliations.

I had not read anything by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar until the last few months. I have recently seen a few columns by him in Time Magazine, and I have been impressed with his analyses, logic and even-tempered approach. His August 17 column is no different in its tone, taking a serious look at class in America and what Ferguson means. However, while his writing is excellent, I find his analysis and conclusion to be fundamentally flawed.

To start, I will say that Mr. Abdul-Jabbar’s lead paragraphs are very interesting. While I had heard of Kent State, I had never heard of the Jackson State shootings – which is precisely Mr. Abdul-Jabbar’s point. The Jackson State shootings, as he explains happened as follows:

On May 14^th, 10 days after Kent State ignited the nation, at the predominantly black Jackson State University in Mississippi, police killed two black students (one a high school senior, the other the father of an 18-month-old baby) with shotguns and wounded twelve others.

There was no national outcry. The nation was not mobilized to do anything. That heartless leviathan we call History swallowed that event whole, erasing it from the national memory

And, unless we want the Ferguson atrocity to also be swallowed and become nothing more than an intestinal irritant to history, we have to address the situation not just as another act of systemic racism, but as what else it is: class warfare.

Mr. Abdul-Jabbar’s first point here is well-taken: the murder of white student protestors at Kent state elicited an outcry while the murder of black students did not. That was unfair in a society where all people are supposed to be equal. However, it isn’t surprising. Society in the 1970s was fairly racist across the board. Furthermore, in the 1970s the country was dominated by a small oligopoly of media outlets who exercised control over the news and decided what was and was not important. If those outlets decided that the murder of black boys was unimportant, there were no significant outlets that could change that. Today, there is less of a chance of that occurring due to the fragmentation of the media and new technologies. Mr. Abdul-Jabbar’s second point, that Ferguson is representative of class warfare, is not so well-taken. While I agree with many of the points that are made in the column about how the poor are often poorly served by the state (and Mr. Abdul-Jabbar’s central point is that it is not race, but class that makes incidents like Ferguson a reality), to say it is class warfare is to mistake an outcome for a motive.

And it is here that Mr. Abdul-Jabbar not only goes off course, but uses conspiracy rhetoric to attempt to explain the United States. That starts with such phrases as “[a]nd that’s how the status quo wants it” to creating a mass of people called the “One Percent” (capitals in the original) who, according to Abdul-Jabbar, need to “keep the poor fractured by distracting them with emotional issues like immigration, abortion and gun control so they never stop to wonder how they got so screwed over for so long.”

This argument fails on two levels. The first is that the claim of the “One Percent” itself is utter nonsense (a point which Mr. Abdul-Jabbar himself recognizes later in the piece when he says there are a few good apples who are wealthy and he doesn’t mean to include everyone who has money in his One Percent). There is no One Percent in the sense of a large body of people conspiring to keep the underclasses down. The wealthy in this country comprise free market Republican energy tycoons, big government Democratic venture capitalists, industrialist, newspaper magnates, highly paid trial lawyers, surgeons, small business owners, etc. They come from all over the country and hold vastly different views. While they certainly share wealth, status and move in the same circles, they are not a monolithic group – by any stretch of the imagination – when it comes to their politics and their views on class. The second is that the “One Percent”, or even a small percentage of that group, wishes to keep the poor fractured. The top one percent may be wealthier than other citizens, but I will guarantee you that they are no different in terms of their humanity and their compassion. If Mr. Abdul-Jabbar were to ask the wealthiest people in our society whether they want a more just, more equal, less discriminatory society where everyone does better, I doubt he would find one person who would say no. He might find vastly different views on the means by which those goals are achieved and their order of priority (which is more important, equality of opportunity or result, for instance) but he won’t find many who oppose the concepts themselves.

Mr. Abdul-Jabbar’s column, at best, over-simplifies societal divisions to the point of meaninglessness. At worst, it seeks to explain US social policies as the result of some conspiracy amongst a wealthy, privileged class against the poor in America. It is an absurd assertion, not only because there is no evidence, but also because even the concept that the 3.2 million people that comprise the “One Percent” share a vision is laughable.

Bloomberg-affiliated groups are going after Kroger in a bid to get the chain to ask its customers to stop carrying firearms.  From the Wall Street Journal:

“When a company like Kroger doesn’t have a policy around guns, it seems to send a signal to gun extremists that they tacitly support or even endorse things like open carry,” said Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action.

Or maybe it just means it’s not an issue that doesn’t even register, just a though.