Instead of "Believe the Woman" or "Believe the Man," how about Believe in Due Process? This video by Matt Orfalea illustrates why we need to be highly suspicious whenever the corporate media conducts its own hysterical "trials" of celebrities.
Most people accused of crimes aren’t famous ballplayers, but small-timers whose shoplifting or assault mugshots become ugly headlines above little online arrest reports that remain on the Internet forever, for potential future employers and friends alike to see. What should media do, about people who are accused but not yet convicted? Probably at minimum, cover exonerations with as much vigor as opening charges. Unfortunately, dirty laundry will always sell better.
Many years ago, I read Moral Politics (1996), in which George Lakoff tried to make sense to the two baskets of positions taken by the two political parties. He was intrigued by the idea that Republicans strongly cling to positions that didn't seem to have any coherent underlying value. What does a strong Second Amendment position have to do with being anti-abortion? What does willingness to through one's weight around in the world using the military have to do with Prayer in Schools, cutting welfare assistance or attempting to limit jury awards on tort cases? Then Lakoff realized that he, a self-proclaimed liberal, took the opposite position on all of those issues. In short, he had his own basket of seemingly unconnected issues. But, he thought, there must be an underlying basis for these two opposing collections of issue-positions. When I read his book, I wondered the same thing.
Lakoff concluded that there, indeed, were separate foundations for the Liberal and Conservative mindsets. He called these the "Strict Father Model" and the "Nurturant Parent Model." See pp 33-35. Lakoff claims that at the center of the conservative worldview is the Strict Father Model.
This model posits a traditional nuclear family, with the father having primary responsibility for supporting and protecting the family as well as the authority to set overall policy, to set strict rules for the behavior of children, and to enforce the rules. The mother has the day-to-day responsibility for the care of the house, raising the children, and upholding the father’s authority. Children must respect and obey their parents; by doing so they build character, that is, self-discipline and self-reliance. Love and nurturance are, of course, a vital part of family life but can never outweigh parental authority, which is itself an expression of love and nurturance—tough love. Self-discipline, self-reliance, and respect for legitimate authority are the crucial things that children must learn.
Once children are mature, they are on their own and must depend on their acquired self-discipline to survive. Their self-reliance gives them authority over their own destinies, and parents are not to meddle in their lives.
According to Lakoff, the liberal worldview centers on a very different ideal of family life, what he calls the Nurturant Parent model:
Love, empathy, and nurturance are primary, and children become responsible, self-disciplined and self-reliant through being cared for, respected, and caring for others, both in their family and in their community. Support and protection are part of nurturance, and they require strength and courage on the part of parents. The obedience of children comes out of their love and respect for their parents and their community, not out of the fear of punishment. Good communication is crucial. If their authority is to be legitimate, parents must explain why their decisions serve the cause of protection and nurturance. Questioning by children is seen as positive, since children need to learn why their parents do what they do and since children often have good ideas that should be taken seriously. Ultimately, of course, responsible parents have to make the decisions, and that must be clear.
The principal goal of nurturance is for children to be fulfilled and happy in their lives. A fulfilling life is assumed to be, in significant part, a nurturant life; one committed to family and community responsibility. What children need to learn most is empathy for others, the capacity for nurturance, and the maintenance of social ties, which cannot be done without the strength, respect, self-discipline, and self-reliance that comes through being cared for. Raising a child to be fulfilled also requires helping that child develop his or her potential for achievement and enjoyment. Th it requires respecting the child’s own values and allowing the child to explore the range of ideas and options that the world offers.
Lakoff contrasted these two models in a way that would intuitively sound correct to many people who traditionally vote for Democrats:
Strict Father morality assigns highest priorities to such things as moral strength (the self-control and self-discipline to stand up to external and internal evils), respect for and obedience to authority, the setting and following of strict guidelines and behavioral norms, and so on. Moral self-interest says that if everyone is free to pursue their self-interest, the overall self-interests of all will be maximized. In conservatism, the pursuit of self-interest is seen as a way of using self-discipline to achieve self-reliance.
Nurturant Parent morality has a different set of priorities. Moral nurturance requires empathy for others and the helping of those who need help. To help others, one must take care of oneself and nurture social ties. And one must be happy and fulfilled in oneself, or one will have little empathy for others. The moral pursuit of self-interest only makes sense within these priorities.
There's a big problem with Lakoff's analysis. From 1996 to the present, those who identify as "liberals" have dramatically flipped their positions on censorship, warmongering, race consciousness, trust in the U.S. security state. Did these issues become more "nurturing?" It's impossible to account for these 180 degree turns using a Strict Parent/Nurturant Parent analysis. Over time, conservatives have also turned themselves into pretzels, as discussed in a new book, The Myth of Left and Right, by brothers Hyrum and Verlan Lewis (2023). When they voted for Trump in large numbers, Republicans decided that the type of morality they had strongly touted for decades was no longer important.
Self-identified conservatives and liberals have also recently switched places on the importance of personal morality in public officials. During the Clinton years, conservatives were nearly unanimous in believing that the personal char acter of a politician was crucial to his or her performance in office - it was one of their central justifications for impeaching President Clinton- but as soon as Trump assumed leadership of the right, conservatives reversed course. Before Trump, only 36% of Republicans believed that "public officials can behave ethically in their professional roles even if they acted immorally in their personal life," but after Trump's nomination, that number shot up to 70%.54 More recently, Gallup found that:
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Excellent video by Ryan Long. The answer is to start with this premise: There are real-life human beings on all sides of this horrific situation. Start from this position. Martin Buber's I-Thou. Then think slowly, not impulsively, with the assumption that the past doesn't strictly determine the future.
One more meme . . . Be a problem solver. Don't pick sides.
Dr. William Makis lists these one after another. Fifty young healthy adults dying in their sleep. Why? And why is there no curiosity by corporate news? Are these related to the COVID vax? The diagnosis often is "SADS." " Often no vax status revealed. I'd like to know. Here's the list:
Bluntly put, I’m going to ask you for money. But, before I do, I have a pressing question: Do you know how fire alarms work?
I do. And I’d wager that most of the press did, too, until Representative Jamaal Bowman pulled one this week in a possible attempt to shut down the work of Congress, and, in a transparent attempt to ignore the problem with his having done so, the operation of fire alarms immediately became one of those great Talmudic mysteries that prompt furrowed brows and the perplexed shrugging of shoulders. If you want to see a journalist lose faith in epistemological truth, have a Democrat do something corrupt or stupid. Within seconds, you’ll be transported to a pot-filled sophomore philosophy seminar. “When you think about it, what can we really know, dude?”
I mention The Strange Case of the Exquisitely Complicated Fire Alarm because it strikes me as a perfect example-in-miniature of how the media have elected to treat the growing evidence of serious wrongdoing by President Biden and his family. Back in 2017, when the subject of rumors was Donald Trump and his supposed “collusion” with Russia, the press treated every claim that was made as if it were self-evidently true . . . Questions were begged without relief. If it was alleged at 5 p.m. that Trump had once tried a vodka martini, by 6 the walls would be closing in. . .
With Biden, the media have taken precisely the opposite approach. I would like to say that this reversal represents a salutary overcorrection, but, of course, we all know that it is no such thing. It represents corruption. . . The press wanted Trump to be guilty, it wants Biden to be innocent, and it has proceeded accordingly in both cases. With Trump, fluff was treated as evidence; with Biden, evidence is treated as fluff.
This excellent article is the reason I created a category on this website called "Narratives in Media." It's probably my fasted growing category, with more than two hundred examples, most of these from the past three years. I created this category relatively recently; my of my older posts could have been categorized similarly. I sometimes refer to the post in this category to remind myself that we are constantly being gaslight by corporate media. When I wonder whether my positions are reasonable on COVID, immigration, Biden, Hunter Biden, politization of the U.S. security state, censorship, etc., I refer to these articles. It's simply not possible that left-leaning versus right-leaning (FOX) corporate news repeatedly come down on the opposite side of all these issues.
My main question is whether all of these so-called "reporters" and "editors" are intentionally misleading us, paltering, or whether they have drunk so much of the Kool-aid that they are oblivious to their own need to preach to us (through commission and omission) rather than simply telling us what is happening out in the world.
I do want to put in a good word for National Review, a conservative-leaning publication that is also self-critical. A conservative publication that was consistently and critically opposed to Trump. As Cook accurately says in his article on Jamal Bowman and media polarization,
I am proud to say that National Review did not behave in this manner in either case. The phrase that I have heard most frequently uttered by my colleagues during the discussion of both of these stories is “don’t get out over your skis.” Instead: Be skeptical, be open-minded, be patient, look for evidence, and follow it where it goes.
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