If you didnt know anything else about AGW but the fact that advocates of the theory demand cessation of the use of coal in the US - but are mute about the frenetic rate of construction of coal-fired plants in China (and elsewhere in Asia) - you would know that it is a political ploy intended to damage liberalism.By liberalism I of course mean what F.A. Hayek, writing in Britain during WWII, meant by the term. I.e., precisely the opposite of the fraudulent post-1930 American usage in which the term is a synonym for socialism.
Theodore Roosevelt was articulating liberalism, circa 1910, in his famous speech at the Sarbonne:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deedsIMHO post-1930 liberalism is accurately defined by the perfect inversion of TRs meaning:It is the critic ; the man who points out how others could have done things better; who counts. The credit does not belong to the individual, who didnt do that, and who falsely claims the credit implied in the status of ownership.When put that way, it is should be obvious that the contempt which 1910 liberals (we) feel for the MSM derives from the fact thatIt is journalists who didnt do that - they have never even tried to, and cant actually relate to anyone who ever actually even did try to, do anything. But what defines their nature - and what they therefore obsessively do - is criticize.Having located the reason for the fact that journalism = socialism, we turn to the reason why the effect of the socialistic tendency inherent in journalism is and must be as homogenous and powerful as it is:People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. - Adam Smith, Wealth of NationsHence we are reliably informed not only that the mere fact that journalists, as people of the same trade," read each others output is a serious and fundamental problem for us, but that every organization of journalists must exacerbate that problem. All of which compounds the (as shown above, inherent) tendency of journalists to promote socialism. To promote, that is, an ideology whose inherent nature is a conspiracy against the (pre-1920 liberal) order which the Constitution defines as the public interest.There are organizations, and then there are organizations. There is a National Press Club, and there is The Committee to Protect Journalists, and no doubt there are numerous other journalism organizations with high-sounding titles. But the true root of all organization of modern journalism is the wire service. Any and every wire service, without exception. But the granddaddy of them all is the Associated Press.
- News Over the Wires:
- The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844-1897
by Menahem Blondheimdescribes the aggressively monopolistic rise of the AP. And I have seen it credibly mentioned on the Internet that in 1945 the AP was found guilty of violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act by SCOTUS. But it wouldnt matter if none of that were true - it is the mere fact that it is an organization of journalists - an intimate association capable of instantaneously communicating with all of major journalism, and of giving direction to them all in a stylebook as to how things are to be expressed, what expressions are taboo, and what makes a good story - which makes it a mortal threat to the order (everywhere but America, and in America as well before 1920, called liberalism) which is the public interest.
In 1945 when the AP was held in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, it was too big to fail due to the value then inherent in the conservation of transmission bandwidth, which was the legitimate mission of any wire service, in the communication of the news. But this is 2014, deep into the Internet era. This era is defined by technologies which practically eliminate the cost of the bandwidth which the transmission of the news requires - with or without the AP et. al.
It is one thing to speak, in frustration, of the homogeneous negativity of the MSM, and it is quite another to have the wit to finger The Associated Press and its membership as a single entity which is responsible for the industrial production of libel against any target it can fix and freeze as representative of the (pre-1920 liberal) order which is constitutionally mandated and which history has confirmed to be the public interest. IMHO the next person, or any recent person (e.g., George Zimmerman) or group (e.g., the Duke Lacrosse Team defendants) should launch a massive suit against "the Associated Press et. al - alleging antitrust violation and RICO treble damages in the pattern of corrupt libel of themselves and of the constitutional order as a whole. And calling for damages sufficient to ruin the AP.
The Internet can disseminate the news, thank you very much. Claims of objectivity - not commendable efforts toward objectivity, but claims actually to be objective - are actually admissions of lack of objectivity about ones own self. Such claims rebut themselves.
Its simple . . . from the founding era up to the Civil War era, newspapers were about the opinions of their printers, as much or more than about the news. What changed in the Civil War era? The advent of the telegraph and the Associated Press. And any other wire service you can name, the AP is just the biggest and most monopolistic of the bunch. The legitimate mission of the wire service is to economically share news over expensive telegraph bandwidth. But the wire service concomitantly functions as a continuous virtual meeting of the newspapers which belong to it - and therein lies the rub:People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. - Adam Smith, Wealth of NationsIn plain sight, the wire services - basically, the AP - functions as a conspiracy against the public by journalists. A conspiracy to promote journalists above the public by creating the impression that journalists are superior beings who are objective. But what is the journalist? journalists are critics rather than doers. The wire service journalist is an ordinary citizen telling you what went wrong when people other than journalists (and their acolytes) were in charge. Back in 1910, before the meaning of the word liberalism was inverted (in the 1920s, according to Safires New Political Dictionary), Theodore Rooseveltfamously asserted that"It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena . . . who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds . . .In saying that, Roosevelt was articulating liberalism., as the word was then understood (and as it continued to be understood outside the US). The liberalism we are used to is the precise opposite of that; according to liberalism, the critic is the only one who counts, because nothing actually matters except PR. The perfect inversion of the credit belongs to the man in the arena is,If youve got a business, you didnt build that.Political correctness, AKA liberalism, is the natural thought process of the journalist. Everything has to be wrong to the extent that it is controlled or executed by people who work to a bottom line in an effort to win credit by deeds rather than words. The long and the short of the matter is that freedom of the press is subverted by wire services. Because the press is homogenized into a single entity, and the newspapers are no longer about the divergent opinions of the printers but about wire service copy. In this milieu you dont become a printer unless you are simpatico with wire service journalism. So we have the irony that our free press is not a defender of the First Amendment. In fact, our free press was the driving force behind campaign finance reform because it weakens the ability of others to compete with our unified free press in promoting or opposing candidates.Back when Senator Bill Bradley was promoting Campaign Finance Reform on the grounds that the poor mans soap box couldnt compete with the rich mans wallet, the Internet was in its infancy. But in reality, it is wire service journalism which is the rich mans wallet - and it has been since memory of living man runneth not to the contrary. And it is the Internet which is now the poor mans soap box. And even the ads by truly rich people like the Koch brothers cant compete on level ground with wire service journalism backed up by FCC broadcasting licenses.
It is a joke to take campaign finance regulation seriously as constitutionally legitimate. Campaign finance regulation is inimical to freedom of speech and of the press.