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To: Boomer; Drew68
The SPLC is a vile, despicable organization that needs to be sued out of existence. - Drew68
Couldn't agree more but as it turns out, the left has figured out its true worth as a label maker, so they donate heavily to it. Not sure suing it would work but I would like to see it discredited to the point it becomes worthless to the left. Make it be viewed as the lefts version of the KKK.

Sure, the left would just find another fake organization to use to make the labels they want but it would sure feel good to knock this one into the dirt and mud where it belongs.

The SPLC is a symptom. The disease is the Associated Press in particular and wire service journalism in general.

The formation of the AP started in the 1840s, and it was fully formed by the time of the Civil War. What’s wrong with a wire service? What’s wrong with the AP in particular? Any newswire is a continual virtual meeting of the subscribers of that wire service.

The trouble with that was explained by Adam Smith:

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 Nations (1776)
The wire services homogenize journalism, inherently - and you have to be “naive as a babe to believe” that journalists have, in all the many scores of decades since the invention of the wire service, never found common cause separate from the public interest. And in fact, that common cause is easily identifiable:
The natural disposition is always to believe. It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing.

The man whom we believe is necessarily, in the things concerning which we believe him, our leader and director, and we look up to him with a certain degree of esteem and respect. But as from admiring other people we come to wish to be admired ourselves; so from being led and directed by other people we learn to wish to become ourselves leaders and directors . . .

The desire of being believed, the desire of persuading, of leading and directing other people, seems to be one of the strongest of all our natural desires. - Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)

Journalism’s inveterate claiming of “objectivity” is nothing but a conspiracy to promote the conceit that journalists have a right to believed. But since journalism inveterately hypes of bad news, journalism is not objective and journalists know it. Journalism, knowingly, is negative - and the conceit that journalism is objective is a conceit that negativity is objectivity. And "the conceit that negativity is objectivity” is a fine definition for cynicism.

Journalism is cynical about society, and naive towards government:

SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins.
Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness;

the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices.

The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions.

The first is a patron, the last a punisher.

Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil . . . - Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)
Seen in that light, cynicism towards society and naiveté towards government are two sides of the same coin. And, IMHO, that “coin” is socialism.

The long and short of the matter is that it is the AP along with its membership in particular, and wire services in general, which should be sued and broken up. The AP is particularly pernicious in that to a significant extent it is its membership. And the agreements which the AP entered into with the telegraph companies would have been in direct violation of the Sherman AntiTrust Act, if that had been in force when those agreements were being struck. In addition, the rationale which protected the AP in 1945 when it was sued under Sherman must have been that it was “too big to fail.” Its mission - the conservation of scarce telegraphy bandwidth in the dissemination of the news - was too important. But at this point, as the Internet shows, telegraphy bandwidth is plentiful and dirt cheap.

68 posted on 09/04/2018 11:18:14 AM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion (Journalism promotes itself - and promotes big government - by speaking ill of society.)
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To: conservatism_IS_compassion

Some good next-level thinking! Thanks!


70 posted on 09/04/2018 11:53:40 AM PDT by Boomer
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