Miscellaneous Rambling
New TWE podcast posted: Tiger Woods, Seven Nation Army of Actuaries, Twitter's Narrative, Grand Narratives and Post-Modernism.
Tiger Woods: Congratulations to Tiger and congratulations to golf.
Tiger and the Press: Tiger the Philanderer . . . covered up by the press. A small example of a much bigger problem: the press can't be trusted.
Insurance Rates: Your credit history has nothing to do with your driving habits? Highly unlikely, the assertion of the leftist Arab congresswoman from Detroit's assertion to the contrary.
Twitter's Post-Modernist Narrative: Twitter has a narrative. If your narrative disagrees with theirs, you get banned. But they assure us: they're objective and only look at context.
A Thought Experiment: What if Google et al have been taken over by the government? There's evidence that they're influenced heavily by government, but what if they're actually controlled by the government? And they're stomping on free speech, controlling the search engine results, etc. There's evidence that they're beholden to government (tax breaks, etc.) and, therefore, influenced by government, but not quite controlled. But if they were . . .?
The Grand Narrative: Post-modernism loves to overthrow grand narratives. It's a related branch of revisionist history. Some of it is is a good thing, but when they want to shift the narrative from “America is great” to “America sucks and needs to be remade,” they're ridiculous and evil.
SHOW NOTES
You want to be a jerk rod and not serve blacks? Fine. I won't patronize your store. Racism is a sin. But I support your right to talk, associate, serve, sell to anyone you want, even if I find you repulsive. Your bigotry does not undermine my security or pursuits, and it doesn't undermine the black man's.
It would be interesting, however, to apply my idea to Twitter, Facebook, and other social media.
But I'm not convinced that Twitter and Google and Facebook aren't “state actors.”
---------------
“Context.” The Twitter people ought to be banned from using that excuse. It's cogent, of course, but man, they're abusing it. “Context” to the Twitter censors means, “Do I find it offensive b/c it offends the narrative I hold?”
---------------
I'm really getting into the “narrative” issue. One, the concept has taken hold. You hear it referenced all the time in the MSM, and I think it's a postmodern concoction. Merely by using it, we're showing how mainstreamed postmodernism's ideas have become.
But I'm sympathetic. I really like historical revisionism.
Peter Novick, author of The Noble Dream, which attacked the “ideal of objectivity” in history. Pointed out that all history is “radically selective.”
You can't get all the facts in. You just do your best to select the facts you, the historian, think relevant, but your biases will play in. Look at my 30-minute history of the Catholic Church video. Not one word of Catholicism in the new world. Now, I only had 30 minutes, but still. I had to select. No matter how much space you have, you must select, which means some things get left out.
Howard Zinn: A People's History of the United States. Counterpoise. Balance the scales against US textbooks.
US standard history paints us as a glorious nation without blemish.
We are freakin' great.
But perfect? Even close? No way.
Zinn balances this out. He wasn't even trying to be fair or objective: his was an unabashed one-sided history that was anti-America . . . or rather, anti-America-as-painted-by-the-standard-and-accepted-American-histories.
