Showing posts with label Straw-Man. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Straw-Man. Show all posts

Monday, July 25, 2011

Some of the Best and Worst Reporting on the Oslo Norway Massacres

BloggingHeads.tv had an excellent conversation online between Michael B. Dougherty of The American Conservative and Michelle Goldman (distinctly liberal and feminist) of the Daily Beast and other venues.  It is at http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/37669.
These are just two earnest people grappling together over what to make of such an event and looking a bit shocked and grief-stricken.  One of the shocking things to these two was how coherently he wrote (though with a good bit of lifting of passages from other works).  He seemed nothing like the obviously insane shooter of Congress Rep. Giffords.  Dougherty (who admits he or his periodical are quoted by the apparent mass killer Breivik), says based of the first fragments he got of Breivik's saying or writing, he did not believe he was a "Christian Fundamentalist", and apparently Dougherty was right despite part of Breivik's manifesto indicating that part of his dream was a "Christian monoculture".  The two seemed to agree that, besides Muslims, he seemed obsessed with a sense of "emasculation" by the feminist culture.

Meanwhile, HotAir.com, which was founded "to provide content and analysis you can't get anywhere else on a daily basis" has next to nothing to say about the whole thing.  There only piece on it was titled  "Norway, with a substantial rate of gun ownership, is normally noted for non-violence".  Right, a hundred schoolchildren gunned down at camp provides such a nice segue to a reminder of their theories that the more guns, the less crime.  But the main theme of the article was "Well you can just bet that the liberals will be whining for gun control and more civility".  Better to make a preemptive strike on liberals reacting to what they haven't said yet.  Once you let them speak you then have to argue with real people rather than strawmen, which is always a pain in the ass.

I've been cruising a lot of new media lately, and intend to attempt some regular coverage and commentary.