Saturday, October 23, 2010

Why Doesn't NPR Shit-Can Loathsome Nina Totenburg?

I plagiarize and sometimes get CAUGHT!!!

James Taranto asks the question I was hoping someone would put forward. Most interestingly, Taranto asks why the NPR "preference cascade" is still in place about Totenburg, easily the most disliked and loathed "journalist" in DC. Thanks to Dr. Zero, he describes the sitrep thus:
I think one of the reasons the hardcore liberals who run NPR terminated Williams is their desire to abort a preference cascade. . . . As described by Glenn Reynolds in a classic 2002 essay, a preference cascade occurs when people trapped inside a manufactured consensus suddenly realize that many other people share their doubts. Preference falsification works by making doubters feel isolated and alone. . . .
Since a free society makes it very easy for individuals to change their opinions, they must be prevented from even considering such a change. Manufactured consensus is very fragile in a competitive arena of ideas, when there is no fearsome penalty for a "Fresh Air" listener who decides to switch over to Rush Limbaugh.
The manufactured liberal consensus about Islamic terrorism rolled off the assembly line a long time ago. . . . A credentialed, taxpayer-supported NPR liberal cannot be allowed to question this consensus. It will shatter too easily if the clients of liberalism begin connecting dots between underwear bombers and pistol-packing Army psychiatrists. They cannot be left to nod quietly in agreement with the earnest musings of Juan Williams . . . then look around the room and see all the other faithful liberals nodding at the same time. . . .
Juan Williams came too close to understanding ideas he was supposed to hate. The Left is deathly afraid of what happens when its constituents begin to understand the Right. They didn't like the idea of millions watching an NPR contributor break the biohazard seal on strictly quarantined ideas.

This is the dilemma of the hard left and its followers. How can it enforce military discipline on its mymidons while they are always veer closely to understanding and even agreeing with their right-wing counterparts? A dead-above-the-neck specimen like Totenberg will never have this problem, but the decent citizen who has stumbled into the leftist briar patch might suddenly fall off his horse and have a sudden revelation---something that would never happen to a total half-wit plagiarist criminal like Totenberg, and defect to the right a la I. F. Stone.

Of such conversions, true drama and even literature can be made. The orcs and uruk-hais of NPR would never understand the whys and wherefores of a human drama concerning politics and the human place in the moral firmament.

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