by Al Sharpton and the Media PC Slime Machine

Hey sounds like a rock group, eh?

This column is resurrected from the Coffee Coaster archive of January 2008, and is doubly pertinent for a more recent instance of successful media lynching of (now former) PGA of America president Ted Bishop. Oh what a tangled web we weave at the Golf Channel, where on the Ted Bishop lynching, commentators were largely silent with their eyes cast down—Ms. Tilghman seemed the most subdued—nobody bold enough in the journalistic cojones department to state the inconsistency of letting the ‘sexist’ Bishop be lynched in silence while objecting vociferously to hanging the ‘racist’ Tilghman.

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by Neil Postman
The surrender of culture to technology

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end. — Thoreau

Neil Postman is the prophet of the Second Enlightenment, the one that “builds a bridge” to the First Enlightenment of the 18th century. The former chair of the department of communications arts and sciences at New York University has a thing about technology and language. Reading any of his books—and I did review his Building a Bridge to the 18th Century—gives one the pure joy of seeing a first-class literary mind wrestling conceptually with the neverending stimulus-response “stuff” coming at humankind through the unchecked machinery of wretched excess. Continue reading →