Quote of the day—Larry Correia

You guys know why Europeans have such ridiculous ideas about what America is like? It’s because we don’t have an American news media. We have a New York City news media, with some affiliates in LA and DC.

The people who present our image to the world are the most vapid, sheltered, narcissistic, pseudo-intellectual, snoots in the entire country. They seldom venture outside of their neighborhoods and their entire understanding of the rest of their nation is nothing but a big bag or stereotypes and projected neuroses.

Of course other countries have dumb ideas about what America is like. The Americans telling them about America don’t know what America is like either.

Larry Correia
September 15, 2020
Posted on Facebook
[Another contributing factor is that, at least from my personal observation, those who picked a career in journalism are far from the sharpest knives in the drawer.—Joe]

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17 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Larry Correia

  1. The other big way Europeans (and the rest of the world) learn about America is though Hollywood. The former Soviet Union in the ’60s used to show movies from the ’30s to “educate” the Soviet people how terrible life in America was; bread lines, poverty, gangsters, etc. One problem they didn’t realize, that even in those ’30s movies, nearly everyone had a car, and lived in a single family apartment or (gasp) house.

    The German and Japanese people of the twenties and thirties were exposed to a steady diet of movies seemingly showing Americans as hedonistic, jazz and party loving shallow people with no resolve beyond greed and the next trip to the speakeasy. They couldn’t imagine that Americans would be an obstacle to their leaders dreams of conquest.

  2. Decades ago when Ich Bin was soldiering in Germany & points elsewhere before, during & after the 1st Gulf War, the guys in our Bundeswehr ‘brother unit’ had a significant number with the firm opinion that the cowboys & western towns of Rawhide, Gunsmoke, The Big Valley etc. were the way it still was out in the western states, I-Keed-You-Not
    Most of the senior career NCOs & Officers understood reality, but the younger enlisted were a hoot.
    The then new surge in Cowboy Action Shooting that was beginning in the shooting community over there (another story in itself what with the way German gun laws worked then) didn’t help things either.

    • Don’t forget Karl May who wrote extremely popular books in German about the Old West with the same sort of mindset.

      One of my amusements when I am camping in a place with lots of Eurotourists is to sneak out of camp at dusk and chant like a movie Indian.

      • Karl May was translated too. I read a lot of his books as a kid, in Dutch translation. I vaguely remember seeing some of them turned into comic strip format as well.
        Karl May wrote not just about the Wild West, or his imaginary version of it (I don’t think he ever traveled to the US). He also wrote similar style stories set in the Middle East, as well as adventure stories set in China.
        A lot of these are on-line, mostly in German but some in translation including English. Look in gutenberg.org. They make fun reading even if you can pick apart the “facts” in the background quite easily.

  3. When college graduates take the GRE (Graduate Records Exam), usually required for admittance to Masters programs, the two degrees which score the worst are – #1 Education, #2 Journalism.
    PS – my degree is journalism.

    • And mine is Education. But my GRE scores look more like an Engineer. I can confirm, however, that the low mean Education GRE score is reflective of the mean logical capacity and academic prowess of the typical teacher. Yes, there absolutely are some very sharp teachers, but on average?….. Yeah, homeschool if you can. If you can’t, stay on top of their classes, lessons, and call out the stupid.

  4. sirs:

    “education” and “journalism” have their share of dull chisels, to be sure, but suffer from the added problem/liability of being sinecures for those with agendas, such as the “gender people” and lefties.

    a genuine pain in the butt, w/ their constellations of issues. oft times, they march hand in hand, so to speak.

    • True. My cousins, who grew up in small towns in Bavaria and Austria were harder working and took less time off than you would think, based on the stereotype of everybody taking a month off to get sunburned in delicate places on some Canary Islands beach.
      They also were more conservative, but that might not be a surprise given the small town existence and the work ethic. Haider who was called a Nazi by the American press was popular with them.

  5. You mean, bag of stereotypes…?

    “…those…in journalism are far from the sharpest knives in the drawer.”

    I don’t know whether they’re almost inconceivably stupid, or expert practitioners of coyness. One would not necessarily be able to tell the difference. What we do know, and without a doubt, is that they’ve been effective at leading millions of people into an abys of confusion, delusion, fear and hatred. Don’t knock it; it works.

    Was it all by mistake? The random chance behavior of bumbling idiots, each stumbling in their own mental fog in their own directions? And yet we know that the media have been working in concert. They’re more coordinated, organized, consistent and dedicated than most.

    It has been said; telling the truth is a lot easier because you don’t have to remember as much. If maintaining lies is indeed more difficult than simply seeing and recording the truth and reporting it, then the leftist media might be far more clever than you imagine.

    That, or they’re all programmed by the same overseers, in which case their inherent brain capacity (intelligence) might be irrelevant. More important would be their susceptibility to suggestive manipulation, rewards and threats, and that’s a totally different set of criteria.

    One way to judge whether you’re susceptible to suggestive manipulation (hypnosis) is to ask yourself whether you think so. If you think you’re immune, for whatever reasons, then you’re susceptible.

    Are the thoughts you’re thinking right now your own, or were they fed to you? How would you be sure? Maybe you’re only personalizing what was fed to you, in the way you might customize a Ford pickup of which there are millions, all the same in their essence and all made by the same company? And even the custom doodads you’re adding to your Ford, to make it “your own”, were made to fit it, weren’t they? Likewise all of your “original thoughts” have to be fitted into your overall paradigm, but you didn’t invent the paradigm and therefore the various “plug-ins” for it have to be made to fit or they won’t work.

    How would you know for sure whether you’re thinking independently or your thoughts, and more importantly your thought paradigms, are mostly or entirely the result of programming? Maybe the fact that you think journalists are stipud is the result of your mind being successfully manipulated by journalists or their programmers. You pride might then seal the deal, making it psychologically impossible for you to see what’s been done, as is being done, to you.

    That’s all speculation of course. I’m not making accusations here. I do believe that I have objectively observed that people tend to think in paradigms (we often call them “bubbles”), and that furthermore there is a small number of these “thinking paradigms” in the entire world, which have run throughout history. I also believe that I have objectively observed that intelligence per se has nothing to do with the paradigm (bubble, or “world view”) that a person has adopted as though it were his own.

    So you might just as well laugh and poke fun at those “fools” who’ve been hypnotized as a demonstration at the county fair, but in so doing you’d be missing the point. This stuff is serious. The implications are a matter of life and death.

    • Groups of people can, and do, frequently agree on stuff that is clearly false without there being a conspiracy to deceive or a “programmer”/deceiver. One of my favorite examples is Sherif’s autokinetic effect experiment. The short version of this is that a light on a wall in a room which is otherwise completely dark will appear to an observer to move even though it is actually stationary. If you put two or more observers in the room they will all agree on the direction and distance of “movement”.

      As I have said before, “Reality is really, really difficult to understand.”

      It is far more likely there is a similar phenomena going on here rather than some decades long conspiracy which has managed to stay secret.

      • The teachers being in lockstep doesn’t require a conspiracy to achieve. Apparently, it starts with students in school self-selecting “teaching” as their life goal. This seems to occur with some of the students that like being in school, as they like the “fit” that the mindset and organization has for them. Since most teachers like the students that mirror them, the system becomes self-selecting for their eventual replacements.

        The teaching industry has known for a long time that female teachers don’t work well for male students, but that has never been a concern for them. As the male teachers from the “greatest generation” aged out, they were replaced by females for the most part. Nothing short of shutting down the dept of education will ever begin to address the problems with our schools. What drives the actual conspiracy to shortchange the schools is the textbook industry. The teachers only know what is in their book. Nuke the people who create the books, to start with. Those would be the brighter Progressives in the school system.

  6. Yes, but that’s different because SHUT UP.
    That’s about all the explanation I get when I point that out, when they say anything at all. Yeah, all the HS councilors are female. All six of them. Only something like 3 male HS councilors in the whole district (five high schools). Totally fair. Muddle schools are about 2/3 female teachers, almost entirely female non-teaching staff. Elementary schools about 90% female teachers. As near as I can tell, there is ZERO outreach to encourage males to enter the profession. Though, to be fair, most of the males I’ve seen expressing interest in being elementary teachers are very much NOT the ones I’d like to see in those classrooms, IYKWIM.

  7. I remember once when a kid getting lost in Yellowstone park hit national news. One of the anchors started asking about search parties and why the search parties hadn’t found him yet and she was going off about how they could be so incompetent.

    When the search and rescue representative tried to explain that Yellowstone was kind of BIG, she said, something to the effect of “well I understand you think it’s big, but it can’t be bigger than Central Park.”

    As far as she was concerned, that was the end of the discussion. I’m fairly convinced she’d never set foot off of Manhattan.

    • I know an Idaho lawyer who once had an insurance claim case with opposing counsel from New York City. The case was going to be heard in an Orofino Idaho court. Opposing counsel asked for instructions to get there. Orofino does not have commercial flights into its tiny airport. Lewiston is the closest airport. The Idaho lawyer informed the New Yorkers of this and sent them a map of how to drive from Lewiston to Orofino. It included bright red highlighting of the Nez Perce Indian reservation boundary which required crossing to get to Orofino.

      The New Yorkers called the Idaho lawyer and asked about the highlighting of Nez Perce Indian reservation boundary. The Idaho lawyer assured them it wasn’t a big deal. “Just don’t stop on the reservation and you should be fine. Most people have a rifle in their gun rack when they go through there but I don’t think you should have a problem. Just don’t stop inside the reservation.”

      The New Yorkers agreed to a settlement rather than a trial.

      • I grew up in Pocatello. Most people didn’t like stopping in the Fort Hall Reservation, though they calmed down a bit when they realized that messing with people might impact the gambling revenue.

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