About “The Daily”
The greatest offender is the advice columnist Coquette, whose embrace-your-inner-slut advice is so bad as to risk being harmful to anyone stupid enough to listen to her. Here’s an actual example:
Q: Why do I always feel so guilty after hookups?
A: Because you were raised to believe that hooking up is a moral violation. There’s nothing inherently wrong with hooking up, but until you’re strong enough to develop a personal morality that is free of sexual shame, you will continue to feel guilty.
What crap. There may not be anything inherently vicious or cruel in hooking up, but of course it’s degrading to treat your body as if it were detached from higher human needs and desires like love and respect. It’s a recipe for self-hatred and depression, especially in women, who inherently know better and have more to lose. Who prints fashionable garbage like that knowing it could have a hugely destructive effect on impressionable people? Shame.
If Murdoch isn’t policing The Daily to root out such nonsense, he ought to start. I’m not looking for conservatism or piety, just balance and simple decency. And toss Coquette in the trash where she belongs.
That’s the crux of it: start with the truth and conservatism will naturally follow. I think you actually said that awhile back…
It’s worth noting that Coquette seeks to develop a ‘personal morality’ that can exempt her from guilt for the behavior she seeks. Putting that together with the militant atheism you previously mentioned, I guess ‘personal morality’ is roughly equivalent with ‘physiological response’. After all, some people really do go through life entirely ‘freed’ from all ‘traditional moral constraints’… Some of them rape, some of them kill, oh so many of them steal, and as I recall a convicted murderer once said, when asked whether he felt sorry for what he’d done, he answered to feeling no guilt whatsoever and that he felt sorry for anyone who does feel guilty about anything.
Chesterton said it best; the infinite skeptic will always undermine his own mine, because it requires a moral doctrine to condemn a social more, and so many these days are rabidly seeking total destruction of the only origin of absolute moral authority.
Just discovered this site, and was considering a paper after the WSJ myself, but it won’t be the Daily, now.
Not until I learn it has changed its ways.
No society survives for very long once it eliminates its taboos.
Coquette from what you write, is, therefore, helping to kill off our society… and worse, getting paid for it.
Coquette will not object to the charge she is helping to kill off our society. She is more likely to think she is building a new one and to that extent I suspect she is a happy contributor to it. A could be wrong, but if I am there is no rational explanation for her point of view I can see.
Andy, Gimmicks will only get someone so far.
After a while, people catch on and feel ‘suckered’ by said bait and switch tactics.
People have far more access to information than they ever did before, so, the idea of people being totally ‘oblivious’ is flat-out mental laziness in this day and age.
Liberal bias? Conservative bias? Why is a bias a bias? Isn’t a bias a preconceived set of ideals that lean one way or the other and so what? Is it a sin and a crime to have ‘morals’? Yes, apparently so according to the Commies.
Anyhoo, Andy, I have a new book/movie idea for you… It’s sci-fi…
You know those wolf spiders that have super long legs and can get HUGE? Well, some housewife vacuums one of those suckers up and she is so scared of said wolf spider that she puts her vacuum in the garage for days whilst said spider feeds on all of the nasty tidbits in the vacuum bag and grows larger and larger and…
ha-ha
I agree with Coquette. Those who are not married need not avoid sexual pleasure, and effective, easily obtained birth control mitigates the risk of pregnancy. In any event, the risk of pregnancy is something to be dealt with rationally and not superstitiously.
And just asserting that there is a God does not make it so.
Ugh.
“It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods, or no god.”
Thomas Jefferson
“And just asserting that there is a God does not make it so.” So what? Who cares?
Bob, don’t forget the risk of STDs. I know it’s not as much fun to put a raincoat on the little man, but perhaps better not to die painfully and slowly.
Oh, and there always the risk for the women of simply being used by a “modelizer”.
Andrew, you be nice to Mr. Murdoch and all of his publications. Principles don’t feed your family. Mr. Murdoch will.
Please – its CHILD EATING REPUBLICANS. Let’s get with the program, here.
Personally, I prefer eating kittens. With barbecue sauce.
Fox News “fair and balanced”? Bzzzzzt, WROOOOONG!
Rupert Murdoch is in business to make money. Sometimes he guesses wrong. I think that there is a market for a news network that does not try to be “fair and balanced” by letting the left have yet another venue to express themselves. If he doesn’t provide it, the blogosphere will.
It is a crap shoot, making money versus making sense AND can one do both? All the Yahoos and FBs etc are decidedly leftie and seem to prosper in spite of it. As one being older than dirt I am always dismayed that so many espouse ideas that have never once worked anywhere. Speaking of which, I can’t seem to get Daily Caller any more though I get their daily e-mail, are they a victim of evil lefties or have I screwed up my laptop again?
Coquette, french: wanton, diminutive of coq, same in French as in English.
You should rather ask Prudence for advice. The current English definition of coquette is a flirt, perhaps the choice of the name is an indicator of the sort of answers that will be provided.
Running a newspaper is a capitalist business. A capitalist business succeeds by meeting the needs or preferences of its potential customers. To ignore over 50% of your demographic market base is either stupid, or a commitment to becoming a propaganda rag. Andrew is correct: Murdoch is one of the very few remaining newspaper owners who insists on offering both sides, and the Democrat/Socialists accuse Fox and the WSJ for being biased because they aren’t. 95% of the dailies across the nation direct their editorial content at the the leftist third of the voting population and depend on those who buy it only for local news and cultural features to keep their creditors from shutting them down. The internet has doomed them already; they are simply hastening the day.
As for refusing to subscribe because of a hedonist column: come on! Just ignore her, like you do most of the columnists one either side. Murdoch, and many of the publishers of the British dailies, learned long decades ago that putting in “naughty” features adds spice to readership, and generates volume for its “whither are we drifting” letter content. For every one who refuses to subscribe because of “smut” there are probably two who do because of it.
I’d bet against Murdoch and News Corp. Why?
Murdoch is old, in his eighties and his kids are … pretty awful business wise. They have stated that when they take control (as has Wendi Deng his wife) they will fire Roger Ailes and turn Fox News into MSNBC. That is their stated goal. Never mind the $1 billion in profits that pays off the yearly debt service to News Corp that Fox News generates. Their goal is social respectability among the Davos Set. Winning Bono and Bill Gates and George Clooney’s approval.
The WSJ is toast too, James or Lachlan Murdoch will turn that into the NYT on steroids. The recent phone hacking scandals and the abuse James Murdoch took makes him ultra-anxious to appease the hard left. He already agrees with them on Israel (it should not exist according to James) and everything else.
Coquette is just representative of female driven infotainment. You’d find the same thing on TV, movies, etc. She is what her female audience demands. She is a fair representative of what most women want and feel these days (those under say 45 anyway). Few women object to hook-ups as long as the guy is an Alpha male. Five minutes of an Alpha beats fifty years of a beta male, for most women most of the time. See Twilight, Sex and the City, gazillion vampire novels/tv shows etc.
I fully agree about the Coquette thing, there is a place for idiotic and immoral remarks like that but not in a conservative medium. That is highly inappropriate. Make at Daily Kos where sexual immorality and promiscuity is encouraged, under the slogan “do whatever you want, whenever, and however.” But for conservatives, we have been known for our power to retain from doing whatever we want and holding onto values and morals, which liberals despise.