Disambiguation

Via Instapundit --




THIS IS THE BBC -- As a kid listening to news of the war, the second world war, that is, the clipped voices of the various BBC correspondents and announcers were so reassuring that their words couldn't have been anything but the unvarnished truth.

Over the years the brand degraded into a propaganda outlet. Perhaps it was always so. I don't know for sure about those earlier days, however, at this point in time, it's unquestionably true that BBC "news" reports are leftwing spin if not blatant lies.

Perhaps the author of the article above has been in the U.S. long enough for something to have rubbed off because it seems he's actually reporting what he saw in front of his eyes. Of course, his conclusions are silly and his tone offensive.

There's a word for that kind of tone. Well actually there are lots of words -- effrontery, delusions of grandeur, haughtiness, insolence, loftiness, lordliness, overbearingness, presumption, pridefulness, superciliousness, superiority, but my favorite is snobbery, defined by WordNet as the "trait of condescending to those of a lower social status." ________________________________________

Just a few sarcastic comments by moi:

How shocking it must be to have been for Mr. Webb to have his finely tuned sensibilities and heart felt shibboleths exposed by colonial simpletons espousing simplistic truths when everyone knows the great universal "truth" is that guns kill people and a society where there are millions of guns is a killing field. Not so you say? People are free and happy and feel safe.

Whoa.

Mr. Webb knows that the convictions he's lived by can't be wrong, so then how to explain this obvious paradox? Easy. He's determined that demon rum causes unpleasantness in the UK and the lack of public drunkenness in the U.S. is what makes it safer here. Webb offers no explanation on why this is true (if it is), but then as a journalist in the mass media, he doesn't have to.

FTA It is an odd fact that a nation we associate - quite properly - with violence is also so serene, so unscarred by petty crime, so innocent of brawling.

The implication being that we're unscarred by petty crime, but that major crime is rampant, but Webb offers no evidence of that outside the inner cities where gun ownership is most tightly controlled -- where criminals have illegally acquired guns and their neighbors are unarmed sitting ducks.

It's not surprising that millions of oppressed third world people want to come here to be free, but Webb seems surprised that his fellow Brits want to come here too.

Perhaps these expats have seen the folly of their country's inflicting socialism on them for multiple decades with the result that their society continues to decline into pockets of ethnicities at odds with each other while our society turns ethnics into Americans usually within one generation.

FYI Mr. Webb: The Sopranos is a television program of fiction and the case may be made that the American state of New Jersey is the state most like the UK politically.

Love us or hate us, but at least learn the truth about us first.