What the Danish and European media misunderstand (and misrepresent) about America, and vice versa. And other stuff.
We have a saying in English that people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. It’s related to the old injunction to get the log out of your own eye before you point out the mote of dust in your neighbor’s. A Sunday article by the rabidly anti-Trump, anti-Republican Steffen Kretz, our taxpayer-funded USA…
A week-old article from TV2 only caught my eye the other day because it compressed so much of what’s wrong with contemporary Danish media coverage of the United States into a single article. You can find the original version (obviously in Danish) here: Trump Costs the Developing World Dearly, Svenning Dalgaard, TV2..dk, 24 November Ordinarily…
A Sunday article from Berlingske (under their AOK rubric) appears to have come straight from the Democratic National Committee (which, insofar as it’s just a recap of a Washington Post article, it sort of did): Trump Burrowed in and Was Like “a Crazy King George”: “I won, I won, I won”, Stine Hansen, Berlingske.dk, 29…
“State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. “Coldly it tells lies too; and this lie crawls out of its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people.’ That is a lie!” The modern democratic republics of the west were, almost without exception, baptized with horrors….
Most Danes are familiar with Statens Serum Institut. It maintains the COVID-19 Dashboard that many of us use to keep track of the pandemic in Denmark. The dashboard looks like this (as of 13:45 on Saturday, 28 November): It’s a lot of data. I’ve gotten to checking it once a day after its 14:00 update…
A Monday editorial from Berlingske Tidende (with a Pierre Collignon byline), coupled with a tweet from David Trads on the same day, offer an excellent case study in the establishment media’s continued acceleration toward irrelevance. The editorial is entitled “Trump og Hitler har ikke noget at gøre i dansk politik.” Sounds reasonable enough. Saying that…
While running for president in 2000, George W. Bush spoke frequently of a “compassionate conservatism” that he himself characterized (years later) like this: The philosophy took hold in my first race for governor. I remember my announcement tour and subsequent speeches saying, “It is conservative to insist that we measure students in public schools; it is compassionate…
Good News! As DR notes in the article that topped their homepage Friday morning, America’s 2020 election was the most secure ever: 2020 Election Was the Most Secure Ever, but That’s Not Stopping Trump, Malthe Sommerand, DR.dk, 13 Nov The American media have run wild with this story as well, and you can gorge yourself…
The Danish coverage of the prolonged American election has been exactly the kind of reporting I’ve come to expect. I’ve been trying to maintain a stoic calm and let the inaccuracies, misrepresentations, and idiocies wash over me—to lie back and think of (New) England. I’ve succeeded pretty well so far. But there’s one article I…
I’m going to assume that Joe Biden fends off the court challenges from Donald Trump and other interested parties and is sworn in as our 46th president on January 20. At that point he would ordinarily become the man I recognize as my president. However, based on my experience of the last four years, which…
Let’s start with something very simple: people are not idiots. There’s an unnamed fallacy that we all understand intuitively. It’s the assumption that people who are smart and competent in one thing are smart and competent in others, and that people who are stupid or incompetent in one area are clueless in general. The strength…
I flipped back and forth between DR and TV2 News Tuesday evening for their American election coverage until about 21:00, then got a little sleep and was watching American coverage on Fox (via internet) from about 01:30. My main takeaway from the Danish coverage was that I’ve been much too charitable on this blog. Danish…
America has, for better or worse, a two party political system. Other parties exist, and some are even quite strong in individual states (consider Senator Bernie Sanders’s socialist following in Vermont), but at the national level American politics is binary: Democrat and Republican. There hasn’t been a president from any other party since Millard Fillmore…
“There is no objective truth,” say the wise men. If that’s the case, you may as well stop reading this. You may as well stop reading anything at all. Or eating, or drinking, or breathing: the idea that such things are necessary to survival is just a matter of opinion. If nothing is objectively true,…
His name is Anthony Bobulinski. I conducted the following searches between 12:15 and 12:27 today, October 28. On Berlingske.dk: On B.T.: On Information.dk: On taxpayer-funded DR.dk: On Politiken.dk: On TV2News.dk And yet, on Google: In case it’s hard to read: that’s 174,000 results in about a quarter of a second. In the news tab of…
There’s a particular kind of “think piece” in American journalism that blossoms in the run-up to every federal election. As a young man I thought they were the misguided efforts of well-intentioned people; as a less young man I now realize they’re just liberals trying to trick conservatives into supporting liberal ideas and candidates. This…
I’m proud of the long and thoughtful piece I wrote the other day. No thoughtfulness today. No fancy philosophical quotes or references to 18th-century French literature. Just a lot of angry contempt served up on a bed of obscenities. Because sometimes a fella’s gotta take a step back and give things some thoughtful reflection, as…
