A thought-feeling or few. . . The blinkered, BOTH SIDES-exhorting, trope of Fair *and* Balanced is fakakta-facile, perniciously perfunctory, purulent -- DUMB! I adore beer. I used to win beer-chugging contests at college. But chugging is sprint-drinking; a greater drinkers-endurance is another thing. For instance, at college, when I was a relative slip of a Los (140 or so Lbs), I could out-chug a certain more-than-200lbs drinking-chum of mine, but my veritably Brobdingnagian friend had me quite beat when it came to the distance-game of drinking. And so, in a drinking contest between my mountain-of-a-man of a drinking buddy and me, in which our quantities of beer were balanced, he would always win -- balanced, though not fair per se. Too, consider: if a community is, say, 80% comprised of Black people, though chronically electorally (nominally) represented by a town council of 10 people, 5 or more of whom are always White and never more than 5 of whom are Black, that council might *seem* balanced in its demographic apportionment, but I dare to say it is not necessarily fair. (Bill Clinton abandoned his short-lived nominee for the top Civil Rights post at Justice, his college friend, esteemed legal scholar, Professor Lani Guinier, when she got into a spot of trouble for saying as much.) In our polity, if something is fair it neednt be balanced. Fairness ought always trump petty, supposed balance. The purported salience of monolithic balance, the oft witless insistence on the intellectual and ethical legitimacy of both sides -- inveterately inane insisted upon by FOX News and its jargogled adherents -- is a cloacal-Conservative (
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 00:59:28 +0000