Fareed Zakaria Is Too Stupid To Pity
By Mitch Berg
On the one hand, Fareed Zakaria – the perpetually hapless hack for the left – has been suspended for plagiarism.
On the other hand? At least when he plagiarizes, he has a chance of sounding smart.
On his dim little CNN show a few weeks back, in the immediate aftermath of the Aurora shooting, Zakaria noted perfunctorily that (and i’m paraphrasing closely here) “while some people note that there might be a link between psychology and gun violence, you are entitled to your opinion, but not to your own facts; it’s all about the availability of guns”.
In so doing, he ignored, well, the facts:
- Crime is broadly down nationwide – a drop that has closely paralleled the skyrocketing sales in guns.
- Notwithstanding the nationwide trend, violence is steady to up in places with the tightest gun control – Chicago and DC.
- On the other hand, it’s been generally down in New York, which has gun laws that Benito Mussolini would love.
- On the other hand, crime is lower still in many places with gun-friendly shall-issue laws…
- …and plenty high in other places with shall-issue laws, like the Deep South, with a culture of violence that started long before the age of civilian firearms (where crime is well above the national average, but has also fallen faster than the national average).
- Even in areas that are ostensibly identical, violent crime rates vary wildly. Minneapolis and Saint Paul are part of the same metro area; by state statute, they have identical gun laws. And yet Minneapolis’ murder and violent crime rates are a dramatically – as in, 50% – higher than in Saint Paul.
So when Zakaria – one of the most noxious anti-Second Amendment orcs there is – says “you’re not entitled to your own facts”, what he really means is “ignore the facts that gut the chanting point I’m repeating”.
Good riddance.
August 14th, 2012 at 8:29 pm
Interesting how one area where the Left absolutely abandons moral relativism is the subject of plagiarism. It’s pretty much anything goes with other crimes, but should a writer publish fiction and label it non-fiction, or copy and paste several paragraphs of vacuous opinion masquerading as fact, they really get their undies in a bunch. Zakaria wrote a bunch of crap even when he wasn’t stealing copy , so ask me if I care? I think I’ve got a tiny violin around, someplace.
August 15th, 2012 at 1:52 am
There is this:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/08/13/lederhosen_on_fire?page=full
Why do they plagiarize? I write academically on occasion. It is tedious. Synthesizing knowledge and deriving new insights from it may be difficult for our wannabe nomenklatura.