Skulduggery, look it up here.
With this article, the anti-culture New York Times is up to something (heh, MY skulduggery is to discuss the NYT's article without linking to them, props to Yahoo! for the link). You might say that this anti-military piece is a not a new tactic for them, but it is. The NYT, you see, usually attempts to denigrate the military LEADERSHIP, not the lower ranks. When it has delved into the lower ranks with it's smear-brush, it is usually some case of note, not a broad-brush attack like this one.
No, this attack, which does nothing less than try to paint the military as a den of thugs, is a general anti-military attack meant to destroy our view of the military as a vital part of our culture.
Anyone who has had even a minor lesson in statistics can see through this. First of all, the NYT article lumped all forms of homicides together, something which is never done anywhere else in crime-statistic reporting. That stands out as a huge red flag. The article puts intentional murder into the same class as a careless hunting accident resulting in a death. We don't do that in this society, which is why we have carefully separated the different classes of homicides by level of criminal intent within our penal codes. The NYT does it here, though.
Secondly, for such a comparison to be valid, the NYT would have had to take a similar group of the population from somewhere, and compare THEIR rate of all types of homicides. The most probable comparison would be to take the size of the active-duty military, take a city of the same size, and compare them.
The active duty military is about the same size as Washington, DC metropolitan area. Do you, for a moment, think that the number of reported homicides of all types in the military comes close to that of DeeCee? I'm not even going to look it up, but I'll make a blind wager right here that DeeCee's rate of homicide is several times that of the military, at least.
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UPDATE: 011308 2108 PST: I appear to be one of the first to react to this bullshit, but I wasn't the last, and the real statistical analysis is beginning to come in now. In this article in Rantburg, one commenter says that the actual rate of homicides of all types in the age group in question is 27 per 100,000. Given 750,000 returning veterans (corrects my above screed which said all the active duty military was being slammed), and the fact that the 121 homicides were over 6 years, that works out to just under 2.7 homicides per 100,000 per year, or one tenth of the homicide rate for the age group taken from the nation as a whole. One tenth. The NYT says we should be disturbed that these returning vets are so disturbed. I say that we should be disturbed that WE are so homicidal compared to the vets and especially disturbed that the New York Times has fomented another Big Lie.
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No, the NYT is up to something here. I'm going to hazard a guess as to what that motive is.
When the war in Iraq winds down, we are going to have a LOT of Iraq veterans re-assimilating into the culture. Some of them will want to run for Congress (some already have, and have been elected). The (D)emocrats among them are known as the Blue Dog Democrats. Those veterans WILL unite in a voting bloc, and they WILL have some political power when they do, maybe even enough political power to offset the worst of the leftards in the party. It could make for an interesting time in the leadership of the (D)emocratic Party in a few years.
The NYT wants to get ahead of this, of course, so they are smearing the military as often as they think that they can get away with it. They are terribly afraid that we might have a repeat of the political stability and conservatism of the 1950s again, when returning veterans ran the country and boosted it out of the Steam Age into the Information Age.
They say that there's an exception that proves every rule. If the rule is: "Freedom of Expression is Good", then the New York Times is the best current example of why we have it, because in any other nation, this foul excuse for an information source would have been broken up a long time ago.
New York Times, you aren't fit to tongue-polish the boots of the lowliest recruit in the US military, so quit trying to tear us down.
I wanted you to see this...God bless you...Thank you for your service!!!!!!!
The NYT is exactly as you say...they are propagandists for the enemy
http://aphoticalovesamerica.vox.com/
Posted by: aphotica | January 14, 2008 at 14:11