Sipsey Street Irregulars: Where's Bernard Goetz when you need him? Confused reporter and editor are diffused. Or were they defused? Can they be excused? Let's just settle for confused, shall we?

Friday, May 15, 2015

Where's Bernard Goetz when you need him? Confused reporter and editor are diffused. Or were they defused? Can they be excused? Let's just settle for confused, shall we?

Defuse vs. diffuse: To defuse (something) is to make a threatening or dangerous situation safer. For example, you might defuse a violent argument by calming the people involved, or you might literally defuse a bomb by deactivating its fuse. Diffuse works as both a verb and an adjective. To diffuse something is to disperse it or spread it out. When something is dispersed or spread out, it is diffuse. -- Grammarist.com

Mob of teens attack bystander who tries to break up brawl inside Brooklyn McDonald’s

Two young girls begin trading blows, and people try to tear them apart. An older gentleman in a hat tries to diffuse the situation, but is turned on by the teen boys crowding around, who seemed to have been enjoying the fight. The narrator, Don Balmain, can be heard gleefully yelling, “Kill him!” interspersed with laughs.

Fresh from exploding laws in South Carolina we now have a reporter (with usage checked by an editor) who would have us believe that a good Samaritan intervened in a fight to spread it around rather than deescalate it. Just what sort of illiterate products are the journalism schools turning out these days? No, wait, don't answer that.

6 comments:

Dave said...: Well, since the subject has been raised, here's a grammar problem that bugs me and is becoming universal: Using the plural pronoun "they" to refer to a single person. For example, "Someone (singular) said they (plural) forgot their umbrella." The proper pronoun should be "he," as in "Someone said he forgot his umbrella."

I'm guessing this comes from a subconscious fear of committing a political correctness violation: What if the individual in question is a woman? What if he's a male trans-gendered into a female but also homosexual? (Double-triple PC violation!!!); May 15, 2015 at 4:29 AM
Anonymous said...: Nice to know some things in Brooklyn haven't changed. Let's see that happen in the so-called "gentrified" areas the yuppies that can't afford Manhattan have moved to.; May 15, 2015 at 5:02 AM
Anonymous said...: I'm willing to bet the farm that this was intentional and that it will continue. Unable to defend the incoming ordnance from his first folly and unwilling to just admit a simple mistake, that writer turns to this now, probably singing the autocorrect song along the way somewhere, while loving all the clicks. More articles coming will contain these types of things to get people on the hunt for them. In order to keep it going he will have to sprinkle them in here and there.

What "journalism" schools are turning out is the indoctrinated fools taught only how to spout one line in any way to generate page views. This is this fools way to do so.; May 15, 2015 at 11:47 AM
Jimmy the Saint said...: What you complaining for? He use English much goodly!; May 15, 2015 at 2:02 PM
rexxhead said...: PIX11 is the news arm of WPIX-TV which is owned by the NY Daily News. They have long since been captured by barbarians.; May 16, 2015 at 7:06 AM
Bad Cyborg said...: How about the reporter also implied that the good samaritan was a pedo. Notice how the writer put it, "but is turned on by the teen boys crowding around" (emphasis mine, BC). I think the writer intended to convey that some of the guys watching the fight attacked the old man. The way he wrote it sounds to me like the presence of the teenaged boys watching the fight aroused the old man sexually.

Of course that begs the issue since the writer told the story in that aggravating eternal present tense people have fallen into using these days. I'm not sure why they do that. I just know it grates on my nerves.; May 16, 2015 at 7:16 PM

"Progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress."

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. -- H.L. Mencken

"The Fate of Unborn Millions. . ."

"The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses, and Farms, are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them. The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army-Our cruel and unrelenting Enemy leaves us no choice but a brave resistance, or the most abject submission; that is all we can expect-We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die." -- George Washington to his troops before the Battle of Long Island.

"We will not go gently . . ."

This is no small thing, to restore a republic after it has fallen into corruption. I have studied history for years and I cannot recall it ever happening. It may be that our task is impossible. Yet, if we do not try then how will we know it can't be done? And if we do not try, it most certainly won't be done. The Founders' Republic, and the larger war for western civilization, will be lost.

But I tell you this: We will not go gently into that bloody collectivist good night. Indeed, we will make with our defiance such a sound as ALL history from that day forward will be forced to note, even if they despise us in the writing of it.

And when we are gone, the scattered, free survivors hiding in the ruins of our once-great republic will sing of our deeds in forbidden songs, tending the flickering flame of individual liberty until it bursts forth again, as it must, generations later. We will live forever, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, in sacred memory.

-- Mike Vanderboegh, The Lessons of Mumbai:Death Cults, the "Socialism of Imbeciles" and Refusing to Submit, 1 December 2008

"A common language of resistance . . ."

"Colonial rebellions throughout the modern world have been acts of shared political imagination. Unless unhappy people develop the capacity to trust other unhappy people, protest remains a local affair easily silenced by traditional authority. Usually, however, a moment arrives when large numbers of men and women realize for the first time that they enjoy the support of strangers, ordinary people much like themselves who happen to live in distant places and whom under normal circumstances they would never meet. It is an intoxicating discovery. A common language of resistance suddenly opens to those who are most vulnerable to painful retribution the possibility of creating a new community. As the conviction of solidarity grows, parochial issues and aspirations merge imperceptibly with a compelling national agenda which only a short time before may have been the dream of only a few. For many Americans colonists this moment occurred late in the spring of 1774." -- T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, Oxford University Press, 2004, p.1.

Sipsey Street Irregulars

Friday, May 15, 2015

Where's Bernard Goetz when you need him? Confused reporter and editor are diffused. Or were they defused? Can they be excused? Let's just settle for confused, shall we?

6 comments:

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