| |
Tuesday, March 23, 2021
The (Paltry) Wages of Wokeness I've been amused to see the ongoing dustup over Substack. As our new woke overlords manage to drive out anybody who has ever expressed an unorthodox thought from the mainstream media, a funny thing has happened. All of the legacy media outlets have become boring echo chambers of woke scolds. No surprise, this has led quite a few people to look for other opinions. And it seems that a good number of the unorthodox thinkers have ended up at Substack, where they appear to be making quite good coin. Matt Yglesias, who had the temerity to sign a letter opposing cancel culture, and was pushed out of Vox for that sin, was offered a quarter of a million to write for Substack, and stands to make quite a bit more. Apparently the deal is that you can set a certain monthly subscriber fee--typically between $5 and $10. Substack has offered writers either a straight commission (90% of their subscriber fees) or a fixed amount plus a lower commission. As it happens Yglesias would have made quite a bit more--well over $500,000--had he taken the straight commission. Well, you can imagine the reaction from the woke mob. Here they had routed the evil man from their midst and he landed a job where he's presumably making quite a bit more than he was toiling for Vox. And he's not alone. Many writers who ran afoul of one PC rule or the other have gone over there. Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, John McWhorter and Jessie Singal among many others have set up their own newsletters. And Substack is, to be honest, about the only website worth reading these days because of those people. Of course, the folks who managed to shut down Parler have turned their ire on Substack. Some have called for the site itself to be deplatformed. Others have tried the concern troll tactic: Did Substack really want to be associated with this bad person? Now you might be wondering why the wokerati are not flocking to Substack themselves--here's a site where you can get paid directly by the people who like to read your work, cutting out the middleman (the publisher) and getting rich in the process. Ah, but there's the rub; it turns out that quite a few social justice warriors have tried it and have not been quite as successful as the iconoclasts listed above. You can see the problem; who's going to pay to read the same stuff they can read in every newspaper and magazine online already? Especially when that stuff comes from people who sneer at you and your opinions. And meanwhile the layoffs continue, although now they're not just hitting the legacy media outlets, but the "new media" sites like the Huffington Post. Update: And as if on cue, Medium announces that it will be switching to a Substack-style model. Note the important hall monitoring, err, journalism that we'll be missing out on:
Those publications have published high-impact work over the years: An investigation by tech publication OneZero into a surveillance tech executive’s attendance at KKK meetings led to his firing, for example.
Sunday, March 21, 2021
Glass Houses, Part 1127 Teen Vogue, which manages to combine Marxist theory with $1000 belts, is enjoying its moment in the cancel culture sun. The fashion and beauty and social conscience mag had hired Alexi McCammond, a 27-year-old political writer as its new editor-in-chief. McCammond had previously received criticism and apologized for a few tweets she wrote a decade ago about Asians which were perceived as objectionable (and a few others which were reportedly homophobic, although those particular ones I have not read). The brass at Conde Nast apparently thought McCammond could be forgiven now that she had repented her mistakes, but not so the rank and file, which revolted. Reading between the lines, I suspect that some of the opposition to her hiring is based on her relative lack of experience, which strikes me as a reasonable point. However a great deal of attention was again focused on those old tweets, with apparently a senior Teen Vogue staffer named Christine Davitt leading the charge. Well, you can probably see the fly heading rapidly towards the ointment, even if you didn't click on the link yet. Turns out that Davitt herself has a problem with tweets that have not aged well. Ouch! Live by the cancel culture, die by the cancel culture. I want to say that kids should be forgiven most sins, but it looks like we are headed in the opposite direction. These days they probably need to be counseled on how to avoid expressing themselves on the internet until they are in their 30s.
Tuesday, March 16, 2021
Is Andrew Yang Facist-Adjacent, or Fascist-Adjacent-Adjacent? That seems to be the point of this rather silly article at Politico. Yang told Dave Rubin — whose podcast The Rubin Report has
interviewed white nationalists, white supremacists, conspiracy
theorists, anti-Islamic activists and anti-feminist media personalities —
that he “came of age during the first Clinton term” and considered
himself a Democrat. And: Yang also made appearances on The Ben Shapiro Show, The Joe Rogan Experience, and Tucker Carlson Tonight
to promote his candidacy. By then these shows had built a reputation as
highly critical of progressive policies and “woke” culture — a
viewpoint that had built them a collective, nationwide audience of
millions. At a guess, Yang probably also appeared on Rachel Maddow and El Chapo Trap House as well. An unknown candidate like him has to find a way to get his message out somehow. This used to be called "guilt by association", but of course here it's not guilt by associating with someone objectionable, but by being interviewed by someone who once interviewed someone objectionable. Mike Wallace interviewed a lot of bad people on 60 Minutes, does that mean we can't associate with Mike Wallace? Well, yeah, he's dead, but when he was alive? They go on to point out some of the non-progressive things he said on those shows. This part made me chuckle a bit: As he and Rubin discussed automation, Yang said, "If you take these
people who are working in fast-food restaurants — and these jobs get
automated away — and in my mind they should be automated away. Trying to
preserve these jobs is not where we should be going." I'm sure he meant to say that they will be automated away, not that they should be. That's a business decision with quite a few variables and of course saying those jobs should go comes off heartless which is why we get this silly back-pedal: He told POLITICO that he would only support automating those positions if the affected workers had better job alternatives. If the affected workers had better job alternatives, they'd presumably be working at them, right?
Monday, March 15, 2021
The Awesomeness that is Joe Biden Is it too early to suggest that he be added to Mount Rushmore? That he replace Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln on our currency? That we update the Pledge of Allegiance to include "One nation, under Joe Biden...?" I get that to the media, Trump lowered the bar so much that almost anybody would be acceptable and that's the platform Biden ran on--the acceptable candidate. But since the election a lot of pundits and headline writers seem to have lost all grip on reality and are acting like love-struck teenagers, going on and on about what a great human being he is. Some embarrassing examples: Biden Chooses Prosperity over Vengeance Distinguished Pol of the Week: No progress was possible without Biden Granted, that's Jennifer Rubin, so no particular surprise coming from the WaPo's well-trained "conservative." 7 Takeaways fom Biden's Covid Speech Doesn't sound that bad until you start reading it:
The return of empathy: Biden made a single gesture in the speech that demonstrated the empathy he operates with vis a vis the
lives lost to this pandemic. He pulled a card out of his jacket pocket
-- which he said he keeps with him wherever he goes -- and read off the
exact, up-to-date number of Americans who have died from the
coronavirus. (That number is more than 527,000.)
Yes, of course, Biden did that for dramatic effect. But it worked. And
it drove home the idea that this is a leader who keeps those who have
died from the pandemic close to his heart -- literally. It also provided
a not-so-subtle contrast with Trump's overt politicization of the virus
and those who succumbed to it. Joe Biden is a Transformational President Biden, Champion of the Middle Class, Comes to Aid the Poor SNL, comedians are struggling to parody Biden Yeah, I mean who could parody Biden and his story about the near battle with Corn Pop, and the Black kids who marveled at the blond hair on his legs?
Saturday, March 06, 2021
It's Not That Muddled You're just muddle-headed. An Asian-American writer at the New Yorker covers the 'Muddled' History of Anti-Asian violence. Not you might assume that given the personal history, the writer is against it, and he is--mostly. When the anti-Asian violence is coming from police, he's on the front lines: At the time, I was a college student at Berkeley. A few days after the
incident, a friend and I procured a megaphone and stood on the steps of
the campus plaza, shouting to passersby about Kao’s death. But if the violence comes from other racial minorities, not so much: Calls for more protection in Asian neighborhoods struck critics of
police brutality as the wrong answer; in particular, Kim and Lee’s
so-called bounties were perceived to undermine the efforts of
Asian-American organizers already working toward community-oriented
solutions to public safety. Villainizing the suspects, at least two of
whom were Black, seemed to play into racist narratives of inner-city
crime. Okay so he's just establishing his woke bona fides. But amazingly, he even goes beyond this: Calls to center and protect Asian “elders” drew criticism for playing
into a respectability politics that casts a kindly grandma or grandpa as
a sympathetic, innocent victim. I saw someone on Instagram acerbically
wonder whether these were the same elders whom we had recently been
urged to lecture about their racism? Yep, it's okay to beat up old folks because they were probably racist anyway, don't fall for that "kindly grandpa" routine.
|
|
