Biomechanical Robotic Android Intended for Nocturnal Sabotage, Troubleshooting and Efficient Repair  

 
Politics and other Pastimes
 
 
 
Favorite Blogs: Right Wing News

Conservative Grapevine

Lucianne

Allman's Stove

Ankle-Biting Pundits

Kitty Litter

Radio Patriots

Pam Meister aka Blogmeister USA

Third Wave Dave

Lucky Dawg News (Hiatus)

And You Thought You Were Cranky?

Songbird

Dodo David

On Wings of Eagles

Alive and Kickin' Oldies

A Rose By Any Other Name

Airborne Combat Engineer

American Protest

Anonymous Opinion

Astute Blogger

The American Scratchpad

La Shawn Barber

BlackFive

Blue Crab Boulevard

Lorie Byrd

Captain's Quarters

Carol Platt Liebau

Rudy Carrera

CentCom

Chicago Ray

Chief Brief

Christian Conservative

Combs Spouts Off

Conservative Comet

Constitutional Public Radio

Crazy Politico

CrosSwords

Church & State

Danegerus

Decision '08

Richard Delevan

Dynamo Buzz

Eating Arizona

EckerNet

Educated Shoprat

Fear & Loathing

Flopping Aces

Gawfer

GeosciBlog

GOP and the City

Granddaddy Longlegs

Hell's Freezing Over

Here There and Back Again

Hillary Needs a Vacation

Hot Air

Hugh Hewitt

Illumination Inc.

In My Taxi (Liberal)

In the Right Place

Irish Pennants

Jackson's Junction

Jihadophobic

JREFForum Conspiracy Theories

Leather Penguin

Graham Lester

Let's Play King's Bounty

Liberty or Death

Little Bit Tired, Little Bit Worn

Lone Star Pundit

Marathon Pundit

Mark In Mexico

Twin Cities Chess

Memeorandum

Michelle Malkin

MilTracker

Molten Thought

Moonbattery

Mr Media Matters

Mrs Media Matters

Neander News

New Hampshire Insider

Neo-neocon

NoonzWire (Alex Nunez)

No Pundit Intended

The Nose on Your Face

Punch

Slugger O'Toole

Pajamas Media

Pajama Pack (AKA L-Dotters Blog)

Partisan Pundit

Passionate America

Pink Flamingo

Please Make It Clear

Polipundit

Politburo Diktat

Poor and Stupid

Radio Equalizer

Reaching for Lucidity

Real Ugly American

Regime Change Iran

Right-Wing & Right Minded

Right Wing Nuthouse(AKA Superhawk)

Satire & Theology

Fred Schoeneman

Sister Toldjah

Small Town Veteran

Roger L. Simon

David B. Smith

Shock And Blog

Some Soldier's Mom

Stolen Thunder

Stop the ACLU

The Strata-Sphere

Tel-Chai Nation

Texas Rainmaker

The Kingpin 68

Time Cannon

Tinkerty Tonk

Valley Greaser

Viking Pundit

Weapons of Mass Discussion

Wilkesboro Square

Wizbang

Tim Worstall

WuzzaDem

Ya Libnan (Cedar Revolution)

Add to Technorati Favorites
 
 
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.

0 comments
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.

0 comments
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?

 

0 comments
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?

0 comments
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.

 


0 comments

 

 
  Endorsements: "11 Most Underrated Blogs"--Right Wing News

"Brainster is the Best"--Allman in the Morning FM 97.1 Talk (St. Louis)

"This is blogging like it oughta be"--Tom Maguire (Just One Minute)

"Quite young and quite nasty"--Civil Discourse Bustard (One out of two ain't bad)

Contact Me: pcurley (at) cdwebs (dot) com

Brainster in the Media

Howard Kurtz's Media Notes: May 27, 2005

Slate Today's Blogs:

March 16, 2005

May 9, 2005

June 3, 2005

Cited for Breaking the Christmas in Cambodia story (at Kerry Haters):

Hugh Hewitt: KerryHaters was on this story a long time ago. How could the elite media not have asked these questions before now?

Ankle-Biting Pundits: Our friends Pat and Kitty at Kerry Haters deserve the blog equivalent of a Pulitzer for their coverage of Kerry's intricate web of lies regarding Vietnam.

The Weekly Standard

Les Kinsolving

Greatest Hits

What If the Rest of the Fantastic Four Were Peaceniks?

Lefty Bloggers on Gay Witchhunt (linked by 16 blogs including Instapundit)

Kitty Myers Breaks Christmas in Cambodia

Brainster Shows Brinkley Says No Christmas in Cambodia

Explanation of the Blog's Name

Power Ratings Explained



blog radio

Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting


Archives


 
  This page is powered by Blogger, the easy way to update your web site.  

Phoenix Commercial Properties

Window Cleaning Phoenix

Leather Goods, Leather Craft

Home  |  Archives