Make the primaries be over please.
Archives for July 2015
Time for a Blogger Ethics Panel
Don’t know if you have been following the Gawker shitshow like I have, but today, two editors, Tommy Craggs and Max Read, both stepped down, and we are now officially in the pity party zone:
To the partnership group:
On Friday a post was deleted from Gawker over the strenuous objections of Tommy and myself, as well as the entire staff of executive editors. That this post was deleted at all is an absolute surrender of Gawker’s claim to “radical transparency”; that non-editorial business executives were given a vote in the decision to remove it is an unacceptable and unprecedented breach of the editorial firewall, and turns Gawker’s claim to be the world’s largest independent media company into, essentially, a joke.
I am able to do this job to the extent that I can believe that the people in charge are able, when faced with difficult decisions, to back up their stated commitments to transparency, fearlessness, and editorial independence. In the wake of Friday’s decision and Tommy’s resignation I can no longer sustain that belief. I find myself forced to resign, effective immediately.
This was not an easy decision. I hope the partnership group recognizes the degree to which it has betrayed the trust of editorial, and takes steps to materially reinforce its independence.
Best wishes,
Max
The sociopaths still don’t understand that they should have been fired and that a company will only afford you editorial judgment when you show some. To recap, the post they are demanding stay up so they retain their editorial freedom was leaked text messages detailing an attempted tryst between a gay escort and a married accountant at Conde Nast. The escort leaked them because the accountant refused to use his personal influence and connections with powerful men to help him settle a score regarding his luxury apartment. The editors in question thought this was rlevant and newsworthy- the rest of the world did not.
Shorter- they willingly outed a married man by taking part in a blackmail plot because a.) they could, b.) it would get clicks, c.) He works for a competitor. That’s the fucking hill these sociopaths are willing to die on.
And apparently, there is a Jonestown like cult behind these two, because lots of staffers are rushing to their defense and saying shit like this:
Gawker staffers I spoke to continue to defend the post. “This is gossip and a bizarre story to boot. We fucked up the packaging,” one told me. “The facts of the story are newsworthy, bottom to top.”
Sweet jeebus. It was just the packaging that was wrong…
Open Thread: HATERS & LOSERS!!!
— Bob Schooley (@Rschooley) July 20, 2015
The press is finally treating Trump as a nonsense spewing clown. But why are they still treating Dick Cheney as a foreign policy expert?
— Bob Schooley (@Rschooley) July 20, 2015
***********
Apart from processing all the new applications for the H&L Cadre, what’s on the agenda for the evening?
Long(ish) Read: “Atticus Was Always a Racist”
Since the first hasty not our Gregory Peck Atticus! media “shock,”, there’s been some excellent reviews written about Go Set A Watchman. Many of them make the point that To Kill A Mockingbird (along with Catcher in the Rye) were the first novels sold explicitly as YA, young adult — a new marketing category, basically fairy-tales-for-teenagers. People feel very strongly about Mockingbird, just as people feel strongly about Harry Potter and the Hunger Games; apart from any literary critique, such books capture a permanent place in people’s memories that will always remain tender.
But the review that I most agree with is from Catherine Nicols, at Jezebel, on “Why Go Set a Watchman Is No Surprise“:
The final tableau of To Kill A Mockingbird has always given me a sour feeling toward the book—it ends with the black man dead, the poor white man also dead, the law uninterested in prosecuting their murders. The white gentleman and his children are sadder and wiser, but the wisdom imparted is essentially about the hopelessness of defending black people and poor white people from one another. I used to think Mockingbird was a shameful book to hand out in a high school classroom, all things considered, given that it’s a race story that scarcely passes the black-person version of the Bechdel test. It’s about white people within white culture making Tom Robinson’s life and death about themselves.
So, when the news broke about Go Set a Watchman’s Atticus being racist—in contrast as people said, to Mockingbird’s Atticus, I went back to read both books, wondering: hasn’t it always been this way? Hasn’t he always been racist? As Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in the New Yorker, his defense of Tom Robinson is based on segregationist principles—he works for “accommodation, not reform.” The new book gives the impression that Lee knew what much of her audience didn’t: that her character’s principles didn’t constitute justice. By itself, I thought To Kill a Mockingbird was a racist book. Now, with the publication of Watchman, it stands to be redefined as a book about racism not just in Maycomb County, but within the Finch household itself…
Throughout Mockingbird, Atticus is engaged in the foundational moonlight-and-magnolias Southern delusion that so swayed Ashley Wilkes and Ellen O’Hara in Gone With the Wind. He fought with the genteel cruelty of the slaver, in service of the other American dream, which is the idea that a man can be the ultimate patriarch: the cultivated master of the lower orders, the head of a family that extends through his wife and children down through the slaves. Everyone but the patriarch, it’s assumed, is slowly developing out of moral infancy—and as such, the patriarch is charged with leading everyone in religion, work ethic and cleanliness. Atticus is the son of slave owners, and he’s acting the part of one when he argues that Tom Robinson is from a clean-living family, and the black servant Calpurnia can be trusted raising white kids—this is the race equivalent of chivalry, the imperiled pedestal…
Long(ish) Read: “Atticus Was Always a Racist”Post + Comments (97)
You Broke It, You Buy It
Trump then unloaded on McCain, because that’s what bullies do, and made the veteran remarks, and then came the predictions he would pay a political price when a few people chimed in to attack him To which I noted:
Cruz won't denounce Trump because he knows the crazies in the GOP that run the primaries hate John McCain.
— John Cole (@Johngcole) July 18, 2015
Good post by Josh Marshall (because he agrees with me) that Trump will pay no price for his attacks on McCain:
Is Trump a joke? Of course, he is. But if we judge politicians by any other standard than their ability to garner votes and polling support, we’ll soon run out of candidates. If clowns are above your dignity to report on, find another line of work. Especially with this primary field. Trump isn’t a distraction or mere entertainment any more than the rest of the GOP field is. In fact, this version of his candidacy (I can imagine him running more as a Perot-type centrist figure in earlier cycles) is the logical end result of the Tea Party-ization of the GOP since 2009. Trump is running an angry, populist campaign focused on xenophobia and “I don’t care what you think” aggression against ‘the establishment’ and ‘elites’ of all stripes. To think that trash talk against an establishment favorite, who is only marginally relevant to the politics of the moment in any case, will upset that apple cart is to thoroughly misunderstand the politics of the moment. Trump is the Frankenstein’s Hair Monster, finally walking among us, who is the inevitable product of a decades long embrace of clown-show anti-establishmentism and the stoking of xenophobic and racial paranoia.
This is who the GOP is, and they’ve cultivated it by playing footsie with their wingnut base, actively encourage them with Fox News and the web of wingnut websites, and so on. Palin was then released from Pandora’s Box, and we have what we have. The only thing wrong with the old myth that we’ve seen so far was that in the story, Pandora sealed in hope when she rushed to close the box.
Fortunately, that didn’t happen in 2008.
If we let them sing, we might have to let them talk, and then where would we be?
Via our David Koch, Electablog’s on-the-spot perspective on the Netroots Nation brouhaha is well worth a read.
Sitting in the middle of this maelstrom was a fascinating experience. I, like many of the others there, was initially irritated by the protestors. I was there to hear the candidates and was frustrated that they weren’t being heard. Even a bit angry, in fact. “These are your allies,” I thought. “Why on earth are you attacking them? Why are you disrupting an event where the people there are sympathetic to your cause?”
Frustration. Anger. Being silenced.
Frustration.
Anger.
Silenced.
Talked over.
Ignored.
Every single one of these emotions that ran through my white privileged brain in the first few moments of the protest until I was slapped across the face with what I was being forced to confront. Every single one of these emotions are felt acutely and painfully every single day by racial minority groups in our country. But, instead of being inconvenienced by not being able to hear a politician speak, they face them in the context of being slaughtered in the streets by the police officers who are tasked to protect them, incarcerated in astonishingly disparate numbers, and blamed for not being able to escape from the prison of poverty that holds far too many of them in bondage.
If you’re not able to cope with a group of black women singing songs at you by, say, respectfully listening to what they have to say, inviting some of them onstage, listening again, answering their questions and opening up a dialogue, all without resorting to all-lives-matter bullshit or dropping the mike and going home, you may not be ready to be President.
Unrelatedly, is this the first Myiq2xu sighting for Election 2016? Remember, if he can see his shadow we get six more months of Donald Trump.
That’s Entertainment
The Huffington Post has decided to cover the Trump campaign as entertainment rather than politics (whatever that means). Jay Rosen generally agrees, though his main point of agreement seems to be that journalists should add more context to the coverage of the Trump campaign.
The horseracing DC Press Corpse has a hard time adding that context, probably for a lot of reasons. Saying Trump is just a sideshow carnival barker who will never, ever win would deprive them of precious eyeballs and associated clicks. Taking Trump seriously means they can emit tons of breathless blah-blah-blah about every stupidity that escapes from Donald’s boiling id via his ignorant cakehole. It also allows the Chris Cillizzas of the world to continue pretend that they are objective arbiters of truth, since “the polls say” that Trump is a serious candidate. Never mind that he’s got less of a chance than almost-President Rick Santorum, who actually won one of the real polls (well, semi-real, it was Iowa). (By the way, are we sure Trump can’t win Iowa? I think he’s got a good chance there, given the fucked up rules of that contest.)
From where I stand, every time the sun comes up with Donald’s face in the news, the less Democrats are in trouble. That’s especially true if our noble DC stenographers ask the other Republican candidates to repudiate Trump’s neanderthal utterances. Even Hillary’s band of idiot brothers should be able to make hay from that footage a year from now when it matters.
One more thing: if you really believe that Trump’s candidacy is making headlines simply because there’s nothing else to cover, and that Trump will amount to nothing once the process really engages, then should we care about something that happened at the 2015 Netroots Nation? Setting aside the merits of that particular protest, it’s inevitable that it will be a long-forgotten event by the time the bulk of the electorate engages.