"If you are attempting to persuade this creep's defenders, specifically, and not a general audience, that what [Taylor] Lorenz did was ethical, and that the creep's identity is newsworthy, you have made a category error...."

"You are debating logic and facts with frothing bigots with a bone-deep opposition to your entire project. This new right fundamentally doesn’t want 'newsgathering' to happen. They want a chaotic information stream of unverifiable bullshit and context collapse and propaganda.... It’s an ideologically coherent opposition to the liberal precepts of verifiability and transparency, and the holders of those precepts are too invested in them to understand what their enemy is doing. The creep’s account [Libs of TikTok], everyone in the press should understand, is the model for what they will be replaced with.... All I would like my unbiased, objective, nonpartisan reporter friends to understand is that they are debating with people that consider them the enemy not just in a partisan sense but in an existential one. The only correct posture to take in response is to make yourself an existential threat to their movement."

Writes Alex Pareene, in "They Know How Journalism Works! They’re Just Against It!/They want someone to knock on your door, too. Not to put you in the newspaper, though" (Substack).

That rant is getting a lot of attention. It's inherently contradictory — a rant against chaos. But I thought you should see that. I guess by Pareene's lights, I'm a creep, because I'm just holding something up, giving it visibility, where it will be seen by people who may feel moved to laugh or attack.

ADDED: The "creep" usage makes me long for simpler days, when Eggagog was endlessly alarmed about THE CREEPS.

"His inappropriate gestures became more frequent. He gave roses to female staffers on Valentine’s Day and arranged to have one delivered to me..."

"... the only one on my floor. A signed photograph of the Governor appeared in my closed-door office while I was out. These were not-so-subtle reminders of the Governor exploiting the power dynamic with the women around him. In 2018, I was promoted to Deputy Secretary for Economic Development and Special Advisor to the Governor. I initially turned the job down — not because I didn’t want the responsibility or work but because I didn’t want to be near him. I finally accepted the position at the Governor’s insistence with one requirement — I would keep my old agency office and remain on a separate floor from him and his inner circle. The Governor’s pervasive harassment extended beyond just me. He made unflattering comments about the weight of female colleagues. He ridiculed them about their romantic relationships and significant others. He said the reasons that men get women were 'money and power.' I tried to excuse his behavior. I told myself 'it’s only words.' But that changed after a one-on-one briefing with the Governor to update him on economic and infrastructure projects. We were in his New York City office on Third Avenue. As I got up to leave and walk toward an open door, he stepped in front of me and kissed me on the lips. I was in shock, but I kept walking. I left past the desk of Stephanie Benton. I was scared she had seen the kiss. The idea that someone might think I held my high-ranking position because of the Governor’s 'crush' on me was more demeaning than the kiss itself...."

From "My story of working with Governor Cuomo" by Lindsey Boylan (Medium).

There's also, "The Andrew Cuomo Show Has Lost the Plot/Is bullying fellow Democrats part of the New York governor’s brand, or just a print storyline that didn’t make it to the screen?" by Alex Pareene (The New Republic).

"On Twitter, people appear to identify objects and phenomena with 'cursed energy' every hour of every day."

"It’s not just creepy images: the word has acquired new valences, has come to signify increasingly generalized feelings of anxiety and malaise. 'The way I use "cursed" has a connotation of being trapped, i.e. a sort of Greek Mythology Ironic Eternal Punishment vibe,' Alex Pareene, a writer for The New Republic, told me....  The cursedness that has come to be incessantly invoked online... may be connected to a sense that the very relationship between direct cause and effect has grown weaker. Americans are regularly dying in mass shootings but Congress won’t pass basic gun legislation; the President has been racking up impeachable offenses since the Inauguration but momentum for impeachment is only building now, as we approach the end of 2019 (and, really, who knows for sure). At the same time, our sense of indirect, complex cause and effect may be tightening. We see Caribbean islands destroyed by hurricanes and look guiltily at our air-conditioning units; the Supreme Court ruled one way in Bush v. Gore and now Ivanka Trump is acting as a diplomat in North Korea’s demilitarized zone. I have never been able to interest myself too much in the idea that we are living in a simulation, and yet the idea of cursed energy does evoke a feeling that the simulation is breaking, and that something terrible is emerging from the breach...."

From a Jia Tolentino essay (in The New Yorker) about the social-media concept "cursed."

She doesn't mention Reddit, but I've been following the subreddit r/cursedimages. Tolentino goes so political in her essay. The subreddit  r/cursedimages isn't at all political. That's why I subscribe to it. I've got my Reddit setup to give me endless interesting material that's nearly 100% devoid of politics. That's the way I like it!

Here's the r/cursedimage elaborate explanation of what is and is not "cursed" for the purposes of that subreddit. They're looking for images that produce "confusion, eerieness, or dread." And they quite emphatically do not want "random gross/weird food... [a]ny illustrated/animated character, especially Minions and Spongebob... [y]ou or your friend doing random poses in the dark...  r/mildlypenis or mildly sexual things... Hitler/Nazi/KKK/ Antifa Posts," etc. etc.

By the way, I also follow r/mildlypenis. It's the kind of relaxing entertainment I look to Reddit for.

Here are a few examples from r/cursedimages (which actually I don't recommend looking at a lot of them in a row):

How alarmed are Democrats about Biden?

Here's what I'm reading this morning:

1. Alex Pareene in The New Republic ("Democrats Have Created an “Electability” Monster/And this time, it's even eating establishment candidates")(boldface added to highlight the simmering freakout):

Senator Kamala Harris was supposed to be a frontrunner....  So, what has, thus far (there is a lot of election left to go), prevented Harris’s campaign from breaking out?... Polling broadly shows Democratic voters thinking Joe Biden has the best chance at winning the general election....

“Electability” is a crock of shit. It is defined, like political “moderation,” only in terms of opposition to things people want....

If “electability” previously meant “the candidate most associated with the hawkish and business-friendly wing of the party,” it now seems to have become purely and nakedly demographic. Former Clinton voters are flocking to the various white men in the race, avoiding candidates they actually might like, because they see their own affinity for those candidates as a political liability....

[W]hen even someone like Harris—a member in good standing of the party establishment, a dedicated player of the “electability” game her entire career, a person whose campaign strategy from the outset seemed to be to rerun the Clinton campaign but without the Clinton baggage—struggles to gain traction with Democratic voters, it feels like the monster has turned on its creators....

That was rather incoherent. It made me think that the core problem was the premature confidence in Harris. She fit the electability idea extremely well, as Pareene essentially says. But she never caught on, and Biden stepped into the space she didn't become large enough to fill.

2. Here's Mike Allen at Axios, in "Joe Biden is running like he won the Democratic primaries." This piece is pretty neutral. It doesn't sound alarmed, but it may (subtly) sound the alarm: "In the opening days of his 2020 campaign, former Vice President Joe Biden has gone all-in on the general election, positioning himself as the eventual Democratic nominee rather than scrapping with the 19 other wannabes. "

3. "Media that dismissed Biden now see him as clear front-runner" — Howard Kurtz at Fox News: "I still think Biden has to show that he can operate at today's hyperspeed Twitter pace and defend his long record. But he is clearly showing more strength than most of the pundits predicted."

"This week, as a long-predicted collapse seemed to hit digital media..."

"... we saw a few of the tried-and-true ways managers use to explain to employees why they’re laying them off. BuzzFeed chose the language of corporation-as-family, with founder Jonah Peretti telling staff that making the decision was 'upsetting and disappointing.' Verizon [HuffPost and Yahoo News] went with meaningless corporate-speak. 'Today marks a strategic step toward better execution of our plans for growth and innovation into the future,' a spokesperson said... As always, journalists’ Twitter timelines filled up with the names of the newly unemployed—wow, they let him go? the whole opinion team?—and the usual ominous comments on the precarity of the industry....  What became clear this week is that if the digital natives do survive, it might not have much to do with newsgathering, which both investors and advertisers have recently discovered an allergy to.... The tech platforms, with their advertising duopoly, can 'demonetize' videos that make people sad, and give brands the ability, which they increasingly take advantage of, to prevent their ads from appearing anywhere near political news. The old arrangement, where if you wanted your ads to reach Rolling Stone‘s prosperous young readers you had no choice but to subsidize Hunter Thompson calling the White House a den of thieves, did not survive the digital revolution...."

From "The digital winter turns apocalyptic" at Columbia Journalism Review, by Alex Pareene.

Alex Pareene is the politics editor of Splinter and the former editor of Gawker, Racket Teen, and Wonkette. He has been a columnist for Salon and written for publications including The Baffler and the (Minneapolis) Southside Pride.

Splinter? What is Splinter? I remember Alex Pareene from Wonkette. I took a photograph of him in another age, at this absurd CNN thing, putting bloggers in a place where we could be used as a visual on election night, 2006. Blogged here in "What happened last night?" Those were the days! Pareene seemed to be soaring. Blogging was so glamorous and almost dangerous that CNN wanted to consort with us and thought we made them look cool.

"The Democrats Are Boldly Fighting For a Bad, Stupid Bill."

Writes Alex Pareene, at Gawker (that is, not a conservative, gun-rights type person).

The no-fly list is a civil rights disaster by every conceivable standard. It is secret, it disproportionately affects Arab-Americans, it is error-prone, there is no due process or effective recourse for people placed on the list, and it constantly and relentlessly expands. As of 2014, the government had a master watchlist of 680,000 people, forty percent of whom had “no recognized terrorist group affiliation.” This is both an absurdly large number of people to arbitrarily target in gun control legislation, and far, far too few to have any meaningful effect on actual gun ownership, let alone gun violence.

How is his lefty audience taking it? From one of the most up-voted comments, by RappingNinja:

1) I don’t give a shit about denying anyone the ability to buy guns, even if it’s “unfair” to those people, because - unless you’re getting a single-shot rifle to hunt squirrel to feed your starving family - NO ONE SHOULD OWN ANY FUCKING GUNS....

Why aren't human beings better at reasoning? Notice that this guy is — probably unwittingly — declaring that he'd be just fine with a law that came right out and said no Muslims can buy guns.

When people think a particular liberty isn't worth exercising or is actively wrong to exercise, do they become blind to the problem of selective deprivation? Think of the liberties that could fall into that category: drinking alcohol, having an abortion, sodomy, etc. Assume you're one of the people who think that no one should do these things. You shouldn't accept a law that said only young men are forbidden to buy a drink, only white women are forbidden to have an abortion, and only same-sex couples are forbidden to engage in sodomy. So why would you close your eyes to a government arrogation of power to make a big list of persons who may not do these things? I suspect that the answer you might not want to have to admit is: You favor the discrimination but think it needs to be done covertly.

Why Jonathan Chait thinks political correctness "went into a long remission" and now has returned.

My post about Chait's NY Magazine polemic — "Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say/How the language police are perverting liberalism" — blithely puzzled over Chait's assertion that political correctness was a late-80s/early-90s phenomenon that "burst onto the academic scene" and "went into a long remission" and now "has returned."

All I said was "I missed that remission... or Chait missed the nonremission." In case you couldn't tell, that's my way of saying there was no remission, but I didn't delve into why Chait experienced a remission, why the late-80s/early-90s political correctness affected Chait and he's affected again. I did say that Chait is reacting now because he and people like him are getting attacked from the left — "women and [people of color] are getting really cranked up and free-speaking and it's making him feel threatened." In this light, Chait is not so much a proponent of free speech at all, but a silencer of critics.

Liberals present themselves as the good people, and lefties — if they choose to attack liberals — puncture that smugness. But the left attack on liberals that burst onto the academic scene in late-80s/early-90s — I was there to see it — was a pre-internet, anti-free speech movement. Chait mentions "the theories of Catharine MacKinnon, a law professor at the university" — the "radical feminist critique of the First Amendment as a tool of male privilege" — and the "pro-p.c. activists" who pushed campus speech codes "purporting to restrict all manner of discriminatory speech." The left critique at the time said that free speech empowered those who were already powerful and that repression of speech was needed in support of true, substantive freedom and equality.

But that's not the left-wing of today. Alex Pareene does a nice job of explaining the difference:

Chait, like many liberal commentators with his background, is used to writing off left-wing critics and reserving his real writerly firepower for (frequently deserving) right-wingers. That was, for years, how things worked at the center-left opinion journalism shops, because it was simply assumed that no one important—no one who really matters—took the opinions of people to the left of the center-left opinion shop seriously. That was a safe and largely correct assumption. But the destruction of the magazine industry and the growth of the open-forum internet have amplified formerly marginal voices. Now, in other words, writers of color can be just as condescending and dismissive of Chait as he always was toward the left. And he hates it.... Now, not only is it harder to avoid reading negative feedback from people with different perspectives than you, especially if you engage online at all, but there are actually important people—people with status, who've won awards and hold positions of authority—who listen to those people with different perspectives. Ta-Nehisi Coates is at The Atlantic, for godssake, not In These Times.

That is, today's left attacks on liberals don't rely on the old shut-up-you're-silencing-me demands. The left is getting its speech out there. Lefties are employing the good old-fashioned "more speech" remedy that liberals recommended back in the late-80s/early-90s to the lefties who complained that they were being silenced by the overpowering speech of affluent white males.

It is, ironically, Chait who's feeling silenced and flummoxed by all this new speech.

Maybe that recommendation of more speech was in bad faith back in the late-80s/early-90, when the dominating white male liberals had reason to believe their speech would always be far louder and more widely distributed. Now, with the internet, everybody's talking and jostling for position.

A Facebook billionaire took over The New Republic, which had been Chait's lofty platform of liberalism, and Chait wrote "A Eulogy for The New Republic." He's in mourning! He's in mourning for the death of the cultural dominance of elite liberal media. Shhhh!

How perfectly amusing! Liberals are force-fed their own "more speech" remedy, and they don't like it. Another twist in the glorious history of American free speech.

"Did you bristle at the journalism at all, like why do we need the New York Post if the Times is gonna publish a headline saying you were a leftist?"

WNYC’s Brain Lehrer asked Bill de Blasio (the Democratic candidate for mayor of NYC).

De Blasio, admitting that the NYT headline saying that he "Was Once a Young Leftist" fit his own description of himself, in 1990 as being for “democratic socialism,” but that "I always described my philosophy of being made up of a blend of influences and ideas."

"It is in no way surprising that a Daily Caller reporter would act like a tremendous, disrespectful asshole..."

"... as 'act like an asshole' is essentially the Caller’s mission statement. Presidents shouldn’t be afforded god-like respect by the press or the citizenry, but 'don’t interrupt people while they’re talking to angrily shout disagreeable things at them' is just sort of basic politeness, really. (Of course, in a movie written by a liberal screenwriter — *cough cough* Aaron Sorkin *cough cough* — Munro would be a hero. And in a movie written by a liberal screenwriter, he also wouldn’t be an obnoxious right-wing Irish-accented twit, and also his question would not be paradoxically nativist nonsense.)"

Writes Alex Pareene.

"Matt Drudge's disgusting race war awareness campaign."

As perceived and presented by Alex Pareene.

"If I am elected senator from New York, Harry Reid will not instruct me how to vote."

And New York will have a Senator with a Tennessee accent.

ADDED: Alex Pareene has a lot of fun with what really was an embarrassing interview:

So, just so we're clear, Harold Ford: you want to run for office in New York. You want people in New York to vote for you. Democrats in New York are the people you are trying to appeal to. And, when asked if you prefer the Giants or the Jets, your answer is that you're better friends with the Tisches than with Woody Johnson, so Giants...? That is an insane answer....

Wait, let's ask another question!

Q. Have you been to Staten Island?

A. I landed there in the helicopter, so I can say yes.

Hah. Ha ha ha. 

What happened last night?

Waking up this morning in my quiet hotel room, I realize how insanely hard it was to try to watch the election returns at that blogger party at Tryst. The notion that we were in some way bringing you the news is utterly absurd. We were struggling to watch it -- hear it -- on TV, something you could do not only more directly -- that's always the case -- but also more easily. To be on camera, under the lights, in the middle of a whirl of activity, expected to perform on cue the way you ordinarily perform naturally in the privacy of your home... oh no! The obvious analogy is to a porno movie!

But now, able to read the news in this calm setting, I see in a glance what I was struggling to see all night:

Democrats seized control of the House of Representatives and defeated at least four Republican senators yesterday, riding a wave of voter discontent with President Bush and the war in Iraq.

But the fate of the Senate remained in doubt this morning, as races for Republican-held seats in Montana and Virginia remained too close to call as Election Day turned into the day after. Democrats would need both seats to win control of the Senate as well.

In Montana, Senator Conrad Burns, a Republican, was trailing Jim Tester, a Democrat, by a narrow margin. The race in Virginia — between another Republican incumbent, Senator George Allen, and Jim Webb, his Democratic challenger — was so close that some officials said it would have to be resolved by a recount.

That prospect could mean prolonged uncertainty over control of the Senate, since a recount can be requested only after the results are officially certified on Nov. 27th, according to the state board of elections. Last year a recount in the race for Attorney General was not resolved until Dec. 21.

But the Democrats’ victory in the House — overcoming a legendarily efficient White House political machine — represented a dramatic turnaround in the fortunes of the party and signaled a sea change in the political dynamics in Washington after a dozen years in which Republicans controlled Congress for all but a brief period.

That's through the eyes of Adam Nagourney. He's seeing drama. I love the way the Democratic victories count extra because there was a "legendarily efficient White House political machine" artificially boosting the Republican side. When the Republicans win -- don't you know? -- it's not because people actually want them to win, but because they have devious ways of jacking up the numbers. That way, if Democrats win even a modest margin, it's a dramatic turnaround, a sea change.

Perhaps it is better to party -- as on an Oscar night -- because the dribble-out of information is so slow. You want to be there, witnessing the news as it becomes available, even though you could read it in a few seconds the next day, but there's just not that much to see. Better to enrich the experience with a lively real-life room that minimizes your screen-staring time. I was there for 8 hours trying and failing to watch the news. I felt overwhelmed by the strange visual noise of two dozen bloggers hunched over laptops under looming, multiple, high-definition Wolf Blitzers striding alongside walls of blue supergraphics. My reaction was to move into the imagery. I couldn't think and analyze. Not at all. I dealt in pictures.

The crazy mix of dark and bright lighting blurred many of my photographs, giving them an expressionistic quality -- very James Ensor -- that reminds me now of how painterly my brain got last night:





To answer your question: I had only two small glasses of red wine.

Some folks were collecting Cosmopolitans while others -- notably Jeralyn Merritt here -- kept their writer's minds cooly centered in Language World:



I know. You're thinking: Who are the foreheads? The left-most forehead is Atrios -- Duncan Black -- who seems like a sweet guy. I had a little conversation with him in which I told him he reminded me of Madison blogger Jeremy Freese and that comedian Tom Bodett. Duncan didn't know who either of those guys were. The Easter-Islandish forehead in the lower right corner? I can't tell you who that is. If that's you, claim your forehead. Otherwise it's the Forehead of the Unknown Blogger. And lord knows what fervid thoughts roil therein.

And who are the blurry guys, you may ask. Picture 1 is Alex Pareene of Wonkette, wearing his "no Wonkette" T-shirt and waving a filtered cigarette about, and Nick Gillespie, of Reason Magazine and Hit & Run, who entertained me with his opinions, like about how there are only a small handful of cities left in America that are not culturally defunct. Madison, Wisconsin was culturally vital once, back around 1968. But since then and forever into the future, nothing. Picture 2 is TRex, who wrote about me on his blog -- Firedoglake -- after I blogged a (clear) picture of him last night. He said:

Ann Althouse came by a few minutes ago and took photos of me and John Amato. Amato was nice to her. I just growled under my breath and kept typing.

Ha ha. That's what I expected from half the bloggers: just growling and keeping on typing. It was actually surprising how un-socially-awkward most bloggers are. But thanks to TRex for embodying the stereotype I'd had in mind.

"Cuter than Glenn Reynolds, less cute than Markos Moulitsas."

Alex Pareene (of Wonkette) answers the question: "Would you say you're cute? Pretty? Hot? Beautiful?"

Read the whole FishbowlDC interview. Photo of Pareene at the link, so you can decide for yourself what's the true order of cuteness for Glenn, Kos, and Alex. I'll just say that Alex's photo looks like it belongs on the back cover of "Bringing It All Back Home." That's completely distracting me.