I happened to stop by
Salon yesterday because someone at Facebook had pointed me to
"Jonathan Franzen is guilty of 'extreme intellectual dishonesty,' according to the Audubon Society/Franzen hit first, but the National Audubon Society hit harder." Notice all that hitting and the ugly words "extreme" and "guilty." Something terrible must be happening, right? No, Jonathan Franzen just had an article in The New Yorker saying that the Audubon Society is letting the big issue of climate change divert its attention from practical things that can be done now to conserve birds.
I ended up blogging the New Yorker article, but I'd left open the tab to Salon "extreme intellectual dishonesty" article. Looking at that page this morning, I'm noticing the sidebar of "most read" articles, and I'm seeing way more emotion than makes any sense. I'll add boldface to make my point:
I called him pathetic, he accused me of ruining his life: What children did to our marriage...
Boomer parents destroyed us: I needed rules and boundaries, not parents who want to be friends...
These seem to be routine articles about the challenges of living in families, but somehow it's all ruination and destruction. Absurd!
The right's made-up God: How bigots invented a white supremacist Jesus
Republicans' "Hitler" idiocy: Why their hysterical Iran pushback exposes a secret
Why I left the GOP
That last one is calm. I'll just assume "I" left the GOP because the GOP is a bunch of hysterical, bigoted, delusional, pushy, racist idiots.
Yelp users hilariously revolt against Indiana pizza shop that refuses to cater same-sex weddings
Funny or Die skewers homophobic businesses in pitch-perfect Indiana spoof
Here, the metaphorical acts of violence — revolting and skewering — are presented as wonderful comedy because they punish citizens who deserve it for not achieving the right level of acceptance of gay people.
America's angriest white men: Up close with racism, rage and Southern supremacy...
"They're human beings!": David Letterman blasts Indiana over anti-gay law...
Ted Cruz goes ballistic over "radical" idea that gay people should enjoy equality
Michelle Obama absolutely kills it in the "Evolution of Mom Dancing Part 2"
Apparently, everything is exploding. I guess Salon has its internal research showing this is what people click on. To me, it looks inane. I wish readers would develop resistance to this kind of manipulation. We should laugh at this desperation. Or — I don't know — look at Salon's evident belief that we slaver over violence and have a nuclear meltdown of outrage.
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55 comments:
Not manipulation I think, but a reflection of a growing climate of rage and hysteria, at least in public discourse. Salon (and other venues) is being driven, its not driving.
Twitter and the like seem to act like emotional amplifiers.
Derbyshire has a (free first of the month) podcast on the hate genre on the left just today, Derbyshire.
quote among other nice turns,
The small-business owners being persecuted have uniformly, so far as I know, stood unbending by their convictions, even when faced with crippling fines and the loss of their livelihood. None of them has shown the slightest sign of anything I recognize as hate. I'm pretty sure none of them has trashed any homosexualist websites or threatened to burn down a local gay bar.
They have said calmly and clearly that these are their convictions, they harm no-one and wish no-one ill, they just want to be true to their beliefs. These people are models to us all: models of integrity and good citizenship.
The people persecuting them present a strong contrast, a study in cruelty, snarling vindictiveness, gloating triumphalism, and, yes, hate. Left activists are truly loathsome people, and the homosexualists may be the most loathsome of all, though it's a competitive field.
The slogan of the hour, prominent on a sign held up at an Indiana homosex rally, is Sodomize Intolerance. This would be a tad more impressive in its aggressive vulgarity if it were original; but in fact it was cooked up by the dimwitted British junkie anarchist Russell Brand, or one of his writers. It neatly expresses the mood and intentions of the activists — of, in fact, their own completely closed-minded intolerance.
And of course there's Epstein on Indiana, if you haven't listened already.
In particular, the mistake in the 60s that gave us this war.
link fixed I hope
There's plenty of blame to go around if the accusation is shedding more heat than light.
I feel unsafe ...
Salon? Are they still in business?
Even the most hardcore democrat/liberal/progressive has to start to recognize the failure of the agenda and the Obama administration and the self-loathing manifests in striking out in rage and hysteria. This is the explanation for the Indiana RFRA law. They needed to do something to assert relevancy, plus the well-oiled Obama astroturf operation kicked into gear to rile up a demonstration to take attention away from the disastrous negotiations with Iran. Another shiny object to distract the rubes.
Salon isn't just "exploding," it is throbbing, thrusting, pulsating, heaving, shuddering, writhing with the hot seed of ecstatic anger.
They have replaced sex with anger as their source of pleasure and release. Probably need to smoke a cigarette after writing the headlines.
And perhaps a moist towelette.
I am Laslo.
"Is everything exploding at Salon?"
I do appreciate the semi-fisking, but this is more faux surprise, right? In any case, it's a little late in the day to notice that lefty culture warriors use violent language. Of course, at this point, the warring is a bit one-sided.
"To me, it looks inane."
To you and the handful of honest liberals left in the land.
"I wish readers would develop resistance to this kind of manipulation."
Why? They're winning.
"We should laugh at this desperation."
I do appreciate your good judgment. At a deep philosophical level, all Prog rhetoric has descended into nihilist despair. Hell is not just the others but the self. But of course they're taking their desperation all the way to culture war victory.
"Or — I don't know — look at Salon's evident belief that we slaver over violence and have a nuclear meltdown of outrage."
I appreciate the pushback. You're performing a public service. But in war violence works.
"They have said calmly and clearly that these are their convictions, they harm no-one and wish no-one ill, they just want to be true to their beliefs."
This sentence reminds me of something,
Sir Thomas More: I do none harm, I say none harm, I think none harm. And if this be not enough to keep a man alive, in good faith I long not to live.
I hear the uproar on the left is dying down now that the gofundme total is over $600,000 for the pizza guy.
I haven't followed it having more important things to do.
Althouse Destroys Salon!
We have the most polarizing president in my lifetime and a Democrat party that seems to think its route to survival runs through convincing people that it's them civilized ones against the onset of Republicanism.
Yes, I chose the wording "them civilized ones" deliberately.
" throbbing, thrusting, pulsating, heaving, shuddering, writhing"
Scarlett Johannson loves it when I talk this way.
Of course she does.
I am Laslo.
Salon is a regular catholic click baited compendium of contrived conservative catastrophes. Wearying.
Libruls tend to be knee-jerk handwringers and tell me when Salon didn't suck?
Althouse Destroys Salon!
And you won't believe what happened next!
Michael K,
They closed donations when it was $842k and going strong. I was a bit disappointed-I wanted to see it cruise past a million.
People who knead people need dough.
As for the bird problem, it's an acute vs. chronic thing. Windmills and sports domes slaughter birds in visible numbers; a warming climate (whatever its cause) kills them off over time. No reason to deny one or the other, but either way it bad news to be avian.
From the interview of Camille Paglia at http://reason.com/archives/2015/03/19/everythings-amazing-and-camille-paglia-I/6:
reason: Talk a little bit about Salon. This offers a kind of fascinating vantage point. We're 20 years on from the beginning of Salon essentially. You were writing for Salon at a time when people like David Horowitz, the left-wing-turned-right-winger, was there. It was a much more kind of ecumenical place. The idea was that people should be interesting. Now, we've hardened into what might be called the politics of exclusion and exhaustion, where you're either a right-winger or a left-winger—you're a Weekly Standard neo-con or a Salon P.C. warrior. You were talking about Democrats and Republicans and how never-the-twain-shall-meet. What is driving that kind of intensification of difference and unwillingness to brook any sort of overlap between political and ideological categories?
Paglia: First of all, what I want to say about Salon is that in its great period, you still had David Talbot, the main founder of Salon, in charge, and David Talbot's mind was very sophisticated and cosmopolitan, and he was interested in the full range of ideas. He had tremendous prescience. This was a great editor. And at a certain point, he retired from management, and I had several very sympathetic editors after that I worked with happily, but what had the sense of the pressure coming as the turn toward this kind of hysterical and one-dimensional political rhetoric came in. It was coming from a few of the co-founders of the magazine.
reason: Who are you talking about?
Paglia: I'd prefer not to mention names. David Talbot's imprint on Salon gradually faded, and what happened was today Salon—it's like a collegiate magazine to me. The headlines are strident. It's like knee-jerk and predictable, and I think it's very sad. I think one of the most tragic declines in the history of the contemporary media is what's happened to Salon.
Went through some Salon comments the other night.
"People who don't serve gays should be in Death Camps! Thank you for preaching hate!!"
..And three comments down, the same person:
"How dare you compare me to a Nazi!"
That's how far gone these cultists are.
Speaking of which, where's Alex the Younger?
Salons. They always start out with such high-toned civility, philosophy, a veritable age of reason. Tea and crumpets with Diderot and Voltaire, with frissons of an occasional enfant terrible like Rousseau or young Robespierre thrown in as a palate changing cleanser.
But somehow, they always end badly like this, the fascination with violence, the demonization of others, as mere reason and debate prove insufficient to persuade le peuple of the need for immediate change.
Or maybe Mesdames Roland and Epernay were just hungry for more cliques?
"...I'm seeing way more emotion than makes any sense..."
Isn't this usually the case?
I have trouble not reading it as "Saloon"
Althouse pulverizes Salon by exposing insane use of clickbait hyperbole.
His point is much like Lomborg's point about global warming. Assume that it's true. Fix the (small) things that can be fixed that would occur if global warming were to happen, rather than try to literally change the weather using draconian measures that no one can actually follow.
They don't fix the small issues beause they worry about the big issue that is unfixable. (because we would never go to the extreme required to actually fix it). And if you point that out you will be deluded with speech calling you out for your evil.
Illustrates exactly why such places should be avoided.
I come to Althouse' place for reasoned comments and discussion from posters like Laslo Spatula.
"The small-business owners being persecuted have uniformly, so far as I know, stood unbending by their convictions, even when faced with crippling fines and the loss of their livelihood. None of them has shown the slightest sign of anything I recognize as hate. I'm pretty sure none of them has trashed any homosexualist websites or threatened to burn down a local gay bar."
A different baker was allowed to not bake a cake that said Gay Marriage was wrong, And a court said she had that right.
So I guess the whole "if you can't bake a cake maybe you should find a different profession" argument only goes for those who don't agree with a lefties position.
"They're human beings!": David Letterman blasts Indiana over anti-gay law...
Did Dave really say that? Oh my god! So are the christian bakers David. So are polygamists, and bigamists and incestual couples. So are nazis.So are Isis.
So are people who's rights are being trampled and might need an RFRA,
If you are a human being, which we all are then you share that feature. He figured it out. People are people (so why should it be...)
What an incredible observance.
Salon/saloon.
And here I am talking about the merits of the individual articles. Big picture though, Salon is like The Daily Mail only without the titty pictures, and with all the articles written by demagogues.
Is it because thats how the left argues, or is it because of the internet? Or a combo.
Is this abnormal for Salon or is this what they do every day?
David Letterman can go f himself. He left Hoosierland long ago, both physically and mentally, and has no room to criticize anyone frrom Indiana.
Salon is a large room, such as a drawing room, used for receiving and entertaining guests.
I read the article at the link and can't figure out how the Audubon Society hit back twice as hard.
I can see that Prof. Althouse probably doesn't have a FB friend list full of lefty "friends", because, compared to what's out there in the lefty blogosphere, Salon is a veritable "A la Recherche du Temps Perdu" in its literary quality. I think that Salon sees itself in competition not with "The Nation", but with the various nutjob lefty clickbait sites.
It seems that for the Left, sites that promise easy factual proof that the Right is wrong, on, well, just everything, are the clickbait equivalent of "Click here if you'd like to add 3 inches to your penis".
Given how easy it is to whip up a violent left-wing mob, I think it high time Merriam Webster revisit their definition of reactionary.
Its easy to laugh at this nonsense, but the Left has a history of violence. This kind of rhetoric has turned into death and injuries in the past as Left-wing nutjobs feel justified in bombing, assassinating, and assaulting "Right-wing haters".
" I was a bit disappointed-I wanted to see it cruise past a million."
Me too but, as Socrates said,
"By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher."
No mention of husbands.
I used to read and comment on some lefty sites, especially Washington Monthly when Kevin Drum was the blogger. I often got nasty and ad hominem replies, some really disgusting, but finally they banned me. First they deleted my comments but left the nasty replies, then I was gone.
They really live in a bubble. Huffington Post "moderated" my comments to death for a while but now they allow them. It's really interesting to read what they are thinking.
Leftists. Always on the verge of hysteria.
Whatever happened to BlackLivesMatter? And what happened to Occupy? What's going on at MSNBC? What happened to the New Republic? Where's Brian Williams? Jill Abrahams? Ronan Farrow?
All that's left of the left is tweet-bullies who are making Twitter seem like that Hitchcock movie, The Birds.
Althouse Destroys Salon!
And you won't believe what happened next!
Here's why...
dwick:"Althouse Destroys Salon!
And you won't believe what happened next!
Here's why.."
And here's the 12 things you need to know about how Salon destroyed itself!
Followed by a vox-spanation as to why Salon destroying it's credibility is actually a "good thing" and will lead to even greater credibility!
Why SALON is worthless.
I once lived near a park in which many of the trees were badly infested with something. I went to a regular "friends of the park" meeting to discuss with reps of the city parks department, but all they and other folks there wanted to talk about was the impact of climate change. I found it very strange.
So I think Salon guy might well be right.
Iran's nuclear bomb will take care of a lot the loony liberals along with a lot of good people too.
jr565: They don't fix the small issues beause they worry about the big issue that is unfixable. (because we would never go to the extreme required to actually fix it)
It's the old joke where the husband explains the division of labor in their home: "She takes care of the trivial stuff, like cleaning house, feeding the kids, getting them to school and doctor appointments. I worry about the important stuff, like what our position should be on the Bretton Woods Agreement."
The old Salon was a sophisticated read that employed hundreds of real writers and editors who regularly challenged their readers (see Camille Paglia’s quote in Victor’s comment). It lost more than $100 million before it abandoned that business model and replaced it with an intern-sweatshop model that stamps out a handful of short click-bait posts each day using a template of gender hairsplitting, zero-sum GOP-hatred, titillation, and breathless alarm. The cost per click must be a thousand times cheaper than the previous model — unfortunately, Salon is now the embodiment of online culture in the age of twitter: tribal, herdlike, and dumb.
I am wondering if this has something to do with why Doonesbury is re-running his strips from the 80s about the Audubon Society wanting James Watt to resign from the Reagan administration. Watt had the temerity to point out that some trees give off more ground level ozone that industrial activity does. Hence the great Smoky Mountains and the Blue Ridge Mountains. The smoke and blue haze are both caused by tree released ozone. Again, I'm not sure what all this has to do with birds.
Think of the birds! Shutdown the windmill gauntlets and solar ovens.
Jesus was neither a white supremacist nor was he white. Jesus was born in the Middle East, and his features reflected that birthplace.
As for transgenders and transsexuals, including homosexual orientation and behaviors, either we will adopt principled tolerance or, if we follow the current trans-equality roadmap, selective exclusion. The current pro-choice policy creates moral hazards that will ostensibly be left to our Posterity to reconcile. The same as other pro-choice policies that characterize the State-established religions or moral philosophies in modern liberal societies.
It's not hysterical, it's carefully planned. Religious exemptions from general regulatory laws are a threat. Such exemptions must be destroyed.
There must be no focus of moral authority other than the state.
wildswan asks "Whatever happened to BlackLivesMatter?"
Some of them are still around, not doing much. A hundred or so (maybe: I couldn't be bothered to notice) were marching down Broadway past 12th Street in NYC Friday afternoon around 4:00, shouting "Hands Up! Don't Shoot" and escorted by a bunch of bored-looking cops. I didn't see anyone in the multi-racial crowd of passersby raise their hands or do anything but idly glance at them and then turn away. Then again, I wasn't paying much attention to them.
They marched past me on both sides (I was waiting on the sidewalk for the light to turn so I could cross Broadway as they marched down the sidewalk) but none one of them even asked me to raise my hands - not that I would have. I got a strong impression most of the demonstrators were just going through the motions. Perhaps they're paid by the hour?
Just to reassure you, I want you to know I "resisted" looking at anything on Salon in response to this entry, which is terrific. Actually "resist" is too strong a word, as it has become effortless over the years.
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