Taibbi: The News Media Is Destroying Itself

I'm not sure it's representative of anything going forward. I think it was a high stakes, high stress aberration that revealed some weaknesses in the OpEd process, and will drive some institutional changes to address them.

We'll see though.

 

It's also not representative of anything going backward.

 

Meanwhile, Sen. Cotton has yet to weigh in on reports that his boy in the White House — as opposed to his boys on the side — knew about Putin’s work to have Our Soldiers killed.

 

Sorry to break it to you, but Lena Dunham blogs and tweets are the real threat to America.

 

Taibbi on the book White Fragility. (Unread by me.)

On “White Fragility”

 

Funny little review.

 

Not the exact same topic, but relevant and correct:

Illiberalism Isn’t to Blame for the Death of Good-Faith Debate

 

It has some thoughts in it, for sure. It's too long, and it repeats itself a lot, but interesting.

This is an interesting paragraph:

Now, you may wonder: Doesn’t this world-weary presumption that you know how arguments will go lead to paranoid readings and meta-debates that seem totally batshit to onlookers who aren’t internet-poisoned? Yup! And that crosses over into real-life engagements too, since at this point it would be foolish to insist that online patterns aren’t having offline effects. Take “All Lives Matter.” Most people by now understand how the phrase works to undermine social justice protests, but for a long time, it did exactly what it was meant to: It made people who knew what it was actually saying seem paranoid and crazy for objecting to an anodyne statement that seemed bighearted and self-evident. “Why would you refuse to debate someone who’s simply saying that all lives matter?” is the kind of question an Enlightenment subject longing for a robust exchange of ideas might ask. Well, the reason is that most of us have learned, through bitter experience in the mirror-halls of the internet, that it would be a waste of time. It probably wouldn’t be a true exchange. We’ve tried. We’ve watched others try. And we know by now what “All Lives Matter” signals, and that what it signals is orthogonal to what it says. Your fluency in this garbage means you take shortcuts: Maybe, if you’ve been online a lot, you don’t even bother to refute the text anymore. You leap to the subtext—which is that black people don’t deserve public advocacy or concern despite being disproportionately abused and killed by police. So maybe you don’t argue. Maybe you just call that position racist and call it a day.

I agree that "All Lives Matter" is a kind of pointless submarine of the very real need to address what's happening in and to African-Americans.

 

interesting how and by whom those slogans and phrases get jiu-jitsued into meaninglessness or insult.

woke

politically correct

black lives/all lives/blue lives matter

 

Your boy seems nice.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outl...ff338c-ca3c-11e7-8321-481fd63f174d_story.html

 

This week you have Tucker Carlson on the right and Derecka Burnell on the left both shoveling obvious BS, but as long as their followers hear what they want from them, then they get to keep on doing what they're doing.