Look, Gawker is porno. That’s all it is. Specialized porno.

Cathy Young points out something rather obvious:

…Gawker inevitably incurred the wrath of the progressives who had been the core of its respectable following—people like journalist Glenn Greenwald, whose tweet condemning the story noted that he was “a fan of Gawker,” or one of Gawker’s own more prominent ex-staffers, Adam Weinstein. But the fact that Gawker was seen as acceptable in polite liberal society until now says a lot about the climate on the cultural left.

It does, indeed. Specifically, it says that a lot of the cultural Left has a taste for the worst kind of political-cultural porno.  Now, I’m not the sort of guy who judges other people for their tastes in (legal) porno. I merely ask that people with a taste in the nastier (but still legal) kinds of porno not wave that porno around in public and bother the rest of us. Gawker devotees have long made a habit of breaking this particular social convention, and I for one am grandly unconcerned that some of them are trying now to avoid the consequences of that. If they don’t want to be judged for liking Gawker porno, then maybe they shouldn’t have savored Gawker porno in public.

Via @EsotericCD.

Moe Lane

PS: Between the first draft of this post and now Gawker… ‘head honcho,’ I guess… Nick Denton felt that he needed to weigh in on why the fact that Gawker’s political porno is currently publicly toxic should not be taken into consideration when one is contemplating one’s future political porno needs. It’s a fascinating whine, not least because Denton apparently never read Rudyard Kipling’s observation about journalism:

[As] soon as the staff realised that they had proprietors who backed them right or wrong, and specially when they were wrong (which is the sole secret of journalism), and that their fate did not hang on any passing owner’s passing mood, they did miracles.

Of course, Rudyard Kipling is a Dead White Male – and simultaneously cis and pro-Imperial, to boot! – so Denton probably felt that he could safely skip some corrective reading. Still, Gawker might have been wiser to treat this entire sorry affair as the failure in managerial oversight that it was. The proper response would have been to leave the story up, update it with a crawling apology, then change the editorial policy.  After that, all that would be left would be for Denton to voluntarily withdraw from all managerial duties for Gawker.com. Because these sites of his are not acting contrary to his deeper desires; far from it, really.