Tag: arianna huffington

#rsrh AOL, Huffington Post, Bill Maher, and the h-word.

“Hypocrisy,” of course.

It’s very entertaining to watch Newsbusters hammer AOL  and the Huffington Post for their rank hypocrisy in banning Andrew Breitbart from the latter’s front page for calling Van Jones a commie punk somewhere else, while letting Bill Maher stick around even though he used the c and t-words* somewhere else.  It’s even more entertaining to watch AOL and HuffPo try to put up a Cone of Silence on the subject.  But if you really want to hit AOL hard on this – and it has to be AOL; obviously, Arianna Huffington is comfortable with having one standard for people on the Right who make statements, and another with people on the Left who make infinitely worse statements – then you have to hit them in the only place that you can; their pocketbooks.  Which is very, very difficult, of course.

Oh, by the way: did you know that AOL still has 2.5 million actual subscribers, despite the fact that they don’t actually offer access that’s more sophisticated than dial-up?  Seriously.  If you have high-speed already, that $9.99/month plan pays for dial-up backup service; if you don’t actually need dial-up, you can keep your AOL account for free.

Interesting, no?

Moe Lane Continue reading #rsrh AOL, Huffington Post, Bill Maher, and the h-word.

#rsrh A quick reminder on ad hominem.

As Ben Domenech noted on Twitter, if you’re a blogger it’s important to get your ad hominem insult up and public today if you want to guarantee that you’ll be keeping off of the Huffington Post’s front page.  Background on this absurd story here: the short version is that the Arisian mind-lords over at HuffPo flailed about like lobotomized geckos to find an excuse to throw Andrew Breitbart off of their front page after they invited him on it, and came up with the novel excuse that he had ad-hommed elsewhere.

Hi-jinks, as they said, ensued.

But let’s be clear about something about ad hominem arguments, because the term is horribly misused on the Internet: it is not the same as a direct insult.  Ad hominem is when you bring up a person’s character or actions in order to try to invalidate the person’s argument; put more simply, it attempts to suggest that being wicked means that you can’t ever happen to be right about something.  Which is of course absurd.

So: if I write, say, that  Arianna Huffington is wrong about health care rationing because she’s an easily-scared poopyhead… well, that’s an ad hominem argument.  After all, her recto-cranial inversion has nothing to do with her (I assume) blind support of Obamacare, and it would be highly illogical of me to suggest that it did.  But if I write that Arianna Huffington is a miserable person because she’s an easily-scared poopyhead… well, that’s a direct insult and a mean thing to say – but it’s not an ad hominem.

I hope that this clears things up for people.

Palin and Reagan and bears, oh my.

Not to be mean-spirited about this, but it’s at times like this that Arianna Huffington demonstrates that she has a black-box approach to understanding Americans*.  In discussing the inexplicable (to her) attraction so many people have towards THAT WOMAN, Arianna wrote:

It’s not Palin’s positions people respond to — it’s her use of symbols. Mama grizzlies rearing up to protect their young? That’s straight out of Jung’s “collective unconscious” — the term Jung used to describe the part of the unconscious mind that, unlike the personal unconscious, is shared by all human beings, made up of archetypes, or, in Jung’s words, “universal images that have existed since the remotest times.” Unlike personal experiences, these archetypes are inherited, not acquired. They are “inborn forms… of perception and apprehension,” the “deposits of the constantly repeated experiences of humanity.”

…and then goes on to compare said mama grizzly video with this Reagan campaign video, which is apparently also ‘policy-free’ (that’s the latest progressive buzzword for ‘black magic’). And oh, yeah!  That has a bear, too!  That’s Jungian!  And it links Old Devil Figure to New Devil Figure, so that’s a plus!  Yes!  IT ALL COHERES!

Yes.  It makes Allahpundit’s head ache, too. Continue reading Palin and Reagan and bears, oh my.