Tag: salon

Some day, sites like Salon will be able to talk about religion…

…without making you want to go wince, hide, or find a good stick with which to defend yourself.  That day is not here yet.  Oh, my, no.

https://twitter.com/KevinNR/status/689248338831478785

I particularly enjoyed the bit where the author took his not-very-hidden anti-Semitism and turned it into ostensible anti-Catholicism*.  Well, ‘enjoyed’ is not the right word, of course. But it’s not entirely the wrong one, either.  I don’t really mind it when my political opponents engage in a spot of self-trepanning like this…

Moe Lane

PS: …Man. White people.  Particularly white people who write for Salon, because they’re so white they make regular white people go “Man. White people” without a hint of shame.

*Seriously, there’s considerable overlap between the “I hate the Old Testament God of the Jews” crowd and the “I kinda hate Jews in general” crowd.  Go figure, huh?

Tweet of the Day, No. No, Salon Is Not Better Than This edition.

I know that I should be outrageously outraged at this…

Salon

…but, honestly?  I just want to call Salon’s mother and father and tell them to stop fighting long enough to let Salon have a merry Christmas for once.  Because there’s so much pain there, and this is the one day of the year where I’d feel bad about drinking it.

‘Help us, Al Gore! You’re our only hope!’ – Salon, and *God* help us all.

I hadn’t realized that the Left was this worried about Hillary Clinton: “It’s time to draft Al Gore: If Democrats want to win, it’s clear neither Hillary nor Sanders is the way.” Salon, of course. Mother Jones would rather have Sanders and Gawker’s too busy outing people for no recognizable reason.  Now let me see if I can read the actual article without collapsing in helpless laughter…

…Barely. It’s amazing how people can look at the same data and come to different conclusions, isn’t it? I mean, I look at Al Gore and I see a profoundly emotionally stunted man (one made that way by a domineering father) who received a life-altering shock in 2000 (losing an election that he was programmed to win) and responded to it by first having a carefully-ignored mental breakdown, then by reprogramming himself into a crony capitalist and fear-monger for a neo-Apocalyptic cult that gets more and more tawdry looking every year.  And, oh yeah, the entire divorce and alleged adultery thing.  But Salon… ah, Salon: it sees a potential Democratic Presidential candidate that’s superior to any other Democratic candidate out there.

What should frighten the dickens out of Democrats is that both Salon and I might be correct.

What this Alternet/Salon oopsie tells us about their essentially patronizing worldviews.

Oh, dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

Very short version: National Review Online’s Kevin Williamson caught Alternet (and later, Salon) publishing an article where it was claimed that the five richest Members of Congress each had a net worth greater than countries like Peru, Greece, and Hong Kong*. Once this got caught by horrified pundits across the political spectrum, Alternet and Salon quietly scrubbed this claim (which was based off of a remarkably bad interpretation of a Wikipedia article**) without owning up to it (at least, they haven’t yet, at 1 PM Eastern time). The interesting*** question then becomes How in God’s name did everybody miss that, at either website? Continue reading What this Alternet/Salon oopsie tells us about their essentially patronizing worldviews.

Salon.com goes Full Mundane.

You never go Full Mundane.

…Oh, sorry: ‘Mundane’ is a specialized slur found in the fandom/SCA/geek community: it translates to Not a fan/SCAdian/geek.  Mundane is in fact a rather rude slur; you’re not supposed to call people by that in public.  I may get yelled at, in fact, for calling Ms. Randa Jarrar a mundane, but I don’t particularly care.  She started it:

Why I can’t stand white belly dancers

Whether they know it or not, white women who practice belly dance are engaging in appropriation

Continue reading Salon.com goes Full Mundane.

Thomas Frank still can’t quit Kansas (the reverse is apparently not true).

Not much to say about, except that Thomas Frank apparently wonders now why the hell he bothered to write What’s The Matter With Kansas?* – and my but he is bitter about it. What makes it kind of entertaining, in an admittedly not-nice way, is that he almost gets the real problem:

For the ruling faction of the Democratic party, meanwhile, I felt like the Kansas story triggered a bout of guilty conscience. To begin with, there was something true at the core of all the conservative bullshit: we really are ruled by a meritocratic, professional elite — just look at the members of the president’s cabinet, or who gets interviewed on NPR — and a great number of meritocratic believers really are found in the ranks of the Democrats. As a party, they are openly in love with expertise; it is who they are; it means more to them than any ideology. It’s the awful story of “The Best and the Brightest” repeating itself over and over and over again.

Continue reading Thomas Frank still can’t quit Kansas (the reverse is apparently not true).

Salon’s sad attempt at smearing the Right wrt Kermit Gosnell.

Now, I understand that this Alex Seitz-Wald fellow wishes to a) distract and b) infuriate the Right by repeating the bald-faced lie that conservatives only covered the Kermit Gosnell stories in the last week or so (and it is a bald-faced lie).  I will therefore trashcan my previous remarks and thus merely note that if Salon is going to talk about how conservatives supposedly did or did not cover the Gosnell atrocities in 2011, then they really should include a survey of what RedState – you know, a site that has its own Salon tag – did during that time period:

…Or did Alex Seitz-Wald actually do that research, and then decide that it was… unhelpful? Continue reading Salon’s sad attempt at smearing the Right wrt Kermit Gosnell.

Jack Lew, union-buster.

Honestly, I don’t really even care all that much about Jack Lew being tapped for Treasury: I had a pretty target-rich environment already.  But who the heck is doing the background checks, over at the White House?  – Because they aren’t doing their job properly.

With President Obama poised to tap current chief of staff Jack Lew as his next treasury secretary, Republicans are already attacking Lew for supposed slights during budget talks. Some progressives may bring renewed scrutiny to his time at CitiGroup. But if history is any guide, there will be little talk about another line on Lew’s résumé: The key role he played in New York University’s campaign to rid itself of a graduate student workers’ union.

Lew, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Clinton, joined NYU as chief operating officer and executive vice president in 2004. At the time, NYU was the only private university in the United States whose graduate students had a union contract. By the time Lew left two years later, NYU graduate students had lost their collective bargaining rights. In between, picketers hoisted “Wanted” posters with his face on them.

Continue reading Jack Lew, union-buster.

You can almost *smell* the relief coming from this Salon Prevarigate piece…

[UPDATE]: And welcome, Protein Wisdom readers.  You may be amused by Morgan Freeman doing a Barenaked Ladies cover.

…because now they have an acceptable devil figure to blame it all on. Via @vermontaigne (and Protein Wisdom):

Cheney’s torture trap for Democrats

[Note: Salon defines ‘waterboarding’ as ‘torture’ throughout this article. Please calibrate your semantic filters accordingly. – ML]

You might have thought getting torture back in the news would be a bad move for any Republican; after all, it was the Bush administration that authorized the torturing. But the last few days have shown Dick Cheney knew exactly what he was doing when he went on TV last week and started talking about “enhanced interrogation”: It was a masterstroke of bureaucratic warfare.

[snip multiple paragraphs that dance around the fact that Pelosi Knew All Along.]

Cheney, safely ensconced in his McLean, Va., mansion, must be chortling all the way to his cave every night. After three decades in the top levels of U.S. government, he knows better than most how to set his opponents against themselves.

You have to understand that this sort of thing is the product of a certain kind of mindset. Let’s say that you’re a person who has adopted a particular set of beliefs – for whatever reason – that you have come to depend on as being an integral part of why you consider yourself to be a good person. And let’s say that these beliefs have been reinforced and validated by certain outside individuals, through a series of deliberately provocative statements and actions. And let’s finally say that it becomes clear that those people have been lying to you with those statements and actions – and without them, the set of beliefs that you’re relying on now come into serious question. You have two options at this point. The first is to critically examine your beliefs, and be prepared to change them; the second is to find something else that would validate them.
Continue reading You can almost *smell* the relief coming from this Salon Prevarigate piece…