WHAT DO THEY HAVE AGAINST MEANINGLESS DRIBBLE: Sinclair exec: Print media is ‘meaningless dribble’.
Archive for 2018
April 5, 2018
CLASSLESS IS AS CLASSLESS DOES: Wu, Black and the YouTube Shooter.
April 4, 2018
AT AMAZON, Spring Savings on Bras. Also, Men’s Shoes.
SO I BOUGHT AN IPHONE X A WHILE BACK, and I’m pretty happy with it. The battery life is good enough I don’t need a Mophie charger case — I did get the wireless charger, which is more useful than I expected. The display is very sharp and clear, it’s fast, and the camera is excellent which is the main reason I upgraded. Here’s a pic of the Insta-Wife from today, fresh back from a TV shoot for the Oxygen Channel.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: A Guide to Properly Hating Old Movies.
There are interesting ideas floating somewhere beneath the surface of The Guardian’s article, but whatever insights might be offered are lost in the all-too-typical emphasis on personal experience as objective analysis. I’m open to reading an article about what The Shining lost during the adaptation process, or why Wendy Torrance is a disappointing female lead given the horror genre’s history of progressive female characters, or even how a movie like The Shining transitions from a disappointment to a work of genius in just a few decades. Instead, we get two very familiar and, frankly, boring arguments: I Was Personally Unimpressed and This Film’s Audience Is Annoying.
But you know what? I’m a helpful guy. If authors are dead set on publishing these types of pieces, then the least we can do is take a moment and work out the perfect template. This way, the argument gets made, the author gets paid, and audiences can breathe a little easier knowing that they aren’t actually missing anything if they don’t click. Film criticism moves a little closer to its future as a perpetual motion machine that chugs continuously on without outside interference. Let’s give it a shot.
Heh. Read the whole thing.
Note that in the era of #metoo, with just a few minor changes, the template that follows the above quoted passage can do double-duty, serving those who priggishly choose to hate on old TV sitcoms as well for insufficient wokeness.
OPEN THREAD: You know what to do.
LINDSAY SHEPHARD: GOODBYE TO THE LEFT.
Shephard was that Canadian university TA who was summoned before a Diversity Kangaroo Court to explain why, as part of an issues-in-media class, she had played a debate (which aired on a liberal Canadian tv station) about the use of made-up trans pronouns. The debate featured Jordan Peterson on the “against” side, and one or more students complained that being forced to listen to a debate (in which the other side was represented, too) about a contentious issue in the media was like Hitler invading the Issues in Media class.
She used to consider herself a leftist, but she says she now knows what leftism actually is, and she’s not that, any longer.
Related: Novelist Lionel Shriver: “…it seems I was cited on Twitter as a ‘racist provocateur’”
We’re well on our way to the label becoming a perverse badge of pride; if you’re outside the far-left faithful, your first charge of racism constitutes a losing of your political cherry, inoculating against any further sense of injury. This commonplace code for ‘not one of us’ is morphing into a meaningless playground taunt, just as forgettable as ‘stupid’.
QED: MSNBC Sees Trump ‘Playing the Race Card’ Against ‘Uppity Black Person’ Obama.
As James Taranto likes to say, if you can hear the dog whistles, you’re the dog.
JACOB SULLUM: Irrational Fear of Mass Shootings Can’t Justify Unconstitutional Gun Control: Stinging insects kill more Americans than mass shooters do. It’s got nothing to do with safety. It’s all about humiliating the flyover rubes and showing them who’s boss.
BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: I Flew 16 Hours Nonstop In Economy Class On One Of The Busiest International Routes — Here’s What It Was Like. “Overall, it was somewhere between OK and good.”
MEGAN MCARDLE: What Caused The 1968 Riots? A Lack Of Respect.
Fifty years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down in Memphis, the scars of the riots that followed are only now fully healed in Washington. In other cities, they still aren’t. And we still don’t know exactly why they happened — or for that matter why the 1960s as a whole saw more rioting than the decades before or since.
What we can say with some confidence is that we can’t simply explain them as a function of unemployment and poverty.
Marxism as an ideology was crushed when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, but as a method of analysis it still thrives. Modern thought has a tendency toward economic reductionism, viewing every historic problem as a mechanical working-out of underlying economic processes, and every solution in those terms. . . .
What did cause the riots, then? Well, rage and despair and a lot of hard-to-quantify socio-political factors. But taking them all in total, I’d sum them all up with one word: respect. Whatever our economic conditions, we also want — we need — to command a certain minimal amount of admiration from our fellow citizens.
The great victories of the civil rights movement changed many things. Schools were integrated; funding disparities eased. But that didn’t obliterate the racism that still followed black people around stores, eyed them suspiciously on the street, dogged them in job interviews and caused the police to stop them for “walking while black.”
In the late 1960s, as the legal barriers fell, the gulf between legal status and social reality may have chafed more than usual. This is a hard theory to prove, and it may not be the whole explanation. But it’s probably more useful than yet another exegesis of the unemployment rate and housing conditions. After all, most people, for most of history, have lived in objectively wretched conditions without rioting. . . .
There are vast differences, of course, between the race riots of the 1960s and the 2016 election. But when we explain these events, the tendency toward economic reductionism looks very similar, as does its implausibility.
Many places that voted for Trump never had many factories to lose to China or Mexico; many factory towns turned to Trump only after decades of decline. What most consistently motivates the Trump supporters I’ve met is not jobs or racism but anger at a culturally powerful elite that veers between ignoring them and disrespecting every facet of their lives.
But no riots. Yet.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, TWINKLETOES: Arthur Murray (born Moses Teichman) would have been 123 years old today. Among his students were Eleanor Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Johnny Mercer and Jack Dempsey. If you can bring one-tenth as much happiness to your fellow man as Murray and his chain of dancing schools have brought, you will have been a smashing success.
CLINTON FOUNDATION BROKE VIP NEW HAMPSHIRE CHARITY REGULATION: If your name is Gordon MacDonald and you are the Attorney General of New Hampshire, you really need to read this ASAP … OK, now what are you going to do about it?
NO WHITE HOUSE FOR YOU, MARK ZUCKERBERG: Brian Bosche explains why the evidence has been there all along.
JACK SHAFER: TRUMP IS RIGHT. IT IS THE AMAZON WASHINGTON POST.
Bezos became the world’s richest person through his labors at Amazon, which he still controls. He purchased the Post in 2013 with $250 million of his Amazon pin money. While it might be more accurate to call the newspaper the “Bezos Washington Post,” seeing as Bezos and Amazon are joined at the hip, it’s not ridiculous to speak of the paper—at least in the vernacular—as the Amazon Washington Post. If Amazon didn’t exist, it’s unlikely the Washington Post would exist in its current form.
Read the whole thing.
SMASH ALL THE STATUES! AIRBRUSH ALL THE HISTORY! Why Students at Ottawa’s Carleton University Are Trying to Have a Statue of Gandhi Removed.
As Richard Grenier wrote in his incredible 13,702 word rebuttal in Commentary to Richard Attenborough’s hagiographic 1982 film, Gandhi was…some piece of work. But to paraphrase GK Chesterton, perhaps today’s students at Carleton might bother learning why their predecessors erected a statue of him, before demanding its destruction.
Found via Kate of Small Dead Animals, who warns, “Visit The Washington Monument While You Still Can.”
REVIEW: 2019 Ram 1500 Rebel.
BRIDGET JOHNSON: Rosenstein Names Former McCain Campaign Lawyer His Right-Hand Man at DOJ. “Ed O’Callaghan, who has been serving as the principal deputy assistant attorney general in the National Security Division, is moving over to be acting principal associate deputy attorney general.”
FOLLOWED BY A COURSE ON HISTORIC IBM SELECTRIC FONTS OF THE 1970s: Good news! Dan Rather is here to teach you about fake news.
I’D BE INTERESTED IN HEARING MARK RIPPETOE’S TAKE ON THIS: Weightlifting Injuries Common for Deployed U.S. Troops.
UPDATE: Mark Rippetoe emails:
I looked at the full text of the paper. As you might guess, with the paper titled “Acute Pectoralis Major Tears in Forward Deployed Active Duty U.S. Military Personnel: A Population at Risk?” it is not about the larger topic of strength training but rather it’s a small review article that primarily deals with the surgical interventions. This, of course, does not prevent the authors from pondering the overwhelming threat posed by the most popular exercise in any gym in the United States except for mine, on the basis of 9 reported injuries. I strongly suspect that since 80% of these injuries were pec tendon avulsions at the humerus (not really pec tears at all), and since one of them occurred at 135 pounds (!), what you’re seeing here is a bunch of pre-inflamed tendon insertions — courtesy of the now-popular CrossFit training these military guys do — which decided to rupture on deployment.
1. How many pec tendon avulsions were treated in non-deployed troops? Statistics?
2. This injury is in fact uncommon, and I’d never seen one prior to CrossFit. An occasional pec belly rupture or partial rupture, like Bill Kazmeier’s back in the 80s, but not a tendon avulsion. How many of these guys had a history of CF or other high-rep ballistic shoulder work?
3. Look at this bizarre statement: “Due to the alarming frequency with which pectoralis major ruptures were diagnosed and treated at one expeditionary military treatment facility over a short four-month deployment cycle; combat deployed active duty US military personnel likely represent a high-risk population for this injury.”
Is an illogical conclusion now required for publication in medical journals?
It doesn’t hurt.
WELL, YEAH: Facebook Scans What You Send Other People on Messenger App.
The company confirmed the practice after an interview published earlier this week with Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg raised questions about Messenger’s practices and privacy. Zuckerberg told Vox’s Ezra Klein a story about receiving a phone call related to ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. Facebook had detected people trying to send sensational messages through the Messenger app, he said.
“In that case, our systems detect what’s going on,” Zuckerberg said. “We stop those messages from going through.”
Some people reacted with concern on Twitter: Was Facebook reading messages more generally? Facebook has been under scrutiny in recent weeks over how it handles users’ private data and the revelation struck a nerve. Messenger doesn’t use the data from the scanned messages for advertising, the company said, but the policy may extend beyond what Messenger users expect.
For your own good, of course.