Ikr?!

But it was never about their own wants and wishes. It was about owning the Libtard Soy Bois. And boy, did they ever. We are awash in tears over our broader likelihood of being able to afford the add-ons to view an Internet that reviles them.

I guess the silver lining is that the Internet is what got us to this point to begin with, maybe putting it down is the best thing.

"the Internet is what got us to this point to begin with"

I don't know about that. For the Right it was Fox News, and for the Left it was their being more scared of being called "sheeple" than of anything else. The Internet may have exploited their weaknesses, but people being suckers in whichever direction ... ? That's on them.

Looking forward to the people who were pretty sure Trump wouldn't hurt them personally, to start pissing and moaning because their online games are gonna be laggy.

"people being suckers in whichever direction ... ? That's on them."

This right here is exactly why the left always loses.

I mean "liberals."

When the Cenks, Glenns, Matts, and other voices on the Left stop selling their rubes on how the Democrats are no better than the Republicans, the Left / liberals / whatever might stand a chance. But that would require the rubes to fix themselves.

But don't worry, I'm sure they learned their lesson after the 2010 election! I mean 2014! Okay, 2016!

TIN FOIL HAT EDITION:

So all these sex predators being scooped the last month? Kevin Spacey killed Netflix’s prestige budget. Harvey Weinstein scuppered a lot of Miramax content. Louis CK effectively chilled upcoming comedy talent. I personally wager Eisner is next (Bojack Horseman is his money on the line, and he has bad blood with Disney.) Can’t quite figure out Al Franken but he’s a noted Net Neutrality champion. Disney announced a deal with Fox to get the original Star Wars prints, but I think that’s cover for what’s coming: Murdoch is pulling out of entertainment television considering his immanent mortality, and who better to pick that up than Disney?

So we KNOW Disney is pulling out of Netflix to put together a Disney owned streaming service. We KNOW the Trump Administration just sued to halt the AT&T merger with Turner (ostensibly to cripple CNN out of spite). We KNOW that the writing is on the wall for cable, and it will be obsolete within five years bundled as it is. Fox News is struggling with advertisers and the popular media has failed to get on board with Bannon’s narrative of populist nationalism.

Netflix is not aligned with the major corporations or the Disney/GE/Newscorp triad. They are killing cable as it is, and Netflix is the enemy of a lot of powerful players. If my Tin Foil Hat theory holds out, it’s all about supplanting Netflix with a bundled Disney/Fox streaming service built into your cable box. Add to it that Zucc wants in on that box, and nobody here is a friend to Apple, and you’ve got not exactly a conspiracy but a wild storm of collusion built on the back of decades of reserved blackmail material and the wherewithal to move and remove people based on who they fucked fifteen years ago. This is mercenary stuff, and nobody in a position of authority is happy about your Net Neutrality. All it takes is a few phone calls to the right Russian spambots, gin up some Twitter outrage, set a date to remove Net Neutrality, and you’ve got the internet as we know it effectively gone in a year’s time.

"Bort
When the Cenks, Glenns, Matts,"


I don't know ho the other two are but I'm right there with you on Cenk. TYT has always been Progressive Fox News in my book and I can't stand watching that crap.

Anyway, democrats and republicans aren't the same. 21st century Democrats are 1970s Republicans and 21st century Republicans are 1970s neonazis.

Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, respectively. (Matthew Yglesias has his days too ...)

Oh yeah, I pay exactly zero attention to either of those two.

Far from comprehensive, but these days I tend to be pretty in to Thomas Frank, Sam Seder, Angela Nagel, Chris Lehmann is often (but not always) good, I've got a really hot-and-cold relationship with the stuff Jessa Crsipin has written in the last few years but I'd say 3/4 of it is fantastic vs 1/4 that just doesn't work a bit for me.


Notice that all but one of those people are writers, and none of them rely on television or the Youtube economy to support themselves. This is not a coincidence.

Rafia Zakaria is usually good.

People don't think of him as a pundit or social critic, but Jaron Lanier has written some of the most important stuff out there about the intersection between sociopolitical ideologies, interface design, economic inequality and the Internet, and anyone who cares about this stuff who hasn't read Who Owns the Future? yet really, really should. It's sprawling, inconsistent and often frustrating like everything he does, but it's also one of the most insightful books I've ever read.

At any rate, we can all agree that Big Money Salvia is a smarter pundit than all of TYT combined.

Thomas Frank might well be a candidate for the "ignore" list. The fucker doesn't think racism has any significant part of what's wrong with Kansas, because Republicans say they're not racist. Well SHIT, that settles that!

Thomas Frank's whole thing is, he wants to reduce everything to economic arguments pitched to rational wealth maximizers, because if that is the case then he has a solution (a return to the New Deal). But if the problem is vastly more complex in nature -- grassroots Republicans seeing themselves as the "true" Americans, existential worries about being displaced by those insufferably fecund brown people, and a religion constructed around the notion that everyone else are Satanic baby killers -- then Thomas Frank's got nothing. Therefore he is loathe to talk about the problem as it is, and instead talks about the problem as he wants it to be.

http://www.isreview.org/issues/39/kansas.shtml

---

One of the more bizarre claims Frank makes is that of the "racial elements of modern conservatism"–playing on "white fears" by pressing "hotbutton issues like busing, welfare and integration"–"none…is an important factor" in the story of the Kansas backlash. Indeed, he claims, "If anything, the conservative movement in Kansas is conspicuous for its tolerance on racial issues."

His proof? Drawing on a historic tradition of Kansas abolitionism, Kansas conservatives accuse their opponents of being "bigots," or members of "hate groups"; Sam Brownback supports "open immigration policies"; and anti-abortionists delight in calling themselves "abolitionists." All and sundry conservative issues, he tells us, from anti-gay bigotry to fighting against a woman’s right to choose, are cloaked in the language of "civil rights." Here Frank is guilty of muddying the distinction between the appropriation and manipulation of the language of the Left and the civil rights movement by the conservative Right, and the reactionary positions they are harnessed to.

George Bush, in proposing to gut affirmative action, makes allusions to Martin Luther King and the traditions of the civil rights movement. Indeed, from the beginning the backlash against affirmative action presented itself as a movement fighting against "reverse discrimination." That hardly qualifies it as non-racist. This has been a conscious right-wing strategy to throw its opponents onto the defensive: Those who are against school prayer are for "suppressing free speech," proponents of vouchers are merely standing up for "school choice," and so on.

In attempting to argue that race in Kansas was not a factor in the backlash, Frank offers an extremely selective history. Abolitionism and populism may have a place in Kansas history, but so does ugly Jim Crow racism. On June 10, 1882, a white mob in Lawrence lynched three Black men who were suspected in the murder of a white man. In the 1920s, the Klan chapter in Wichita was bigger than the total population of Blacks in the city (6,000 to 5,600).

Though we can agree with Frank that Kansas was and is "not Alabama in the sixties," it imposed segregation in most public institutions, including elementary schools, theaters, restaurants, swimming pools, and high school sports teams, until a movement changed it. Indeed, the first successful student sit-ins at lunch counters took place not in Greensboro, NC, but at a drug store chain in Wichita in 1958.

As Frank admits, the backlash since its emergence in the seventies has always used coded language to disguise its racism–crime (young Black men), welfare (young Black mothers). It isn’t as though the Kansas conservative movements in their various guises over the years have been somehow hermetically sealed from the rest of the country or have somehow been open to the ideology of the Right but have heroically resisted its central racist props.

Just last September, Reverend Jerry Johnston’s First Family Church in Overland Park (he is a leader in the conservative’s anti gay crusade in the state) sponsored a meeting featuring the "iron-lady" of the right, Phyllis Schlafly, whose speech featured a pro-Buchanan rant against immigration. She was introduced by Kansas Republican Kris Kobach, a former aide to John Ashcroft who ran for Congress in Kansas’s 3rd District (he lost). He ran a campaign denouncing taxes, gay marriage, abortion rights, denying in-state tuition for illegal immigrants, and demanding 20,000 troops on the Mexican border. In the audience at that meeting were also seven members of Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an organization that contributed the maximum amount permissible ($5,000) to Kobach’s congressional run. FAIR’S leader, John Tanton, once argued: "Will the present majority peaceably hand over its political power to a group that is simply more fertile?... As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion?" Kobach also received campaign funds from Gun Owners of America, whose executive director is Larry Pratt, a man with known associations in white supremacist organizations.

>>>But it was never about their own wants and wishes. It was about owning the Libtard Soy Bois. And boy, did they ever. We are awash in tears over our broader likelihood of being able to afford the add-ons to view an Internet that reviles them.

Well, it was never about their wants and wishes, even though they might have imagined that it was. Anita Sarkeesian was never going to rake away their first person shooters. It was really just another game to these guys, but if the Trumpamistas fuck up the internet, it WILL be about their wants and wishes, and it WON'T be a game.

I honestly think Trump won't finish his term, but I'm basing this on the assumption that he's going to continue to be Trump. If the steady drumpfbeat of new scandals, policies that directly threaten citizens, barely veiled racism, and childish statements and actions stops, he may have a chance. I'm betting it won't stop.

I MEAN AVATARDS

Blame the people who voted third party or sat home. Or voted for Trump.