My god, Roy, another treasure. It's hard to pick my favorite part because so much of it is pure gold, but I think it's a toss-up between "(((schmear)))" and the NRO boys looking "like the bad guys in Hallmark Christmas movies."
I guess we should have known the days when a Kevin Williamson could get un-hired from the Atlantic for being a raving loon were now far behind us. It looks like David French was only the first domino to tip over in the quest for the Great God of Both-siderism.
"bad guys in Hallmark Christmas movies" is indeed a brilliant phrase. Today's Republican party is a coalition between the bad guys in Hallmark Christmas movies and the bad guys in Deliverance.
Jan 27, 2023·edited Jan 27, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso
Nicely done ! I hate ol' Hiram and he's not even real!
At least he's honest. I would rather have this asshole bark at me the usual race bait nonsense than have David Brooks try and Tut me to death with his snooty bullshit.
Jan 27, 2023·edited Jan 27, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso
A few years ago I used to say Jeff Bezos revitalized the WP. (And it had gone down quite far). Now I realize it was only in the Frankenstein sense of revitalization.
The questions are, when bezos sells the remains of the rag:
• to whom
• for what purpose
The chatterers claim he's tryna raise money for to buy the Washington Professional Football Team, which, if so, shows Bezos knows more than he lets on. That is, he knows an NFL team owner can sway USian opinion and policy more than any dumb newspaper owner can.
I see what is happening at the Post, the NYT, the conservative pivot at CNN, the Elon Musk disaster at Twitter, and Meta deciding to allow Trump back on their platforms as all of a piece.
The good part is we've apparently got them scared. The bad part is people with their kind of money and power usually win the information battle -- and every other kind of battle as well.
Jan 27, 2023·edited Jan 27, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso
Gannett has hollowed out the Sioux Falls Argus Leader to where it’s just a husk of its former self. However, two longtime reporters have started their own independent paper, the Dakota Scout, so maybe there’s hope (assuming their young reporter learns the difference between “shudder” and “shutter”). And locally we still have the independent, small-town Press & Dakotan (since 1861!) for five days a week, so that’s something.
Why do investigative journalism anymore when you can just sit on the story for three or four years and release it in your behind the throne tell-all book? Assuming we still have a First Amendment, but details.
Gotta say, impressive hires there; the ghost of Fred Hiatt surely is smiling 🤮
But the question is yet raised: Come on, just important are editorial/op-ed pages? More people get news from social media than news media. Only ~55% of Times subscribers subscribe to news as opposed to sports, WireCutter, cooking, games, whatever. CNN's audience is ~neglible. And you know out of those news consumers only a fraction bother with editorials and op-eds. Meanwhile, the punditocracy has almost constantly gotten things all wrong.
So again, of what importance is this crap other than to distract and maybe confuse libs?
And in a faint defense of the WaPo, the old time dig is that it's a company town paper and given the state of that town now, those hires actually make sense.
Well, to quote Ol' Karl Marx, the ideas that rule society are the ideas of the ruling class. So the ruling class must be exercising that hegemony somehow. They don't really need a majority to read their ideas, they just need to keep the majority from reading anything else (and given how a lot of people feel about reading, that's easier than you might think.) Instruments like the Times and Post are useful in establishing the boundaries of debate. You don't have to buy our bullshit, just know that There Are No Alternatives.
Yeah, well, keeping people stupi-- I mean, poorly informed relies on many other tools than promoting the BS of pundits and opinionizers. Again, I can’t see any significant importance to editorial and op-ed sections.
Distracting and confusing libs are worthy goals to the billionaire class in general, is my guess. Also, it appeals to certain totebagger liberals who want to feel like they’re open minded about the cletus demo and their well-known economic anxiety.
The Times has been on something of a tear lately on the subject of "Rural Rage" (if "on a tear" means a Thomas Edsall column followed by a Paul Krugman column.) Seems our fascination with the hurt feelings of rural whites will just never end. Edsall's column in particular shows how this has spawned an entire industry of academics conducting their own data-driven versions of the Cletus Safari. Interesting that I never see rural academics coming to Madison to explore the minds of Homo Liberalis. I guess I'm just not worth studying, which hurts my feelings, but also nobody gives a shit about my feelings.
The one guy in that Edsall article from George Mason going on about how it's all Dems fault that rural whites feel so disrespected made me want to...have another avocado toast and then throw out my gas stove.
Hiram reminds me a bit of the conservative columnist Democratic Underground used to have... Maybe he finally revealed his real name & switched over.
The only thing more depressing than the fact that Democratic Underground's idea of underground turned out to be Hillary Clinton is that someone like ol' Hiram has changed only in the sense that they are getting actual newspaper jobs and are more and more mainstream... Fuck this life.
Hiram’s diction and grammar has gotten a lot worse in the last two and a half years, judging by comparison with the previous screed linked to. I have to think this was caused either by Hiram’s ingestion of some toxic substance (maybe intentionally — he’s known to have engaged in distillery-related programs activity); or he’s faking the Bubba McCracker shtick a la W. But it’s the question of our times: do these knobs really believe the bad comic-book history and ideology, or do they spout it for the power, the glory or the lulz, reveling gleefully in the nihilistic rapture of it all? And do voters go for politicians who embrace his views because of those views or in spite of them? And which of these types of voters is more despicable? I can’t decide.
Shipley ran Hiram's original draft through the old Flesch-Kincaid and determined it was too high-pitched to reach the intended readership. "So that's why I haven't been a big success up to now!" said Hiram as he set about revising.
Jan 27, 2023·edited Jan 27, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso
I think I'm on the record that asking "Do they really believe this shit?" is impossible to answer and mostly a waste of time, and yet I can't help myself.
You can say something the first time to get a reaction, knowing the thing you say is bullshit, but after you've repeated it a few more times, don't you kinda-sorta start to think it's maybe true? And then 10-15 repeats later, why damn, that thing is CERTAINLY true, everybody knows it and anybody who says otherwise is a damn liar!
Human beings are a remarkable species, is what I'm saying.
What a joy to find that this is the second in the Hiram P. Galligash series, and that the first dates from a time before I was a paying subscriber! It's Bonus Edroso Friday for me!
Poor Krugman tried to point out that rural Red regions get more government help than urban Blue areas and he got a lot of suggestions to make rural lives matter even more. My favorite: Girl Scout projects, I shit you not.
I saw that column and dipped into the comments, but any Krugman column attracts 1500+ comments, so I'm sure there were some real gems I missed.
Mostly, what I see in comments to columns like his is urban Times readers saying a highly-educated version of "Fuck these losers." Could be that all this effort to Understand the Other is actually backfiring, in that it just makes me hate people I never gave much thought to before (and yes, I know that not giving them much thought makes me a terrible person.)
I Understand The Other perfectly because they *lynched* people who look like me for a hundred and and thirty years. (That's why we tend to collect in cities.)
I only find I feel that way ("fuck these losers") when they refuse to have a good-faith discussion about the facts on the table (e.g., rural areas getting a lot of help). So, uh... yeah, I guess I feel that way pretty often.
TBH telling people that "The things you feel are incorrect and here's the math to prove it" NEVER goes over well, I can attest to that based on decades of bitter personal experience. That's why I think we'd all be better of with some form of disengagement where we stop trying to correct peoples feelings and instead police their actions. You can hate me if you want, but try and overthrow the government and we'll throw your ass in jail.
I dunno man. I gotta go with my personal experience: When I'm shown proof I'm wrong, or even get called a moron by some jerk, I get annoyed as hell -- right away. Then 20 minutes later, alone, I ask myself, "Did that jerk have a point?" Maybe I google up research, two days later I have modified my thinking. I do this a lot (I get called a moron a lot?). Any adult realizes "I don't have all the info about everything all the time."
So I don't think "correct their feelings" is it, I think: Trust em like adults. Show em how they are just plain wrong on the facts, let em stew on it. Otherwise, short of insurrection, they'll just keep voting for the stupidest, cruelest circus and drag us all down with them.
(I mean obviously my approach does not seem to work, even on loved ones I suspect trust me; I have come to the tentative conclusion that conservatives above all do not want to "lose," and accepting new information is somehow a crow-eating catastrophic loss for them; how we are wired so differently is a question for brain science.)
Since the midterms, I've become more optimistic that we don't actually need to convince these people that they're wrong, they can just continue to be wrong, and we'll just outvote them. In Wisconsin, if we could just get better at voter turnout in Milwaukee, the Dems could probably win the statewide races pretty consistently, and that seems like a more practical plan than trying to school a lot of right-wing knuckleheads who don't want to be schooled.
I think there's a liberal tendency (which I certainly suffer from) to feel like we've always got to be educating people, like we can't make any progress til we get the whole class to pass the final exam. But we just got nearly half a trillion dollars in climate finding even though there's probably 70 million adults in this country who just refuse to learn a damn thing about it. Let's do enough education with willing students to get to a majority and then give the education thing a rest.
You're right, of course. For all my self-proclaimed "I learn and change!" policy, I have a hard time learning that some people refuse to learn. So we just need to forge ahead without regard for the stupidest mewling nonsense endlessly obsessed over by the NYT. Are you freer and richer because of Democrats? Yes. Do you insist the opposite is true? Fine, that's not my problem, I will continue working to make you freer and richer.
And the thing is, even if we did all those things to improve rural life, they would still be resentful, bitter bigots watching their (smarter) kids head for the cities as soon as possible.
Sounds like the Times' years-long effort to promote mutual understanding by sending platoons of reporters out to rural diners while also publishing dozens of opinion columns based on academic research about the feelings and resentments of rural folks is not working so good.
I think maybe we've deployed so many reporters for so long that the locals are afeared the rental properties gonna be skyrocketing and they'll be priced out.
The Russ Donut is a variety I never order, but sometimes when I'm getting a box of a dozen and I'm in a hurry I'll ask the staff to pick 'em out and then they'll stick me with a couple, because nobody else likes them either. I don't know why the donut shop keeps making 'em, except maybe as a misguided effort towards diversity, where diversity means "Mixing things that taste good with things that taste like shit."
My god, Roy, another treasure. It's hard to pick my favorite part because so much of it is pure gold, but I think it's a toss-up between "(((schmear)))" and the NRO boys looking "like the bad guys in Hallmark Christmas movies."
I guess we should have known the days when a Kevin Williamson could get un-hired from the Atlantic for being a raving loon were now far behind us. It looks like David French was only the first domino to tip over in the quest for the Great God of Both-siderism.
"bad guys in Hallmark Christmas movies" is indeed a brilliant phrase. Today's Republican party is a coalition between the bad guys in Hallmark Christmas movies and the bad guys in Deliverance.
With a heaping dollop of Simon Legree.
Nicely done ! I hate ol' Hiram and he's not even real!
At least he's honest. I would rather have this asshole bark at me the usual race bait nonsense than have David Brooks try and Tut me to death with his snooty bullshit.
"Tut me to death", 2 marks! (oh wait, that's the other guy's job.)
And yes, he's King Tut.
Stay in your lane, lmao.
Yeah, next thing you know I'll be posting biratic* equations.
*Gimme time to get up to speed.
All that aside, Steve is correct.
I think Florida just banned biratism from its schools
Florida doesn't count...
But for me it is the last straw-reason never to travel there again.
But whatever you do: Don't tell Steve!
He's a ruttin,' tuttin', shittin' conservative, not like one o' them citified Arr-mani suit wearin' types.
A few years ago I used to say Jeff Bezos revitalized the WP. (And it had gone down quite far). Now I realize it was only in the Frankenstein sense of revitalization.
The questions are, when bezos sells the remains of the rag:
• to whom
• for what purpose
The chatterers claim he's tryna raise money for to buy the Washington Professional Football Team, which, if so, shows Bezos knows more than he lets on. That is, he knows an NFL team owner can sway USian opinion and policy more than any dumb newspaper owner can.
I see what is happening at the Post, the NYT, the conservative pivot at CNN, the Elon Musk disaster at Twitter, and Meta deciding to allow Trump back on their platforms as all of a piece.
The good part is we've apparently got them scared. The bad part is people with their kind of money and power usually win the information battle -- and every other kind of battle as well.
Gannett has hollowed out the Sioux Falls Argus Leader to where it’s just a husk of its former self. However, two longtime reporters have started their own independent paper, the Dakota Scout, so maybe there’s hope (assuming their young reporter learns the difference between “shudder” and “shutter”). And locally we still have the independent, small-town Press & Dakotan (since 1861!) for five days a week, so that’s something.
I believe my Mom, who is 90, still subscribes to the Piddle and Diddle
I just re-watched All the President's Men a few days ago. Now I'll go have a good cry.
Why do investigative journalism anymore when you can just sit on the story for three or four years and release it in your behind the throne tell-all book? Assuming we still have a First Amendment, but details.
You'd need to ask IF Stone
No need to watch them anymore – the Archives took that job.
Gotta say, impressive hires there; the ghost of Fred Hiatt surely is smiling 🤮
But the question is yet raised: Come on, just important are editorial/op-ed pages? More people get news from social media than news media. Only ~55% of Times subscribers subscribe to news as opposed to sports, WireCutter, cooking, games, whatever. CNN's audience is ~neglible. And you know out of those news consumers only a fraction bother with editorials and op-eds. Meanwhile, the punditocracy has almost constantly gotten things all wrong.
So again, of what importance is this crap other than to distract and maybe confuse libs?
And in a faint defense of the WaPo, the old time dig is that it's a company town paper and given the state of that town now, those hires actually make sense.
Well, to quote Ol' Karl Marx, the ideas that rule society are the ideas of the ruling class. So the ruling class must be exercising that hegemony somehow. They don't really need a majority to read their ideas, they just need to keep the majority from reading anything else (and given how a lot of people feel about reading, that's easier than you might think.) Instruments like the Times and Post are useful in establishing the boundaries of debate. You don't have to buy our bullshit, just know that There Are No Alternatives.
2 Marx! (Bern's thunder stolen twice in one comment thread. I am filled with guilt and remorse.)
I go away for one relatively innocent bicycle ride and whammo! – rendered obsolete!
Sheesh...
Yeah, well, keeping people stupi-- I mean, poorly informed relies on many other tools than promoting the BS of pundits and opinionizers. Again, I can’t see any significant importance to editorial and op-ed sections.
The editorials are written to the other Very Serious People who run our country. Washington is a company town, and the Post is its daily newsletter.
Yup. When the state abandons its publicly-funded media, what's left are the corporatized media, which become the state media via default.
One would assume but I don’t see them mattering much regardless.
Distracting and confusing libs are worthy goals to the billionaire class in general, is my guess. Also, it appeals to certain totebagger liberals who want to feel like they’re open minded about the cletus demo and their well-known economic anxiety.
The Times has been on something of a tear lately on the subject of "Rural Rage" (if "on a tear" means a Thomas Edsall column followed by a Paul Krugman column.) Seems our fascination with the hurt feelings of rural whites will just never end. Edsall's column in particular shows how this has spawned an entire industry of academics conducting their own data-driven versions of the Cletus Safari. Interesting that I never see rural academics coming to Madison to explore the minds of Homo Liberalis. I guess I'm just not worth studying, which hurts my feelings, but also nobody gives a shit about my feelings.
Ahhh...
The one guy in that Edsall article from George Mason going on about how it's all Dems fault that rural whites feel so disrespected made me want to...have another avocado toast and then throw out my gas stove.
Carry on, carry on...
At this point I'm arguing for "Retire to your respective corners." Rural people can feel what they feel, I'm not going to tell they're wrong, but:
1) If you try to act on those feelings through violence you will go to prison for a long time.
2) If you choose political candidates based solely on your feelings and resentments towards city folks those candidates will mostly lose.
Let that percolate for a couple of decades and then let's see where we are.
Hiram reminds me a bit of the conservative columnist Democratic Underground used to have... Maybe he finally revealed his real name & switched over.
The only thing more depressing than the fact that Democratic Underground's idea of underground turned out to be Hillary Clinton is that someone like ol' Hiram has changed only in the sense that they are getting actual newspaper jobs and are more and more mainstream... Fuck this life.
Here’s to the memory of Bob Boudelang!
What you wrote:
Bob Boudelang
What I hear:
He's so fine (Boudelang Boudelang Boudelang)
Um... this is a delicate subject so I hesitate to broach it, but... You do have a provision in your will to donate your brain to Science, yes?
The geology dept at the local junior college is clamoring for it.
bob bob bob bob boudelang
(sung to the the tune of that old favorite, bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran)
Oh so many brain-donation opportunities!
Hiram’s diction and grammar has gotten a lot worse in the last two and a half years, judging by comparison with the previous screed linked to. I have to think this was caused either by Hiram’s ingestion of some toxic substance (maybe intentionally — he’s known to have engaged in distillery-related programs activity); or he’s faking the Bubba McCracker shtick a la W. But it’s the question of our times: do these knobs really believe the bad comic-book history and ideology, or do they spout it for the power, the glory or the lulz, reveling gleefully in the nihilistic rapture of it all? And do voters go for politicians who embrace his views because of those views or in spite of them? And which of these types of voters is more despicable? I can’t decide.
Love that prior post from Hiram.
and
"Never mind that everybody knows the Democrats is Tax and Spend, Tax and Spend all the way, even my pappy knows that and he can’t tell time."
I useta tell time alla time but it di'nt ever lissen...
Shipley ran Hiram's original draft through the old Flesch-Kincaid and determined it was too high-pitched to reach the intended readership. "So that's why I haven't been a big success up to now!" said Hiram as he set about revising.
"the old Flesch-Kincaid" ain't so old – 1975...but still fun to chart.
I think I'm on the record that asking "Do they really believe this shit?" is impossible to answer and mostly a waste of time, and yet I can't help myself.
You can say something the first time to get a reaction, knowing the thing you say is bullshit, but after you've repeated it a few more times, don't you kinda-sorta start to think it's maybe true? And then 10-15 repeats later, why damn, that thing is CERTAINLY true, everybody knows it and anybody who says otherwise is a damn liar!
Human beings are a remarkable species, is what I'm saying.
"Hiram’s ingestion of some toxic substance"
Now, I'll have you know he makes his own, out in the woods behind his hunting cabin
The one real reason why the goppers defundin' them revenooers!
I'll bet his wife wears flour-sack dresses she prettied up herelf and makes a mean possum stew.
Oooh, I'm gonna report this as an example of liberal condescension like it was said by the head of the Democrat party hisself.
I blame The Squad for this! [brittle sniff]
Don't blame the possums – I'm mean too when I'm stewed.
What a joy to find that this is the second in the Hiram P. Galligash series, and that the first dates from a time before I was a paying subscriber! It's Bonus Edroso Friday for me!
Exactly what I noticed as I was starting to post a comment to it (just before I went Oh...wait...)
Go ahead and post! Then past-Bern can give Present-Bern 2 marks!
!
Jesus Christ, Roy. For a second I thought this was a real person. :😀 well played, my man.
“Punkin County (S.C.)” — aces.
I swear, if you took out the southron-isms and added a few Upper Midwestern-isms, this could be any of a dozen people in our state government.
Poor Krugman tried to point out that rural Red regions get more government help than urban Blue areas and he got a lot of suggestions to make rural lives matter even more. My favorite: Girl Scout projects, I shit you not.
Wherezis?
NYT
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/26/opinion/rural-voters-economy.html
I saw that column and dipped into the comments, but any Krugman column attracts 1500+ comments, so I'm sure there were some real gems I missed.
Mostly, what I see in comments to columns like his is urban Times readers saying a highly-educated version of "Fuck these losers." Could be that all this effort to Understand the Other is actually backfiring, in that it just makes me hate people I never gave much thought to before (and yes, I know that not giving them much thought makes me a terrible person.)
"it just makes me hate people I never gave much thought to before"
This is not a bug.
When I react that way what I default to is "My outrage is LEGION!"
I Understand The Other perfectly because they *lynched* people who look like me for a hundred and and thirty years. (That's why we tend to collect in cities.)
Hearted for that you are here.
I only find I feel that way ("fuck these losers") when they refuse to have a good-faith discussion about the facts on the table (e.g., rural areas getting a lot of help). So, uh... yeah, I guess I feel that way pretty often.
TBH telling people that "The things you feel are incorrect and here's the math to prove it" NEVER goes over well, I can attest to that based on decades of bitter personal experience. That's why I think we'd all be better of with some form of disengagement where we stop trying to correct peoples feelings and instead police their actions. You can hate me if you want, but try and overthrow the government and we'll throw your ass in jail.
the jails are already overcrowded. get the squad involved. you know which one.
I dunno man. I gotta go with my personal experience: When I'm shown proof I'm wrong, or even get called a moron by some jerk, I get annoyed as hell -- right away. Then 20 minutes later, alone, I ask myself, "Did that jerk have a point?" Maybe I google up research, two days later I have modified my thinking. I do this a lot (I get called a moron a lot?). Any adult realizes "I don't have all the info about everything all the time."
So I don't think "correct their feelings" is it, I think: Trust em like adults. Show em how they are just plain wrong on the facts, let em stew on it. Otherwise, short of insurrection, they'll just keep voting for the stupidest, cruelest circus and drag us all down with them.
(I mean obviously my approach does not seem to work, even on loved ones I suspect trust me; I have come to the tentative conclusion that conservatives above all do not want to "lose," and accepting new information is somehow a crow-eating catastrophic loss for them; how we are wired so differently is a question for brain science.)
Since the midterms, I've become more optimistic that we don't actually need to convince these people that they're wrong, they can just continue to be wrong, and we'll just outvote them. In Wisconsin, if we could just get better at voter turnout in Milwaukee, the Dems could probably win the statewide races pretty consistently, and that seems like a more practical plan than trying to school a lot of right-wing knuckleheads who don't want to be schooled.
I think there's a liberal tendency (which I certainly suffer from) to feel like we've always got to be educating people, like we can't make any progress til we get the whole class to pass the final exam. But we just got nearly half a trillion dollars in climate finding even though there's probably 70 million adults in this country who just refuse to learn a damn thing about it. Let's do enough education with willing students to get to a majority and then give the education thing a rest.
You're right, of course. For all my self-proclaimed "I learn and change!" policy, I have a hard time learning that some people refuse to learn. So we just need to forge ahead without regard for the stupidest mewling nonsense endlessly obsessed over by the NYT. Are you freer and richer because of Democrats? Yes. Do you insist the opposite is true? Fine, that's not my problem, I will continue working to make you freer and richer.
And the thing is, even if we did all those things to improve rural life, they would still be resentful, bitter bigots watching their (smarter) kids head for the cities as soon as possible.
Exactamundo.
Sounds like the Times' years-long effort to promote mutual understanding by sending platoons of reporters out to rural diners while also publishing dozens of opinion columns based on academic research about the feelings and resentments of rural folks is not working so good.
I think maybe we've deployed so many reporters for so long that the locals are afeared the rental properties gonna be skyrocketing and they'll be priced out.
DONUT!!
The Russ Donut is a variety I never order, but sometimes when I'm getting a box of a dozen and I'm in a hurry I'll ask the staff to pick 'em out and then they'll stick me with a couple, because nobody else likes them either. I don't know why the donut shop keeps making 'em, except maybe as a misguided effort towards diversity, where diversity means "Mixing things that taste good with things that taste like shit."
I always think of him more as a phrase than as a functioning human:
Russ, Don't Dothat!
I'll do anything for donuts but I won't Dothat
2 marks.
Edit to add: Genuine marks.
Buffalo-head marks (the kind Greenpeace won't let us make anymore)
I was gonna say 2 marks...but then...
You can have my 2 marks when you tear my cold dead hands from the cold dead bison!
deutsche marks
BARI WEISS: "Hiram P. Galligash is the kind of well-spoken reasonable Classic American we need in journalism for these troubled times."
he and his best pal gabby Johnson.
"[O]n cardboard signs I put on the roof of my shed"
Guess the "See Ruby Falls" and "See Rock City" signs got too weather-beaten and faded to be legible. Or they cut back their ad campaign.
Been a few decades since I seen a "See Rock City US Hwy 31" barn. And been the same few decades since I been down that way anyway.
Rock City is Cleveland? Does Cleveland really need to advertise?
"Cleveland! No longer burnin' the river!"
Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVNuT4fkjAs
hung. maybe old Hiram should showed Megan his big pink Himalayan salt grinder. IYKWIMAITYD.
Oh, it's pink alright.