The MSM, the blogosphere, and me
Blogging used to be the hot new thing. That was back in the dark ages of the Bush administration.
I’m not sure when I first discovered blogs, but it was probably around 2002, about two years after I had transitioned to reading most of my newspapers online. I also don’t remember what blog it was, but my guess is that the site is long defunct.
Something about blogs grabbed me immediately. I liked reading one person’s take on things, freely acknowledged as being one person’s opinion but backed up by links to the sources from which the opinion was derived, and often expressed informally and conversationally compared to the dry prose of most newspapers of the day. I liked the ability to comment, which wasn’t available at newspapers back then except through the laborious and hit-or-miss process of writing letters to the editor that might or might not (probably not) be selected for publication.
It was years before I became a blogger myself, and that was initially a lark with a free site set up by my son. I had no intention of ever using it, but a few months later I decided—on a sudden whim—to get serious about it and see what would happen. Little did I know that almost fourteen years later I’d still be blogging. At the time, I would have been surprised to learn I’d still be blogging fourteen days later.
Blogs had their heyday during the Bush administration, particularly individual blogs like this one. Now it’s all changed, of course, and blogs are somewhat passe, superseded largely by social media and also some group blogs. The latter spread the labor and offer readers more of a variety of points of view, and also encourage clicks by putting up new content often.
As all of this was transpiring, the news was changing, too. I’ve chronicled the beginnings of the transition away from the strict separation between straight news and opinion journalism in my posts about Walter Cronkite (see this and this), but now the two are a seamless fusion in which straight reporting has practically disappeared (if it ever existed in the first place). These days—and for quite a few years now—what is presented as straight news is a sometimes-subtle sometimes-flagrant blend of facts, suppositions, assumptions, misrepresentations, and omissions designed to lead the reader to a certain point of view rather than inform the reader of what happened.
There were many influences that led to this point: the turning point during Vietnam that Cronkite represented, the 24-hour news cycle as a hungry beast demanding to be fed, the rise of TV news as entertainment, as well as the internet influences of blogs and then social media such as Facebook and Twitter.
Although blogs are no longer so influential in terms of the MSM, they did garner a great deal of attention from regular journalists at the beginning. A lot of that attention featured attempts to say how superior journalists were, because journalists had all those trustworthy layers of fact-checking, all that experience and credentials, all that access to trustworthy government sources—in other words, all that skill and experience and inside info. But what subsequently happened is that newspaper reporting—already suffering—grew increasingly to feature the very flaws that the reporters had tried to pin on blogs.
These days when I read the MSM I usually have to wade through fiskable sentence after fiskable sentence. The term “fiskable” comes from the verb “to fisk,” coined to represent something that was happening as a result of the blogosphere: the penchant of bloggers to take an article from the MSM and refute it and critique it, sentence by sentence, almost word for word.
It was often ridiculously easy to do so. Articles were full of unsourced conclusions couched as tautologies, as well as quotes from anonymous “officials” that way-too-often turned out to be garbage. Then on to the next, and the next. Reporters grew younger and younger (and it wasn’t just that I grew older and older), bureaus closed down and papers relied more and more on stringers who had their own agendas.
Newspapers are still pretty good for covering some things, although nowhere near as good as they should be. For example, the fires in California have been covered pretty well, although of course there are some mistakes and revisions of the kind one might expect in a fast-breaking story of some complexity and detail. But once we get to the “why” of the fires, which concerns the interface of politics and science, the opinion journalism propaganda kicks in, big time.
To describe and link to the myriad ways that has occurred would be another long, long post, and this one is long enough already anyway. For now I’ll just say that it’s almost obligatory for each MSM article to add something simplistic such as “of course, the fires are all due to global warming, something Trump denies” while often failing to link to any scientific articles actually backing them up, and while often ignoring the ones that say otherwise and offer details on the extraordinarily complex set of causes and possible solutions to the wildfire problem in California (here was my quick effort at the latter).
In the last couple of years I’ve grown even more wary and weary of looking at the MSM. But it still influences a great many people, and it’s still our basic source for many stories. So there’s no way I’m going to be ignoring it. Although distrust of the MSM is high, most people read it and most people are still influenced by it in ways sometimes subtle and sometimes obvious.
I started a blog in 2007 after Cathy Seipp died. I had been a commenter at her blog for some time. I few years ago, when I had my own health issue, I backed off but kept the blog as a way to keep track of stuff I liked. Then I began to comment and read the blogs of Ann Althouse and Patrick Frey, who I had known through Cathy Seipp. A bunch of us commenters had even gone to lunch together before Cathy got sick.
Patrick Frey got a bad case of Trump Derangement and eventually I quit reading there. Ann’s blog has quite a few nasty commenters who tended to get me going and I would get into arguments that I had no business participating in.
Now, I spent more time at Quillete and here. I also read Conservative Tree House most days. Facebook is mostly for family photos as I have lots of family in other states.
I never got interested in Twitter.
MikeK:
Cathy Seipp was great. I wrote about her here.
Your blog, New, is a pleasure to read for its variety and the very good reading. There are a few others I touch base with regularly, including some mentioned by MikeK, but the circle is small.
Speaking of the CA fires and the MSM reporting on them, I have seen several references to the Camp Fire as having been started by a camp fire. (Makes sense,) but nothing about whose camp fire it was or why. Makes me wonder if it was started by a homeless person. Anyone have any details?
Between the double whammy of eight years of Obama love followed by the last couple of years of beyond over the top Trump hatred I find myself incredibly jaded about the MSM.
One small example is in my area of Washington we have the second largest newspaper in the state and it has degenerated into a Trump hatefest. Five or six days of the week the front page has an above the fold huge headline story (almost always a NYT or WaPo story) on the latest Trump outrage. This has never been the case before the last couple of years. The front page was most often about a major local story barring some major national news story.
I suspect a reason for that is massive staff cuts mean they have less local reporters but it is exacerbated by their Trump hatred.
And the thing is I strongly believe that 90% of the people really don’t care about all this but the constant attacks seep through to enough people that it has an affect on the population at large.
F:
Glad you and MikeK are liking the blog.
The fire was NOT started by a campfire. Its name is an unfortunate one because it naturally sows confusion on that score. The name actually comes from the fact that the fire began near Camp Creek Road. It should at least have been called the Camp Creek Fire, which would have avoided the confusion. I have come to call it the Paradise Fire.
I found your lot early on and have been following it most of the time since. I remember Cathy Siepp–in fact, she came to my mind just the other day. Not sure why.
As for the Paradise fire, the air quality here in the Bay Area has been “unhealthy” for the last 13 days. In fact, the Stanford-Cal football game was postponed because the air quality was so poor. We’re supposed to be getting rain tomorrow, which will help!
A number of us knew Cathy and, through her, I met Mickey Kaus and Andrew Breitbart. It was just a shame as she was a nonsmoker and got the type of lung cancer that non-smokers get, which is worse. I took my daughter to meet her. She had a daughter starting UC, San Diego at just about the time she died. Far too young.
I need to get back to biology blogging. Politics is too depressing. I wonder if the Democrats perfected the use of absentee ballots to steal elections this year,
I read your blog religiously. I also read Bookworm Room, and Ace of Spades. And Ann Althouse. I miss Gay Patriot, and IowaHawk. I know the later two tweet, but I don’t, and don’t plan on it. I like some substantial reading.
Bookworm Room has aquired a nasty troll recently that’s put a damper on commenting there. Most of your regulars are interesting to read. So far, the trolls are at bay.
Somewhere about 2010, I started turning away from any kind of mainstream media, but I still listened to NPR some (a 35-year habit). Despite the bias, there was still some depth there at the time; “two sides” of a story existed, if you could just sit through the bias. I could find this nowhere else except in some limited local news coverage.
Back then, I was slowly beginning to realize that everything was becoming an editorial of sorts. It’s hard to pinpoint where the trend really started, although I tended to connect it to 9/11 and the consequences. Nothing scientific about that observation, just what I saw. (24hr “news” and public use of the internet also became more entrenched at about that time).
I gave up on NPR at the end of 2012. After Sandy Hook, it was clear that they had their agenda, and there was one story allowed to be told, and that was it. I’ve never looked back
Since then, I’ve been heavily reliant on bloggers and RSS to get any kind of depth, because it’s simply not available on any conventional/commercial media anywhere (and, yes, I consider “public broadcasting” commercial media also). The list of sites (about 150, with 30-40 being “trusted”) in my RSS feed has been carefully cultivated over a few years. It’s how I get here.
If it wasn’t for thoughtful, deliberate bloggers (and the best usually have a decent commenting culture following them), I would have completely lost hope in our civilization. It’s the only reasonable place to find depth and intelligence. Otherwise, one’s lens on the world is established by what appears to be intellectual children.
In frustration, friends sometimes ask “where can you get any decent information”. My response has become “you have to really work at it. If you don’t, you’re being sold something.”. Nothing recent has transpired to change my mind.
friends sometimes ask “where can you get any decent information”.<
I read Ace every day and CTH, although the commenters are a mixed lot. I still skim Althouse for links. There are a few good commenters left. Most have left Patterico. Quillette is good for longer essays. At Chicagoboyz we get esoteric, like warbirds and industrial policy. More commenters there still working.
Neo has a nice selection of topics.
Greg Cochran's blog, Westhunter
can get into the weeds on genetics. Good info if you like that. I’m reading “Blueprint.”
Instapundit is still the first place I read every day.
I read every post of yours, Neo.
I read Belmont Club, but their site refreshed periodically in the middle of reading the comments. Frustrating. I read ChicagoBoyz, but I’m not interested in many of the posts.
I love Bookworm, but can’t bring myself to her website due to the horrendous advertising. It wrecks my enjoyment of it. Pity.
The only paper I read online is the Daily Mail, and that’s got its own viewpoint. I still get the Chicago Trib 3/week, mainly for the Sunday coupons.
Lee:
I work hard on keeping trolls at bay. Some of what I do is not visible to the commenters here. My previous website at blogspot/Blogger was taken over and basically ruined by trolls, and that’s why about 10 years ago I moved to a site that gave me more power to deal with trolls.
Give trolls an inch, they take over the site.
To all here who have said how much they appreciate this blog, a heartfelt thanks appropriate to the season. That’s what keeps me going with this endeavor (that, and my natural curiosity and desire to put in my 2 cents or more).
Keep going. It is a pleasure to not have trolls to deal with and it removes the temptation to respond to them, which is always a mistake.
Keep it up, Neo.
CTH is very good, esp. on Russiagate, FISAgate, etc.
J.H. Kunstler just keeps getting better.
Once w/ Rolling stone, he’s a Carter Democrat who’s appalled by the Dems’ plunge into ID politics, and gargantuan deceit about Russia, FISA, etc.
I meant “Rolling Stone” mag.
Neo,
You’ve been at it long enough to qualify as an historian, or at least, as one who writes the history of our times.
When I first heard of “blogs” back in 2004, I was living in NYC, attending grad school, with no internet at my apartment (couldn’t afford it). You could say I was out of touch. I remember a friend telling me about “blogging,” which prompted a gut reaction from me that amounted to absolute contempt for the notion.
I thought it was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard of. “What, every idiot now broadcasts his uninteresting personal issues or ill-considered ‘thoughts’ to the world, instead of just shutting up or keeping a diary? Count me out.” That’s the watered down version of what I said.
Yeah, so… I didn’t really think that one through, but in my defense this was before I became politically aware. I was imagining everyone writing bad literature, poetry, and philosophy that in the aggregate would prove so stupid and impulsive it would turn us into an idiocracy. Which, in fairness, we may be heading towards, but it isn’t the fault of blogging.
I guess I still had the academic disease that produces a gag-reflex whenever notions pop into credentialed heads of “ordinary people” trying to think. People who read books for a living need some perch to condescend from, right? Well, to quote one my favorite retorts from the classic noir Gilda: it isn’t right, but it’s true.
A decade and a half later, all I read online are blogs, I’ve made wonderful friends in the comments sections that segued into emails and personal relationships, I’ve been informed and educated by the same “ordinary people” I once scorned – overall, my world is much bigger and richer because of blogs. If all blogging stopped tomorrow and we went back to the old “Cronkite” days, the days where only academics could write on academic subjects and gatekeeper-approved “artists” could write prose and poetry, I would feel like I was suffocating beneath some tyranny.
That’s somewhat interesting in itself, the fact that what was once experienced as normal and quite free can come to be experienced as creepy and cramped with subsequent, freer experiences under one’s belt. The way I see it now, most people just glide along intellectually anyway, seeking out Pleasing Things, now as always, but on top of this, the internet has given anyone with *any* inclination toward curiosity and learning a gift that is priceless.
A quick, geeky example. I mainly study classical philosophy – Greek and Latin stuff – and in the old days it was very hard and more than very pricey to lay hands on texts in the original language, lexicons, comparative usage statistics, etc., without access to a university library. One could buy a couple of Loeb editions, but every edition one would like to have? You need a library. But even with such access, using libraries is annoying and time-consuming, and not being able to mark up and annotate the books is killer. Now, however, there is a resource run out of Tufts called Perseus which allows me to get the Greek or Latin, plus translation, plus relevant commentary, plus comparative statistics, plus anything I could possibly want in *seconds,* for *any* classical text I’m interested in.
I just sit here and shudder at what scholars in the old days had to go through to accumulate all of this information. In 2018, little dummy Kolnai has it all before him instantaneously on a screen. What was the Greek in that passage in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia? What exact Latin phrase did Tacitus use to describe Sejanus? Was that word Plato used a hapax legomenon? Click!
Amazing.
Biblical resources? My God – Biblehub? Word-by-word literal translations of the original Hebrew, Aramaic or Koine Greek, *plus* the originals, with linguistic information for every ancient word right there without moving anything but a finger.
Or if I’m stuck on a German phrase researching Hegel or whomever – Google it up: bang, answer! If I need original texts from Nietzsche, or Pascal, or Maistre, I can download them all online.
I essentially have most of what every university library contains right at my fingertips sitting on my ass in my living room. And if it’s not there for free, I have Amazon. It’s beyond anything I could have imagined. Say what we will about the (very real) dangers of Googlocracy using SEME and TME and other such dastardly tactics to manipulate our socio-political consciousness, the substance of the free internet itself is like an endless sea in which the mind can swim.
I suppose it’s no different from anything else in life that has utility for us. Used responsibly, it’s a blessing; used irresponsibly, it has predictable results.
Blogging, while just one of many, and certainly not the least among them, has been a blessing.
Neo, your blog, Chant du Depart, and Bookworm are the blogs that are must reads. Your commentariat are very wise, and I learn a lot here. Chat is primarily military history, as he is a retired USAF Master Sgt. Bookworm is under attack by a rather nasty troll. I wish there was some way to get rid of it.
But I shall return here every day, as long you keep posting on it. I shall purchase a drill Wednesday night through your Amazon portal, to show my support in a small way.
I hope you’re fine with me asking the question.
When is it good for a man to hit a woman?
The question is no longer “Never.” We are sending women into ground combat. This isn’t my choice. Now I’m forced to ask. I have all sorts of reasons.
I stumbled into blogging at about the same time, Neo – early 2002; I was a regular commenter at an early mil-blog, Sgt Stryker’s Daily Brief. I had retired from the Air Force a bare four years previously, and my daughter was on active duty as a Marine – and deployed to the middle east. A lot of the early mil-blogs are gone now, but I always thought that they offered insight into the military life – especially now that there was a war on. One thing let to another and then another; I started writing professionally as an independent author thought having blogged, I got involved in the local Tea Party as the media contact … and eventually my news-consuming gravitated to on-line media rather than print. The local newspaper shriveled into a thin tabloid-style publication, many of the magazines I subscribed to either went belly-up (Brill’s Content, Spy) or became unreadable. (Newsweek, Entertainment Weekly.) And I still blog – both at the successor to Sgt Stryker, at Chicagoboyz, and at my author blog.
A quick, geeky example. I mainly study classical philosophy – Greek and Latin stuff – and in the old days it was very hard and more than very pricey to lay hands on texts in the original language, lexicons, comparative usage statistics, etc., without access to a university library.
My daughter, a few years ago, was working on a PhD in History and her subject was the Muslim period in Spain. She learned Arabic to read the documents and lived a year in Spain, during which she also learned Portuguese from a roommate. In 2010, there was a meeting in Madrid by a scholar group on the texts she was interested in. It is held only every ten years so I took her for a week so she could attend.
We had fun and, while the meeting will be held again in 2020, her interests have changed. She is now into the art world. Her sister, who is an FBI agent, tried for years to recruit her to the FBI because of the Arabic but she never was interested.
That meeting holds the record for me for a problematic research topic.
Hi Neo,
Yes, the blog, more generally the Personal Website, and in its purest form the would-be One Person Library of Alexandria cum Oracle of Delphi, had it’s hot ‘n new phase, just after the turn of the millennium. Everything is new, once.
A blog is easy, firstly: weB LOG – drop the little log over the side of the ol’ sailing ship, count “One thous’n one, one thous’n two, one thous’n three…”, while it floats by between point A and point B. Write the count-number down in the Log Book. Keep track of the time so you don’t miss the next Log Entry. Darn near sailor-proof.
The ‘new’ phase ended, of course, but that is not a reliable portent, one way or any other. Everything is new once, and never again, or at least until it’s forgotten & rediscovered.
The reality of the rise of the Blog is that this is where the hardcore Techies lost their grip on tech-culture. The first big expression of tech-culture Advocacy & Activism, was Linux and the rush of Open Source software, starting in the early 1990s. Ten years later, the blog arrived, allowing technical & programming illiterates to run their own domain & website. OMdG.
There was already sophisticated website-platform software, to enable sophisticated, glorious & glamorous website Architectures. (And they were still in their exciting new-phase, themselves.) Members of the Community liked it that way, and saw no reason to yield anything to average/normal humans.
Then along came this snot Matt Mullenweg, with a blog-script he called WordPress. The scorn, mockery and derision knew no bounds. You could implement a blog, in a proper Website Platform like Drupal … but who would be so gauche?
Sal Alinsky and Donald Trump, both great fans of mocking their opponent off the stage, would know better. Matt was immune. We have all broadly known better, at the very least since it was formalized scientifically in the 1960s: You cannot mock-down everybody; there is a minority who actually & actively ‘get their back up’, when it’s tried on them. It’s a species of the sleep-dog: don’t go there (but Tech does, since it’s a blind-spot for them).
WordPress was originally the original dork-ware. But it started receiving upgrades & improvements early, and while Drupal is still the last-word in highly-intellectualized platform-schemes, WordPress has more than enough plug-n-play intellectual alacrity, and is vastly more-readily adaptable. Not necessarily “more-adaptable”, but certainly “more-readily-so”.
There is ‘some work’ in making WordPress more than a simple-blog, but a humongous array of pretty-darn-fancy implementations are “readily” doable, at the work-level of cruising the aisles of Home Depot and WalMart. You look. You see. You like. You pick it up and place it in your cart. While the elitist Techies grit their teeth, the masses throng to it.
=====
It’s not really ‘the Blog vs the MSM’. Many ‘blogs’ are becoming serious & competent Businesses, and that’s all that the MSM really has over citizen-journalism. But to have a business, you have to become a Business Person. A suit.
The MSM flies camera crews down to southern Mexico caravans. They ensconce people in Davos, Switzerland ahead of the big conflab. The blogger can’t do that. Well, she *can*, but she has to accept become a Business, which very widely in Citizen activism, is something we hope to avoid.
So the comparison with MSM is a bit of a mis-characterization.
To have very large numbers of meaningfully-engaged bloggers, means they are going to divvy-up the visitorship-pie into very tiny slices. We already see this, with the 500 channel Television industry. Either the audience gravitates to a very few successful programs, and the rest are starvelings, or they’re all starvelings, anyway.
The attraction of Amazon associate-arrangements etc etc is that one theoretically does not have to become a suit. And as long as it works, it’s a reasonable solution to paying the bills. People whom I have noticed having success at it are integrating Product-treatments into their original-work. In Outdoors stuff, you can readily get freebies to Test; also happens a lot, in Tech. Do you like braving the rain in camp-outs, hikes? Like to play with gadgets? Kinda made-to-order for ya, huh?
Basically, one proven formula here is to become intimate with what you’re peddling. Bear in mind that Itinerate Peddlers and Tinkers of olde were a very serious life-style element on the landscape, before like 19th C Sears & Roebuck horned-in on it. No doubt in my mind, the Contact & Gossip was at least as important as the scissors-sharpeners & 60-proof medicinals.
“Influence” is an altogether different matter. Bloggers do continue to exert – disproportional – influence, because they enjoy the advantage of trust. Even Matt Drudge populates his page with a lot of crud, as a straight-up Business-decision. And he subtly doctors his titles, so you don’t realize what it really is, until you find yourself at the – eww -destination.
It’s not a secret, how to make your blog more-popular, and how to expose your Associate-links to more eye-balls, at higher click-to-purchase ratios. And yeah-huh, Amazon etc etc KEEPS TRACK.
Renovate old pages & Categories. Even if you’re tired of it, no longer into the original thesis … find a new angle you can get a kick outa. There are always ways to ‘refactor’ that old exploration of your archaic potty-training issues. It is hugely to Neo’s advantage, that she has a classic example of this, conspicuously parked on the top of her Categories.
You do this, because Google Is Watching. If you think the topic is dead, dull & fit for deep-archiving … who are they to argue with you? But if you do more work on in, that jumps right out, when they re-index your site. It does not have to be anything ‘heavy’. In fact, you often got away from it, because it was too-much-heavy. First thing most such examples benefit from, is reorganization & a Table Of Contents. It was originally, after all, just a string of more-or-less disjointed Posts. A TOC is machine-readable, and showing Google that you know & appreciate how their bot-crawler works, counts.
The Holy Grail of course is addressing the fact that good Posts quickly go into the Archive, rarely to be seen or heard-from again. Bummer. Although it’s obvious with blogs, it affects a great deal of the Internet. The MSM included.
Archive-death is 2 problems, really. One is lack of attention & interaction, for old stuff. But the other is lack of adequate Navigation facilities. You can only put so-much linkage on a screen-page, and it’s a turn-off for folks to have to ‘drill-down’ through successive UNPRODUCTIVE layers of just-navigation.
There is an easy & effective navigation upgrade for folks like Neo. Make your Category link open on an Introduction, synopsis, TOC of the category & its cumulative contents. In the default case, it’s just a ‘dump’ of the post-Titles that have been assigned to this category. Chronologically, which is usually a mish-mash.
Wikification is a good word to spend time with. Matt Mullenweg has had a long semi-secret romance with it. You could not remotely hope to build Wikipedia, without the underlying wiki-architecture. And the wiki-system is arguably even simpler than the chronological blog-system. [Hint: learn to edit Wikipedia entries. It was made for Dummies. Then you know how wiki-things work, in general.]
Because of Social Media problems, and smart phone follies, and currently-emerging geopolitical factors, the Personal Site/Blog is looking up!
Ted
Your blog is the only blog that I read. Why? Mainly because I am impressed by the range of topics that interest you. Your comments are perceptive, informed and reflective of common sense rather than the residue of conventional wisdom. It’s no wonder that your views elicit further engagement by followers whose comments enhance rather than detract from the substance of your remarks.
You make it look easy. It’s not. I wonder how you find the time and the energy to compose such copious, clear and well-structured commentaries. You bring to your work a fresh and invigorating viewpoint that is free of clichés and jargon. You are at the top of your game. As far as I can see, you have no equal.
If the wheels ever fall off this republic of ours I hope that your blog that will continue to shine its beacon light on our follies as well as our hopes for a better future. On this Thanksgiving eve perhaps we need to be reminded that if we step back from the fight we have only ourselves to blame for the inevitable loss of individual liberty and freedom. President Ronald Reagan cautioned us:
“The United States remains the last best hope for a mankind plagued by tyranny and deprivation. America is no stronger than its people — and that means you and me. Well, I believe in you, and I believe that if we work together, then one day we will say, We fought the good fight. We finished the race. We kept the faith. And to our children and our children’s children, we can say, We did all what could be done in the brief time that was given us here on earth.”
(Ronald Reagan)
First of all: what Rob said (and very eloquently to boot).
Then:
kolnai on November 21, 2018 at 1:19 am at 1:19 am said:
“A decade and a half later, all I read online are blogs, I’ve made wonderful friends in the comments sections that segued into emails and personal relationships, I’ve been informed and educated by the same “ordinary people” I once scorned – overall, my world is much bigger and richer because of blogs. If all blogging stopped tomorrow and we went back to the old “Cronkite” days, the days where only academics could write on academic subjects and gatekeeper-approved “artists” could write prose and poetry, I would feel like I was suffocating beneath some tyranny.”
Finally: Happy Thanksgiving to Neo and everyone here at the World’s Best Blog.
Steve57 on November 21, 2018 at 7:51 am at 7:51 am said:
I hope you’re fine with me asking the question.
When is it good for a man to hit a woman?
The question is no longer “Never.” We are sending women into ground combat. This isn’t my choice. Now I’m forced to ask. I have all sorts of reasons.
* * *
It is never good to hit anyone.
Sometimes, it is necessary, for important reasons.
If she is screaming hysterically and you are hiding from the Nazis (the real ones) or the Communist apparatchiks, then a knock-out may be called for to shut her up (and that applies to male wailers as well).
Now I’m forced to ask: what in the world are you mixed up in !?!?!
neo on November 20, 2018 at 4:45 pm at 4:45 pm said:
MikeK:
Cathy Seipp was great. I wrote about her here.
* * *
I read your linked post and enjoyed learning about someone who, sadly, I missed reading at the time. None of the links in that post worked any longer, unfortunately.
One of the worst things about blogging is that the site goes dormant after the owner dies or drops it, and often some excellent work is lost.
Books are still in libraries, newspapers are still in newsroom archives (and even microfilm), but where is the electronic repository of the past?
Here, for one: her NRO posts (at least some of them, and some links don’t work).
https://web.archive.org/web/20100514155414/http://old.nationalreview.com/seipp/seipp-archive.asp
This post seemed especially appropriate today:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110810204830/http://old.nationalreview.com/seipp/seipp200404200830.asp
“April 20, 2004, 8:30 a.m.
Media Need a Chill Pill
The voodoo they do on the news.
There used to be something unseemly about publicly quaking in your boots, but no longer. The constant “Eek, a mouse!” tone of girlish fright has seeped from feminist rhetoric into the general rhetoric of the left. This became particularly evident after Sept. 11, when various commentators began fretting that Bush’s America/John Ashcroft/Red State Crushing of Dissent etc. fills them with more terror than actual terrorists.
And media people used to be embarrassed at not being able to analyze statistics or even understand basic science; but again, no longer. The feminization (and psychotherapization) of American culture so influences the newsroom now that gut feelings are too often treated with the respect of hard facts.
Ignorant media people irritate me more than ignorant regular people because not only do they have easier access to information (and therefore no excuse), they can be a big part of the problem in the first place — spreading misinformation because they’re too lazy and complacent to bother educating themselves. Or for ratings. Or just because they can.”
RTWT, of course.
Her writing reminds somewhat of Camille Paglia, who I always enjoy reading.
This eulogy was interesting for giving a view of the world that doesn’t seem to hold anymore.
https://ocweekly.com/a-year-without-cathy-seipp-6438059/
“Cathy was slower to join the blogosphere than some of us, but she was one of the first to champion it, and frequently hosted parties for online journalists of all stripes, possibly the only get-togethers where you’d see the likes of Matt Drudge-sidekick Andrew Breitbart and conservative L.A. prosecutor Patrick Frey mingling with outspoken gay film critic David Ehrenstein and Wonkette’s Ken Layne. And, well, me. People are occasionally surprised how many right-wing friends I have, and I’d say Cathy’s responsible for most of that. You meet folks at parties, you like ’em, and by the time you get around to checking their ideology, it’s too damn late; you’re already friends. Bringing disparate groups of friends together to mingle is always what a great host aspires to.
…
Like Andy Kaufman, Cathy mysteriously contracted lung cancer despite hardly ever being around cigarette smoke. It’s a brutal way to go, but she dug her heels in and outlived the standard life expectancies long enough to see Maia off to college (and hold a high school graduation party for her to which Slate’s Mickey Kaus showed up with Ann Coulter).”
I don’t think Cathy would approve of unfriending people on Facebook because of who they voted for.
Hmm, tried to leave a comment but don’t see it now — Neo, you’re doing great.
I read you all the time, along with Instapundit and Althouse,
and some econ blogs you don’t seem to read much,
askblog (Arnold Kling) and Marginal Revolution.
I’ve long liked you and your comments, starting on Michael J Totten’s blog.