femmenietzsche:

How Rod Dreher’s Blog Got a Little “Too Weird” for The American Conservative

“It never got weird enough for me,” once spoken by Hunter S. Thompson, is an apt mantra for the dedicated fans of eccentric conservative blogger Rod Dreher. Over the last 12 years, Dreher, whose blog at The American Conservative will post for the last time Friday, has built a cult following with some of the most bizarre diatribes in opinion journalism. He has warned that so-called sissy hypnosis porn is “profoundly evil;” detailed the “formal” Catholic exorcism of a friend’s suicidal wife; and recalled—in unsettling detail—the time he witnessed a Black classmate’s uncircumcised penis.

But one particular reader, upon reading the last of said posts, determined the blog had simply gotten too weird, according to two sources familiar with the publication. That disgruntled reader was Howard Ahmanson Jr., the heir to a California banking fortune and the sole benefactor of Dreher’s six-figure salary at TAC, which is published by American Ideas Institute, a nonprofit. This unique funding arrangement—a single donor choosing to cover one writer’s entire salary—was paired with an even more unusual editorial arrangement: Dreher was allowed to publish directly on TAC’s site without any revisions or legal oversight, according to the two sources.

Dreher, Ahmanson, and Emile Doak, TAC’s executive director, did not respond to requests for comment.

Ahmanson had apparently long admired the work of Dreher, who has authored numerous conservative books and previously wrote for the Beliefnet blog and The Dallas Morning News. But according to the two sources, Ahmanson began to sour on his beneficiary in 2021, when Dreher, in a blog post debating circumcision, wrote the following: “All us boys wanted to stare at his primitive root wiener when we were at the urinal during recess, because it was monstrous. Nobody told us that wieners could look like that.” Incredibly, that was the “first red flag” for Ahmanson, one source told me, adding that the rift had been building for about a year.

Some of Dreher’s commentary on the gay and transgender communities also proved off-putting to Ahmanson, such as his lurid musings on anal sex, rectal bleeding, and the “partially rotted off” nose of a gay man who contracted monkeypox. “At some point, he basically decided, ‘This is too weird,’” the source, paraphrasing Ahmanson, explained to me. “‘I don’t want to read this or pay for this anymore.’”

…

As for Dreher’s future, he has said he plans to move his blog to a Substack while continuing at TAC as an editor at large and will “probably” contribute a column––this time, per the two sources, under an editor’s supervision. “I want to thank Howard and Roberta Ahmanson for their generous financial support of me at TAC for my run here,” he wrote in a Friday farewell he published after being notified of this story. Remarking that he wrote “important things” and “stupid things” during his time at TAC, Dreher closed with a nod to a post he said fit the latter category: “All you Mongoloids were the Primitive Root Wiener in my Lucky Dog, and I love you very much.”

*dying*

probablyasocialecologist:

cathkaesque:

txttletale:

is this good

This is horrifying

ALT

play-now-my-lord:

play-now-my-lord:

play-now-my-lord:

mr. beast has given 5,000 rural children an all-expenses-paid trip to the big city to develop postmodern anomie and eventually become podcasters

mr. beast has begun teaching farm animals about the inescapable duhkha of the endless cycle of birth and death and has already given several horses and cows the buddha nature

mr. beast has given me a handjob under the table

kazieka:

kazieka:

hold up im reading more about the lionfish thing and this one island in Honduras has had such a huge problem with lionfish that the measures they have taken include

• getting special exemption from the Honduran government to allow divers access to harpoons and spears which are otherwise illegal in fishing

• public campaign to teach people how to prepare and eat lionfish (apparently they are very tasty once the poisonous spines are removed) (but watch out)

• holding lionfish combination hunting competition and cookout (reportedly they killed and cooked 1,700 in a day) (someone killed 60 of them with a rubber band spear gun???)

• most recently and apparently out of desperation, the divers in charge of culling the lionfish in the Roatan Marine Park just started. feeding the lionfish they killed to sharks. bc what else are you gonna do with it

• the sharks don’t seem to notice or be affected by the poison and begin hanging out with the divers

• the sharks then were seen hunting and killing the lionfish on their own

like this is nuts to me sorry. the sharks just had to be shown “hey this is food, did you know?? you can eat these!! here try one!!” we are possibly altering an entire foodchain bc we like feeding the big ocean wolves

here’s the article please read it

hotvampireadjacent:

shieldfoss:

marisatomay:

huge congratulations to drugs for continuing to win the war on drugs

From: The Workers of the World
To: Capital

COPE

xenosagaepisodeone:

a dumb throwaway seasonal anime being a dumb throwaway seasonal anime doesn’t mean it’s above criticism (even if being dumb is “the point”), but I feel as if the 5 hours that paid(?) contributors for a blog titled Anime Feminist spent watching a series called Onimai: My Older Brother is Now My Sister⁉️ would have been better used watching something more ambitious

femmenietzsche:

The Kournikoving of College Sports and Its Discontents

Lol, I hadn’t considered this, after the Supreme Court let college athletes earn money the top earning female college athletes are mostly just random hot chicks:

Overall, of the top 5 in women’s collegiate earnings, four of the athletes are some variation of blonde, and yes the list skews attractive.

Small-sample-size alert, but there are implications here, implications oh-so-carefully broached in Kurt Streeter’s New York Times article, titled, “New Endorsements for College Athletes Resurface an Old Concern: Sex Sells.” Such a fraught topic gets the most wordy subhead imaginable, lest the NYT risk putting a foot wrong here. So after the title, it reads:

Female college athletes are making millions thanks to their large social media followings. But some who have fought for equity in women’s sports worry that their brand building is regressive.

That’s not the only concern, apparently. From Streeter:

Race cannot be ignored as part of the dynamic. A majority of the most successful female moneymakers are white. Sexual orientation can’t be ignored, either. Few of the top earners openly identify as gay, and many post suggestive images of themselves that seem to cater to the male gaze.

Like or hate the demographic outcomes (we at HoS are neutral on such matters), there’s no conspiracy here. This is the free market, the one many high minded sports writers demanded that the college men have access to in the interest of fairness. This same set just didn’t anticipate free market results on the women’s side that they’d regard as unfair. Women’s sports, from the perspective of the prestige sports writer, was about a greater quest for equality that managed to highlight marginalized groups. Now, all of a sudden, it’s about….hot blondes getting paid?

Men have their general preferences, preferences that are reflected in the dating market, and now, apparently, the NIL market. It’s a touchy subject, but certain groups do better on the dating apps than other groups. Short guys can attest that life isn’t exactly fair in this space.

As observed in dating site statistics and also in common sense noticing, a large cohort of men show more interest in a slender straight-presenting blonde than in some other sorts of women. These men also show more interest in women who appear available to the intentions of guys. These average revealed preferences are uncomfortable for some to deal with, and here comes the NIL revolution, making it all so salient, putting a number to what’s been suspected.

NIL legalized a market that was always there, one sports media barely considered while hyperfocusing on what this revolution meant for big-time college football. Men, who comprise not just the majority of sports fans overall but the majority of sports fans who watch women’s sports, had the collective capacity to upend the incentive structure of collegiate female athletics. We just didn’t see it because the status quo had NCAA women’s sports high on prestige (from winning competitions) but low on monetary compensation (scholarships). Now that compensation is allowed, the system finds itself scrambling to reckon with what gets rewarded.

argumate:

Chinese livestream fashion companies are swapping out female lingerie models for male models because China has banned women from modelling undergarments online.

gentlemen we cannot allow a femboy gap

Just saw a guy ride by in one of those cargo bikes with a big bucket in the front and he had a laptop in there and was watching a movie.

etirabys:

etirabys:

counterintuitive to me that, even with the high rates of immigration and the quality of translation technology, I’m so insulated from the Chinese internet. I don’t know what discourse they have. I read about crazy intense doxxing and harassment incidents in books about China (like Age of Ambition) but that’s like being a Chinese person who kinda knows what Twitter is like from the Justine Sacco incident. I want to… oh, get their jokes, be in some actually good Discord servers, know whatever arbitrary sexual acts or dynamics are taboo in their culture. (There was a really good tumblr thread on Chinese fandom is totally okay with… was it incest? Something that US fandom feels weird about? but is not okay with poly or even multi-shipping? I loved that thread.)

Would be so amazing if there was a blog run by a normal Terminally Online person in China who just happened to speak very good English and was willing to post 1 screenshot a day of something that was on their feed, translating and explaining everything to me. God, I’d fund that Patreon

My wishes are answered! The spouse of someone I share a Discord server with is running weibo.substack.com

Premise: just faithfully translate the first 1500 words of whatever shows up in the Weibo trending posts today. No cherry picking articles, no punditry or commentary. Come experience the Chinese internet!

I’ve enjoyed every single post. Just picking a random one:

A lot of parents are asking a blogger for advice about going to high school overseas, because Chinese high school is too stressful. But they’re concerned about their children not being patriotic anymore after leaving China. The blogger admits that this is a very valid concern, especially since lately, there’s been many incidents of very patriotic Chinese students going overseas and getting into violent physical conflicts with their classmates over political differences, and that this is illegal in a lot of countries. So therefore, his advice is to send their kids to Russia. There are a lot of great schools in Russia. Russia’s leading the world in tech, and is pretty good in the arts too, and their food is great. A lot of modern Chinese processed food actually comes from Russia, so it’s very easy to find things like cream popsicles and sausages that were a hallmark of Chinese people’s childhoods. And you don’t have to worry about war in Russia, because it’s such a big country that no invader can win. Also, lots of hot chicks in Russia. But if your child is a girl, you have to be a little careful going to Russia, because their food is high in calories so it’s very easy to get fat. And Russian men like to drink a lot, so it might be a little scary for girls.

Two recurring themes that make me go “oh wow, huh” are bride prices (major driver of social drama and economic action) and treatment of children.

brightwanderer:

todayiwrotenothing:

dorkery:

Must-know for Japanese fandom: the meaning of “proship” and the concept of “proshippers” in Western f｜オレンジア｜note

I have never read a more excellent article

This is a great take and I would like to adopt “Feelings Yakuza” in English actually, I feel like it conveys the whole thing way more obviously than “anti” (not to mention the muddled meaning of “proshipper”).

kontextmaschine:

I do have sympathy for the immunocomprised who find they can now not at all safely circulate among humanity in an environment with Covid loose in humanity’s ecosystem.

But, yes, that’s what happens when a new highly infectious virus that can go several rounds with healthy individuals debuts, it becomes an environment incompatible with vulnerability for a while

I suppose now we at least know enough germ theory that we can even think of isolation as an option. And I suppose they were really often lucky to get to be immunocomprised in the first place, given how often that’s a side effect of something we figured to treat things lethal through all of human history until last generation.

Actually that’s a good question, is all that stuff practically dead-ended now? Do we just… lose the ability to do organ transplants for a millennia until humanity evolves genetic Covid defenses?

“But if you all dwelt forever as shades, as unto unliving things that never breathe among others or see their faces, I could still mix among you!”

Yeah, as I’ve seen you lament, even your friends won’t take that deal. And I don’t know you from Adam.

So after Trump upset the government and the rhythms tied to it the next stage was the Discourse, and so much of that is Twitter, and sure enough the winds are shifting and the Musk takeover was the trigger in a lot of ways, which is just…

Like, you could have interpreted the lay of things as the intersecting product of the 21th cen. shift of the population into knowledge work, and since-90s internet business finance cycles, and particular resonances with the stage of the culture cycle and institutionalizations of how this stage was addressed previous cycles…

…and this ends up resolved in accordance with the personal and fairly bumbling intervention of the richest man in the world, a literal heir to the form of European colonialism to persist closest to the modern day…

People joke about blaming things on the shooting of Harambe, but yeah, since about then events have consistently unfolded in line with a freakishly novelistic logic

Like, my brand here is kind of as a history guy, and part of that is I can make things look like dynamic narratives, in retrospect, but another part is being aware of how odd and unlike things it is to be like this at the time

rednines:

wizardgender:

rednines:

Libs think that if they stand by and let bad things happen to marginalized people that we’ll all become Damaged Artists who make music for them to listen to on their commute to work at Raytheon Oppression Cybernetics Lab instead of what actually happens which is We Just Die

Oh look they’ve just passed a bill banning masks for trans people again

Oh cool now pants are legally defined as obscenity if a trans man wears them

Cant wait for the new trannynoise breaktrap albums we’re about to get

thanks

spindash:

CAME OUT OF MY DADS PRINTER AT WORK TODAY……….

ilikeit-art:

Seeming to me the thing around Hogwarts Legacy is that people who’ve been Harry Potter People all along have already taken up some position regarding everything but the advertising campaign has hit a broader, less internet-poisoned market of “hey, remember those wizard books you were into two goddamn decades ago? Here’s a game!”

In a way I guess like the 1993 X-Wing and ‘95 Dark Forces were for Star Wars fans

And that radically more people who have never been Quidditch players, or into wizard rock, or moaning “read another book”, still have positive memories associated with the brand, as something two decades ago they never got obsessed with

thyrell:

Someone was moaning about it the other day but you know it’s true, I have noticed an increase in depictions of drunk driving as antiauthoritarianism lately