kontextmaschine

NYT: Trump Launches Attack on Delaware After Provocation
WSJ: Trump Strikes Back Against Delaware Insurgents
WaPo: Don't Be Mad At Trump for Delaware War- Be Mad At Congress
CNN: Delaware Needs Our Help, Says Pentagon
Fox News: Why Is It Always the Blue States?
NPR: Trump, Rebel Commander Markell Swap Insults
Vox: Why Dover is Such a Hard City to Take Back
Huffington Post: Delaware Has A Right to Secede
The Guardian: Civilian Body Count in Wilmington Hits 2,000
Breitbart: Rebels Look a Little Mexican, If You Ask Me
Mother Jones: The Alt-Right's Newest Conspiracy Theory Is Ridiculous
Forbes: Arms Industry Sees Major Growth in Q3
Buzzfeed: School Children Try Delaware's Local Root Beers
The Atlantic: Delaware: A History of Insurrection
Vice: Delaware's Death Metal Scene Makes Tough Choices
Economist: Free Trade: The Olive Branch We Need
Mic.com: JK Rowling's Epic Callout of Delaware's Racism
Daily Caller: Senate Democrats Refuse To Protect U.S. Soldiers
Reuters: Trump, Rebel Delegation Meet in Boston for Peace Accords
ThinkProgress: Boston Treaty Wouldn't Have Been Possible Without Jimmy Carter's Help
USAToday: Trump Op-Ed: You're Welcome, Delaware

Speaking of alternate timeline dispatches…

And so, thanks to Trump’s unexpected electoral victory, there is now a massive, unprecedented content graveyard of articles celebrating or analyzing Hillary Clinton’s would-be historic victory… . Most of that content won’t be read by anyone. But here is a small sampling. This collection is a tiny glimpse of what the internet would have looked like on November 9 if Clinton beat Trump, as so many pundits forecast.

Michael Tracey can get a little ridiculous, but if you told me in 2005 that VICE would form a news bureau he’s a lot closer to the ‘70s Rolling Stone I’d’ve expected than the millennial Time-Life it turned out to be.

mostmodernist:

chicanochamberofcommerce:

this is liberalism, scurrying like rats from a sinking ship to make amends with trump.

fucking cowards

everyone who saw this coming even close was an intuitionist. they ignored polls and studies and numbers and listened to taxi drivers and anonymous commenters and nowhere randoms

argumate:

spookchins-revenge:

jesus h. christ

or alternatively: the West maintains friendly diplomatic relationships with countries that have the death penalty for homosexuality.

this isn’t a story about Twitter, really.

Isn’t Prince Alwaleed bin Talal one of the bigger Twitter owners?

Haven’t Anil Dash and Ellen Pao and them been pushing Twitter to punish people for blasphemy and lèse-majesté and punching down and other political crimes?

Well?

Friendly reminder that “callous and blithe wits push society towards revolution for profit and attention while billionaires in their interests underwrite smug warmongering” historically IS journalism’s workable business model.

What is Quartz even supposed to be? I see stuff linked there off twitter sometimes and it’s like “kinda what you’d expect from being linked to medium off a 300ish reblog tweet only better, also with a graphic design sensibility that reminds you of when Vice was Vice and not “Time-Life with a 2007 style because 2007 is 4eva” or whatever the fuck it is now

But then I go to their front page and it’s like “What does the slowdown in Foo’s heavy industrial sector mean for Bar’s resource exports?”

Is this like, woke The Economist

fuck us, that could work, couldn’t it

Sometimes I wonder why I punish myself by still reading Slate, the answer is occasionally you come across buried nuggets like this:

Sometimes the election’s psychic fallout takes less obvious forms. Silvestri, for example, has noticed a curious phenomenon among some of the millennial women in her practice: The rise of Trump has made them wonder how much they can reasonably expect from romantic relationships…

It’s not just that Trump reminds them of their exes. It’s that Trump’s success seems to validate the men’s behavior. “They had gotten themselves to a place of, This is not what I deserve, I deserve better, I can do better,” Silvestri says. But watching dutiful, responsible Clinton struggle to best Trump, “people are really backtracking and saying, ‘I made this move to be more empowered and be who I am based on my values, but now I see my ex writ large on the national stage, and everyone’s following him,’ ” Silvestri says. They start thinking that, for a woman, maybe being beautiful really is more important than being smart, assertive, and authentic.

The quote comes from a psychologist who, if you do some digging, has offices by NYU.

So, straight from the horse’s mouth: the mere nomination of Donald Trump is inspiring urban millennial elite women to give up on confrontational feminism in favor of charming femininity as a source of self-identity and -value.

So yesterday I remembered that Slate and Salon had been around for like twenty goddamn years, and I thought it would be funny to go back and check their early stuff and see how much had changed and how distant the past seemed

I settled on this issue of Slate, April 26, 1999 which of the earliest Wayback Machine archives was the first one to be something useful, sooo, let’s take a look

First off, it leads with a bunch of features that are really just summaries and links to other publications or websites - I forgot before social media platforms and blogs, really, how much websites were just daily-updated lists pointing you to interesting things elsewhere. It’s interesting that many of these summaries don’t have any links, I’m not clear whether that was because they were of dead-tree media that didn’t have websites or because of journalistic etiquette policy.

I remember that back then old-line journalism was kind of daffy about the net, and I know some places at least frowned on linking to internal pages, because they wanted you to approach and navigate through the front page, paper-style. So as to prevent someone from undermining their advertising model and system of cross-promotion and cross-subsidy exactly like Facebook did maybe, so.

The big news of the day was NATO’s war in Kosovo and the Columbine shooting, which had just recently occurred (and seemed to be shorthanded more as Littleton than Columbine at this point). So, what kind of OC do they have on the war?

Ah, hm. Masha Gessen kinda mawking us towards Eastern European war, William Saletan meandering in circles stroking his chin, Jonathan Chait (in an installation of regular feature “Crapshoot”, tagline “Dumb Ideas Exposed Here”) dismisses the notion that soldiers are underpaid and in need of the raises they recently recieved

The 13 percent “pay gap” represents the difference in the growth of military versus civilian wages since 1982–that is, civilian wages have grown 13 percent faster. This does not mean that soldiers earn less than civilians, because it does not take into account the pay differential from 1982. If my wages have increased by 100 percent during the past five years while Bill Gates’ have increased by nearly 50 percent, this does not mean that I am earning 50 percent more than Bill Gates, since he was making more to begin with.

So, the more things change, I guess. What else, what else? Oh, “Explainer” was them. That wasn’t cited enough as a precedent to Vox, at least their early intentional style, the modest height they dived off to chase clicks

Looking around in other links there ARE some really striking bits in here though.

Students at Wofford College in Spartanburg, S.C., staged a protest March 3 against one of their fellow students, white supremacist Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a Web-savvy junior who runs a neo-Nazi organization from his dorm room.

man was just ahead of his time

A University of Arizona student who enrolled in a class called “Women in Literature” was dismayed to discover that the class addressed gay and lesbian issues. As a result, the Arizona legislature is now considering warning labels for courses with potentially “objectionable” content. Says Arizona Regents President Judy Gignac, “The students are our customers and they are paying to be taught. They need to know in advance what it is they’re paying for.”

ditto

Confronted by an increasingly vocal faction of rabbinical students and liberal rabbis, New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary may be forced to reconsider its ban on admitting homosexual students.

That’s Conservative Judiasm, if you were curious

The Matrix (Warner Bros.). Keanu Reeves stars in this complex, dystopic sci-fi thriller. Critics give high marks to the computer-enhanced special effects but are divided on the merits of the ambitious plot and the everything-but-the-kichen-sink filmic provenance, from Soylent Green to Terminator 2 to Hong Kong actioners. For some the effects are enough…

nice

(To see the trailer and some fine Keanu pics, visit this fan site[)]

NICE

Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman writes [10 Things I Hate About You] “may be the cheekiest ‘literary’ update yet–a post-riot grrrl gloss” of the play. Many gush over the foxy young star, Julia Stiles. Complaints are mainly a result of critics’ upscale-high-school-caper-film fatigue.

yeah, I guess those were two actual movie trends

A Walk on the Moon (Miramax Films). Mixed reviews, tending toward the negative, for this tale of sexual liberation set in 1969. A 32-year-old Jewish housewife who married too young is on vacation in the Catskills with her two kids and mother-in-law when she meets a sexy, young blouse peddler. The rest? As the Chicago Sun-Times’ Roger Ebert says, it’s “one small step for the Blouse Man, a giant leap for Pearl Kantrowitz.”

uh

Economist, May 1
(posted Friday, April 30, 1999)

The cover story predicts that the disappearance of privacy will bring about “one of the greatest social changes of modern times.” Technology is destroying privacy that we took for granted 20 years ago, but the corresponding benefits–better government services, cheaper products, less crime–may outweigh that loss.

uh

New Republic, May 17
(posted Friday, April 30, 1999)
      The cover story describes the Palestinians’ shriveling economy and corrupt political system… …Holocaust scholar Daniel Jonah Goldhagen asserts that Serbia’s crimes are “different from those of Nazi Germany only in scale.” He also argues that an allied victory could stimulate a postwar democratic transformation of Yugoslavia similar to that of West Germany after World War II.

…

New York Times Magazine, May 2
(posted Thursday, April 29, 1999)
      The cover story contends that eliminating affirmative action does not devastate equal opportunity in higher education.  …A Susan Sontag essay riffs on the Kosovo crisis, concluding that it is a just war to deter “radical evil” and that the allies will fail if they don’t oust Milosevic.

Time and Newsweek, May 3
(posted Tuesday, April 27, 1999)
      The newsweeklies reconstruct the Littleton massacre and solicit expert opinions on why it happened. Newsweek says that teen-agers kill when pre-existing biological flaws are exacerbated by poor nurturing. Biological warning signs: low heart rates and swollen brain lesions.

haha wut

Newsweek reports that black athletes are shunning white agents for black ones. Among the black agents courting rookies are Puffy Combs, Master P, and Johnnie Cochran.

When Dan Quayle announced his presidential candidacy late last week, he also announced a theme. He would run against the “dishonest decade” of Clinton rule.

As someone who has been more or less overweight for most of my life, I’ve noticed the increasing virulence with which TV and movies treat the issue of weight. It is rare, in fact, to see a portrayal of a fat person in which his weight is not the primary reason he is on screen. In the recent movie Office Space, for example, the heart-attack death of a fat marriage counselor is used as a pivotal plot point played for yuks…

…In a time when almost every deviation from the norm has been reclassified as a disability–you can’t even make fun of drug addicts any more–fatness has become the new Polishness: an all-purpose locus of fun.

One person caught unawares by the popularity of armed guards in high schools was Charlton Heston. Heston, the NRA president, told reporters just after the shooting that the presence of “even one armed guard in the school” could have averted tragedy. (For a Swiftian take on Heston’s comments, click here.)

…ah, I’m gonna regret it, arent I

Shoot Hooligans, Not Hoops
Stop school violence: Arm school kids.

By David Plotz
Posted Saturday, April 24, 1999, at 4:30 p.m. PT

THERE’S the Slate I knew and loved

ABC’s movie Swing Vote (Monday, April 19, 9 p.m.) plunges us immediately into a liberal’s fever dream: Roe vs. Wade is ancient history, and a black Mississippi woman has been convicted of murdering her unborn baby.

In The Simpsons, a donut is not just a donut. It is a semiotically loaded piece of iconography nine years in the making: We have seen Homer steal the huge metal donut from the parking lot of Lard Lads Donuts to exact revenge for its “false advertising” (they wouldn’t sell him a donut as big as the one outside). We have seen him pretend Grandpa Simpson was so senile he qualified for a helper monkey, which he then used to steal from donut shops. We know that at one point Homer actually sold his soul to the devil for a donut. In short, that small ring of frosted dough contains a universe of meaning for Simpsons viewers.

This detail goes a long way toward explaining the subdued critical response to the pilot of Matt Groening’s new show Futurama, which aired last Sunday.

So, takeaway lessons?

First, yeah, I guess Slate really always was a liberal hawk rag, getting high on R2P.

Second those external links to essays from names you’d still recognize on the necessity of war in Yugoslavia are fuuuuuuuucking bonkers though. I forgot how crazy the ‘90s were when we had no idea what to replace the Cold War with

Third I forgot how much they were still running a literary tone carried over from “small magazines” - in the selection of culture topics and the general tone of writing

Got passed this 1961 book by a friend. Fascinating - all witty young people mocking “The Fifties” from a perspective that’s not at all “The Sixties” (or post-)

frankfurtschooldropout:

Milo peddles a pageant of insincerity that is immediately legible to fellow Brits. Americans understand irony differently, and sometimes not at all. The crowd of excitable young and young-ish people gathered to hear him pontificate believe what he’s saying, even if he doesn’t. Which he doesn’t. And it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t mean it. It doesn’t matter that he’s secretly quite a sweet, vulnerable person who is gracious to those he considers friends. It doesn’t matter that somewhere in the rhinestone-rimmed hamster wheel of his mind is a conscience. It doesn’t matter because the harm he does is real.

Yeah, I saw this. Told you the British thing was key to Milo. Interesting Penny’s take on it tho

A certain school of spiteful camaraderie, of bloodless political jousting before dinner, has long been the form of political discourse in Britain, where the mainstream media is dominated by private school graduates who were trained to debate as if it were a bloodsport in which empathy is a handicap. London media wonks routinely treat one another as sparring partners and drinking buddies despite their political differences: after all aren’t we on the same team really? Aren’t we playing the same game?

She seems to be saying that a flaw of the US relative to the UK is that we treat ideas in popular media circulation seriously, rather than as a forum for the elite educated to play larkish status games.

That’s an odd thing for a self-proclaimed socialist to say, but hey, Laurie Penny*. Might not be wrong.

*did anyone else notice that time a few years ago she and Richard Seymour and China Meiville (the “Sino-Seymourists”, rimshot) tried to schism the Socialist Workers Party away from its fuddy-duddy elders? They used “rape culture” hysteria which was clever - British student governments are aligned with real parties and control real funding flows, a major base for leftists making undergrad silliness a vulnerability. Anyway they kicked up a big stink in public AND THEN WENT QUIET WHEN PEOPLE IMMEDIATELY SCHISMED THEIR FACTION OUT FROM THEM THE SAME WAY. It was kinda obscure which is a shame, wish more people knew cuz it’s a great fucking microcosm of something

When Brody compares the phenomenon of “independent” wealthy film producers to the way that opera and classical music are funded, he touches on exactly the point — the increasingly aristocratic nature of pop-cultural production. Turning from a more chaotic, arbitrary, and of-the-moment mass market-driven production method, we’ve entered an era where one side of the market, namely, Hollywood, is driven by five-year plans and endless franchise sequels, while the other relies on the whims of benevolent aristocrats.

This is hardly a death sentence for art: Much of the history of Western art is merely the reflection of the whims of benevolent aristocrats. But it does mean the end of “mass market” cultural production.

Reducing fascism to some vague idea of extreme conservatism, which in its American context essentially means angry old white people, misses the sense in which fascism prospered because it was something young, cool, transgressive, and new. For fascist intellectuals, at least, the liberal bourgeoisie was their enemy as much as were communists or Jews, and it was precisely because the bourgeois were old, self-righteous, and boring. Fascism was sexy and fun.

Milo gets this… Milo exploits to great effect the perception among his disaffected, youthful fan base that liberal pieties about diversity and anti-racism are just the moralistic droning of an elite losing its grip on power.

Trump’s success has raised among liberals a fear that the far right has made itself respectable. Milo’s success at creating a following for a figure like himself — limited as it might be — suggests that the bigger fear should be that the far right might make itself cool.

I do kinda appreciate Freddie deBoer and the twitter irony left going in on journalists for dropping Game of Thrones references all the time, but I should point out that even in the golden age of journalistic seriousness before the internet there would be tons of facile pop culture comparisons on the editorial page, just they would be in the cartoons.

Like, my hometown paper would run syndicated essays from Molly Ivins and Cal Thomas and Nat Hentoff and Mike Royko (Mike Royko!) and Phyllis Schlafly, and right in the middle of that the biggest thing on the page would be a doofy cartoon with like, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky doing the Titanic “king of the world” scene with an iceberg in the background labeled “grand jury investigation”.

I do think they’re on to something though in that the young journalists working at these online shops have Game of Thrones as a go-to reference for “political strife” because they don’t have any other experience to draw on - none of them have done a turn in the Istanbul bureau, none of them have reported from or even contemporaneous to previous coups in Turkey, or Greece, or South America, or even the Balkan wars of the ‘90s. At best one of them might by luck have taken a seminar on the topic in their Ivy League college, past that they’ve got wikipedia and the more farsighted might call up a professor who’s basically just a better trained distant observer and ask.

That’s an issue, yeah. Also rereading that last paragraph I realized I’m describing myself, so. One distinction is I don’t feel obligated to have a post about everything, my sole input to the Turkey thing was waving vaguely at the concept of a young officers coup. And the Economist tends to do a decent job with bright young things.

One distinction there is that the Economist runs unsigned articles, while at places like Vox, brand-building Twitter bragging seems to be at least 2/3 the point, and it really rankles to see the ignorant proudly parading their insufficiency as a career-building credential to be rewarded, and I can see how that would be a particular sore spot for the Weird Left, who tend to be strikingly better and more knowledgable writers tbh.

One thing to consider is the same lean budgets that gave us rookie reporters mean there’s not much room for internal advancement - if there are only a handful of slots above you and they’re full of the 30s/40s first-gen blogger founders, career advancement will require you to switch outfits and thus build up a public reputation as a “catch” - this is what I’m getting at with my concern that journalists through Twitter are shifting their schmoozing energy from sources (which at least generates new public facts as a side effect) to each other (which generates new takes, mostly).

I hear there’s a similar dynamic going on in the nonprofit world, which might pressure existing operatives to favor interventions that prompt the creation of new activist movements, organizations, and titles.

(Also I suppose Weird Left Twitter is kind of resurrecting that serious text/silly cartoon thing by alternating medium articles about, like, the potential for socialism with absurdist Harambe memes)

When Vox formed I was like “well at least Klein is climbing the value ladder, fuck knows what Yglesias is up to”

But by not lashing himself to the brand and wielding his legacy he still gets to write explainers that are like “here’s how something now prominent ‘out of nowhere’ actually connects with many factors you might or should be aware of”

And not like “here’s how it proves your preconceptions were right all along”

turtlebones420:

Now I’m no political scientician, but this seems to be the exact opposite of how it is.

weirdbuzzfeed:

I can’t believe the Blue Man Group straight-up murdered one of our employees.