The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Guess Who Reviewed ‘Game of Thrones’ Finale for Salon-dot-Com?

Posted on | May 21, 2019 | 2 Comments

 

Did you guess Amanda Marcotte? Yes, while everyone else was grumbling about the rushed and illogical wrap-up of the HBO medieval fantasy, everybody’s least-favorite feminist was proclaiming it “nearly perfect.” According to Ms. Marcotte, Game of Thrones was successful because it rejected the “repressive values” of “chivalric tradition,” which had previously been used by “reactionary writers and thinkers . . . to justify their hostility to social progress and change”:

These chivalric tropes, which persist in both genre stories and high literature, are what the kids these days would call problematic. They equate able-bodiedness, masculinity and having the “right” bloodline to morality, and justify a might-makes-right attitude towards leadership. It’s not a surprise that medieval fantasy and fantasies about medieval society have long had a pull on the reactionary mind and supplied images and ideas that motivate actual fascists.

Marcotte pronounces Sansa Stark “the Nancy Pelosi of Westeros,” apparently intending that as a compliment. Anyway, the reason I was checking Salon-dot-com today was that it was reported last week the left-wing site has been sold to tech entrepreneurs Chris Richmond and Drew Schoentrup for a nominal price of $5 million. I say “nominal price,” because terms of “the deal would only require a $550,000 payment at closing. It said $100,000 would go to an escrow account and $500,000 was already paid as a deposit. The remaining $3.85 million would be a promissory note payable in two installments over two years.”

When Salon-dot-com went public in 1999, it was valued at $107 million, which means the publication has been losing $5 million a year, on average, for the past two decades. In other words, it was just a charity operation, a way for rich liberals to create “journalism” jobs for otherwise unemployable writers. For many years, their biggest “name” writer was Joan Walsh, who was editor-in-chief before she exited in 2015, a couple of years before she got canned by MSNBC. But the site has never done much in the way of actual news, and its greatest notoriety was from publishing Todd Nickerson’s pro-pedophilia arguments, which it subsequently deleted about the time the Left started denouncing Milo Yiannopoulos for making similar arguments.

More recently, Salon-dot-com published a list of “25 conservatives actually worth following on Twitter,” i.e., RINOs and other worthless anti-Trump feebs like Tim Miller and Christian Vanderbrouk.

How long will Salon-dot-com continue publishing? If their “burn rate” has been $5 million a year, which also happened to be the nominal sale price, doesn’t it seem likely that whatever staff remains at the site will be cut back sharply? Will Amanda Marcotte’s byline continue appearing?



 

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2 Responses to “Guess Who Reviewed ‘Game of Thrones’ Finale for Salon-dot-Com?”

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    May 22nd, 2019 @ 3:51 am

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  2. Saturday Links | 357 Magnum
    May 25th, 2019 @ 10:48 am

    […] Other McCain – Guess Who Reviewed ‘Game of Thrones’ Finale for Salon-dot-Com? (I had to have something about Game of […]