Category: Ed Morrissey

GamerGate And Why It Matters To Conservatives

Posted on Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

“Politics is downstream from culture.”
-Andrew Breitbart

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that with regard to entertainment, conservatives and libertarians find science fiction and videogaming to be the most attractive options offered by pop culture these days, mainly because there’s a lot of SF that doesn’t try and stuff political correctness and half-baked socialist egalitarianism up our snouts. The same goes for videogames, which are mostly about killing bad guys and/or solving puzzles.

This is, of course, intolerable to the Social Justice Warriors who insist that everything has to have a “teachable moment” or six about how horrible straight white males are and how heroic GLBTWTFBBQ persons are and what a utopia we could have if those wreckers and kulaks would quit trying to undermine kindly old Uncle Joe…oh wait, that was the 1930s pravda. Well, it hasn’t changed much over the last eighty years, as we can see in the pages of DKos and other online asylums for those afflicted with Hopeychangium overdoses. So it’s not too surprising that the SJWs have wound up running most of the legacy publishing houses and turning thumbs down on authors who don’t toe the line of correct thought and correct characterizations; as I have previously remarked in various book columns, the main holdout against this sort of tripe is Baen Books, whose interest has always been in telling a good story and only incidentally in whether the protagonist is gay, straight, or involved in a long-standing passionate affair with her slide rule, IYKWIMAITYD.

Unfortunately for gamers, there is no publisher comparable to Baen, but for the most part companies like EA, Bungie and Ubisoft are still more interested in the bottom line: what are gamers buying, and how can we sell them more of it? Questions of binary gender and other nonessential BS just don’t have much of an impact on the bottom line, and so while the publishers may pay lip service to the SJWs in the industry press, they don’t actually DO anything. Which just stokes the anger of the SJWs, who have been increasingly filling the pages of the gaming press with rants about what a misogynistic bunch of violent bigots the gaming community is made up of. Unfortunately, they’re messing with the wrong guys. For the most part, these are people who don’t take smack talk and harassment lying down – they’ll serve it right back with a side order of butthurt and rage, and they will move mountains to stick it to people who are getting up their noses. Which is how we arrive at GamerGate, the sad tale of how hypocritical “feminist” game developer Zoe Quinn literally slept her way into getting a crappy game nobody wanted to play featured on Steam, and further, got lots of positive reviews and supportive essays from game site reviewers who she also happened to be boning. Which is unfortunately a matter of public record, since her now ex-boyfriend went public with her faithlessness and hypocrisy; even more unfortunately, the game sites which should have been covering this doubled down and censored all discussion of the flap.

Much of this is going to sound familiar to conservatives and libertarians; discussion of political topics hostile to the liberal narrative has been verboten on places like Digg, Reddit, and other supposedly “neutral” online fora for quite some time, which is why there’s a thriving blog culture on the Right even without the bucks poured into the lefty blogs by people like George Soros and various foundations.I suspect that part of the fallout from GamerGate is going to be a bunch of new game review sites that have nothing to do with Kotaku, Rock Paper Shotgun, and all the other sites that have taken to telling gamers what horrible people they are instead of telling them about games and mods and related topics of interest. Gamers may even start casting a jaundiced eye on the rest of the media; as culture critic Maddox remarked, game media are now suffering a high-speed version of the credibility collapse that the mainstream media took decades to suffer through. Or, as the eponymous boss of TheMittani.com said in a recent column, people will blow this off since the idea of “objective” game journalism is nonsense anyway.

I don’t agree; the rage of gamers at being called a bunch of racist sexist bigots for being upset with this is precisely why Ed Morrissey and Breitbart ran pieces on GamerGate. (Ace linked to Cranky T-Rex.) One of the worst features about the contemporary left is their conviction that the personal is political, and everything is personal with them. Everything, be it football, basketball, science fiction, videogames, movies or whatever, has to be relentlessly politicized and examples made of people who say Bad Things. Offensive Things That Make Somebody Feel Bad. Most conservatives don’t give a damn about any of that, and we resent the hell out of some dipshit like Bob Costas giving us a lecture on gun control when we’re trying to watch a damn football game. Conservatives and libertarians may not agree on a lot, but we can all agree that obnoxious leftist actors, authors and singers need to shut up and sing, and quit trying to force their half-baked political notions up our snouts, because that’s not what we’re paying them for.

This is also why Larry Correia, Sarah Hoyt, Vox Day and John C. Wright (to name but a few) have been up in arms against John Scalzi and the wretched Stockholm Syndrome crew at the SFWA. Scalzi, the academic leftists who have come to dominate SFWA, and their SJW allies on Tumblr are quick to take offense at any SF or fantasy that doesn’t meet their politically correct templates, and have not scrupled to lie or misquote authors who don’t toe the line. So far the Glittery Hoo-Has are “winning” in the sense that they and their allies still dominate Hugo voting – but in a time when DragonCon and GenCon attendance exceeds Worldcon’s by an order of magnitude, what worth does a Hugo actually have? In times past, when geek culture and science fiction fandom were the same thing, the Hugo was worth serious money, but that was decades ago. Geek culture now includes anime fans, gamers, podcasters, webcomic creators, bloggers, cosplayers, comic book fans, and endless combinations of the preceding, and I’d bet money that if you went to DragonCon and asked people if they knew anything about Worldcon or the Hugos, most of the people would have (at best) a vague idea of what you were talking about.

This is not the tempest in a teapot some Hot Air commenters think it is. This is a battle for the last pieces of pop culture still friendly to conservatives and libertarians, a battle to keep some parts of society free of the Social Justice Warriors and their craziness. It’s a battle we can win. All we have to do is pitch in with a little mockery, some pointing and laughing, and buying the occasional book or videogame to support the authors and creators we like and respect. Capitalism, what a concept!

Shop Amazon – Hot New Releases in Video Games

‘Arab Spring’ Update: Hostages Killed in Algeria; French Fight Islamists in Mali

Posted on Comments

“The International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had entrusted him with the making of a report, for its future guidance. And he had written it, too. I’ve seen it. I’ve read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence, but too high-strung, I think. Seventeen pages of close writing he had found time for! . . . But it was a beautiful piece of writing. . . . It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’”
— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

If you have been troubled recently by the thought that Mr. Kurtz may have been onto something, certainly you aren’t alone. We haven’t been doing too well in the Suppression of Savage Customs lately:

In a bloody finale, Algerian special forces stormed a natural gas complex in the Sahara desert on Saturday to end a standoff with Islamist extremists that left at least 23 hostages dead and killed all 32 militants involved, the Algerian government said. . . .
The siege at Ain Amenas transfixed the world after radical Islamists linked to al-Qaida stormed the complex, which contained hundreds of plant workers from all over the world, then held them hostage surrounded by the Algerian military and its attack helicopters for four tense days that were punctuated with gun battles and dramatic tales of escape. . . .

The Obama administration remains clueless:

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said much remains “sketchy” about what  happened at the remote Ain Amenas gas field.
“We know that lives have been lost,” he said.
Asked how many Americans were in danger and what happened to them, Panetta  said he knew Americans were still being held hostage earlier Saturday. On what  happened to them, he said, “we need to get better information.”

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports on events in neighboring Mali:

With French officials saying confidently on Saturday that an advance by Islamist militants on Bamako, Mali’s capital, had been halted, France’s foreign minister told African leaders that “our African friends need to take the lead” in a multilateral military intervention in Mali. . . .
The French defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, said Saturday that France now had 2,000 troops in Mali, with more in the region, and that France was likely to add to its forces there. . . .
Residents have told local news agencies that the Islamists have left Diabaly, which they seized as an important way station on the road to the administrative capital, Ségou, north of Bamako.
French airstrikes have halted the Islamist advance toward Mopti and nearby Sévaré, French officials said, while they confirmed that the village of Konna, north of Mopti, was now back in the hands of Mali’s government. The French have also sent troops along with Malian forces to secure a bridge over the Niger River at Markala, north of Ségou.

Mitt Romney was mocked for mentioning Mali in his final debate with President Obama. Professor Stephen Clark observed this week that the connection between “the Islamist takeover of northern Mali with the NATO-led overthrow of the Gaddafi” in Libya was overlooked by the media:

Mali is a knock-on consequence of a failed north-African policy. Just such consequences were the fear expressed by some with US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those failed to materialize. Now that they have materialized as a consequence of Obama’s policies the grand-high poobahs and their courtiers are as silent as church mice.

William Wallis in the Financial Times described the uprising in Mali as a “boomerang” of U.S. anti-terror policy, and this inspires bitter Kurtz-like reflections from Ed Morrissey:

The boomerang in this case came from our extremely ill-advised and reckless intervention in Libya, which turned that nation into a failed state and sent tentacles of radicalism throughout the Sahel. And what did we gain from the Libyan adventure and the revolution we blessed in Egypt by tossing a 30-year ally to the wolves? In the latter, we now have leadership that feels entirely comfortable using eliminationist rhetoric against Israel; in the former, we have a burned-out consulate, four dead Americans, and a central government whose writ won’t run in half the country. Our policies in the last two years in this region have emboldened our enemies and disillusioned our allies, and in this case we didn’t get anything at all in trade for the unintended consequences we have reaped.

Don’t worry, Ed: The President’s a Nobel Peace Prize winner! And I’m sure the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs is eagerly awaiting your final report.

PREVIOUSLY:

Ed Said Nix Flick: Odd ‘Squad’ Cop Flop, Mugs Thugs With Lame Gang Bang-Bang

Posted on Comments

Ed Morrisey pans the new movie Gangster Squad as an all-star ripoff:

Contrast this with The Untouchables, which I think is overrated but at least addressed the moral issue of crossing the line between law enforcement and thuggery.  For that matter, skip The Untouchables and watch the infinitely superior L.A. Confidential , which dealt with the same issues in nearly the same time and place — but put the thugs in the right moral position, and managed to get the Cohen story more accurately than this movie did even as a subplot.

L.A. Confidential is one of the few movies of recent years to come close to capturing the film noir feel, and especially the moral tension that Morrissey finds woefully missing in Gangster Squad.

The classic film noir set-up requires a flawed protagonist who finds himself trapped in a situation where right and wrong are not clear, where sinister individuals are trying to deceive him, and he must rely on his wits to survive. Also, there is usually a dame involved in the problem.

The 1947 noir classic Out of the Past (Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas, Jane Greer) was successfully re-made in 1984 as Against All Odds (Jeff Bridges, James Woods, Rachel Ward), but it is otherwise difficult to find good recent examples of the genre.

Why was that particular sensibility so distinct to a certain period of time? It’s hard to explain, but notice this: The producers of Gangster Squad, while making a movie set in Hollywood during the same era of the late 1940s — and quite conscious of the visual elements of the noir style — neverthless can’t capture the moral element. Ed Morrissey observes:

This film does nothing but glorify violence, not just as stylish entertainment but also as the answer to crime and social problems.  It’s an almost-unending series of bullet eruptions that numbs much more than it excites. . . .
It’s not appropriate for children of any age, and I’d argue not really appropriate for anyone else, either.

Film noir is never just a shoot-’em-up. The danger of violence — a sense of menace — is very real in film noir, but the movie is not about violence.

 


FROM OHIO: POLLS, POLLS, POLLS

Posted on Comments

CINCINNATI, Ohio
Pete Da Tech guy disassembles a Quinnipiac Poll that has samples of D+7 in Florida and D+8 in both Florida and Ohio, so that while Mitt Romney handily wins independent voters in both states, he nonetheless trails Obama by 1 point in Florida, 2 points in Virginia and 5 points in Ohio. These numbers are a sort of statistical hallucination. Pete quotes Ed Morrissey at Hot Air:

In each of these three states, the CBS/NYT/Q-poll shows Republicans at a lower percentage level of turnout than in the 2008 election.  If one makes that assumption, it’s not too difficult to be guess that Obama might be ahead.  However, that’s exactly the opposite of what all other polls rating enthusiasm are telling us what the electorate will look like on Tuesday.  In fact, it’s not even what this poll shows, with Republican enthusiasm +16 over Democrats in Florida, +14 in Ohio, and +7 in Virginia.

You might think some reporter at the New York Times, which co-sponsored this poll, would think it worth his while to interview the people at Quinnipiac and ask where they’re getting these weird over-samples of Democrats. What is causing this? How is it that Republicans report greater voting enthusiasm by such large margins, and yet are underrepresented in the poll’s sample? It makes no sense.

Meanwhile, there is an actual campaign to cover here in Ohio. I’m going to see Ann Romney’s 11:30 a.m. event in Hamilton.

Did You Say ‘Preference Cascade’?

Posted on Comments

“One might have thought that the 2010 mid-term elections . . . would have convinced the Left that they had miscalculated. Instead, they placed their confidence in Obama’s ability to navigate the new environment . . .
“Everything seemed to be proceeding in accordance with those beliefs until Romney dismantled Obama in Wednesday’s debate — a psychological shock that has unhinged the Left, causing them to begin lashing out furiously and rather erratically at anyone who suggests that the dam has broken and that the ‘preference cascade’ may doom Obama to defeat in November.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Oct. 6

“[I]t is possible to imagine a scenario where Mitt Romney comes into the Oct. 16 debate sitting on a 4-point lead in the national polls with just three weeks to go before Election Day. And if I can envision such a scenario, you know that Democrats must be imagining the same possibility with a sense of Fear and Loathing.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Oct. 7

As a great man once repeatedly said, “Don’t get cocky,” but there are good reasons for Republicans to be optimistic with 22 days remaining in the 2012 campaign. Ed Driscoll has previously invoked the phrase “preference cascade” to describe what we may see if Americans wake up to the reality of the SCOAMF’s incompetence. And today Ed Morrissey employs the same phrase:

I don’t think that Obama has lost the election yet, but there is only three weeks to go now. This is when preference cascades begin to materialize, and usually away from the incumbent, who has had nearly four years to make the case for re-election.

Exactly. While defeating an incumbent president is always an against-the-odds project, history would suggest that (a) the debates would be a decisive factor, and (b) the shift toward the challenger wouldn’t happen until fairly late in the campaign.

If this is what we’re seeing now, then Obama’s poll surge in September — on Sept. 29, he led the Real Clear Politics average of national polls by 4.3 points — was in fact a mirage. Whether or not those of us whom Jonathan Chait called “poll denialists” were right about the skewed samples, Obama’s poll lead prior to the first debate was actually an illusion that did not take into account the underlying reality of (a) Obama’s failed policies and (b) his inability to defend those policies when challenged by Romney outside the media filter.

So far, only one poll (Pew) has shown Romney leading by 4 points nationally, and Romney’s biggest RCP lead was 1.3 points on Saturday, but the latest Gallup tracking poll has Mitt leading 49-47, and if Obama doesn’t score a clear win Tuesday, the whole thing may shift toward an outright Romney landslide.

The RCP Electoral College map currently has the race at Obama 201 and Romney 191, with Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Michigan and Pennsylvania in the “toss-up” category. By this point in 2008, John McCain’s campaign was in meltdown mode and had already pulled out of Michigan. For Romney to win any of those four states would almost certainly be decisive: If Mitt wins Michigan he won’t lose Ohio, and if Pennsylvania is even competitive in the final week of the campaign, Romney could win as many as 300 of 538 Electoral College votes.

What will happen in Tuesday’s debate? Both campaigns are “working the refs” with CNN’s Candy Crowley as moderator, Michelle Malkin reminds us of “plant” infestations at town-hall debates and Noel Sheppard quotes Ed Hart: “We will know in the fullness of time.”

Keep watching the slo-mo walkback by Nate Silver, whose Incredible Mystical Forecasting Model™ has now raised Romney’s odds to a precisely calculated 36.7% after having him at 12.9% Oct. 4.

UPDATE: The Insta-Driscol-lanche! Thanks, Ed.
 




 

RECENTLY:

Liberals Beginning to Realize They’ve Overestimated Obama’s Popularity?

Posted on Comments

A steady drip, drip, drip of polling data — including a new Battleground poll showing Democrats on the losing side of an “enthusiasm gap” — has started to undermine the carefully maintained perception of Obama’s re-election as inevitable. Ed Morrissey comments:

If Obama trails in a D+8 poll by 6 among the extremely likely voters with four weeks to go, he’s in deep trouble — and his debate performance certainly won’t boost him.

Meanwhile, also via Hot Air, we find the WaPo’s Chris Cilizza as the first liberal analyst to try getting ahead of the chance that Obama might lose:

Obama’s debate performance also raised a bigger question: Is he overrated as a candidate?
Four years ago, that question would have been unimaginable …
Fast-forward to this campaign — and specifically its last two major public events — and you see Obama’s flaws as a candidate in starker relief.
His acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention was flat and, rhetorically, felt like a patchwork effort — five or six different speeches all clumped into a single address. His debate performance was glum and defensive, leaving anyone who watched with the overwhelming sense that the president would have rather been anywhere but sharing the stage with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (R).

That the question “would have been unimaginable” in 2008 is likely a result of Cillizza having his head inside the liberal media echo chamber where never was heard a discouraging word about Obama. Democrats were pumped up and eager for action after eight years of Bush, and having a completely untested candidate allowed them to project onto Obama whatever they wished to see there. If you bought into that hype (as Cillizza evidently did), then it was easy to imagine Obama the Light-Bringer riding to glory astride a flying unicorn, eating Magic Peace Flakes for breakfast and farting rainbows all day long.

Reality? What a bummer. It’s like the old joke: What did the Grateful Dead fan say after the dope wore off? “Dude, this band sucks.”

Two weeks ago, I warned that Democrats were “spiking the ball early,” but they didn’t listen to me then, and I don’t expect them to listen now. Cillizza is shrewd enough to see the value of hedging his bets, being one of the first liberal media types to warn of the possible defeat ahead, but Nate Silver seems unwilling to kick the Kool-Aid habit just yet.

Remember that a month ago, Silver gave 4-to-1 odds against Romney. Nate’s confidence is quietly fading, as he starts to wonder what excuses he’ll make on Nov. 7 if he has to explain why he was wrong.

“Ride Right Through Them — They’re Demoralized as Hell!”

UPDATE (Smitty): Welcome, Instapundit readers.

From the Home for Elderly Bloggers: Disrespectful Young Whippersnappers! UPDATE: Ten Cents a Column Inch

Posted on Comments

Of course, I refer to Jonah Goldberg who, at the tender age of 43, is a callow parvenu — a mere stripling! a rookie! — by comparison to my superannuated 52-year-old self. Nevertheless, Goldberg is old enough to resent the pretensions of still younger punks:

“It is a simple fact of science that nothing correlates more with ignorance and stupidity more than youth,” the National Review Online editor said in an interview. “We’re all born idiots, and we only get over that condition as we get less young.” . . .
“My view is, they’re going to run the country some day, so we should really explain why they’re so frickin’ stupid about so many things,” he said.

Via Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, who is a few years older than Goldberg, but still not as old as me. In fact, I didn’t realize how old Ed was (I’m guessing 48 or 49) until I started researching and discovered that he’d been working for four years as a tech writer in Southern California before losing that gig in a 1988 downsizing. “Peace dividend” and all that.

Rather than go the Michael Douglas Falling Down route — we can picture Ed rampaging across L.A. with a 9-mm — he first drove a cab for a couple months before landing a job in a call center, which “accidental career” he pursued for 18 years before his success with Captain’s Quarters finally landed him a full-time political communications gig.

All of which is to say, Ed paid his dues.

These young punks nowadays? They ain’t paid no dues. Act like they invented the dadgum Internet! Them and their Tweetdecks and “social networking” and what-have you. By cracky, when I was their age, a computer had punch-cards and was the size of a Buick! Dang smart-alecky upstarts want to tell me about this here “blogging” stuff, do they?

GET OFF MY LAWN!

Excuse this geezerly outburst. Here at the Home for Elderly Bloggers, they’re understaffed on Sundays, and I get a mite cranky when the nurse doesn’t show up for my daily sponge-bath . . .

 

 

ADDENDUM:
JOURNALISM IS NOT
A POPULARITY CONTEST

I find myself accused of having “waged a war on young bloggers,” which was not at all my intent. The problem is the “flattening” effect of the Internet, which is both an opportunity and a trap.

The opportunity, of course, is that self-publishing permits anyone to put their stuff out there on the Internet and, potentially, reach a worldwide audience. Thus, if this post gets linked at Instapundit — which I certainly hope it will — then little ol’ me can reach a readership as large as anything else linked at Instapundit. Similarly, I could Tweet this to Ann Coulter and, if she re-Tweets it, then I reach her vast readership.

However, this “flattening” of hierarchy is somewhat of an illusion. Any random bozo can get up in my face on Twitter, but if this random bozo has only a couple hundred followers, so what? Ignore ’em. And just because I’m linked by Instapundit or re-Tweeted by Ann Coulter, this does not make me a law professor or a best-selling author.

The “flattening” effect of the Internet is therefore a potential trap, in that people can become confused about a virtual world that is somewhat chaotic and apparently egalitarian.

Ace of Spades, who has craploads more traffic than me, has talked about the absurdity of being “blog-famous,” which no one should ever confuse with actual fame. At any gathering of conservative bloggers, Ace is the coolest guy in the room, whom eveyrbody wants to hang out with. But when he goes to the store to buy a Diet Coke, he’s just another guy at the cash register.

Our little niche of the online world — conservative politics — is small enough that getting to that Big Fish/Small Pond point, where you are kind of fairly well-known, isn’t really all that difficult. But being fairly well-known among conservative bloggers won’t buy you a cup of coffee at Starbucks, let alone pay the rent, and finding some way to parlay this trip into an actual job that pays the rent . . .

Well, it’s a mighty hard dollar. The point of my rant (which was what the young lady first asked me about) was mainly just to continue a bit of shtick I always do, riffing on how old I am and how I was hitting deadlines for a living when these kids — and to me, Jonah Goldberg is still a kid — were still in high school, or grade school, or not even born yet, depending what they were up to in 1986.

But there is truth in humor, and there is here a point to be made about the “flattening” effect of the Internet: It used to be, if you wanted to write for a living, you had to apply for a job and get hired at a newspaper or magazine or whatever. You would be hired in at the very lowest level, and assigned to do scutwork, and if you didn’t like it, tough — your boss had a stack of resumés in his desk drawer, and more arriving every day, and your low-level young self was certainly not irreplaceable.

Remember, I was born two years after the peak of the Baby Boom; ambitious and inexperienced young people were a dime a dozen when I was starting out. So you took a lot of crap from your bosses, and hustled your butt off just trying to hold on to that low-level job.

There were no online job banks, no Craiglist, no e-mail, no Facebook, no free self-publishing software or cheap laptops to enable young writers to reach a mass readership sitting in their parent’s basements. My daily traffic at this blog exceeds the circulation of the weekly newspaper where I started out as a $4.50-an-hour staff writer, and it took me more than 11 hard years in the newspaper business before I made it to The Washington Times as an assistant national editor, by which time I was a 38-year-old married father of three.

In the Old School, there was a clear hierarchy in journalism, and very few ways to circumvent that hierarchy, so if you wanted to get ahead, you had to work your butt off, and nobody was going to do you any favors: Get the damned job done, or get the hell out.

The whole concept of “bosses” and “employees,” it seems, has been undermined by the Internet. Your resumé is now more or less constantly “in the mail,” as it were, because you can post it on one of those job-search sites and be reached by anyone looking for someone with your particular skill-set. And it is amazing to me how young people in the political world change jobs so rapidly. You see a 20-something at CPAC one year, and they’re working for Think-Tank X. You bump into them at the next CPAC, and they’re working for Lobbying Outfit Y. The next year, they’ve hired on as a staffer for Senator Z.

Evidently in 21st-century D.C., if you haven’t changed jobs three times by the time you’re 26, you’re considered sluggish and lacking ambition.

This rapid churning is enabled by the Internet, and when you talk about “young bloggers,” this returns us to how the Internet undermines hierarchy. “Young bloggers,” for the most part, have never had the experience I had, grinding it out on deadline, writing about a bunch of crappy local news of interest only to a relative handful of readers, under the direct supervisory authority of an editor who might fire you if you screwed up. The collapse of the Old School publishing environment is not your fault, but it has deprived you of the immense value of that experience, and there’s not even anybody who will bother to try to explain to you why that experience matters, for fear of being laughed off as an obsolete fuddy-duddy.

Being young and ambitious and impatient for success — hey, I can relate. Been there, done that, and still as ambitious and impatient as ever. But you have no right to accuse me of having “waged a war on young bloggers,” when I’ve always done everything I could to encourage anybody who does good work.

The “flattening” effect of the Internet is in large measure an illusion, and you’ve got to focus on what’s real. You can try to jump to the head of the line, but if you get to the head of the line that way, you’d damned well better be able to show you deserve to be there.

Finally: You’ll note that I’ve linked Robert Novak’s memoir Prince of Darkness. Why? Because if you’ll read that book — and you really should — you’ll find that Novak remarks that when he made it to the Washington bureau of the Associated Press, he was the only man under 30 in the bureau, and most of his colleagues were over 40. By that point, Novak was 26 had been a working journalist since he was a teenage stringer covering high-school sports for the Joliet Herald-News at ten cents a column-inch.

On page 25, Novak makes an important revelation of self-awareness: “I am not a person who is easy for a lot of people to like. No stirrer-up of strife is ever popular.” Indeed. Blogging is a form of journalism, and it is unfortunate that it is more difficult for kids to get those entry-level jobs, even at 10 cents a column inch, so that they might have the kind of experience Novak had. But fortunately, one thing hasn’t changed: Journalism isn’t a popularity contest, and even unlikeable people — stirrers-up of strife — can succeed if they do good work.

P.S.: In case you never heard of this Novak guy, he was kinda important. Ask @TPCarney.

Notes on an Unfinished Letter of Apology (Or, Does Ed Morrissey Torture Cats?)

Posted on Comments

“Television, naturally enough, is biased toward compelling visual imagery, and in almost all cases the charms of a human face take precedence over the capabilities of a human voice. It is not essential that a TV newsreader grasp the meaning of what is being reported . . . What is essential is that the viewers like looking at their faces. To put it bluntly, as far as TV is concerned, in the United States there is not one sixty-year-old woman capable of being a newsreader. Viewers, it would appear, are not captivated by their faces. It is the teller, and not what is told, that matters here.”
— Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (1994)

“As for my own personal feelings, who cares? While I’m often accused of unfairly hurting other people’s feelings, no one ever seems to care about my feelings. I’ve long ceased to expect anything except insults from anyone, and those expectations are seldom disappointed.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Aug. 29, 2011

When the draft of the e-mail passed the 3,000-word mark, and was still clearly not half-finished, I gave it up. What had begun as a mea culpa had metamorphosed into a treatise explaining the entire history of my engagement with conservative New Media, and what the past 15 years had taught me about the apportionment of status, prestige and influence within the universe of political communication.

But why should I burden anyone with all that? Ed Morrissey has neither time to read such a thing, nor any interest in discovering why I view things the way I view them. It would have been an arrogant imposition to foist upon him that document — which surely would have neared 10,000 words if completed — with any expectation that he would actually enjoy reading it, or that the anecdotes and observations might inspire him to exclaim, “Oh, now I understand!”

So never mind all that crap, and I’ll just apologize. Continue reading Notes on an Unfinished Letter of Apology (Or, Does Ed Morrissey Torture Cats?) →