The Other McCain

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

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | May 25, 2019 | 1 Comment

by Smitty

“What?”
“I’ll have another Shirley Temple.”
“OK.”
“You the new hire? You’re not laughing at me for skipping alcohol?”
“No. You’re the customer. I don’t drink, either.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“Pay’s good, until I get signed. Here’s your drink.”
“What do you play? Here.” Handed him a ten.
“Guitar. Blues. Here’s change.”
“I want to hear you.”
“Park. Tomorrow. Noon. Busking like usual.”
He was. His blues were serviceable.
He was stunned when the bar owner offered him play the evenings gig.
Until she was in the front row and the family resemblance was obvious.
No pressure.

—
via Darleen

Category: Friday Fiction

Condé Nast Is Decadent and Depraved

Posted on | May 24, 2019 | Comments Off on Condé Nast Is Decadent and Depraved

 

Remember the Teen Vogue anal sex issue? The presentation of this material in a beauty-and-fashion publication aimed at minors (many of them too young to legally consent to any sexual activity) alarmed and enraged parents who wondered what the hell was going on at the offices of the publishing giant Condé Nast. It turned out that this magazine, aimed at a readership of middle-school and high-school girls, had hired a gay man, Phillip Picardi, as their digital editorial director in April 2015, therefore of course, anal sex. While the parents of teenage girls were shocked, many feminists were also angry about the situation at Teen Vogue, because there is research indicating that many girls and young women are being forced into anal sex by porn-addicted boyfriends. Meghan Murphy was particularly enraged by this issue, offering an anatomy lesson on why homosexual men enjoy anal sex in a way that women don’t. Why is this deviant, painful and unsanitary practice being promoted as “mainstream”? Well, in part, it reflects the hegemonic influence of LGBTQ activism in liberal culture, but also because of the influence of 1990s-era porn producer John “Buttman” Stagliano.

A few months after this anal sex controversy, Condé Nast announced that Teen Vogue would cease print publication, although continuing online as a sort of digital zombie site. “Get woke, go broke.”

Meanwhile, at another Condé Nast publication, Allure magazine, Rosemary Donahue is “Digital Wellness Editor,” writing articles with headlines like “These Are My Fave Sex Toys, Lube, and More to Use For Masturbating” (May 17) and “When Men Like Joe Biden Conflate Connection With Consent” (April 4). What does Joe Biden have to do with “wellness,” you may ask? I dunno, either, but it’s 2019. Politics is everything and everything is politics, and if feminists have a problem with Biden, there simply must be an article on Allure‘s website.

 

When she isn’t busy soliciting “weird, creative, queer” content about “mental health,” etc., for Allure, Ms. Donahue is busy dealing with her own mental health problems and queerness. You see, after she graduated from Cal State-San Bernardino in 2015, Ms. Donahue moved to New York with her boyfriend, Dane Cardiel, who was working at Condé Nast at the time. In March 2017, the couple were married.

 

Their wedding was attended by a lot of blue-check media types, but their marriage lasted barely two years — 26 months, to be precise, including several months for the legal paperwork to finalize their divorce. The problem, it seems, is that Ms. Donahue had incorrectly believed she was heterosexual, because she’s crazy. She recently published an article at the Condé Nast site Them with the headline, “Why I Needed to See a Queer Therapist (And How You Can Find One, Too).”

In this article, Ms. Donahue reveals that she “first started going to therapy around 13 years old,” at the behest of her parents, who “were concerned about my behavior” because she was “acting out as a result” of “suffering from severe trauma and PTSD from being sexually abused” (an experience of which she claims to have “recovered memories,” but let’s not go there). She refused to cooperate with the therapist, and continued acting out, with some “particularly shocking incidents — including one where I threatened to take my own life, was placed in an involuntary psychiatric hold, and misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder.” She was subsequently “sent away to a residential behavioral program for ‘troubled teens’ at 17.” She has continued to suffer depression and anxiety, and it was not until after her wedding to Dane Cardiel that Ms. Donahue “was able to find an affirming therapist, who told me that my identity was valid and . . . I was able to come out of the closet and get a divorce.”

We are thus asked to believe — Ms. Donahue has elaborated on this in her Twitter feed — that she was never sexually attracted to her husband, nor to any other man. Her heterosexuality was a mirage, an illusion, and Ms. Donahue has actually been a lesbian her entire life.

 

Perhaps the reader can imagine the skeptical expression on my face, but we are not permitted to question these narratives. If Bruce Jenner could marry three women, sire six children and be a 64-year-old grandfather before “discovering” that he was actually a woman named Caitlyn, then why can’t Rosemary Donahue declare, at age 28, that despite her previous marriage to a man she has always been homosexual?

 

Her ex-husband apparently accepted this explanation without a quarrel, as might be expected of a Democratic Socialist. Marriage is a bourgeois institution, as any student of Marx and Engels must understand, and certainly Dane Cardiel wouldn’t want to be a bourgeois oppressor.

So now Allure‘s digital wellness editor, having divorced her husband and abandoned her pretense of heterosexuality, is happily queer, and never mind that she sometimes breaks down crying for no reason. Oh, and she also seems to be a frequent companion of the recently hired politics editor of Teen Vogue, a transgender person known as “Lucy Diavolo.”

 

Are there any normal people working at Condé Nast? Or has this prestigious publishing company been completely taken over by the road-show cast of The Rocky Horror Picture Show?



 

Category: Culture, Gays, Media Bias, Sex Trouble

‘Strong Delusion’

Posted on | May 24, 2019 | Comments Off on ‘Strong Delusion’

 

Richard Cooper called attention to this woman’s online dating profile: A 22-year-old unmarried mother who demands that any guy who contacts her must be 6-foot-3 with “stable housing and income … open to the idea of marriage … intelligent,” etc. Beggars can’t be choosers, ma’am.

The average height of U.S. males is 5-foot-9. At 5-foot-11, a man is in the top 25%, at 6 feet, he’s in the top 10%. The man who is 6-foot-3 is taller than 99% of men in the United States.

Thus, the woman begins by eliminating 99% of all males from her search, and then adds numerous other qualifiers, as if such men are so numerous that they’ll be lining up for the opportunity to date this not-very-attractive woman who, by the way, has another man’s child in tow.

What is this woman thinking? Her unrealistic expectations remind me of the Apostle Paul’s warning about “strong delusion” that will seize the minds of those who “had pleasure in unrighteousness.” I’m also reminded of Elliot Rodger, the murderous dweeb who grandiosely declared himself the “Supreme Gentleman” before his murder-suicide spree.

 

Recall that the “incel” killer, who had no close friends and was such an introvert he couldn’t summon the courage to talk to girls, was convinced that he was entitled to the companionship of blonde beauties. This kind of grandiose delusion is symptomatic of a damaged ego engaged in a defense mechanism, overcompensating for negative feedback. There’s a sort of sour-grapes rationalization involved: “These ordinary people who reject me are inferior, unworthy of my attention.” The reason he can’t get laid, the loser tells himself, is that women are too shallow and stupid to appreciate his superior qualities. And this is relevant to the single mother who evidently expects a 6-foot-3 knight in shining armor to rescue her by swiping right on her dating-app profile.

We might guess that this woman’s “strong delusion” — her irrational overestimation of her chances in the mating market — is just additional evidence of the poor judgment that resulted in her being a 22-year-old unmarried mother. She is too stupid to realize how stupid she is. Such people will stumble from one easily avoided disaster to the next, ignoring the wise advice of those around them. They are “trouble magnets,” attracting to themselves bad influences, and are easily deceived.

As easy as it is to laugh such idiots, many women with elite education are prone to similar folly. We call these women “feminists.”

 

Remember Ella Dawson, the graduate of elite Wesleyan University who made her name a synonym for herpes? Well, she recently unleashed a Twitter thread that included some interesting remarks:

 

She concludes: “I was petrified of being dismissed as desperate, when what I actually was… was demanding. I was demanding what I deserved.”

Let’s scrutinize the word “deserved” here. How does one deserve respect? What did Ms. Dawson do that would inspire others to respect her? Has she comported herself in a respectable manner? And if respect is something deserved, is it Ms. Dawson’s habit to treat others with respect? Or is she generally disrespectful to others?

 

If you do not behave respectably, you should not be surprised when people do not treat you with respect. Given that Ms. Dawson has not only boasted about her irresponsible sexual behavior, but has encouraged others to emulate her behavior, while hurling abusive language at anyone she disagrees with, it is difficult to say how or why she believes she has deserved respect. Ms. Dawson just turned 27, which means she can no longer use her just-out-of-college naïveté as an excuse.

Furthermore, as anyone who has read The Rational Male must realize, Ms. Dawson has entered her Epiphany Phase, in which a woman who has ridden the carousel realizes her SMV is not a durable commodity, and that she is at risk of becoming surplus goods in the mating market.

What is her solution? How can a woman who made her name synonymous with an incurable sexual virus convince a Beta provider that she is the kind of Quality Woman he should marry? Her Twitter lecture about being “desperate” seems to be an attempt to sell herself as having gained wisdom from her past experience — she now knows what she was looking for when she began screwing around so recklessly as a teenager.

Will she be able to sell that rationalization? Depends on who’s buying. There are plenty of Blue-Pill Beta males out there, and Ms. Dawson lives in New York City, where Hillary Clinton got nearly 90% of the vote in 2016, so most of the men she encounters are unlikely to question whatever rationalization she offers. On the other hand, what man wants a wife with such a notorious reputation? Well, sure, there’s Andrew Golis, but such Harvard-educated fools are rare. And thank God for that.



 

Category: Sex Trouble, The Red Pill

In The Mailbox: 05.23.19 (Evening Edition)

Posted on | May 24, 2019 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

I’m going to be attending Balticon with friends I haven’t seen in a couple of years this weekend, so the linkagery may be sparse, delayed, or possibly even nonexistent, but we’ll see how my work ethic holds up.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Cyber Attacks Against Infrastructure – The New Battlefield
EBL: The End Of May?
Twitchy: Twitter Permanently Bans Krassenstein Brothers For Operating Fake Accounts, Purchasing Fake Interactions
Louder With Crowder: You Cannot Be Pro-Science And Pro-Abortion

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: The Supply & Demand Of Wage Growth
American Greatness: Federal Rats Are Fleeing The Sinking Collusion Ship
American Power: Theresa May Faces Pressure To Resign After Push For Second Brexit Referendum
American Thinker: The Democrats’ Alien Voting Strategy
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Stupid Idea News
Babalu Blog: The Cubanization Of Venezuela, also, Neglected School Building Collapses In Cuba, Five Kids Injured
BattleSwarm: Creepy Porn Lawyer Even Creepier
CDR Salamander: China Shows A Little Leg, also, Diversity Thursday
Da Tech Guy: Corporatism, Capitalism, & The Constitution, also, Mercy Lives Here
Don Surber: Americans Want The FBI Investigated
Dustbury: Remember Shopping?
The Geller Report: Watch Ilhan Omar Attack Conservative Christians On The House Floor, also, UK Muslim Parents Pelt LGBT Activists With Eggs
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, First Amendment News
Hollywood In Toto: Indy’s Last Crusade And The Search For A Higher Power
Joe For America: Top Democrat Elijah Cummings & Wife Involved In Pay-For-Play Scandal
JustOneMinute: They Did NOT Dazzle Us With Science!
Legal Insurrection: LA Wasting Money On Homeless Camp Cleanups, also, India’s Modi Headed For Landslide Victory
The PanAm Post: Key Chavista Reveals Electoral Fraud That Kept Maduro In Power, also, The Game Of Thrones Utopia
Power Line: Global Warming – It Can Do Anything! also, Will The Media Ever Pay A Price For Its Irresponsibility?
Shot In The Dark: Why Trump Will Win In 2020, Exhibit AOC-449
This Ain’t Hell: If Wishes Were Horses, Beggars Could Ride, also, So The Cold War Isn’t Really Over Yet?
Victory Girls: Typhus, Sky-High Trash Plague Los Angeles
Volokh Conspiracy: Washington Supremes Rule States May Punish “Faithless Electors”
Weasel Zippers: Flashback – Media Drooling Over Michael Avenatti As “Savior Of The Republic”, also, Judge Rules To Unseal Records In Smollett Case
Mark Steyn: Talibanny Ribbon Round The Old Oak Tree, also, Declassify Everything, Mr. President!


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Category: Linkagery

Conflicting Signals

Posted on | May 23, 2019 | 1 Comment

David Solway on the feminist education agenda for boys:

Recently, my wife Janice posted a video in her Fiamengo File series about an Ottawa school, Brookfield High, that had launched a ManUp campaign, complete with posters targeting males as prone to evil and females as innocent victims. “Judging from the displays,” she states, “Brookfield High goes out of its way to make girls feel welcome through positive messaging; boys, in contrast, are set apart to be lectured and shamed about male evil.”

This demonization of masculinity conflicts with the reality that any boy can see with his own two eyes: The cutest girls in school are attracted to the most masculine boys, and masculine not just in terms of physical traits, but also in terms of personality traits — confidence, assertiveness, “swagger.” Here we see a problem with what Rational Male author Rollo Tomassi calls the feminine-primary social order. Every observant man knows that there is a yawning chasm between (a) what women say they value most in a man and (b) the kind of man women actually go for. Listen to what women say, and you’d think they are magnetically attracted to “sensitive” guys. Watch what women actually do, and you can see that women obviously don’t actually care about “sensitivity.” Women want men who are tall and muscular and, ceteris parabus, rich, although no amount of money is going to make a short chubby guy sexy. As for the claim that women go for “sensitive” guys, anyone with two eyes and a brain knows this is nonsense. You don’t see throngs of lovestruck college girls chasing after guys who major in sociology or English literature (unless, of course, these guys are also tall, muscular and rich). No, it’s the jocks and frat boys who get the best action on campus, and if you pay attention to the choices women make, you’ll begin to suspect that their professed preference for “sensitive” men is the exact opposite of truth. That girl who was lecturing you about your need to be more “sensitive” will, with surprising regularity, end up falling head-over-heels for some selfish creep or dimwit brute who can’t even spell the word “sensitivity.”

In the same way that individual women often say one thing and do the opposite, so also will the educational system in a feminine-primary social order give confusing and misleading messages to boys and young men about how they should behave. Boys are bombarded with anti-male messages that label masculine behavior “toxic,” but they can see with their own eyes that women prefer masculine men, even the “toxic” ones! The gangster hoodlum is seldom without female companionship and, if he’s not killed by his gang’s rivals, the 25-year-old hoodlum will probably have sired three or four offspring with various girlfriends during the intervals between his jail sentences. This is relevant to the situation at Brookfield High School that caught Janice Fiamengo’s attention because, as her husband points out, there were comments on her video from students and former students at the school: “Brookfield was a horrible school . . . The school was filled with gang members.” In other words, the boys who caused trouble at Brookfield were not the kind of boys who were likely to be reformed by posters in the hallways.

You know what a useful masculine trait is? Stoicism, particularly as manifested in the ability to maintain a tactful silence. The wise young man, when confronted by obviously false messages from school administrators, will say nothing. He will follow the rules, and avoid drawing attention to himself by openly mocking the school’s official propaganda, but he will resist the pressure to parrot these false messages. He will not become one of the castrato choirboys singing this feminist tune, but instead will silently carry on about his business, as if he doesn’t even notice the tune they’re singing.

“What’s up with Josh?” his friends may ask when they notice him sitting quietly, reading a book by Sun Tzu or Machiavelli. He is intelligent and observant, and not generally shy about expressing himself, but he knows when to keep his mouth shut, and he also knows this: When your enemy seeks to provoke you, you should refuse to be provoked. Never permit the enemy to draw you into battle on a field of his own choosing, at the time that best suits him. Your enemy would not seek to provoke you into an attack here and now, if he did not think conditions were favorable to him.

Applying the maxims of military strategy to a situation like this anti-male propaganda campaign at Brookfield High, let’s make one thing clear: Feminists knew that boys would feel insulted by these hallway posters — that was the intended purpose, to insult boys. If you study feminist rhetoric, as I have, you realize that whenever you see a woman publicly declaiming against misogyny, toxic masculinity, rape culture, etc., she knows full well that men find this rhetoric insulting. Her anti-male rant on social media is intended to provoke hostile reactions from men, to make them lash out and say stupid things she can then screen-cap and show her feminist colleagues as evidence of male inferiority.

Don’t be that guy. Never argue with a feminist. Never let yourself be provoked into a hasty reaction that will discredit you (and do nothing to persuade her she’s wrong). Learn to remain silent in the face of such deliberate provocations, especially in any situation where your response could be used as a weapon against you. Because feminists now exercise hegemonic authority in our educational institutions, you can never hope to “win” an argument with a feminist on campus. Therefore, you should instead strive to avoid feminists on campus and, if you cannot completely ignore them, practice silent observation. If you’re in class and the discussion turns to some topic (e.g., abortion) where feminists feel obliged to comment, do not participate in the discussion, but watch and listen, making a mental checklist of your female classmates who are most vocal in expressing feminist ideology. These are women to be avoided. Never speak to feminists. Never associate with them. Ostracize them and advise your trusted friends to avoid them as well.

Feminism is a sort of incurable mental virus, causing women to develop a destructive rage toward males. Any woman exhibiting symptoms of this disorder should be socially quarantined. The young man who thinks it safe to interact with feminists, who believes they can be persuaded by rational argument, will become a target of destruction.



 

Category: The Red Pill

In The Mailbox: 05.23.19 (Morning Edition)

Posted on | May 23, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #628
EBL: Chernobyl – A Review
Twitchy: Sarah Sanders Reiterates Trump’s Message That He Won’t Work With Democrats Until Investigations End
Louder With Crowder: Ted Nugent – Raw, Unfiltered, And HIlarious!

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: The Cult Of Nice
American Greatness: A Government Coup By NASA’s Bureaucracy, also, Obama’s Other Intelligence Operation
American Power: Trump Walks Out On Pelosi & Schumer
American Thinker: Biden & The Millenials
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
Babalu Blog: Deep State Holdovers Purge US Agency For Global Media Of Anti-Soros, Anti-Communist Trump Supporters
BattleSwarm: Democrats All In On Tranny Agenda
CDR Salamander: The Story Of The Afghanistan Graphs
Da Tech Guy: You Will Be Made Accountable For Your Voting Choices, also, The University Weapons System & Other Thoughts Under The Fedora
Don Surber: Cauliflower Is Too White For Democrats
Dustbury: Hard Water
First Street Journal: NYT Editors – The Peasants Are Revolting
The Geller Report: UK Orthodox Jews Mobilize For Tommy Robinson, also, NV Passes Bill To Give State’s Electoral Votes To Popular Vote Winner
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, Jupiter’s Magnetic Field
Hollywood In Toto:  CAIR Slams Release of Aladdin In Age Of Trump
Joe For America: NM Governor Pulls National Guard From Border, Drug Shipments Surge 1700%
JustOneMinute: Read His Lips – No New Tax Returns
Legal Insurrection: Another Narrative Busted – Record Number Of Foster Children Adopted In Alabama, also, Feel The Bern – Gallup Poll Finds 40% Of Americans Support Socialism
Michelle Malkin: DUH! HUD Housing Should Put Americans First
The PanAm Post: Top FARC Leader Says It Was A Mistake To Lay Down Arms
Power Line: Impeachment Mania, also, Transformative Technology Needed?
Shot In The Dark: “Earthers”
The Political Hat: Rise Of The Urban Rat Overlords – NY, LA, & San Francisco
This Ain’t Hell: The VA Gets One Right. Sorta. also, The Other Stolen Valor
Victory Girls: American Taliban John Walker Lindh To Walk Free
Volokh Conspiracy: Court Throws Out Lawsuit Against Tor For Providing Anonymous Routing
Weasel Zippers: Republican Google Engineer Writes Open Letter About Company’s “Outrage Mobs” & “Witch Hunts” To Shut Down Conservative Thought, also, 70% Of Democrats Say Socialism Would Be Good For America
Megan McArdle: Here’s Why You shouldn’t Expect Impeachment Any Time Soon
Mark Steyn: Honey Traps & Money Traps, also, Investigation Without End

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Category: Linkagery

Sweet (Pro-Life) Home Alabama

Posted on | May 22, 2019 | 1 Comment

Professor Glenn Reynolds linked to my post examining the feminist rage over the Alabama law restricting abortion. In the comments, one reader drew attention to how few abortions are actually performed in Alabama — 6,063 in 2017, 6642 in 2016, 5899 in 2015. So, in a state with a population of 4.9 million, only about 6,000 abortions are performed annually. There are roughly 900,000 females of child-bearing age (15-44) in Alabama, so that each year, more than 99% of Alabama women don’t get abortions. Even if you think of the problem in terms of cumulative risk — i.e., the chance of any woman having an abortion at any time in her life — the abortion numbers are still very low in Alabama.

There are more than a million abortions a year in the United States, and the National Abortion Federation claims that about 35% of American women will have an abortion in their lifetime, but it seems obvious that Alabama’s women are not a significant contributor to that grisly statistic.

Numbers matter in politics. Data from the Kaiser Family Foundation indicate that the abortion rates are highest in New York (23 per 1,000 women ages 15-44 annually), and a few other liberal states (Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, etc.), while the abortion rate in Alabama (6 per 1,000) is some 70% lower than for women in New York. While it may be true that more than a third of U.S. women will have abortions in their lifetimes, that number is likely somewhere around 10% in Alabama.

In other words, about 90% of Alabama women have never had an abortion and never will. Actual difference between the behavior of women in different states — the more rural South versus the more urban North — reflect not only differences in socioeconomic conditions, but also differences in cultural attitudes. The South is more religious than the North, and this may explain a lot:

Alabama’s governor said Monday the new abortion ban she recently signed into law reflects the high value residents place on the “sanctity of life,” adding she doesn’t expect any fallout from the controversial measure on tourism or business recruitment.
Gov. Kay Ivey last week approved the most stringent abortion law in the nation— making performing an abortion a felony in nearly all cases unless necessary for the mother’s health. The law provides no exception for rape and incest. Asked about criticism the state has received— particularly over the lack of an exception for rape and incest— the Republican governor noted the bill was overwhelmingly approved by the Alabama Legislature without the exceptions.
“The Legislature has spoken,” she said. “It underscores the sanctity of life the people of Alabama value so highly.”

The governor of Alabama is a woman — a pro-life Republican woman. Liberal women elsewhere in the country, including journalists in New York and Washington, D.C., may find it mind-boggling that a woman would sign Alabama’s legislation and defend the law, but life in small-town Alabama isn’t life in Brooklyn or Dupont Circle. Numbers matter, culture matters, and the pro-abortion culture in liberal states has real consequences. Consider that the total fertility rate (TFR, average lifetime births per woman) in Alabama was 1.82 in 2017, whereas the TFR in New York was 1.65 and TFR in Massachusetts was 1.51. This means that Alabama women average about 10% more babies than New York women, and about 20% more babies than Massachusetts women.

Last week, it was reported that the U.S. birth rate is the lowest in more than 30 years, and the Associated Press quoted an expert:

If trends continue, experts said, the U.S. can expect labor shortages including in elder care when aging baby boomers need the most support.
“I keep expecting to see the birth rates go up and then they don’t,” said demographer Kenneth M. Johnson of University of New Hampshire’s Carsey School of Public Policy.
He estimates 5.7 million babies would have been born in the past decade if fertility rates hadn’t fallen from pre-recession levels.
“That’s a lot of empty kindergarten rooms,” said Johnson . . .

If you are a young person planning a career as a teacher, chances are you’ll have trouble finding work in Massachusetts or New York, and the scarcity of children being born in these liberal states may explain why Democrats support illegal immigration. New York needs to import people to substitute for the children liberal women aren’t having, whereas people in conservative states like Alabama, with higher birth rates, perceive illegal immigration as a threat to their own offspring.



 

Category: Abortion, Alabama, Culture

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?



 

Category: Media Bias
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