Ace blogger felled by fit of Spitzer envy

I don’t know how else to interpret his words. Russ Wellen writes in Scholars and Rogues:

Middle-aged men especially need to ask themselves: If we were wealthy like Spitzer and able to spend the money without our spouses noticing it, wouldn’t we too be tempted to buy a 22-year-old? Deep down, aren’t we envious of what he had been getting away with up to now?

Speaking personally, I have looked in the mirror and the mirror spoke back: You would have to take it one day at a time.

Russ, the girl is a porker. You know, as in porcine. And, as elsewhere observed, she’s covered in enough tramp stamps to force the price down to two bucks (see the Bear Sterns debacle so well covered in Scholars and Rogues).

Don’t sell yourself short. You’re one of the brilliant bloggers at Sam Smith’s Scholars and Rogues. An awkward girl, more flab than baby fat: she’d gladly pay you for it. Stop playing auto-didact with yourself and get yourself a Kristen of your own.

Auto-erotic road less traveled

Pornography consumes far more bandwidth on the Internet than the blogosphere. We find it refreshing, therefore, when Brian Angliss at Scholars and Rogues takes the high road of mental masturbation in announcing that he’s now a journalist because he’s been “accepted for membership by the Society of Environmental Journalists.”

Or, to quote Brian:

It’s an absolutely wild feeling, a strange combination of elation and apprehension. It’s my first real step toward following my passion – writing – and if that step was toward journalism instead of fiction, then that means my need to write has become more encompassing than I anticipated a few years ago.

This, in spite of the fact that (again, quoting Brian):

I’ve never worked for a news outlet as a journalist, and as valuable as I consider my work here at S&R, it’s never really felt like a “real” journalism endeavor as I expect working for a newspaper, magazine, or broadcast media outlet might.

So we know that the Society of Environmental Journalists is something like the Society for Creative Anachronism, who want to play at being medieval nobility by claiming an imaginary pedigree for themselves. As the SCA are neither medieval nobles nor the descendants of medieval nobles, so the SEJ are not journalists.

In this, Brian seems to have succumbed to an unholy trinity of self-deludedness. He imagines that:

1. He’s a journalist because of his shiny new membership in the SEJ;
2. He’s a columnist because of his blogging; and
3. He’s a writer of fiction on account of a self-published short-story.

Dude, can the writer in you spell vanity press? Spend money to publish through a vanity press and exercise your 1st Amendment rights!

All of this is rounded off with a reflection on Frost’s Road Less Traveled. Brian should be aware that this is not the road less traveled. It’s a wide road frequently traveled by delusional people throughout the nation and all over the world. The generic form of the disorder is known as wannabeism.

Illiterate j-school prof

I quote from Dr. Denny’s recent post in Scholars and Rogues:

As a transitive verb, seem is used to suggest uncertainty — not, as The Times failed to do, tie one set of facts to another set of facts and thus conclude with certainty we gotcha.

No, to seem is not transitive. It’s a special kind of intransitive verb called a copulative verb. Other copulative verbs are to be and to feel.

Transitive verbs are a dead giveaway: they take the accusative in the predicate. Intransitive verbs don’t take the accusative. Copulative verbs, in particular, take the nominative, which may be either or a noun or an adjective.

Not much more to say on this subject. The guy’s dumber than a brick; but he’s free to exercise his 1st Amendment rights on his crummy blog along with Dr Slammy and the rest of that crew of self-appointed scholars and rogues. Opinions, they say …

PhD in Mass Communications?

Sure, couldn’t have hurt at Nurenberg; but might not be needed at UColorado.

No

Dr Denny (Dennis Wilkins, a j-school prof at some no-name Northeastern U) agonizes about the collapse of the business model in journalism, which is revenues through advertising. Ad revenues might or might not be in decline due to the Internet, but much of the analysis depends on disentangling the effects of recession on ad budgets. We can’t know until the economy and consumer spending recover.

Then he asks the question:

Would you pay a few pennies for each item you read on the Web, billable at the end of the month? If you visited S&R, would you pay a few cents to read the posts? More to the point, if others read your comments, should you be paid a few cents as well?

Yes, I know it would be cutting off my nose to spite my face, but the answer is “NO!” Not the smallest fraction of a penny to Scholars and Rogues. I’d love to see those guys try to monetize their vanity press newspaper in cyberspace. It’s kinda funny when these aging mediocrities try to rationalize their failure to find a day job in real journalism as a failure in social policy. Scholars and Rogues purports to be a journal of progressive opinion, but it is much more just one long, wistful sigh of regret for what might have been in a more appreciative world. Their definition of progressive is making the world more appreciative for mediocrity.

Attention seeking blogger

Another predictable posting in Scholars and Rogues slanted against a branch of the US military, this time the Marine Corps. Some unfortunate Colonel from USMC PR, reluctantly under orders to monitor the blogospheric freak show, writes a comment to refute the story and ask for patience until all the facts have come out. Then Dr Slammy replies:

Col. Lapan: Thanks for taking the time to reply. I guess the PR pro in me is struck by a couple things. First, that the USMC’s PA group (I assume that’s where you are?) is paying attention to forums like this and responding is a tribute to your willingness to understand the wild world of new media. I once had the pleasure of lecturing the Air Force’s PA division on Internet PR, so obviously I’m impressed by this.

Of course, the fact that you got pinned on time with a story breaking late Friday, etc., makes me think that not all parts of your organization are fully on-board with the 24/7 nature of new media. If I’m right, I doubt I’m telling you anything you’re not already well aware of.

In any case, I’m sure we’d all be grateful if you’d keep us posted on future developments here. Thanks again.

That’s not a reply. It’s Slammy telling us that he’s a PR pro. It’s Slammy telling us that he’s given one single lecture to the Air Force’s  PR organization or one of the Air Force’s PR organizations. It’s Slammy paying himself tribute that somebody from the Pentagon noticed his crummy, self-satisfied blog. And it’s Slammy threatening the Colonel that his blog will take an adverse view if they don’t hear back from him.

Yo, Slammy, ever think the NSA tipped the Colonel off to your posting? Maybe the US Govt has decided to get a little proactive about managing opinion in the blogosphere?  I’d think there’s enough budget in electronic surveillance to keep an eye on the crummy blogs, wouldn’t you?

Meaningless prattle across the decades

Obsession with the trivia of popular culture is an unambiguous indicator of ADD/ADHD and ritalin-induced hypomania. The blogosphere is rife with it: sub-geniuses riding the cycle from lethargic muddle to laserlike focus on the meaningless details of a barren cultural landscape. The unfortunate Dr Slammy at Scholars and Rogues provides more data for study of this disorder in his post on Buster Keaton, Johnny Depp: genius across the decades. There’s no need for me to argue that both Keaton and Depp, amusing as they may be, are no more than ephemeral products of a shallow popular culture. In Keaton’s case, interest in him doesn’t extend much beyond required classes in the film schools. And, as I don’t need to remind Dr Slammy, these things are generational: with Keaton it’s very much a case of “Let the dead bury the dead.” His audience are as mouldered away as he is. And Depp’s more interesting for the projects he chooses than for his acting: he’s boring and mannered, almost wooden. In any case, one only rhapsodizes these things during episodes of ritalin-induced hypomania.

Slammy’s fairly amusing when he rationalizes his wife’s failure to share his taste in Keaton with this line: “First I’m a poet married to a woman who doesn’t like poetry.” Married, but not bound by shared tastes? More likely Slammy’s wife likes poetry and has decent taste in poetry; but she also has the good sense to pretend not to know better for the sake of their marriage. Women fake all sorts of things.

Look Slammy, a squirrel!

Through a Glass Darkly

I’ve always associated this picture with those words, but it’s taken from Persona, a different Bergman film. The words, although possibly mistranslated, are no less evocative than the picture. The quote is from 1 Corinthians 13 12-13, where Paul writes:

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

Nostalgia’s like that. Distorted memories of a decade we might never have experienced, imaginings really, seem evocative of phantom beauty, sweetness, and hope. Nostalgic imaginings, imaginings as evocative as Liv Ullman and Bibi Anderson looking back at you from inside a mirror, distort historical memory of a decade 40 years past and inspire a desperate yearning for return to an idealized and historically misconceived era.

The ’60s will never return, in part because the ’60s as conjured by Scholars and Rogues never happened. Generational identity, if there is such a thing, is no more than the imprint of popular music on the adolescent mind. And if Obama is JFK redivivus, God help him.

Politics and Shallow Demographics

The world is always looking to treat you as a stereotype of yourself. You’re not yourself, you’re your age group, your ethnicity, your education or years of education, the job you do, your sex, your income, the religion of your parents, etc. That you might be capable of thinking for yourself and acting on your own is simply denied. We understand and sympathize when African-Americans, Jews, Latinos, Italians or Asians take offense because we’ve reduced them to predictable stereotype; we recognize that stereotyping is a peculiarly flawed and lazy way to think about people in the aggregate and as individuals; but we make no demur when the stereotyping is by generation. Nobody objects to the shallowest reasoning from observation that a population is or might largely be made up of Baby Boomers, Gen Xers or Gen Y (Millennials). You might not be the color of your skin, but you are the decade you were born.

I think all of this is doubtful. I think ethnicity and skin color count for more than age group. I think religion counts for more than age group. I think level of education counts for more than age group. I think region of the country counts for more than age group. I think income counts for more than age group. And, finally, I think the individual counts for more than any of these. In the language of statistics, none of these is sufficient either alone or in combination to provide a satisfactory explanation of the variance.

The sub-literates over at Scholars and Rogues have always displayed a dreary enthusiasm for banal thinking about the generations. In his post endorsing Obama, Martin Bosworth quotes ’60s radical Tom Hayden to make his argument for him:

I have been devastated by too many tragedies and betrayals over the past 40 years to ever again deposit so much hope in any single individual, no matter how charismatic or brilliant. But today I see across the generational divide the spirit, excitement, energy and creativity of a new generation bidding to displace the old ways. Obama’s moment is their moment, and I pray that they succeed without the sufferings and betrayals my generation went through…If history is any guide, the new “best and brightest” of the Obama generation will unleash a new cycle of activism, reform and fresh thinking before they follow pragmatism to its dead end.

It seems pathetic enough that Bosworth feels he has to rely on the language and authority of some guy on Lipitor and blood pressure meds to express his reason for supporting Obama: Obama as candidate of the Millennial generation understood as a Messianic generation. But the idea is plain silly. Holy shades of Francis Fukuyama’s End of History! Fukuyama was a deluded over-achiever. Hayden, like so many other student leaders of his era, imagines his so-called generation was held together by a bond of identity that united privileged university students who enjoyed the leisure to demonstrate and take drugs at will with working class kids stuck in the military, factories, gas stations and other similarly unglamorous pursuits. The myth of the ’60s generation is no different from the myth of the Millennial generation. It’s also an open question whether the truly representative candidate of this particular generation isn’t Ron Paul. Hayden and Bosworth assign their favorite candidate to a generation in spite of abundant evidence that the generation in question favor someone entirely different in kind from Obama.

How I might be persuaded to become a libertarian

And that would be accomplished by reading the most recent drivel from bone-stupid Brian Angliss at Scholars and Rogues Libertarianism doesn’t work – but it’s still useful. After sketching out Michael Kinsley’s objections to Libertarianism in The Church Doctrines of Libertarianism, Angliss argues: “But libertarians are still useful in our culture for one, very important reason – they keep us on our toes.”

Here’s an example of Angliss stumbling on his toes:

And when libertarians ask why there should be regulations barring too much media consolidation in a single market, we’re forced to explain to them why monopolies are bad for them as much as everyone else.

The link in the quote is to a Scholars and Rogues post on the subject of FCC favoritism towards incumbent telecoms monopolies. The objection to the telecoms monopolies is that they’re per se monopolies. But the problem of monopolies still requires an explanation: they didn’t become rabid dogs of the economy because the word sounds evil. Libertarians are happy to believe that the simplest accounts of microeconomics are true and that in the presence of free markets, perfect competition, perfect information, etc., etc., etc., everyone will be much better off than any government could conceive, in the sense that total output of the economy will be maximized. For reasons too technical to explain here (see Wikipedia on monopoly), output of monopoly firms is substantially less than where competition is robust, and prices are correspondingly higher. If all of us participated in the overall society’s economic well-being, all of us would suffer in the presence of monopoly.

That’s why monopolies are bad in the economic sense. However, in relation to consolidation of journalistic outlets under single ownership, the argument relates to a loss of diversity in opinion. It’s no longer an economic argument, but a pure consideration of the damaging consequences in our outspoken society of limiting the number of important voices and opinions to the one voice of a single ownership interest. Irrespective of our other political convictions and our ignorance of economics, we understand that consolidation of ownership would effectively abridge free speech and exclude points of view that reflect competing economic interests.

Angliss doesn’t understand the distinction, Scholars and Rogues don’t understand the distinction; and it’s their half-baked sense of deep conviction supported by the shallowest understanding that destroys their value in a necessary debate with the earnest but naive Libertarianism of the Ron Paul supporters.