News Jun 5, 2014 at 6:00 am

Comments

1
Yeah, like someone parks a truck in a bike lane on Capitol Hill, which is clear evidence why that Westlake cycle track should be built. Or an Amazon employee has a fancy red car, which becomes the image for a "story" on Amazon. Quite frankly you guys are the fucking A1 offenders at using anything to further your agenda.
2
LOL!!!! Oh Eli....have you ever read what the other staffers at The Stranger post? Hello kettle? Meet the pot!
3
The news always has been ideologically driven. For a few decades in the 20th century, the corporations tried to promote the sham that their propaganda machines were fair, but even at the time this was laughable (see Network, for example).

What has changed is that they've lost control of the narrative, and even the most obtuse morons have begun to question the motives of our kleptocracy's rulers.
4
I read a story about large hailstones recently and the first comment is a question of "Why is this news?" because large hailstones happen every year in the heartland. I see this kind of comment all the time, but traditionally news is simply a report of what happened yesterday.
5
What I'd like to find is a news feed that actually acknowledges and responds to arguments made in comments.

As in the case of Elliot Rodgers, even if you brought up the "facts" of the case, each stream would relentlessly keep its own beat like a player piano. So the first charge was misogyny. But many including myself pointed out he killed more men than women. Now, in a regular human scale argument, that would then have to be debated and answered, right? But not in News Feeds -- they just repeat the same assertion another sixty times! In comments you at least get replies to your replies.

Right now there is a big disjunct between the Oratorical big streams and the Conversational commenting.
6
@1 is absolutely correct. The Stranger/Slog is undeniably the worst offender of all. "Facts? Who cares about facts? We're only here for the page hits."
7

Here's the lead sentence in a Washington Post Facebook post from an hour ago.

People in Hing [sic] Kong are growing more resentful of mainland China and sadness over the Tiananmen Square massacre is turning into anger.


https://www.facebook.com/washingtonpost/…

So not only do they get the name Hong Kong wrong, they refer to it as if it were not on the mainland. I think they are confusing it with the island nation of Taiwan!

8
@1, 6..i think this format, the one with pictures of peoples cars and cycle tracks, the one that you frequently comment on, is what's known as a 'blog'. it's a kind of testing ground for 'news'.. that other thing that it links to , is a newspaper, and it's been doing that newspapery thing, more or less, since before y'all was born..
10
Lots of props to Frank Bruni. He's a great writer and personality and we're glad to have him in New York. It's not hard to figure out what happened, though. Look at the 24 hour froth-fest that is Fox News, and the Republican strategists who coordinate their talking points with RWNJ radio, Fox, and GOP officials.

This is the new politics, and with social media, open comment threads and the rest of Teh Internets, anyone can play. And, for most of the players, it's about winning, about beating your opponents, about silencing the opposition. The news is merely a tool in that struggle.

Now excuse me while I go beat up some Mormons who oppose marriage equality...
11
#9

Rarely are my comments ignored. Typically they invoke violent outrage of the sort exhibited by people living in a delusion having their reality stuck in their faces.

And I'm not arguing my particular opinion here, merely stating that the "fact" of him murdering men to women in a ratio of 4:2 was squelched by most streams (not just SLOG). For nearly a day after the incident we neither heard about the 3 Chinese male students. Or that they were murdered by knife, not by gun.
12
@8 I see your point, although I don't necessarily agree, that Slog is a blog and therefore subject to a different level of truthiness. The Amazon story appeared in the newspaper.

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-s…
13
Frank Bruni is one of the worst offenders when it comes to trivializing and freakifying facts. This is what he wrote about the presidential debate in 2000:


And as Mr. Gore loped effortlessly through the Balkans, barely able to suppress his self-satisfied grin, it became ever clearer that the point of all the thickets of consonants and proper nouns was not a geopolitical lesson.

It was more like oratorical intimidation, an unwavering effort to upstage and unnerve an opponent whose mind and mouth have never behaved in a similarly encyclopedic fashion.

The conventional wisdom held that in tonight's presidential debate, the first, and perhaps most important, of three encounters between Mr. Gore and Gov. George W. Bush, Mr. Gore should show voters a warm and fuzzy side while Mr. Bush should seize a tough, commanding tone.


(snip)


Despite Mr. Gore's efforts at laughter and all his references to the middle-class people who had become his chums, he was above all a reference book of foreign names and domestic facts and figures.


http://tinyurl.com/l8m7lcn

At the time, the New York Times was paying him to be a reporter.
14
@11
I don't know what you're talking about with this "squelched" business. By the time I found out the details of the rampage -- sometime over Memorial Day weekend -- the number and gender of his victims was widely reported. It's been common knowledge ever since.

Nobody disagrees with your narrative because we are suppressing the *fact* of Rodger having killed more men than women. The rest of us are perfectly able to comprehend how somebody can be motivated by misogyny but end up killing more men than women, mostly through circumstance. His goal was to slaughter a sorority, but his more important goal was to kill a bunch of people.

Really, I've been quite disturbed by the constant drumbeat of men trying to downplay the extremity of his misogyny. I would have thought that normal guys -- as in, not MRA types -- would be much more unequivocal in their condemnation. Instead, an awful lot of them come across almost as apologists for it.

It has actually made me look a bit askance at all the men I see in a day who I don't know. I find myself wondering, "is that guy one of the misogyny apologists? How about that guy? What about him?" I expect the effect will fade in time, but I don't like it at all.
15
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA #OhTheIrony #TheStrangerPrivilege
16
@9 I would tend to agree with you, but it is worth considering that SRotU has written at least 137 pages worth of comments about how he knows things.

JBITDMFOTP
17
This reminds me of when The Stranger, which is run by white guys, and mostly staffed by white guys, was criticizing Apple for being run by white guys, and mostly staffed by white guys.
18
@7: Hong Kong actually is an island, at least in part. The original British Colony was on Hong Kong Island. It later expanded to a small part of the Kowloon Peninsula, and added the rest, plus some more islands, under a 99-year lease established in 1898.

Geography aside, the use of "mainland China" to distinguish the territory of the People's Republic from the various bits and pieces on the fringes is standard in discussing China. Even a territory like Hong Kong, which is legally a part of the PRC, has significant historical, cultural, and governance differences from the Mainland.

There is no excuse, however, for "Hing Kong".
19
@17 You're comment got me thinking about Danielle Henderson. Where the hell did she disappear to? She hasn't has a SLOG post in close to a month. I liked her stuff.
20
Yes! Thankyou, Eli. Now maybe The Stranger will hesitate to participate in this kind of shit? Or is that too much to ask.

Something happens, and before the facts are even settled, the morals are deduced and the lessons drawn.


And don't forget: "And apologies demanded (which usually are "inadequate")."

@14 Hey. I'm with you.

But if people want to end institutional misogyny then stop using the accusation of "misogyny" as a rhetorical cudgel for what ever cultural thing they don't like.

I'd like to see EVERYBODY calm their fucking asses down and acknowledge the humanity of ALL the victims of that shooting before rushing to retrofit meaning to it. That will help too.

Almost no essay after that shooting even mentioned the names of the victims. Let alone their gender.

In the case of Rodgers, for the first time in along time, the word misogynist was actually accurately applied in internet media.

That word gets thrown around very casually and hyperbolically, which doesn't do anybody any favors.

For fuck sake one the essays after that shooting the essayist was blaming Judd Apatow movies - because they were "misogynist." Good Christ. And stupid shit like that is everywhere. Call that shit out, too.

21
#20

You could make the case that Rodger's problem was Philogyny not Misogyny. Because of his excessive desire for women, and sex, which transcended his capacity in the real world, he struck out against real people (of all sexes).

What he exhibited was the classic "psychological break" where an idealized fantasy (him as the rich, jet setting person) could not get sex from the girls that he desired. Moreover, he expected their adulation just for being the sort of guy that every movie and video game tells us should be that object of desire.

Thus his behavior stemmed from a hyper-philogyny.

22
#18

Well yeah I guess you have Wikipedia to back you up, but in the same sense then Seattle, a peninsula is not part of the Continental United States because it sticks out into a western bay and it has its own unique Government that likes to set very high minimum wages and ban bottled water.

To me there was always Taiwan...and mainland, or "Red" China. Now everything is China and it's all basically part of the same land mass -- and Taiwan is still hanging around on its own island...like the Azores.

25
@22: In no sense is Seattle a peninsula. It's a city built on an isthmus. Neither the man-made Ship Canal nor the former outlet of Lake Washington, the Black River, is considered to divide the isthmus into peninsulas. Otherwise the entire U.S. east of the Mississippi would be considered a peninsula.
27
But...AMAZON... something ... something bad... outrageous!
28
#22: It doesn't matter was wikipedia says. Differentiating between mainland China and Hong Kong has been standard practice since pretty much the beginning of Hong Kong as a British territory.
29
Do they award a Nobel Prize for Irony?

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