Media

Good targets for the trolling contest

Last month we announced our trolling contest. Wondering who to skewer with satire? Here are some links to the submission section of publications:

Tech/Gaming Websites (#gamergate!)

Righty Websites

Obviously you’re going to want to be in line with the usual style and content of the websites, so do a bit of research. They’re also going to want to know about you, so either actually be someone who could reasonably believe what you’re writing, or make up a believable bio that can’t be proven fake with Google. Since a lot of them publish based on qualifications, a believable bio, pedigree and paper trail would be necessary.

If you think any other sites should be up here, let me know in a comment.

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Alt-right blog reading list: How do you read?

Sorry for the minimum of posting lately, y’all, I’m working on my talk for this Thursday at Jack Ross’s book release at the National Press Club. It should be quite an evening, so be sure to make it if you’re in the DC area.

It’s April, which means on the 24th, this blog will have existed for one year. To date there have been 302 posts, and traffic, though it’s stalled recently, has been on the up and up. So please, dear reader, forgive the retrospection and stats.

I thought it would be a good idea to update the reading list of blogs and websites I read. I last did this in December 2013, and my reading habits have expanded and changed a great deal since then, so there are more than 40 links this time. Roughly speaking I get news in three ways; aggregator sites, social media, and blogs. Timely news I mostly get through the first two, and then the rest is heavily curated by ideology or personality. What strikes me about this kind of news diet is one doesn’t spend a whole lot of time on an individual site. I don’t, say, skim the top dozen papers every morning, which, if I’ve been paying attention to social media, mostly contain old information. Some aggregators I use frequently are Newsmap.jp, Memeorandum, and the Drudge Report. Anyway, here’s the list, I welcome feedback and recommendations:

Conservatism/Porchers
The Imaginative Conservative
Front Porch Republic
Nomocracy in Politics
Pittsford Perennialist
Throne, Altar, Liberty
The Heavy Anglo-Orthodox
Hipster Conservative
A Conservative Blog For Peace
The Mendenhall
Chris Bray
Solidarity Hall
Outside the Beltway

Republicans
Ace of Spades
RedState
Libertarian Republican
A Certain Enthusiasm

Libertarianism
The Beacon
Propertarianism
Students for Liberty
Tenth Amendment Center
Pileus
Antiwar.com
Antiplanner
Market Urbanism
Library of Law & Liberty
Liberty Unbound

Left
Freddie DeBoer
Undernews
Anarchist News
Socialist Worker
Democratic Left
Outside the Circle
Murray Dobbin
Steve Lendman
Political Research Associates
Revolting Europe
FAIR
CommonDreams
Rancid Honeytrap
New Internationalist
Red Pepper
Libcom

Religion
Cosmos the in Lost
Outside The Asylum
Ordinariate News
Anglican Use News
Ordinariate Pilgrim
Foolishness To The World
New Liturgical Movement
Caelum Et Terra
Opus Publicum
Fr. Hunwicke’s Mutual Enrichment
Fr. Ray Blake
Fr. Z
Standing on my Head
The Josias
Rorate Caeli
Titus One Nine
That the Bones You Have Crushed May Thrill
OrthoCuban

Geopolitics/secession
GeoCurrents
Springtime of Nations
Let a Thousand Nations Bloom
Nationalia
Hawaiian Kingdom
Jefferson Declaration Blog

Magazines
Via Meadia
The National Interest
Spiked
Taki
Oxford American

Neoreaction
Xenosystems
The Reactivity Place
Bloody Shovel
A House With No Child
Free Northerner
Graaaaaagh
Henry Dampier
28 Sherman
Losing The Creek
The Orthosphere
Anarchopapist
Social Matter
Neocolonial
Anomaly UK

Culture/Philosophy
Across Difficult Country
Street Carnage
Garvey’s Ghost
Arma Virumque
Steve Sailer
Never Yet Melted
Royal World
Modern Medievalism
Uncouth Reflections
Sweet Talk
Dark Ecologies
People of Shambhala
Gornahoor
Slate Star Codex
Ribbonfarm
Hooded Utilitarian
Ecology Without Nature

Science
West Hunter
Razib Khan
William M. Briggs
Dienkenes
Parapundit
Noahpinion

History
Old Virginia Blog
Mad Monarchist

Other
Jake Bacharach
The Fly Bottle
3 Quarks Daily
Luke Ford
Dangerous Minds

Local
Barticles
Bearing Drift
Deo Vindice
Shaun Kenney
Virginia Conservative
Virginia Virtucon
Ox Road South
Shenandoah Breakdown

Update: I should add, the fourth way I get news is newsletters, which are a bull market these days. The Transom, Prufrock, Politico Playbook, and those by individual writers (Chris Morgan just started one, subscribe here). There used to be a great CQ defense one that is now defunct.

Introducing the Mitrailleuse’s trolling contest

Let’s screw with people!

There are a lot of stupid publications out there. Some of them are so stupid that they are easy to troll. But fake articles can also speak to truths about the media, or, in the case of the Sokal affair, academic publishing. These are usually funny, and we’d like to see more of them, so we’re offering a bounty for the best trolling of media outlets. You may remember when Jordan and I made it into the news for our parody of Salon that fooled even pro-Salon Twitter users. It was a lot of fun, and now we want to give everyone the opportunity to put their satire skills on display. This is a rolling contest of trolling, where a winner is picked every four months.

The Rules

  • Get an article published. The editor can’t be in on the joke.
  • The article must be published somewhere that is a real and decently-trafficked publication. Think Wikipedia’s reliable source guidelines.
  • You can’t let it be known that the article is parody before we decide the winner.
  • While we were thinking more on the lines of trolling lefties, it by no means should be limited to that. You have free rein to screw with people across the political spectrum.
  • Winners will be chosen at the end of back-to-back six month periods. That means it will happen two times a year, with the first winner being chosen on September 1st, 2015.

The Criteria

  • It should be funny.
  • The goal here is to push it to the limits of absurdity while still being believable (and therefore publishable), which is a fine line to walk.
  • It has to somehow satirize the viewpoint of the publication that runs it. The more truth it reveals about them, the better.
  • Proportionality will be factored in. Getting a ludicrous piece published in an actually respectable publication like Jacobin or New Inquiry is different from getting it published on xoJane. We will keep that in mind when choosing the winner.

The Reward

  • 50 USD
  • Your fake name, real name, and article enshrined in a dedicated section of our website until the end of time.
  • The satisfaction of getting the last laugh on a publication that you presumably don’t like.
  • Even if you don’t win, we will link and rank all articles in order from best to worst.

Submissions may be sent to [email protected] Happy trolling.

Update: If you want some good examples of sites to submit to, we’ve compiled a list.

Striving to cease being “Addicted to Distraction”

0600 – Wake up, start coffee maker.

0605 – Check Twitter for new “notifications.” Check email for new posts from Dampier, Land, Social Matter, The Mitrailleuse. Etc. Check Drudge to see if the world ended overnight.

0620 – Begin reading local newspaper. Front section is a mish mash of local crime, state legislature blather, Christians beheaded by ISIS, chickens loose on a California freeway after falling off a truck, train crashes in West Virginia, snow storms Back East. Etc.

0645 – Begin making breakfast and lunch for me and my son. For the first time so far today, deal with something real.

Periodically throughout day – repeat check-check-check. Get angry at Mitch McConnell for giving in on “clean DHS funding bill.” Obama wins again. The country is going to shit. The goddam Democrats are blocking everything good and holy, except for bringing millions more illegal aliens who will eventually vote for them and for more welfare. Pope Francis is quoted as saying he’s just skippy with homos having anal sex…or at least that’s what the Lamestream Media want you to believe about him. Greece elects hard-lefties who promise to screw the EU, and it’s hard not to get excited/concerned about that, either because they’re hard-left a-holes or because it would be so delicious to see the EU collapse like the craptacular, multiculti house of cards it truly is. Tweet the blog posts from the people you like that were posted in the last six hours. Throw in a couple of original tweets about how the Oscars are a disgusting sewer hole of Political Correctness. Check Drudge again to see if the world ended while you weren’t noticing. Don’t resist clicking on the story about a man having a freaking baby. Don’t resist clicking on the link at the bottom to “8 Hottest Hotties in their Hottest bikinis.”

Etc.

Read Dr. Bruce Charlton’s new book Addicted to Distraction. It’s free, and it’ll take you an hour. May you never look at Mass Media the same. We are indeed addicted to distraction, you and I and most of the people who immerse themselves in the Mass Media. Which is just plain most people in the West, and soon the world.

1878bruce_resized

Dr. Charlton makes the point often missed: the media aren’t “biased” to the Left, the Medium is the Message, and the message is that everything is someone’s opinion, everything is “relative.” Even when media presents something good, heroic, charitable, it’s immediately subject to analysis and criticism, to dissection of motive, to questioning on whether the White Cismale who saved a kid from drowning was just another Macho stereotype.

We thought we would use the Web for our purposes, us conservatives, men of the Right, Traditionalists, Neoreactionaries. The Left controlled the Old Mass Media, the NYTWAPO and NBABCBS, but we would seize our chance for every man and woman jack to blog and comment and share our perspective, to go around the Gatekeepers, to form our own networks and “get our message out.”

We were wrong. We were assimilated. We continued to click on the Mass Media, to respond, respond, respond to all of the relativism and the bullshit, to “strike back” at Obama and Reid and Pelosi and Jezebel and Buzzfeed,  Slate and Salon, to the married fags and the trannies and the Slut Walkers, the beheaders and terrorists, the escaped tigers and maniacs, the Kardashians and Housewives; to the Daily Spew.

Dr. Charlton is a blogger himself, of course, and he’s quite frank in his assessment that not only is he mired in the Mass Media, too, but his efforts to escape the addiction are subject to constant temptation and periodic backsliding. But it’s a fight well worth making, not in an effort to save the society, but to save your soul. You might with profit read his piece The Psychological Basis of Self-Remembering as an aid.

It is possible, if barely, to continue to use the web and to post articles on real things without remaining in the Mass Media matrix. I’m going to try.  My strength is the examination of Old Stuff, anyway. Like Dr. Charlton, I know I’ll backslide, just like with the Commandments I’m taught in the Church. These human frailties are the base upon which the Mass Media was built.

The Church, at least, has the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

Hopefully, as the media continue to lead society toward the drain we can, like AA members, help each other retain a measure of sanity.

The rise of the mega-title: How gratuitous, list-filled names optimized books for Internet age sales, conquered the market, and made titles more boring

An interesting trend has developed in the world of books over the last fifty years. The emergence of the excessively long and overly informative book title has been swift and decisive. Once a rare style of titling, it now fills best-seller lists and Amazon search pages like sand fills a bucket. It took no prisoners. It came, it saw, it search engine-optimized.

Complete with a colon marking the break between the work’s main title and a subtitle attempting to indicate its content, the trend of the new literary mega-title isn’t going away anytime soon. If you’re someone who even occasionally shops for new books, then surely you know what I’m talking about.

Here are a few examples from current popular titles:

Gridlock U.S.A.: How America’s Traffic Problems Damage our Health and Wealth

Please and Thank You: Why Manners Matter More in a Digital World

Have you read or heard of either these books? Probably not, because I just made them up, as you might (or might not) be able to tell. It took me all of ten seconds. They were the first things that came to mind. Yet if you saw them prominently displayed on a Barnes & Noble shelf tomorrow they’d fit right in. Book titles seem to be getting longer and simultaneously worse.

Lest you think I am overreacting, or that I am whining about some imaginary trend in book naming (although I certainly am whining), I took a look at New York Times bestseller lists over the years. In the nonfiction category, which is particularly at risk for this type of title mumbo-jumbo, 80 percent, or 12 out of 15 selections in the most recent hardcover list, are of the mega-title variety. They total a whopping 137 words altogether, or just over nine each.

Going back twenty-five years and taking a peek at the nonfiction NYT list from December 1989, I find seven out of fifteen names, or 47 percent using colons for a grand total of 120 words, equal to eight words per title. There’s a trend emerging.

Turning the dial back yet another twenty-five years, the December 1964 nonfiction list yields ten winners with only three containing subtitles. The entire group clocks in at thirty-one words, a paltry three per book. Moreover, two of the three titles with colons pertain to biographies along the lines of Harlow: An Intimate Biography by Irving Shulman, which made the cut at a mere four words. (the NYT lists used can be found here.)

Three words per title is how you get it done. It’s simple and classy and doesn’t jam some garbled condensed summary onto the cover. The 1964 list contains such mouthfuls as Markings, Reminiscences, and The Kennedy Wit while 2014 boasts the quick and efficient Killing Patton: The Strange Death of World War Two’s Most Audacious General and You Can’t Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television. Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it?

These are not book titles, they are short essays. Fifty years ago, two-part titles functioned merely to stylishly identify what category of book you were actually looking at. Today we get full-blown sentences worthy of a third grade English exercise following the colon (e.g. Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution.) A book title is not the appropriate place to demonstrate your command of comma use.

So why did this trend emerge in the first place and why has it become so dominant, so fast?
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Gamergate revisited

A piece I wrote on Gamergate back in September went viral. It called the defeat of Gamergate inevitable because of the forces of cultural inertia stacked against it. The actual outcome was in some ways predictable, but otherwise quite surprising.

Gamergate didn’t win – but it didn’t lose

I attributed Gamergate losing to a phenomenon that in fact did come to pass. The groovy media intelligentsia did everything in its power to paint Gamergate as a simultaneously laughable yet dangerous hate movement that exposed male geeks as crypto-Nazis. To any normally socialized and status-conscious type of person, the media gambit would have led to the spiral of silence that I foresaw. The important factor here is that geeks, by definition, are not normally socialized and status-conscious people. This is particularly true when speaking ex cathedra from their identity as geeks; the threat of looking uncool doesn’t work because they are already uncool. They are already pariahs with ‘lame’ hobbies. Media elites and uncool nerds are two fundamentally different types of people.

Every single dominant cultural institution was stacked against Gamergate. Nobody had the intellectual bravery to side with a movement that was apparently just bitter nerds being prejudiced. Gamergate was rapidly becoming a dirty word in the mouths of anyone concerned with looking sensitive and enlightened. Thousands upon thousands, armed with roughly zero information on the controversy, were tripping over each other to signal their righteous “socially aware” status. “Misogynerds” were in the crosshairs.

And to their credit, the geeks came out pretty unscathed. Only through their tenacity and lack of concern with their image did Gamergate not get nuked from the chic heights of media that stooped to notice it. The desperately fashionable media displayed its contempt for nerds for “not being with the program.” The problem is that they only had a little less contempt before this fiasco. This is just another example of the people in media, entertainment and academia having a values dissonance with pretty much everyone else. That’s what a cultural elite is – a set of people with values not necessarily shared by the general public, but with a near-monopoly on cultural soapboxes to promulgate their ideas.

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