I happened to come across this post from 2011 about a now-forgotten journalist who was upset that bloggers were “destroying the business model for quality” in writing by flooding the market with free and crappy content.
It’s all so quaint. To be a journalist and to think that Public Enemy #1 is blogging . . . wow!
Here we are 12 years later and blogging has pretty much disappeared. This makes me sad. But that dude might well be happy about this state of affairs!
In today’s blog, Andrew referred back to something he wrote back in 2011. And there, I found this:
“Just when you finally become an expert on something, your expertise becomes obsolete. You spend a couple decades getting good grades and becoming really good at taking tests, then suddenly you never need to take a test again. You master the skills of diaper-changing, then all of a sudden your kids are walking around wearing real underwear and you have no place to apply your talents.”
Despite being well put poetically, I would add that “obsolete” is an understatement of the problem. “Derision” should be part of the discussion. Slide rule proficiency, use of the subjunctive and trousers without holes at the knee, did put me a leg up, but now those skills and attributes scream “pasquinade,”
https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/pasquinade
which is a word (a verb as well as a noun) I had never heard of until I just wrote it down. Am I alone in my ignorance of pasquinade’s existence and meaning(s)? Given how touchy people are these days, what trouble will ensue if you use it in public or in the classroom? Indeed, in this blog?
Kind of a strange trio of skills. Slide-rules are truly obsolete now that we have computers. The subjunctive, however, is still widely used; although I understand it is rarer in English than in Romance languages, the divergence occurred much earlier than the deprecation of the slide rule (i.e., a person alive today could remember having lots of slide-rule lessons in school, but I don’t think anyone alive today would be able to recall a time when the subjunctive was commonplace in English). I don’t understand about the trousers.
Adede said, “The subjunctive, however, is still widely used.” In my day, we were taught that you should say/write, “if I were there…” and not “if I was there…” but that (contrary to fact) distinction has disappeared in present-day usage. On the other hand, perhaps I am entirely wrong. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_subjunctive:
“Virtually none of the things people believe about the subjunctive or its status in English are true. Most purists who witter on about it couldn’t actually pass a test on distinguishing subjunctive from nonsubjunctive clauses to save their sorry asterisks. But then they don’t have to: Merely mentioning the subjunctive approvingly and urging that it be taught is enough to establish one’s credentials as a better class of person.”
Regarding trousers, we were taught that a sign of poverty was a hole at the knee. Now, it is a symbol of modernity, freedom and fashion.
In the British version of the TV quiz show “The Chase” the host Bradley Walsh always asks each contestant “if you was to win some money today what would you do with it?” It always grates on my (69 year old ) ears.
Ah, yes, ripped jeans. Now I see what you mean. Their position in fashion has waxed and waned. I’m not when (if) they peaked, but they never really went away (and in some sense are so common that I can barely see them as a symbol of anything but perhaps ordinariness). I think their desirability depends on the wearer. A 21 year old in ripped jeans can come across as cool. A 42 year old in ripped jeans comes across as pathetic.
I would like to see a good self-reflexive, longform piece on how the culture of journalism in the rich English-speaking countries changed from fretting about bloggers in the oughties, to embracing twitter and erasing the open web in the 2010s. Twitter really did outcompete traditional journalism on some kinds of punditry and analysis, but both individual journalists and editorial policies embraced it.
And yet since then Journalism has somehow managed to become even more elitist, snobby, and self-important. All while eliminating any ideological diversity among their ranks, leaving two poles that pretend they disagree about everything while actually disagreeing on very little. There is always broad bipartisan support for any and all wars, and for making sure the rich stay rich.
User:
I disagree with you regarding lack of ideological diversity in the news media. Agreed, there are not many openly-Communist or openly-Fascist news media, but within that range, there’s a lot. And the statement, “there is always broad bipartisan support for any and all wars,” hides a lot. There’s a big difference between supporting the war that Russia launched in Ukraine, and supporting Ukraine’s warlike effort to defend itself. Similarly with Israel/Palestine and other conflicts. When A and B are fighting a war, the position to support A can be much different from the position to support B, and it seems to miss the point to say that these two positions represent “support for any and all wars.”
I’d imagine that “User” was referring to broad partisan support in American “mainstream media” in support of American support for Ukraine.
Relatedly, there’s stuff like this…
88% of New York Times headlines about attacks against civilians in Ukraine blamed Russia for the violence. Whereas only 36% of headlines about attacks on Yemeni civilians launched by the U.S.-backed Saudi coalition attributed those attacks to their perpetrator.
https://twitter.com/justfp/status/1687224463325052929?s=42&t=n1bSYJRv8PP0Or34KoMkcg
Of course I can think of reasons for that imbalance…but I’m not sure they refute the suggestion that there’s a lack of ideological diversity regarding these two conflicts, at least.
Joshia:
An important chunk of the U.S. Republican party and conservative media take Russia’s side in the Ukraine war. They support the war in the sense of supporting Russia’s invasion, or I guess to put it more carefully they supported Russia keeping the fruits of its invasion. The rest of the parties and media take Ukraine’s side: they support the war in the sense of supporting Ukraine continuing to fight. My point is that both sides “support the war” but in different ways.
In 1991, the leaders of the Republican party supported the U.S. fighting in Iraq. Meanwhile, a large part—a majority, I think it was—of the Democratic party opposed U.S. active military involvement, although it could be argued that they were supporting war in the sense of supporting Iraq keeping the fruits of its invasion of Kuwait.
In either case, it’s ridiculous for anyone to claim that, in the U.S., “there is always broad bipartisan support for any and all wars.”
Andrew –
I agree with your final statement. The invasion of Iraq, as an example, famously had elements of support in the “MSM’,” but there was opposition as well. The idea that all the media are merely putty in the hands of the defense industry is, I think, facile.
As for Ukraine. I think there are a lot of people painting with too broad a conspiratorial brush (see Glenn Greenwald), but I think it is true that broadly speaking there’s little criticism of support for Ukraine from Dems or the GOP to be found IN THE MEDIA.
There is an important block of the GOP that voices opposition to continued support, but they aren’t getting a whole lot of media coverage, imo, especially now that Tucker was fired.
I don’t think that criticism of support for Ukraine is taking Russia’s side or supporting Russia’s invasion. Nor do I think that it’s fair to characterize advocating for a negotiated settlement as supporting Russia keeping the fruits of the invasion
Although I can see how in the end splitting out the difference can seem like more of a semantic argument, I don’t think it is merely semantics and I think the distinction is important. These issues are very complicated.
For me, the trick is finding the space between simplistic rhetoric on both sides. One the one side that rhetoric would be saying that interrogating US support for Ukraine is tantamount to “appeasing Putin.” On the other side its saying if you believe Russia should have to pay a price for the invasion, or you say there’s a legitimate reason for the US to continue support for Ukraine’s military, you’re merely bending over for the arms industry.
Getting back to the OP… I see relatively little nuanced investigation either in the “MSM” or blogs or alternative press. I find it hard to avoid the observation that we mostly have facile rhetorical gamesmanship and little else on this and many other issues. On Twitter in particular but I think elsewhere as well.
There’s also a huge difference in kind between supporting say a US invasion of Afghanistan in the name of anti-terrorism and nation building… And supporting Ukraine to fight an invasion by a large and dangerous opponent who is pretty clearly losing and having it’s military and country slowly declining, putting a pressure on that country to democratize and become less militaristic.
Daniel –
Obviously, there’s a lot of subjectivity involved here. The US, with a fair amount of bipartisan support in the Cngress and the “MSM,” pushed rhetoric that justified invading Iraq in order to fight terrorism and conduct nation building.. Much of the world, including some Democratic and largely Western-aligned countries, don’t see a huge difference between that rhetoric from the US and the rhetoric from Russia justifying their invasion Ukraine. And Russia and China are using that apparent hypocrisy to successfully enlarge their sphere of influence at the expense of America’s sphere of influence.
Fiona Hill, hardly a “Putin apologist” speaks to that issue here:
https://news.err.ee/1608977948/fiona-hill-ukraine-in-the-new-world-disorder
I certainly not advocating against support for Ukraine, I’m just saying that a lack of interrogation for the full rationale and potential geopolitical ramifications of that support is largely lacking from the “MSM,” which at some level overlaps with “User’s” comment even though a agree with Andrew that in full form it’s “ridiculous.”
There is broad bipartisan support for war. And no Marjory Taylor Green’s reflexive anti-Bidenism on Ukraine is no more a commitment against war than the squad denouncing Trump’s illegal assassination of Qasem Soleimani. And before I start this part, I want to say I fully welcome anyone who can demonstrate any and all errors made, Either in evidence or reasonable interpretation of it. The level of propaganda you have to consume to believe that this war was “unprovoked” is just astounding. If the US didn’t actively carry out the 2014 coup in Ukraine, it certainly did everything in its power to push for it and had everything in place to benefit from it afterwards. The pivot point was the massacre of protesters in Maidan square. Everyone assumed they were killed at the behest of Yanukovych and chased him out of the country. Unfortunately, as this Ukrainian-Canadian author published in this Dutch peer reviewed journal, points out that all the forensic evidence points to Ukrainian far right snipers (who have close ties to the US).
https://brill.com/view/journals/rupo/8/2/article-p181_5.xml
And post-coup, we handpicked the next government.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957
And then for some cognitive dissonance I highly recommend this article that gives you an idea of the US and EU mindset post-coup.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/18/the-undiplomatic-diplomat/
Putin pushed for a diplomatic settlement which resulted in the Minsk accords, which as Merkel and Hollande have admitted was a ruse to buy time to arm Ukraine.
When Zelensky (who ran on peace with Russia) tried to follow through with that Ukraine’s far right threatened to kill him and refused to stop attacking ethnic Russians in the Donbas. https://mate.substack.com/p/siding-with-ukraines-far-right-us
And of course, we were too busy impeaching Trump for threatening to stop arming Ukraine to even consider (not that we would have done it anyways) supporting his push for peace, so he got pushed into preparing for war. Biden has long been a hawk on Ukraine, and with his election Putin saw the writing on the wall. Again, I’ll point you to a peer reviewed Canadian journal on Putin’s decision to pull the trigger.
https://jmss.org/article/view/76584
And of course, it’s also worth noting that Putin and Zelensky had a tentative peace agreement in the April after the war started only to have Boris Johnson fly in and shoot it down.
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/09/02/diplomacy-watch-why-did-the-west-stop-a-peace-deal-in-ukraine/
Also, worth checking out, this timeline:
https://thekennedybeacon.substack.com/p/the-real-history-of-the-war-in-ukraine?sd=pf
And this poll of actual Ukrainians, where the pollster confidently asserts that all the Ukrainians who disagree with the western narrative have obviously been duped by Russian propaganda, rather than accurately reporting their lived experience.
https://voxukraine.org/en/the-ability-of-ukrainians-to-distinguish-messages-of-russian-propaganda-results-of-public-opinion-research
And no, I don’t love Putin, or Russia, or China for that matter. I do, however have a deep hatred of war and being lied to by the news. I’m perplexed that everyone who lived through Iraq doesn’t share those sentiments. I also have an incredible amount of empathy for Ukrainians, which is why I hate to see us using them as cannon fodder to weaken Russia. And if we are being honest the US public has been lied to and propagandized into supporting almost every war we have ever been in: Remember the Maine, The Lusitania, Gulf of Tonkin, pulling babies out of incubators (gulf war I), and that handing out viagra to commit mass rape was made up about Gaddafi before it was made up about Putin, odd no one noticed. And those are just the more widely known cases. I could make an argument for WWII, and Syria too, and all that still excludes our never ending legacy of attempted and successful regime change in our own hemisphere, which is generally deemed too insignificant to even get more than a mention in the news. But I’ll leave it up to Smedley Butler to give you a taste of. (it most certainly continues apace with Haiti, Cuba, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua ,Venezuela, Brazil and others).
https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html
And on the rich; Obama got nothing but praise from the mainstream press for INTENTIONALLY choosing to maximize the number of foreclosures on poor people (destroying half of black wealth in the process) to make the bankers who blew everything up in the first place whole again. He also chose the most expensive, least effective, and slowest way to repair the banking sector (according to an IMF Study that came out shortly before his inauguration).
https://prospect.org/economy/needless-default/
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/03/the-empire-continues-to-strike-back-team-obama-propaganda-campaign-reaches-fever-pitch.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/05/the-quiet-coup/307364/
And the shrill panicked lies and denunciations of Bernie Sanders proves whatever nominal support for any ant-oligarch policy they have is skin deep.
Joshua, you’re amplifying my point actually, so maybe my point wasn’t clear. Supporting Ukraine is supporting an attacked nation in its defense against a country which has the potential to be a powerful enemy of the US. Supporting invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan is supporting an invading force, which is supporting a different kind of thing.
Supporting Ukraine is like supporting Afghanistan in your analogy.
Russia even uses the same kind of propaganda (they are fighting nazi terrorists, etc), has their own type of Haliburton profiteering wing (Wagner, and I’m sure there are others), and seems content with declaring some kind of victory while things drag on for decades.
User –
Looking aside what I consider your propaganda on Ukraine (none of the issues you describe are as one-sided as you describe, imo – but I don’t think this is the place to go deeper into it), you’ve got a bit if a non-sequitur there.
Whether or not the true picture is how you describe, that doesn’t really make an argument that “There is always broad bipartisan support for any and all wars,” let alone that the reason for that putative broad bipartisan support is simply because of “making sure the rich stay rich.”
Daniel –
The US largely portrayed the invasion of Iraq as defensive in nature and Russia does the same with their invasion of Ukraine. This fits I to the tradition of a “realist” framework
Sturgeon’s Law probably applied to blogs when there were a lot of them, but I think not as much any more. I still get most of my news from blogs, as I find a lot newspaper and cable news pontifications annoying. The McNeil-Lehrer News Hour on PBS was good, but that went downhill also. Don’t get me started on grammar in general and the subjunctive in particular. According to TV sports announcers there are no adverbs anymore. “He plays real physical.”
Well, we knew entropy would win in the end.
Seems to me that Substack is pretty much equivalent to a blog, and it’s doing pretty well. Blogging hasn’t disappeared, it has just changed its stripes. FWIW, I have a traditional blog that is very popular in its niche. I’ve been thinking of moving to Substack but haven’t bothered so far because I’m not interested in monetizing.
Anon:
Good point. I discussed Substack here It appears to be a sort of branded blogging and RSS platform. If this blog were on Substack I think it would be pretty much the same thing.
I looked up the author we were discussing, Jonathan Rauch, and from the description he seems a lot like a blogger: he has lots of strong opinions and likes to argue about them. The main difference is that he expresses his opinions in books, rather than blogs. I guess that works for him. His books probably don’t get tons of readers; then again, this blog doesn’t get tons of readers either. As I wrote in my earlier post, getting a huge readership, even if you choose topics that interest lots of people, is a matter of luck. Rauch had some of that luck earlier in his career and hasn’t had that luck right for awhile, so I can see how he would be annoyed, but I think he hasn’t fully thought through that this is just how things go, and it’s not really the fault of bloggers or anyone else: it’s just not so easy to stay at the top of the greasy pole of attention and readership.
I agree with you about blogs, but Twitter (screw EM), as a microblogging platform, certainly had a lot to do with the decimation of news media, although this had more to do with what journalists did than with what laypeople did. Journalists on the one hand embraced Twitter as a publishing platform, undermining the need for the news website as a source of news, while also to a large degree turning to report on what’s on twitter as a primary fount of informatiom, because they needed an ever increasing stream of content, not QUALITY content.