Daniel Greenfield on the death of the printed ‘alternative’ media: 

The real reason that the Village Voice is dead is because the alternative media is dead, and the alternative media is dead because there is nothing for it to be an alternative to. New Yorkers can just as easily read shrill rants about the NYPD in the Daily News, pretentious movie reviews for artsy films at The Onion, and leftist denunciations of the War on Terror in the New York Times. The way that the Village Voice used to cover Republicans is now the way that every media outlet, but the handful that aren’t part of the liberal collective, covers Republicans… When mainstream newspapers give positive reviews to books and movies that envision Bush’s assassination, cheerlead anti-war rallies run by militant Trotskyites and demand unilateral surrender in the War on Terror, what possible territory is left for the alternative media to explore?

Related to the above, the New York Times’ Arthur Brisbane – the horse’s mouth, as it were – on the paper’s “culture of like minds”:  

Across the paper’s many departments… so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism – for lack of a better term – that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of the NYT. As a result, developments like the Occupy movement… seem almost to erupt in the New York Times, overloved and undermanaged, more like causes than news subjects.

The NYT did indeed champion Occupy – that’s these guys, remember – as a “new progressive movement” for a “new progressive age,” breathlessly insisting that, “The young people in Zuccotti Park… have started America on a path to renewal… A new generation of leaders is just getting started.”

Yes, a new generation of leaders.  

See also this. 

All of which reminded me of this by Fabian Tassano, written some five years ago: 

I suppose it’s fairly obvious that I’m no great fan of socialism. But what I write in this area is determined by what I experience as being the dominant ideology – every society has one, of course. This happens to be leftist as far as British culture goes, and has been at least as far back as when I was at college (the Eighties). Even in the heyday of Thatcherism it seemed fairly obvious that the intelligentsia was dominated by people who despised the right… The worst sort of dominant ideology is the kind which portrays itself as not dominant but counter-cultural, like the present one… Subversion as counterculture is inspiring, subversion as dogma is obnoxious.

Tassano’s book Mediocracy is well worth a read. And for some of those aforementioned views of the intelligentsia, see, for instance, this. 

Feel free to add your own links and snippets in the comments.

Hoverbike, baby. // Nukes near Vegas, 1953. // Red Star in Orbit,1990. (h/t, MeFi) // The making of Aliens’ xenomorph queen. // Wernher von Braun thinks about Mars (1954). (h/t, Coudal) // There’s a red planet approaching. // When pensioners have guns, part 2. // When pensioners restore art. // Pittsburgh, 1907. (h/t, Mick) // Pill terrariums. // At last, your own Lego desalination plant. // Loving Israel. // Hurricanes since 1851. // Here’s a thing. // Impress the kids with a 3-ton hydraulic triceratops sculpture. // Flying hovercraft, $190,000. // Solar filament. // Big head squirrel feeder. // And finally, meet Teddy, the asshole cat. 

Yay. Peter Risdon has returned to active blogging.  

As some of you will know, he’s the chap who wrote this belter of a piece, often quoted here, on the malice of Polly Toynbee: 

One thing, and one thing only, keeps people trapped in the kind of poverty of mind where they don’t feed their children properly even when they could, and shit in their own stairwells. It’s a lack of ownership; a lack of self-reliance. It’s a lack of the very concept of self-reliance. It’s an idea that the mere thought that they should be self-reliant is immoral, evil, callous and cruel.

His latest is here.  Do pop over and say hello.

Michael J Totten interviews the author Benjamin Kerstein. He begins with the question, “What possessed you to spend three years writing about Noam Chomsky?”

To which Kerstein answers,

Chomsky is an absolutely shameless liar. A master of the argument in bad faith. He will say anything in order to get people to believe him. Even worse, he will say anything in order to shut people up who disagree with him. And I’m not necessarily talking about his public critics. If you’ve ever seen how he acts with ordinary students who question what he says, it’s quite horrifying. He simply abuses them in a manner I can only describe as sadistic. That is, he clearly enjoys doing it.

A little elaboration follows:

He is essentially the last totalitarian. Despite his claims otherwise, he’s more or less the last survivor of a group of intellectuals who thought systemic political violence and totalitarian control were essentially good things. He babbles about human rights all the time, but when you look at the regimes and groups he’s supported, it’s a very bloody list indeed.

And,

He makes people stupid. In this sense, he’s more like a cult leader or a New Age guru than an intellectual… Since he portrays everyone who disagrees with him as evil, if you do agree with him you must be on the side of good and right… I think people come to Chomsky and essentially worship him for precisely that reason. He allows them to feel justified in their refusal to think… His tone is very intellectual, in that he speaks in a very quiet, measured style most of the time. But the content is clearly driven by what can only be called a species of hysteria… He seems to be at heart an extremely angry man, and I would guess that his anger is driven by something that is ultimately not political.

From then on in it gets rather critical.

See also this, by the late Christopher Hitchens. And of course this.

Update, via the comments:

It’s been a while since we’ve had a classic sentence to add to our collection. So here’s one – actually two – from the Observer’s ersatz class warrior Barbara Ellen:

Mocking the posh and smirking about silver spoons rammed into gobs is a comic artform honed by the masses as a response to centuries of oppression. Unlike chav-baiting, which was pure bullying, posh-bashing is part of an instinctive protest against inequality that lies at the very core of sociopolitical emancipation.

Actually, it seems to me the word chav, like scrote, is a favoured working class term, typically used to denote the kinds of thoughtless and antisocial people you wouldn’t want housed next door, or next door to your elderly parents, however modest your means. Which is to say, the kinds of people Guardianistas want us to believe don’t in fact exist. Perhaps Ms Ellen, like Ms Toynbee, feels that people who live in the rougher parts of town shouldn’t have a word to describe those whose behaviour, not their income, lowers the tone or makes their lives a misery.

Update:

In the comments, Min notes that while any use of the term chav is denounced by Ms Ellen as bullying, “posh-bashing” is considered protest and an artform. This is given the hashtag Guardianlogic. Well, it’s also the logic of identity politics, according to which, you must always treat people as social categories, as examples of some put-upon victim group, or conversely, some notional oppressor group. To which, various contradictory and patronising assumptions must be applied regardless of the particulars in any given instance. By this reckoning, when opportunist oiks at my old comprehensive school picked on a new arrival who was well-spoken, polite and somewhat studious, the people doing the bullying were righteous, entitled and “responding to oppression.” Their shoving and sneering was apparently “an instinctive protest against inequality.” But my calling them oiks for doing so is practically a hate-crime. You see how it works?

Oh, and here’s a third contender:

Which would they prefer – the current culture of mild piss-taking or a full-on bloody revolution, at least a full-on socioeconomic overhaul?

Yes, my prole comrades, my brothers and sisters-in-arms, bitching about Benedict Cumberbatch is the next best thing to full-on socialism – and it too will set you free. Because class prejudice is a good prejudice whenever we say it is. However, one mustn’t aim that self-same bitching at one’s Guardianista colleagues, whose own affairs are not to be discussed and any mention of which will tend to get deleted.