Dennis the Peasant

Yikes!!!

Now remember, at some point in time Ollie looked at the picture below and decided it was the best one he had...

 

...because now it's the one gracing his web site.

I'll certainly never qualify as the most photogenic person on the planet, but Jesus H. Christ! And it's truly unfortunate that he placed the word "stupid" within 15 miles of that photograph. Although I'm doubtful that I'll be able to establish myself as a noted personal image consultant anytime soon, I probably would have gone with this one instead...

 

But that's just me.

Demonstrating The Sort Of Business Sense That Has Already Made Him A Legend...

In this episode of Bidness With Da Raj, Roger L. Simon demonstrates the sort of business - not to mention common - sense that has made Pajamas Media what it is today...

As most of you know, Da Raj is in the middle of the promotional tour for his utterly dreadful (and hilariously silly) tome Blacklisting Myself. As part of this effort, Da Raj decided that doing an hour interview with some weenie named Thom Hartmann was the perfect way to sell his wares to the 12 or so rabid progressive partisans who actually listen to Air America. Now, I know you'll be as shocked as I was, but...

...evidently things didn't go all that well.

Who'd a thunk it, eh? I mean, here's Roger L. Simon wandering into the middle of Progressive Land trying to peddle the idea that he can't get work in Hollywood because the progressives there won't tolerate any political views other than their own. What could go wrong?

Hartmann turned out to be the rude type who interrupts you and puts words in your mouth, making assumptions about what you think from the most conventional of liberal playbooks. I sensed immediately that he hadn’t read the book through and when I called him on it, he admitted it, but allowed as how that was impossible given his schedule.

Boo-hoo. At that point, Raj, you have a choice to make: You can either sit through an interview with a guy who hasn't read your book or... You can get up, say something to the effect of, "You invite me on your show to talk about my book and you haven't read it? What sort of clown show are you running here, Asshole?" and then walk out of the studio.

But wait, according to Da Raj, things only get worse!

... It was a comment he made shortly thereafter that I found to be despicable.

He said that, “After 9-11, you and Ron Silver were frightened,” or words to that affect, implying that Ron and I had become suddenly terrified of the terrorists and our acts thereafter, supporting the war on Islamofascism, were motivated by a (one supposes) bullying cowardice.

Again: Boo-hoo. At this point, Raj, there a few new choices for you to consider. First of all, you could just get up, without a word, and walk out of the studio. If you think Hartmann's being 'despicable', why not? You don't owe him anything. Second, you could say something to the effect of, "You know, that's just the sort of smart-ass, dumb-fuck question I'd expect from a bed-wetting pussy like you." Then you could just sit there calmly and wait for Thom's next move. Third, you could simply punch him out. It's a not unreasonable response to an unprovoked insult from a stranger. Or, fourth, you could simply state the obvious to ol' Thom: Fear was an emotion millions of Americans experienced in the wake of 9/11. We'd just watched a small group of terrorists destroy themselves, the World Trade Center, four passenger jets, damage the Pentagon, and kill over 3,000 innocents. Why wouldn't that scare the living shit of a normal, thinking human being?

Roger L. Simon could have stood up for himself and his beliefs, but of course, Raj being Raj, what he decides to do is get all hurt and huffy instead. Perhaps he has become a true Republican after all.

Bottom line? Roger L. Simon really doesn't seem to understand anything about anything. If he was worth a shit as a business man, he'd have never bothered going on Air America in the first place. Virtually nobody pays attention to it, and the few social and intellectual cripples who do wouldn't buy his book under any circumstance in the first place. They are not part of his demographic. And if he was worth a shit as a so-called maven of the political blogosphere, by now he'd have figured out the nature of modern partisan politics, or at least the nature of partisan political entertainment... Which is this: It ain't about learned discourse and meaningful debate. 

The man is a fool.

Six Punk Albums You Need To Own, Presented In No Particular Order...

Every now and then some lost soul emails me asking for a list of albums I admire. In response to one such email, I'm going to throw out six punk albums I own and enjoy.

The Buzzcocks: A Different Kind Of Tension

This is the Buzzcocks' brand of magical punk pop at its most polished. While it lacks the frantic energy and amazing death-or-glory heroics of Another Music In A Different Kitchen, A Different Kind Of Tension makes up for any such lackage with impeccable songwriting and perfect delivery. If I could only have one Buzzcocks album, it would still be Another Music In A Different Kitchen, but A Different Kind Of Tension still rates as good a punk album as you are likely to hear.

The Circle Jerks: Gig

Like so many other punk bands, The Jerks were - first and foremost - at their best live. So while any number of their studio albums are worth owning, Gig is the one Circle Jerks album that really defines what the band was all about. This is L.A. punk rock at its' most primitive, which is exactly why The Circle Jerks and Gig should be treasured.

Stiff Little Fingers: Hanx!

This is the first album Stiff Little Fingers released in the States, essentially being a live "best of". As such, it pulls together some choice material from the band's first two studio albums, Inflammable Material and Nobody's Heroes. This is what I call a "paint peeler" album: You put it on your stereo, crank the volume to "11" and watch the paint come off the walls. This is the band U2 would have been if they'd had balls.

The Sex Pistols: The 76 Club/Burton-Upon-Trent Concert

This recording of a 1976 club gig by the Pistols (with Glen Matlock, rather than Sid Vicious, on bass) has been released by a number of record companies under a variety of guises. It remains the best live gig by The Sex Pistols I've been able to locate. The recording isn't good, and the band as a fair amount of trouble with their sound system, but it is clear they know they are onto something. Also clear is how much tighter they were with Matlock on bass. Get this concert and begin to understand why so many people fell in love with this band.

The Pretenders: Pretenders

It would be hard for today's young 'ums to understand the seismic shock created by the release of this album. First of all, you had this astounding, peel-the-paint-off-the-walls rock band playing like their lives depended on it (listen to The Wait real loud and you'll see what I mean). Second, you had Chrissie Hynde presenting a persona unknown to rock - that of a tough, cynical, nut-crushing but strangely vulnerable broad you won't dare fuck with (but might fall in love with). Pretenders is marred only by the inclusion of the Nick Lowe produced Stop Your Sobbing; without it this could have been a Perfect Album.

Pere Ubu: Terminal Tower

Cleveland-based Pere Ubu isn't really a punk band. It's an art band. A punk art band. Strangely enough, about the best place for the uninitiated to start is with a compilation of their early singles and b-sides called Terminal Tower. While the collection is worthwhile in its entirety, three songs get to the heart of what Pere Ubu is: Heart Of Darkness, 30 Seconds Over Tokyo and the utterly amazing Final Solution. The first time I heard Final Soluton (on WMMS, then the finest rock radio station in the nation), it began to dawn on me that there was something going on at the fringes of rock that was going to change everything. 

Great Moments In Business And New Media, Part Two...

Here's a perfect example of why nobody takes Roger L. Simon seriously anymore...

From pages 136 and 137 of Blacklisting Myself:

Now, of course, we'd called ourselves Pajamas Media from the outset internally, as well as to the ninety or so bloggers we had assembled. We were aggregating these blogs into a news and opinion plus advertising network. And, yes, we were well aware that the Internet was filled with success stories of companies with goofy names - Yahoo, Google, Amazon, etc. Why not Pajamas? Yet still we thought to choose something more official and corporate sounding, and came up with Open Source Media, which was an at best perfunctory bow to our roots.

How wrong we were. In the midst of our fancy, overpriced debut at the W Hotel in New York, replete with press conferences, panel discussions hooked up to Spain and Iraq, cocktail receptions and a keynote speech by journalist Judith Miller - just emerged from her recent incarceration for refusing to divulge the sources of her New York Timesstories on Scooter Libby and Valerie Plame - we were informed that a tiny online radio station called Open Source was accusing our new Internet behemoth of plagiarizing its name. The World Wide Web erupted. News of our arrogance sailed to the top of Technorati in a number of links, passing even Paris Hilton for a couple of days. The new and presumptuous OSM had taken the name of a poor honest innocent little "netizen" podcaster.

As it turned out, we had done no such thing. The podcaster had no legal claim to Open Source Media. But we were embarrassed. Never mind that much of the criticism came, as it usually does in such circumstances, from envy. Charles and I felt terrible. Everything our critics had said about us was true. We were The Man.

We tried to turn lemons into the proverbial lemonade by going back to as quickly as we could to our roots. We publicly apologized and gave the podcaster back his name. We would be Pajamas Media once again...

You know, it isn't so much that Simon is a baldfaced liar; it's that he's a remarkably bad baldfaced liar. You'd think the dumb bastard would take, at the very least, enough care to tell his falsehoods in such a manner that some batshit crazy internet denizen (especially the one he names on page 141) couldn't easily prove them to be outright lies. At least that's what you and I would think. When you're Roger L. Simon, veracity isn't the issue... Your ego is the issue.

Simon would love you to think the whole Open Source Media dustup was a product of there being (a) a podcaster too tiny to register as a internet life form, and (b) a bunch of envious bloggers bent on destroying OSM/Pajamas Media out of, well, envy. That is, of course, pure bullshit. Let's start from the beginning, shall we?

This is my November 15, 2005 post regarding Pajamas Media's announcement of the change to Open Source Media.

This November 16, 2007 post is where Dennis' deranged minions spot the fact that OSM and Open Source Media are already trademarked.

This November 17, 2005 post reproduces Roger L. Simon's first attempt to lie his way out of Pajamas Media's trademark infringement.

Here's my November 18, 2005 post reproducing (the real) Open Source Media's letter to Simon regarding Pajamas Media's trademark infringement. Read Seth McGrath's description of (the real) Open Source Media and tell me if that fits Roger's description of a "tiny online radio station".

Here's my November 18, 2005 post reproducing several emails from (the real) Open Source Media. Both emails demonstrate to what extent Roger L. Simon willing to lie to get out of this debacle. Be sure to follow the links back to (the real) OSM's blog.

Here's another November 18, 2005 post regarding another email received from (the real) Open Source Media. Be sure to follow the links back to (the real) OSM's blog.

Unfortunately, I didn't get around to posting a link to Roger's press release declaring Pajamas Media was going to give up Open Source Media. On November 19, 2005, Roger's wife - Sheryl Longin - commenting anonymously as "sj" at rogerlsimon.com, began demanding that Roger "out" me (at that time I was blogging anonymously). On that date I posted my true identity. Then on November 20, 2005 I revealed the sordid details of my business association with Roger L. Simon in a post entitled The Certain Thing. It would appear that I was a busy enough boy to forget to document the OSM fuckup to its conclusion. Strangely enough, Pajamas Media's archives only go back to April, 2006, so there's no way to find the announcement there. I do remember two things about the press release, though:

1. Roger lied about what had transpired between Pajamas Media and (the real) Open Source Media.
2. He actually used the word "groovy".

I think it's pretty clear from the posts provided above that Roger L. Simon is a compulsive liar. Open Source Media (the real one, that is) wasn't some unknown blogger podcasting in pajamas from the basement of his house. It's also obvious that Roger L. Simon and Pajamas Media didn't just magnanimously grant (the real) Open Source Media the right to continue using the name... Open Source Media (the real one, that is) had Simon and Pajamas Media dead to rights on trademark infringement.

So why is Roger L. Simon peddling this sort of bullshit? His ego, of course.

Blacklisting Myself is, to the extent I been able to force myself to read it, a love letter from Roger L. Simon to Roger L. Simon. What Simon wants from his reader is acceptance of the extremely dubious proposition that Pajamas Media's failure had far more to do with the incompetence - or envy - of others than anything he actually did. Hence the tone of silly fake honesty that permeates his telling of the saga of Pajamas Media.

Given the needs of his ego, it shouldn't surprise anyone that in the end Roger L. Simon blames none other than Aubrey Chernick for the Open Source Media fiasco:

We tried to turn lemons into the proverbial lemonade by going back as quickly as we could to our roots. We publicly apologized and gave the podcaster back his name. [That is an outright lie - DtP] We would be Pajamas Media once again. Indeed, we are Pajamas Media, or PJM, to this day, and now Pajamas TV as well. But the damage had been done. Our critics chortled. In the midst of this, Aubrey was blamed, perhaps more than he should have been, for pushing the bloggers toward pompous corporate respectability. [My emphasis - DtP] The fault was at least as much as mine. But the solution wasn't simple, either.

Catch that? Read between the lines and... Now it's all Aubrey Chernick's fault. I don't recall anyone criticizing Aubrey Chernick from the OSM debacle. And given that I was Pajamas Media's leading critic at that point in time, I'm pretty damn sure if somebody had publicly blamed Chernick, I would have heard of it and posted about it.

So the bottom line is this: Roger L. Simon is using Blacklisting Myself as the vehicle to suggest that it was Chernick, and not he, that screwed the pooch. I wonder how that went over with Chernick? As I've said more than once, Simon will sacrifice anything and everything on the altar of his own ego.

Two Slightly Off-Topic Questions: Can anyone out there think of a single blogger who has been more ridiculously pompous about blogging, the blogosphere and "new media" than Roger L. Simon? If not, why would anyone buy into the idea that it was Aubrey Chernick (and not Simon himself) who was pushing Pajamas Media towards "pompous corporate respectability"?

Update: The estimable - and invaluable - Tex McRae, who was very much my (silent) partner in crime back in November, 2005, managed to find an archived copy of Roger L. Simon and Charles Johnson's November 21, 2005 announcement of Pajamas Media's decision to drop Open Source Media and OSM and revert to Pajamas Media. Here's the link and text:

Once upon a time, some friends who met in the casual atmosphere of the blogosphere (us) got together and decided it would be groovy to start a blog company. "We could call it Pajamas Media," we said, referring to the now-famous quote by whatshisface, who disparaged bloggers as a bunch of guys sitting around in their sleepwear. Well, we were as surprised as anyone when we managed to raise a significant amount of capital to form said company.

 At our swanky launch party in the Rainbow Room at New York’s Rockefeller Center on November 16, we changed out of our "pajamas" both literally and figuratively. We went from being http://web.archive.org/web/20051126024300/http://www.pajamasmedia.com/ to OSM™ Media, LLC, the OSM being short for Open Source Media. And oh, what a drubbing we took. Many, many readers pointed out to us that OSM™ was an oxymoron; the open source tech community expressed concern; and a very fine gentleman named Christopher Lydon at Open Source (http://web.archive.org/web/20051126024300/http://www.radioopensource.org/) politely pointed out that we might be trampling on his space. (We’re sending him a pair of warm, fuzzy slippers, a heartfelt apology, and his name back, as we speak.)

All of which, as it turns out, has led us to make a change for the better. We are re-assuming our identity as Pajamas Media. (Just give us a few days to sort the technical issues out.) In short, the whole experience of being caught with our pajamas down has been a bit embarrassing, but in the end, when we realized we could get our beloved name back, we were overjoyed. So a warm, hearty thanks to all of you who expressed your displeasure with our phony identity.

So how did this happen in the first place? Back at the beginning, certain, shall we say, paternalistically minded parties (i.e., the guys in suits) decided that we should act like grownups, and being as yet somewhat immature—at least as businesspeople--we did as we were told.

Which is how, one day, we ended up sitting around a conference table listening to representatives from a "branding" company. What followed is still a bit of a nightmarish blur, but it involved a PowerPoint presentation on the history of names, and such probing questions as, "If you were an animal, what animal would you be?" (Which is how we almost ended up as Jellyfish Media.)

Enough said. So, in the spirit of "open source," we thought we’d tell you the real story behind the reason for our name change. And hope that our corporate parents will be satisfied with good grades and healthy revenue.

UPDATES: OpenSource graciously acknowledges our name change (or re-assumption of our old name).

See, I told you he used the word "groovy" in a business press release.

What a putz.

Also note that in the announcement, Simon acknowledges that Lydon owns Open Source Media and OSM. In Blacklisting Myself, he tries to sell the reader on the idea that he graciously permitted Lydon to use it because he (Roger) is just, well, a really swell guy...

What a putz.

It's Time For A Big Pile Of Amanda Sentences...

Leonard Pinth-Garnell here...

...Bringing you yet another installment of Bad Femnist Blogging: The Amanda Marcotte Edition.

Sentence #1:

A rape culture is a funhouse mirror version of the anti-choice culture’s attitudes about abortion.

16 words. I defy anyone to make sense of the above sentence.

Sentence #2:

Anti-choice sentiment is part of the rape culture, of course, because like rape apologists, anti-choicers view women as subhuman and our bodies as eligible for being commandeered for others to their own ends.

35 words. Of course it would never occur to Amanduh that equating the act of rape and the idea that abortion is immoral might - just maybe - completely trivialize the seriousness of rape. Now would it?

 Sentence #3:

But what’s fascinating is whether or not a rape victim’s account is given social weight by being collaborated by a Be-penised American, the same slurs come out as would if rape apologists thought they could get away with calling the victim a liar.

44 words. "Be-penised"?

Sentence #4:

Of course, I’m a fun-killing feminist who thinks all rape makes you a suck-ass rapist who should go to jail. 

22 words. Planet Amanda appears to be a very scary place indeed.

Sentence #5:

The sperm-worshipping crowd managed to sneak in a victory almost under the radar yesterday when the state house of North Dakota passed what will probably prove to be a complete ban on abortion, and quite possibly on most female-controlled types of contraception.

44 words. Given how much time Amanda spends writing about blowjobs, I just assumed she was part of the "sperm-worshipping crowd". Maybe this means there's more than one.

Sentence #6:

I say that this about sperm vs. women, because men will still have full legal rights to tell their sperm where to go and what to do.

27 words. I not sure what is funnier... The notion that Amanda thinks sperm are trainable, or the notion that men can take non-complying sperm into a court of law.

Sentence #7:

But while sperm don’t really have intentions in the human sense, they’re perceived as having purpose, and these laws are about making sure women have no way to interfere with the sperm’s purpose once the man has relinquished control.

39 words. Hey, if we've trained our sperm, we wouldn't need to relinquish control, now would we?

Sentence #8:

The injection of the person of the pregnant Bristol Palin in the ongoing debates over sex and whether or not women are fully human was a divisive thing---it separated the wingnut base from the rest of us who don’t have the energy or desire to obsess over forced pregnancy as the ideal way to get women in line.

59 words. "The injection of the person of the pregnant Bristol Palin..."? How about "The injection of the pregnant Bristol Palin..."? Is there some Amanda Rule of Writing that requires one to use twice as many words as necessary in the most confusing manner possible to entertain one's readers?

This Week's Grand Jury Prize For Absolute Proof That No Matter What The Context, And No Matter How Much You Familiarize Yourself With Her, Amanda Marcotte Really Is Disgusting:

Not just that it’s wrong to conflate disgusting with wrong, but the concept of disgusting is very context-dependent.  If you familiarize yourself with something, it’s less disgusting.  So anal sex turns your stomach the first time you hear about it, but as you grow used to the idea, it’s no big deal.  Sex in general loses a lot of the disgust response as you grow used to it.  Masturbation isn’t disgusting if you don’t think of it as disgusting.  But even then, all this is context-dependent.  If you encountered any of these behaviors in a public bathroom by accident, you’d be disgusted, most likely.

Evidently blowjobs just don't make it any more...

The Week's Grand Jury Prize For Absolute Proof That We Don't Find Amanda Marcotte Either Disgusting Or Morally Inferior Because She Shaves Her Legs... We Find Her Disgusting And Morally Inferior Because She Spends Inordinate Amounts Of Time Discussing Oral And Anal Sex:

Of course, all this means that women have traditionally been portrayed as morally inferior by dwelling on the idea that our bodies are more disgusting.  Which causes a real moral quandary, because every time I shave my legs, I’m contributing to a society that argues that women are more disgusting, therefore women are less moral.  But of course, it has a lot more functions than just that, so I suspect I’ll keep the habit up. 

You go, girl!

This Week's Grand Jury Prize For Absolute Proof That Not Matter How Disgusting Amanda Marcotte Can Be With All The Oral Sex References And The Anal Sex References, She Can Still Reach Back And Pull Out Something Even More Disgusting... In This Case The Image Of President Obama Urinating On His Fellow Citizens:

Under Republicans, Congress voted on most of its important legislation at 2 or 3AM so that it wouldn’t be covered by the media, and used the daylight hours to name post offices and give awards to Little League teams.  After behavior like that, Republicans should be lucky to have a voice in the proceedings at all, and they should be honored that Barack Obama is such a big person that he’s trying to reach out to them, instead of just piss in their faces in revenge.

It's somewhat amazing that she hasn't found work as a speech writer. Kind of brings a whole new meaning to the idea that the words should flow across the page...

This Week's Grand Jury Prize For Willful Forgetfulness:

 Instead, they’ve done what the Democrats never did, which was openly set out to make sure that the country goes to shit under a President so they can hold him accountable and get re-elected into power.  Imagine if the Democrats had openly stated that they hope the war and the economy go to shit under Bush so that they can win.  Just imagine the outrage.

Yeah, just imagine...

Sentence #9:

The first three rules of writing fiction are: 1) Show, don’t tell. 2) Don’t indulge exposition. 3) Seriously, exposition just comes across as lazy.

21 words. I'll just bet she meant to say "Don't indulge in exposition". Then again, Amanda's Next Three Rules For Writing Anything are: 1) Grammar? 2) Syntax? 3) Proofread?

Sentence #10:

There’s a couple of links I want to toss up tonight, because I think these are troubling indicators that armchair evo psych “theories” about how women are biologically inferior to men have become so ingrained in our consciousness, that half-baked pseudo-science evolutionary just-so stories don’t have to be made up at all.

55 words. Make sense of that, if you dare. The funny part? I'm pretty sure that she didn't mean to imply we could start using true half-baked pseudo-science evolutionary just-so stories... Which is exactly what she did.

The Week's Grand Jury Prize For Unintentional Hilarity:

Invariably, when I write about this issue, I get accused of thinking that humans didn’t evolve at all.

18 words. Actually, when Amanda writes about most issues, many of us tend to come to the conclusion that not all humans have evolved at the same rate...

Sentence #11:

Which is, of course, complete nonsense that is wielded by people who are too emotionally invested in proving these stereotypes to see the big gaping holes that occur when you make claims above evolved traits with no real proof to back it up, in a society where there are often millions of pieces of evidence for the social conditioning theory.

60 words. It takes a special sort of genius to write a 60 word incomplete sentence.

Sentence #12:

But what really bothers me is that people have fallen so far into the habit of thinking all differences or behaviors must be biological and genetic in origin, that you almost never see anyone confront some of the otherwise obvious issues, like women often lose their desires because, as I put it in the article, “women feel overworked, underpaid, underappreciated, understimulated, and shamed about their bodies.”

66 words. Then again, maybe their partners spend all their time rambling on about blowjobs, anal sex and pissing in other people's faces. No wait...

Sentence #13:

To point out that women’s lowered libidos are the direct result of being tapped out and understimulated suggests solutions that will unnerve a lot of men and challenge male power---more balance in sexual imagery, less bullying women about their bodies, more social permission for female libidos that makes some men fear infidelity, more men picking up housework and treating women with more respect, and even direct changes to what you do in bed so that it’s not all penis-centered.

81 words. "Penis-centered"?

Sentence #14:

I realized yesterday that I’ve been in this world for five years now, which means that I was around when we liberal bloggers felt like a small group of outrageous dissenters pushing back against the insanely huge and disturbed right wing blogosphere, which means that I had to witness all their bloviating about how they were “citizen journalists” who would topple the evil liberal media by blogging a lot about how awesome and manly they were sitting behind their computers wearing camouflage pajamas to “support” the troops.

87 words. Stop playing victim, will you? We all had to listen to Raj, OK?

Sentence #15:

I bring this up, because as a blogger you occasionally get some baffling hostility from mainstream media reporters (never from the alternative press, though), and I think it’s because they sort of lump all bloggers together as their enemies, because right wing bloggers actually declared themselves as such.

48 words. Then again, it could just be that they are offended by the brutal murder of the English language.

Sentence #16:

And liberal bloggers criticize the media relentlessly, so it’s no wonder journalists often think we’re all in the same boat, and frankly I think that’s one reason that mainstream media sources were glad to dogpile myself and Melissa McEwan two years ago without doing things like checking up on the Catholic League to find out what they were really about.

60 words. The fact that the Catholic League was the messenger wasn't the issue, Amanda. The fact that John Edwards was stupid enough to hire two viciously anti-Catholic bloggers to work on his presidential campaign was the issue...

This Week's Grand Jury Prize For Coming Up With Something Even More Disgusting Than The Other Disgusting Stuff:

Like if I saw a bloody tampon laying on the sidewalk and felt disgust, does that really have to mean that I’ve got internalized misogyny against women and our body functions?  No.  It’s just gross.

Of course, if I - as a man - wrote a post that I was disgusted by seeing a bloody tampon on the sidewalk, Amanda Marcotte would be the very first to accuse me of misogyny against women and attempting to shame them for their perfectly natural body functions. Am I right?

The Week's Grand Jury Prize For Coming Up With Something Even More Disgusting Than The Other Disgusting Thing That Was Even More Disgusting Than The Other Disgusting Stuff:

But the fact that people confuse the two emotions---moral outrage and disgust---is fascinating.  And it seems like it’s an accident of evolution, actually.  Morality had to evolve out of pre-existing emotions, I suspect, and instead of piggybacking on anger or grief, moral outrage appears to have evolved out of disgust.  Last night I was walking down the street and walked by a woman whose dog was shitting on the sidewalk, and when she quite responsibly picked up the poop, I smelled it and my face wrinkled up into the disgust expression involuntarily, and she looked at me, and I felt bad, because for a moment, I worried she thought I was disapproving of her when in fact I appreciated that she cleaned up after her dog.  Moral outrage looks like disgust and vice versa.

Wonder what she and her boyfriend discuss over dinner, don't you?

Sentence #17:

But wouldn’t it be awesome if we could distinguish easily between the two emotions?

14 words. Yes. It would be totally awesome.

This Week's Grand Jury Prize For The Essay Most Likely To Be Read During Open Mike Night At A Nightclub Named "The Ramrod":

I think a lot of our culture war issues exist strictly because it’s easy to disgust people with things they aren’t familiar with, and from there you can make them feel morally outraged about it.  It’s really obvious how homophobes do this. They exploit a lot of people’s anxieties about sex acts they don’t understand and therefore find disgusting, like anal sex, and then allow that disgust to substitute for sound moral judgments. If they could step back from it and realize that even if anal sex does and always will disgust them, it doesn’t make it wrong. 

That may be true, but it still seems Amanda will always be both disgusting and wrong.

Gadzooks! How many of you feel like you need seven showers and your mind washed out with soap?

If you haven't attacked your computer with a ball peen hammer, passed out cold, or run screaming from the room, feel free to vote for either the least or most disgusting and/or morally outrageous sentence we've thrust upon you.

As always, this week's winner will receive a genuine Pandagon Anal Sex Toy Of Death™...

 

...Personally signed by Amanda Marcotte. And...

 

"Mmm... Moral outrage..."

...A genuine Pandagon Vagina O' Death Combination Butt Plug and Bottle Opener™.

Great Moments In Business And New Media, Part One...

From page 136 of Blacklisting Myself:

...The board, largely Aubrey, asked me to be CEO.

And then the troubles began.

None of use really knew what to do. New Media, whatever its provenance, even if we were herding the proverbial cats, ninety (and growing) wildly individualistic bloggers with ideological spread from Michelle Malkin to David Corn of The Nation. (Despite our best efforts, Corn and other left-wing bloggers like my old friend Marc Cooper are no longer with us. It's no surprise that in our time it proved very difficult to keep left and right together.) But what would this mean in practice? How would we preserve the integrity of the blogosphere while evolving into a viable, profit-making enterprise? This is where the blunders began. We decided to hire a branding company, one of those strange institutions that tell you who you are and what you should call yourself. It should be no surprise that I had only vaguely heard of such operations until about a week before we hired one. But a-branding we did go.

When I think back now on the spectacle of Charles Johnson - the aging hippie in his fifties still with a blond pony tail - and me sitting around a conference table in West Hollywood watching a slide show on the "history of names" from the Greeks to Coca-Cola, I have to laugh to preserve my sanity. This exercise took up the first two days of this company's traditional presentation, for which we were paying a hundred thousand dollars (as oppposed to reading about it in a book for $19.95). At the time, I felt I had just joined some new form of corporate Scientology. Even after this charade, neither the branding company nor Charles and I could come up with an acceptable name. (Acme Media, if you believe it, was considered - and only half in jest.) 

Makes you wonder why Pajamas Media failed, doesn't it? I mean, what sane and sober business person wouldn't go out and pay $100,000 to a branding company prior to actually developing a viable business model (and plan)? Kind of clues you in on what Wodger's primary concern was...

IMAGE, baby!

Right? Given that it was obviously Aubrey's money that got thrown down the rathole, I wonder if he found this episode as humorous as Wodg did. Especially given the fact that $100,000 got him was this:

 

Which is exactly what he had before Wodg and The Poodle ran off with the $100,000.

Like I said: Makes you wonder why Pajamas Media failed, doesn't it?

Simple Graphs For Simple People...

Demonstrating the sort of subtle intellect he's become renowned for, Richard Murphy appropriates an embarrassingly simplistic graph from Huffington Post and uses it as "proof" that massive government spending is THE ANSWER. He thinks it is the sort of thing that will move adults to back the New Economic Institute's embarrassingly simplistic Green New Deal, which Dickie helped write.

Here's the graph:

 

It's worth noting that the author (one Paul Abrams) of the Huffington Post article uses the above graph to defiantly hurl the following dare at the non-Hopey/Changey:

Winning The Economic Argument: Show Opponents This Graph, Then Ask Them To Explain

It's also worth noting that were Mr. Abrams a college sophomore his graph and argument might, on a good day, rate him a B-/C+ in a typical Introduction to Macroeconomicscourse taught at a typical midwest land grant institution of higher learning. That Richard Murphy would slap this up on his web site and declare victory tells you all you need to know about his grasp of the dismal science.

Anyway, in answer to Mr. Abrams' challenge:

When I see Gross Domestic Product moving in lockstep with governmental (federal) spending over a substantial period of time, the conclusion I DO NOT REACH is that the New Deal ended the Great Depression. What the above graph suggests to me is that the federal government's spending has appropriated enough of the available credit to significantly depress private investment... thus prolonging, rather than shortening, the Great Depression. Private investment is, first and always, the only path to economic recovery and new growth.

Anyone interested in the finding the basis for my conclusion would be advised to read the following two books:

The Great Contraction: 1929-1933 by Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz

Depression, War, and the Cold War by Robert Higgs

There are others, of course, but these two will give you what you need the fastest.

That someone with Murphy's educational and professional background would appropriate the sort of dreck Abrams is peddling is as disappointing as it is predictable.

It is worth noting that unfettered capitalism was not the root cause of the Great Depression... That honor must be shared by the Federal Reserve Board, Congress, and the Hoover and Roosevelt Administrations. I think there is an excellent chance that should this recession (largely caused by the Federal Reserve Board, Congress and the Bush Administration) deepen, it will largely be because of the Federal Reserve Board, Congress and the Obama Administration.

And for you Republicans out there, please understand that your "plan" is simply a different path to the same error being committed by the Democrats.

OK, OK, I Get It: You Don't Care That I Made Raj's Book...

Well, instead of Ragging on Raj, which is what I wanted to do, it seems most of my readers want to talk about this. Evidently, they have minds of their own, those readers of mine.

The bastards.

Well, as much as I'd love to jump right in there and regale you all with accounting theory, governmental GAAP and overall we're-on-the-fast-track-to-Hell-now-that-Obama's-in-charge fearmongering, I just can't do it. Neither the energy nor the enthusiasm is there.

Corsi's article is the financial equivalent of one of those global warming scare articles... You know, the sort that proclaims if we don't all go vegetarian, install pee-recycling toilets, forego having rug rats and stop the cows from farting methane, Gaia will be a 1,000 degrees in the shade wasteland by next Wednesday.

In both cases my response an appropriately apathetic Yeah, whatever...

If you're the sort that enjoy wringing your hands over the state of the national debt, by all means indulge. Who am I to deny you the pleasure of being neurotic? In the meantime, I'll concentrate on that which I find to be meaningful...

I Made Page 141...

Evidently I really did get to him. Good for me.

Here's a paragraph from page 141 of Roger L. Simon's Blacklisting Myself: A Memoir of a Hollywood Apostate in the Age of Terror:

My experiences at Pajamas Media have not always been fun, of course. As a screenwriter and a novelist you get your quota of bad reviews and nasty insults, but they are nothing compared to the assaults you undergo on the Internet., which can be non-stop and are now written in indelible digital ink. (In the old days, bad notices faded away in the nether reaches of libraries; now they pop up perpetually in the three-second Google search.) You will find high in my ranking a man named Kenton Kelly, who blogs under the name of Dennis the Peasant and was briefly involved with the formation of Pajamas Media. Because we decided not to include him in the business, Kelly evidently considers me somewhere between Gilles de Rais and Attila and has gone on to tell the world as much with the devotion of a medieval scholiast, albeit an obscene one. Such, I have learned, is the nature of running a business in the digital age.

Nice job there, Rog. If anyone reading your book hasn't heard my bitch yet, they will now. Good of you to point them in the right direction... The extra sixteen pageviews I'll garner from a mention in your opus will just be a bonus, I guess. Too bad I don't have any advertising.

It's interesting to note that what he didn't call me was a liar. And unsurprisingly, Roger L. Simon shows his usual unwarranted self-regard: What I consider him to be is somewhere between Max Bialystok and Max Bialystok... He hasn't the gravitas (or the cajones) to qualify for anything weightier than a buffo opera character.

 

"I'm blacklisted, Kenton Kelly called me names, and I'm wearing a cardboard belt... HELP!"

Update: Here is the 2005 film - rarely seen in the West - of my arrival at Pajamas Media's world headquarters (interrupting Roger L. Simon and Charles Johnson during a strategic planning session) to discuss my petty grievances:

Degrading Himself: Memoir of a Defective Man

Don't try to tell me that you're an intellectual
Cause you're just another boring bisexual
"I met Andy Warhol at a really chic party"
Blow it out your hairdo 'cause you work at Hardee's

-"Instant Club Hit" by the Dead Milkmen

During last week's kerfuffle about Pajamas Media's blogging network going belly up, a blogger (unfortunately I cannot remember who) pointed out that Roger L. Simon's remarkably inappropriate press release announcing that event was more a product of Roger's lack of self-awareness than his lack of business acumen. In essence, this blogger contended, the genesis of many of Simon's most serious Pajamas Media problems related to his inability to understand how he came across to others.

I couldn't help but think of that particular insight while reading the extraordinarily self-degrading excerpt (entitled "A Night With Timothy Leary") from Simon's new book (Blacklisting Myself: Memoir of a Hollywood Apostate in the Age of Terror) that is posted at the Pajamas Media website. In all honesty, I can't remember reading anything like it in years... something I am profoundly grateful for. And understand that from my perspective, the most shocking aspect of Simon's remembrance isn't the events he is recounting, but rather his complacent, self-satisfied tone. Evidently, smoking crack with Tim Leary constitutes one of life's highlights.

It's enough to make you turn away from the page in embarrassment for the man.

In passing such a judgment, it's important to emphasize several points about "A Night With Timothy Leary". Before doing that, though, let's make sure we understand the salient points of the story:

1. Roger L. Simon takes his wife to a dinner party with Timothy Leary.

2. On what is essentially a schoolyard dare, Roger L. Simon takes his wife home and then drives Leary and Leary's wife to a drug house.

3. Roger L. Simon smokes crack with Leary, Leary's wife and a $10 hooker.

4. Roger L. Simon drives Timothy Leary, Leary's wife, and the $10 hooker from the drug house to their respective residences.

5. Roger L. Simon drives home to his wife to recount his evening.

Now, let's consider the following...

Point the First: At the time this happened, which was sometime in the 1980s, Roger L. Simon was probably in his late 30s to early 40s. He was married and had children. Think about that for a moment: Here's a man risking his life, his freedom, his career, his marriage and the futures of his children on nothing more than a whim born of his own ego. He could have been murdered, robbed, addicted, arrested or imprisoned. None of that mattered. What mattered was impressing Timothy Leary.

Point the Second: We're talking about Timothy Leary here. By the eighties Leary had devolved into the equivalent of a carnvial geek. He'd destroyed his professional credibility, done college tours with G. Gordon Liddy, speculated (in all seriousness) on the need for time travel and space colonization, tried to land work in Hollywood, and also done some really stupid stuff. This is the sort of person one smokes crack with - in a drug house no less - just to make a "good" impression?

Point the Third: While Simon makes a half-hearted attempt to convince us that he understands just how stupid he had acted in accepting a crack pipe from Leary, it is abundantly clear from the tone of his recollection that he doesn't. There is no remorse there... largely because he doesn't seem to understand just how repellant this little episode is.

Point the Fourth: This is a man who is willing to divulge this sort of tale, in this sort of manner, and still believe that he can purchase political currency amongst social conservatives at CPAC this very month. I can see him now, wandering around CPAC with Joe the Plumber saying, "Hey, I didn't screw the hooker... What's the problem?"

I am amazed that anyone with an ounce of self-awareness would ever breath a word of this sort of episode to anyone, let alone publish it for public consumption. I knew Roger L. Simon would do just about anything for money... but this?