From the Virtually Speaking Media Panel: digby & Joan McCarter- discuss developments of the week; countering the narratives of the legacy media. Informed, lively and informal. Plus political satire from Culture of Truth. Follow @digby56 @JoanMcCarter
Comments, questions here <http://virtuallyspeaking.us/
Listen live and later http://www.blogtalkradio.com/
Virtually Speaking with Jay Ackroyd. 6p PT/9P ET – Listen live or later http://www.blogtalkradio.com/virtuallyspeaking/2013/05/17/ian-welsh-virtually-speaking-with-jay-ackroyd-1
Engaging the surveillance state. Editor, writer & social media consultant Ian Welsh – “The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine” – comes by to continue his extended conversation with host Jay Ackroyd.
Read Ian here Follow @IWelsh @JayAckroyd
Virtually Speaking with Jay Ackroyd – 6p PT/9p ET –
Veteran campaign strategist, journalist & author Glenn W. Smith stops by to talk with host Jay Ackroyd about Texas as harbinger for the nation. Follow @GlennWSmith @JayAckroyd
Read Glenn at Progressive Voices & Firedoglake
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I’ll be on with Nicole Sandler at 11:30 EST, talking about the Sandford election and other stuff. Click here to listen.
In case you missed it:
This ran yesterday, so you might have missed it.
I wanted to do something to show my appreciation for your support through the years, and since there are so many things I’m no longer comfortable sharing with the general public, or don’t have the time to do on a daily basis, here’s your chance.
Or for now, you can sign up here. (No, I won’t know who you are.) The first newsletter will go out sometime next week.
After this post passes, you can always sign up in the right-hand column.
I probably would have just written “Matt Yglesias: Dalton, Harvard. I rest my case.” But Mr. Destructo’s is so much better:
Matthew Yglesias—a Norelco marketing experiment to see if a hand-drawn Sharpie beard on a peeled potato could sell men’s earrings—wrote a morally and intellectually odious article at his second job yesterday. His Slate column, “Different Places Have Different Safety Rules and That’s OK,” addressed the deaths of 161 workers in a factory collapse in Bangladesh with the tone they so richly deserved: bored.
Writing off the death of 161 people with 370 words of vacuous unconcern requires the machine-like efficiency we’ve come to expect from places where pre-teens assemble Air Jordans. Yglesias’ thesis, what little exists, is that the Bangladeshis are a people squalid enough that death is an acceptable randomly applied career path, and that dead Bangladeshis are what keep flat-front chinos at $29.99 at the outlet store. Our pants are cheap because their lives are, and cheaper things are innately good. Just think how much Upton Sinclair saved on hamburger as a young man. What an ingrate.
At best, one could chalk Yglesias’ attitude up to the neoliberal worship of free trade, but ascribing any ideology to Yglesias is like trying to pin a Bad Citizenship medal on fog. He differs sharply from his Slate colleague Dave Weigel, who takes pains to acknowledge his affiliation with Koch-owned Reason. While Weigel seems like an affable guy who delights in mocking the ridiculous—and, with the GOP the party that forgot math, science and history, he finds common cause with the left—it’s clear that liberals probably would not enjoy handing the budget over to him. This is how honest compromises are struck.
Yglesias offers nothing so concrete. He is a process acolyte, who never strays far from the orbit of Beltway centrist think-speak. His ideological bona fides extend to thinking that slightly-left people saying things identical to everyone else are slightly better than everyone else—all of whom are essentially right anyway, because why else would people agree? Ideas are less important than the formalism of tautologically explaining them, reiterating them, then deforming reality to accommodate them. His job is not to challenge them but hammer out a 500-word explainer detailing how wrong you are, while reassuring you that we’re on the right track. Matthew Yglesias’ voice is the same soothing one you use on your dog while the vet is euthanizing him.
Go read the rest. It’s really something.
6p PT /9p ET
Dave Johnson & Marcy Wheeler discuss developments of the week; countering the narratives of the legacy media. Informed, lively and informal. Topic info tba.
Plus political satire from Culture of Truth.
Marcy Wheeler — Investigative journalist, working primarily on civil liberties issues, Marcy regularly breaks stories related to use of illegal detention and interrogation by the US Government. Anatomy of Deceit: How the Bush Administration Used the Media to Sell the Iraq War and Out a Spy is the definitive work on the Scooter Libby trial. • Follow @emptywheel
Dave Johnson is a Fellow with Campaign for America’s Future and a Senior Fellow with Renew California. He writes frequently at Seeing the Forest and Alternet. Follow @DCJohnson
The Virtually Speaking Media Panel: Avedon Carol, Cliff Schecter, David Dayen, Dave Johnson, David Waldman, digby, Gaius Publius, Joan McCarter, Marcy Wheeler, Stuart Zechman
Listen live or later: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/
Tonight: digby & Gaius Publius – 9p ET/6p PT – Listen live and later http://www.blogtalkradio.com/
President’s budget and the politics of the Chained-CPI, how that affects the 2014 campaign. (What are Republicans really up to?)
Is Obama a “transformational” president?
The new openness on social issues (except women’s rights, of course)
Gaius’s climate change elevator speech.
Plus political satire from Culture of Truth.
Follow @digby56, @gaius_publius,@JayAckroyd, @Bobblespeak
More at virtuallyspeaking.us/
digby — American political writer and founder of the liberal blog Hullabaloo, Digby has contributed to Campaign For America’s Future’s blog The Big Con, Salon Magazine, Huffington Post, Crooks and Liars and Firedoglake.
Gaius Publius — Professional writer of stories, poems, and books on education & technology. Frequent writer and Contributing Editor at AMERICAblog.com. Occasional guest on Ring of Fire Radio, The Matt Filipowicz Show and other venues. Gaius has two political-themed works in process; one fiction and one non-fiction.
