"Microaggression" — the word that died.

I've been working on the theory that the term "microaggression" briefly spiked to prominence and then utterly crashed with the story of the professor who was accused of "microaggression" for correcting spelling and grammar errors. I picked apart some details in the way that story was told here, and then I began to Google "microaggression" every day or so to see what was surfacing in the world of microaggression. It's an interesting label, possibly useful, clearly abusable, and I wanted to see where it would get put. But all that came up, again and again, was that spelling-and-grammar-correcting professor. Hence the theory that the word died.

But today's search turned up something new over at Buzzfeed: "21 Racial Microaggressions You Hear On A Daily Basis." A photographer named Kiyun got her friends to "write down an instance of racial microaggression they have faced," so this is a series of people racially microaggressed against, holding signs. This is a pretty good-humored project, and the young people who went along with the photographer's idea object mostly to dumb remarks ("What do you guys speak in Japan? Asian??"), excessively personal remarks, ("What does your hair look like today?") and — here's something to hearten the John Roberts' fans — lack of color-blindness ("What are you?").

You know there's a color-blind way to fight against microaggression: Etiquette!

"We Wrote a Heartbreaking and Terrifying Post about Viral Content without Lists or GIFs. Then You Clicked on It, and Magic Happened."

"Sure, you clicked on '8 Reasons Why This Puppy Will Make You Cry and Change Everything.' But what if you didn't cry, and nothing changed?"

Once you've clicked on a few posts that promised to make you cry or change your view of the world forever but didn't deliver, your default assumption will become that when you see something like that, it means somebody's trying to get you to be a part of something artificial.

Yeah, but you've kind of got to give the people who do that kind of virality-by-headline credit for being so terribly transparent. How is anyone even fooled? It's as if your 5-year-old child ran up to you squealing "Ooh, Daddy, look, this is really really cute!" I feel a little embarrassed for these people sometimes. They are adults who've decided to write like a bunch of little girls talking about their little ponies.

I'm pretty sure these headline writers assuage their shame by nurturing their belief that it's all somehow ironic and somehow even edgy and not completely smooshy.

How dumb do you need to be to believe the headline's promise that you'll go all gooey or experience a new charge of hope for humanity? Well, if you're a little slow, then as the above-linked piece predicts, you'll probably eventually learn that it's a come-on, just as you've abandoned any shred of hope that — as it says in the email — you really have won a million dollars and just as, years ago, you were able to remain motionless in your recliner when the late-night TV huckster yelled that you must act now.

I'm more worried that these heavy-handed urgings will dull our response to subtler manipulations. The truly dangerous propaganda isn't about a kitten being cute or a dog welcoming a war veteran. That's the candy of pop culture that might waste our time and do nothing to alleviate our shallowness. We may learn that candy is candy, but that's not much insight at all. Maybe the real trick of places like Buzzfeed and Upworthy is that they get you only so far, far enough to notice and resist/resent sharp pokes in the ribs and to become complacent about your jadedness. And that's what leaves you open and vulnerable to the less obvious propaganda that permeates everything else.

"The most important photo of all White House photos."

"Michelle Obama: Realizing that this will look bad," the 2 Nonchalance Boys, the "BEST.DAY.OF.LIFE." Reporter Girl, and all the rest... including the tiny little girl that got killed by Obama's dog. Nah. She just got knocked down by the uncontrollable beast.

And you thought the government was an uncontrollable beast. No, the government is a happy, friendly, family dog. It wouldn't hurt anybody.

Insurance company insider says Obama's IYLYPYCKYP fix "doesn’t change anything other than force insurers to be the political flack jackets for the administration."

As quoted by Evan McMorris-Santoro at BuzzFeed and repeated in the headline.

What the hell is a "flack jacket"? A jacket to keep flacks away?

Perhaps he meant "flak jacket," I don't know. The flacks really have been annoying lately.

When Phillippe Reines — the man behind Hillary's "reset" button — said "fuck off" and "have a good life" to Michael Hastings — the reporter who died recently in a mysterious car crash.

In the comments to the "Snowden is like a hot meat pie in your hands" post — about what leaker Edward Snowden means to the Russians — David said "So much for reset. Apparently Obama and Clinton have not improved relations [with Russia] much." Which got me looking up articles about Hillary Clinton's foolish "reset" button. I found "Hillary’s Aide Really Half-Assed That ‘Reset’ Button Thing" from March 2009:

[F]ingers had to be pointed at someone, and, for the most part they were conveniently targeted at a guy everyone hated already anyway, Hillary's senior adviser Phillippe Reines, who was nearly fired during the presidential campaign for making a tactless comment about John McCain's torture experience. He's also been agitating some in the State Department press corps by restricting their access.

(I think the referenced comment about McCain is here.) Now, we talked about Reines last fall in connection with this story: "Hillary Clinton Aide Tells Reporter To 'Fuck Off' And 'Have A Good Life.'" And I'm surprised to see that the reporter is Michael Hastings, who died in a fiery single-car wreck on June 18th:

He had emailed a warning to colleagues on June 17 saying the "Feds" were interviewing his close friends and associates. He added: "I'm onto a big story, and need to go off the radat (sic) for a bit." BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith confirmed that he had received the email....

The circumstances and rumors surrounding the death led the FBI to issue a statement stating that Hastings was never under investigation.

In this light, you might want to read that Phillipe Reines/Michael Hastings email exchange again. Hastings was asking questions like "Why didn’t the State Department search the [Benghazi] consulate...?" and "What other potential valuable intelligence [besides Ambassador Stevens's diary] was left behind that could have been picked up by apparently anyone searching the grounds?" Reines became extremely defensive and abusive:

I now understand why the official investigation by the Department of the Defense as reported by The Army Times The Washington Post concluded beyond a doubt that you’re an unmitigated asshole.

How’s that for a non-bullshit response?

Now that we’ve gotten that out of our systems, have a good day.

And by good day, I mean Fuck Off.

ADDED: From 4 days ago: "Was Michael Hastings Murdered? Internet Conspiracy Theories Are Rife."

First, it's obvious that Hastings was working on a big story, though the exact subject is under debate. Considering the title of his email ["FBI Investigation, re:NSA"] and his last article on BuzzFeed, many (including the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald) think it may have been a piece on PRISM. The Huffington Post thinks he was writing about General Petraeus, while the Los Angeles Times stated that it was on a privacy lawsuit against the Department of Defense and the FBI. They are all big, government-related cases that many would prefer go unexamined.

Second, Hastings reached out to the legal team at Wikileaks for assistance, claiming that that FBI were investigating him. Wikileaks has also claimed that there is a "non-public complication" in Hastings' death, though they have not released more information.

Third, while is it ordinary protocol for police departments to issue a statement that there was no foul play (as the LAPD have done), the FBI hardly ever responds to media attention. However, in this case, they have made an exception. The FBI has released a statement denying that they were ever investigating Hastings, which is interesting considering that after years in his field, Hastings is well aware of what being investigated by the FBI looks like.

Fourth, the car accident itself was pretty bizarre. When the car hit the tree, the engine ejected and was later found over 100 feet away. That kind of ejection is pretty unusual, especially for a Mercedes, and it also meant that Hastings would have had to be driving close to 100 mph, which is much faster than that section of road permits.....

"Egypt appoints member of terror group that once massacred tourists to run tourism region."

WaPo article which I found because it was #6 on a Buzzfeed list of "100% Picture-Perfect Ironic Photos."

AND: As long as we're over here on Buzzfeed: "23 Pictures That Prove Society Is Doomed." (But it's not the terrorism.)

UPDATE: "Islamist governor of Egypt's Luxor quits after uproar."

"Photographer sues BuzzFeed for $3.6M over viral sharing model."

"The copyright issues poses a threat to BuzzFeed and similar websites, including Upworthy and For the Win, which have an editorial model based on finding content — especially images — that readers are likely to share on social media."

Last year, BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti explained to the Atlantic that the site pays to license images from companies like Reuters and Getty, but that it also pulls from amateur sites like Tumblr and Flickr. In these cases, the provenance of the images can be unclear — in some cases, the photographer has made them available for public use while other times the author is simply unknown.

The "golden age" of the blog is over.

Says Marc Tracy in The New Republic, which is a news opinion magazine, once edited by Andrew Sullivan, who went on to be one of the giants of the Golden Age of Blogging. If this is post-golden age for blogging, is it the golden age for anything else? There are these blogging-y things like Twitter and Buzzfeed (and I was going to add Facebook, but Facebook's golden age is past, right?).

Tracy is writing a "eulogy" for blogging on the occasion of the NYT shutting down a bunch of its blogs. But the NYT only had blogs in response to the blogging trend, and were those blogs really blogs? The real bloggers were people like Andrew Sullivan. Circa 2001:

The Internet had empowered a few strong writers to create their own brand (if you were idiosyncratic—say, if you were gay, English, Catholic, and heretically conservative—then all the better) and a few strong big brands to create their own small brands....

We will still have blogs, of course, if only because the word is flexible enough to encompass a very wide range of publishing platforms: Basically, anything that contains a scrollable stream of posts is a "blog." What we are losing is the personal blog and the themed blog. Less and less do readers have the patience for a certain writer or even certain subject matter. 

How impatient can we get? I'm getting impatient with Tracy right now. I want to interrupt and say that blogs are a great format if you have a distinctive voice, and not just if you have idiosyncratic attributes — like gay, English, Catholic, and heretically conservative. The form — the blog — was so great, so powerful, so liberating, that many, many writers said me too, often pushed by an old-style publisher like the NYT that needed to have blogs to seem up-to-date. What made the age golden was the greatness of some blogs, like Sullivan's, not the sheer number of blogs at any given time.

Sullivan's blog was almost like a soap opera pegged to the news cycle—which I mean as the highest compliment.... A necessary byproduct was that even if you were a devotee, you were not interested in about half of their posts. You didn't complain, because you didn't have an alternative. Now, in the form of your Twitter feed, you do, and so these old-style blogs have no place anymore.

So, when there were only blogs, one had no choice, but now that there are blogs and Twitter, no one will choose blogs anymore? That makes no sense. First, blogs were an alternative to old media. You could still read the New York Times and The Washington Post and provide your own operatic drama. There was a time when we read the newspaper and talked with family and friends about the stories over the breakfast table and in the coffeehouses. Later, it seemed cool to enlarge our circle of interlocutors with somebody from the internet, like Andrew Sullivan (or Glenn Reynolds). And if you got the nerve, maybe you'd offer yourself on a blog as somebody who was willing to be a virtual presence in other people's conversations. (And if you are me, you got one of those interlocutors to actually materialize at your breakfast table.)

Old media survived the onset of blogging, and blogging will survive Twitter, and Twitter will survive ??? 

Whatever comes along next will change what lives on from the old days. And the old folks will always tend to think that there was, not too long ago, a Golden Age.

ADDED: I think this is very relevant: "...the rise of the internet media and social media and all that stuff. He hates it. Okay. He hates this part of the media. He really thinks that the sort of the buzzification, this isn’t just about BuzzFeed or Politico, and all the stuff, but he thinks that sort of coverage of political media has hurt political discourse. He hates it." (That's Chuck Todd on "Meet the Press" yesterday, talking about Obama.)

"38 Things Minnesotans Are Too Nice To Brag About."

#1 is Bob Dylan and #38 is Prince.

That reminds me, for some reason, as we were driving home today, I remembered the line: "Name me someone that’s not a parasite and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him."

"10 Easter Bunnies Straight From Hell."

Oh, no!

"15 People Who Think Google Is Honoring Hugo Chávez."

"Hugo Chávez was the socialist president of Venezuela; Cesar Chavez was a labor leader and civil rights activist. See the difference?"

ADDED: "But to a small minority of conservatives thumping away at their keyboards on Easter Sunday it was something more sinister. It was a slight on Jesus. Worse still, it was a slight on Jesus directed by the White House, and in particular Barack Obama, America's Kenyan-born Muslim leader, probably."

"Democrats Try And Fail To Catch Conservatives Cheering Ashley Judd's On-Screen Death."

"Judd supporters hoped her on-screen death would make for some viral video when played before the audience at annual conservative gathering, and promised BuzzFeed a recording of the event, however it came out..."

Incredibly lame, but "Democrats"... which "Democrats"?

But kudos to Buzzfeed for getting people to link to a story about nothing happening. Think of all the times various politicos are there, ready to catch things that can be used against the other side. All the gotchas should be massively diluted by all the times nothing happened. Let this one nothing stand as a reminder of all the nothings in the mix.

Breitbart wants to go after news outlets "that hide behind this patina of entertainment in order to promote a left-wing agenda."

Says Ben Shapiro, who's especially eager to "smack Politico across the face." Of course, exposing the bias in reporting that might be mistaken for neutral is what the internet is for. One must pick apart the rhetoric of others.

It can get tedious, however, to just be saying over and over that Politico or Buzzfeed leans left. Or, as they say at the right-leaning Breitbart promotes a left-wing agenda. Please. They are not that exciting. They are much more lame and flabby than that. Don't accidentally compliment them. Agenda! It sounds so officious.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines "agenda" as "A campaign, programme, or plan of action arising from a set of underlying principles or motives. Hence: the underlying intentions or motives of a particular person or group."

1976   Newsweek 19 Apr. 23/1   Their hope is that the party..would opt for youth and freshness. ‘Those folks who have their own agenda for Hubert underestimate Jerry Brown’, says one California politician....
1991   C. Paglia Sex, Art, & Amer. Culture (1992) 73   That girl had her own agenda..trying to glom onto the Kennedy glamour!

That's not a reference to Marilyn Monroe, by the way. After making an appearance in post #1 of the day, Marilyn would seem magical is she popped up here too, but Camille Paglia was talking about the William Kennedy Smith rape trial.

And can you hide behind a "patina"? The OED defines "patina" as "A thin coating or layer; spec. an incrustation on the surface of metal or stone, usually as a result of an extended period of weathering or burial; a green or bluish-green film produced naturally or artificially by oxidation on the surface of bronze and copper, consisting mainly of basic copper sulphate."

1748 H. Walpole Let. 6 Oct. in Corr. (1974) XXXVII. 297, I wish you could see him making squibs.., and bronzed over with a patina of gunpowder.

One must pick apart the rhetoric of others.

And speaking of neutrality and smacking in the face... the Althouse blog agenda is cruel neutrality.

"The 23 Best Goat Remixes On The Internet."

#1:



There are 22 more....

"Do you recognize this as the international sign for 'maybe I'll have another sandwich'?"

One of 38 questions to tell whether you had a great childhood.

"Instantly Improve Your Day With This Magical Baby Tapir."

I instantly knew this Buzzfeed piece could only have been written by Summer Anne Burton.

Just remember that tapirs are real, actual creatures that live on the same earth as me and you.

They look like... miracularious little sepia watermelons.