8/14/2007

The poor will always be with us - except at YearlyKos of course

Those of you who've been keeping up with the Yrly Kos debacle, it is, shall we say, trez amusing.

Once again contra-mainstream visibility has been questioned by some sensible people, and for some reason also WaPo, that is, admittedly, trying to make a "oh but the sinister lefties are the real racists/sexists!" point, but the response has been, how do you say? Fucked up.

First of all the correct response by an actually progressive blogosphere to charges of patriarchal caucasoidal hegemonic pandering is to A) accept the fact, cuz it's true (you fuck wits), and then B) deal with it!

Which is what the progressive motherfucking blogosphere fucking well went and did!

And here too! (cuz y'all aren't over there singing Ebogjonson's praises enough dammit)

But of course the liberals, actually my fingers say "liberals" but my heart means "pasty white centrist sons of inbred republican snowboarding goats" (because my heart hates goats so much) didn't quite manage that sort of sensible, reality based, anti-racist and pro-woman response.

Because of course that part of the blogosphere, while going on and on about how they're shifting the hell out of the MSM's paradigm, Dankan! still panders to the MSM normative modes of converse - that is to say, they resorted to a classic (as BA rightly points out) obfuscatory charge of "I know you are but what am I?" attempt to pretend that they are better and immune to the problems of cis-hegemonic non-diversity that are allegedly the "cause" of the MSM general crappiness.

Which is to say, in plain english, that first of all the centrists think that the reason the MSM writes primarily for a bigoted white male upper class audience - and is finding it's losing them money hand over fist doing so - is primarily because there's not diversity enough among the skin tone/nation of origin/gender/sex of the writers (not, you note, diversity and wit in the writing itself, but among the writers themselves, as if the color of their skin or the construction of their genitals had any bearing on the content of their characters let alone their boring ass op ed pieces), and not because the MSM, owned and run by rich white guys, only allows (ding ding ding! Issues of Access to Audiences are Important!) certain views that pander to rich white guys because that's where the money is, and that this then breeds a certain sort of mind numbing myopia that underlays and informs ever single crappy oldspaper article, tevelesion program and beartrap page that the MSM, and others who work in a similar fashion and who's writing is subject to similar pressures, produce.

And second of all, they see nothing wrong with any of this.

In short, the only thing stupider than the centrists is the MSM they all want be a part of.

For instance, my oldbuddyoldpal, Jane Hamsher;

The biggest blogger by far is Arianna Huffington, with 70 million page views per month. Markos is #2, and no amount of willingness to turn him into a white male is going to do that. Markos is Hispanic and that’s just a straight fact. John Amato and Duncan Black are straight white men, but John Aravosis is gay (and so are many of his contributors). FDL rounds out the list of top blogs on the left, headed by two women, although Pach — a Hispanic gay man — is also one of our primary voices. Digby is probably the most quoted and sharpest thinker around, and she’s a woman.


Let's get some things straight:

Did you just do "look! One of my best freinds is an oppressed minority to watch out for!" and used Trex as an example of your diversity!?

REALLY!?!?!?!

It's almost as bad as pointing to Le Lutin Orange, I mean ffs, Kos is a known chauvanistic pig, a man who has described immigration rights "as not that important", who is a raving narccissist with his head so far up the DLC's ass that you can see his face peering out between Edward's teeth when the man talks. His best freind is a man who quit blogging after it was found out that he'd spent his college years as a conman hyping up stocks in duff chinese companies in an attempt to seperate middle class white people from their kids' college funds (and Kos defended this as a childish indiscretion, because 30 something year old college students need a bit of extra cash, and what's the harm eh?).

Do fucking excuse me if your pathetic attempts at tokenisation don't impress me much crazy white lady.

But wait, that's not even teh best part of the post, because there's comments.

And what comments there are. This one's my fave;

Biodun says:
August 6th, 2007 at 12:12 pm

As I said in an earlier Scarecrow thread in response to Rayne’s comment about diversity at Yearly Kos: The diversity in the blogosphere more or less reflects the diversity in the Net-saavy community in the US in general.


A lot of people have been focusing on the issue of racial and sexual equality at Yearly Kos, but I'm going to go on a different track, in part because most of hte rest have covered it very well, so I'll just shorter Scarecrow:

YearlyKos doesn't excludes poc! Indeed, it only excludes the poor. (which in whiteliberal circles is perfectly understandable and excuse worthy logic, because they're idiots basically)

Do you want to know what the first thing that made me go "you have got tobe kidding me!?" about YK? The fucking price of entrance: $225, that's just the ticket understand, not the "ticket insurance" or the cost of travel or even accomadation.

Suffice to say, even if I couldn't go on account of my own self banning from events where booze + mildred will inevitably lead to me attempting to set a wanker on fire (I keep trying to give up smoking...) I woulnd't have been able to go. I keep my anorexia goin in large part because it saves money, over $200 dollars to see kos fellate himself infront of a crowd!? I mean autofellation is impressive, I don't deny that, but if you've seen one fuckwit do it and you've seen them all...

But there's the thing; me and the rest of the majority of the nation, white, brown, native and immigrant could not, physically go, even if we could get off work for long enough to actaully attend, the ticket price - IN AND OF ITSELF - excludes the people these fucking toolbags, both the bloggers and the politicians who live in their fur and are spread with them as they travel from town to town, claim to represent.

After all, how many times do we hear these fuckstains go on about how the democrats and the left wing represent the poor, nevermind that they've never done jack to help the poor, never mind that they ignore us, nevermind that they actively mock the poor, especially southerners (there was a thing a few years back, where it was revealed that peopel out in the sticks have little to no dental coverage and thus have little to no teeth, and Dkos was oh so sympathetic**), playing neatly into the whole artificial dichotomy that is the "redstate/bluestate" faux-divide as they do so, never midn that.

The guy the event was named after (though they're renaming the event " the natalistic interwebz conventional", apparently they're gonna go for a whole "cathedral of light" thing next time, whatever that is) earns six figures a year just from the ad revenue off his site, where no one actually reads him (so why is he called a blogger again...?), note that that's not counting the consultancy fees he gets as a toady. And as for the Beeg Dem hopefuls, I can only shudder in horror at the thought that those toolbags were probably actually paid to come to YK and have the opportunity to get people to vote for them.

Between just those four people, not to mention the other upper-10%-of-the-income-bracket types who sat on the various panels, they could have paid the entire fee for the event, which would have been a good cause after all (allegedly), and gotten rid of that exorbinant entrance fee, and let's face it: What the fuck do these bastards spend that sort of money ON, surely you can only eat so many platinum plated mercedes benz before you'd get sick of them so what the fuck...

But they didn't, because like anything else Kos touches, it's about seperating the cupid and, I admit, well meaning (though little doing) wannabe-progressive-white-man from his cash, just like Jerome Armstrong's college job was. But even so, for a place that goes on and on about being "inclusive" to have a system of regressive taxation at the door is taking the piss somewhat imho.

And here's where such events for the blogosphere don't make any sense at all, especiually if you're all about inclusiveness and shit:

Most people blog because it's one of the few ways they can either afford or have time to do waht amounts to propaganda leafletting, indeed that is what the blogosphere most accurately resembles, for it gives people the ability to disseminate pretty much anything for free, whereas we would have been silent a mere 10 or 20 years ago and most of the poor who can squeeze in time between surviving to be political are not being poltiical for attention, for money, for our own narccissistic wants but because if we are not political we will be squashed under the boots of the fuckwads who are overly represented at "seperate the gullible from their cash" conventions like Yearly Kos.

Who have done absolutely nothing for no one but themselves, but by god, the suffering they endure every time they pat themsleves on the back hard enough to dislocate their own shoulders!

But the thing is, the thing is, you understand, that we are none the less fucking Out there, in greater numbers than this pasty white unteraristocracy becasue the thing that kept us quiet before, monetary constraints are not so relevent now, not to the degree access to leisure time to actually type is, yet we are not represented, we are indeed ignored or brushed aside, and with us the disproportionate number of POC in the nation we share a socio-economic grouping with.

And they talk about it as though, well, that's understandable, that, despite the fact that peopel are excluded becasue they're all sutck up snobs, rich kids playing Che Guavara in their hipster jeans and with their hipster aesthetic, and then they do nothing to change the world becasue they don't see anything wrong with the situation the repugs have handed us, indeed, they accept it as a neccesary, while talking big about being our saviors of course, and all of it because they, like a present day marie antoinette, do not grasp why their repeated bleetings about how, maybe, they could offer the starving some cake, might not be recieved too well.

And that's Yearly Kos, another year gone and good riddance to bad rubbish.

* And for those who don't get why I hate that man so much, understand that that's me paraphrasing him, not hyperbole. He's an overt conman, and represents something as evil and disgusting to my sense of morals as does Bill O'rly, a man who tries to make money of of progressive politics and has apparently misunderstood what "follow the money" means.

** "haha stupid toothless redstaters!" Seriously.

2 comments:

Daisy Deadhead said...

I loved what you linked to, the old piece with the top 10 list. ha! (I'll say so here and not over there, though!)

Also, no disability rights discussions at YK, either. And you know, since Dubya is increasing the disabled population at quite a clip, it IS a pertinent subject.

You'd think a veteran would know that?

ms_xeno said...

Preach it.