Bari Weiss founded this journamalism website, The Free Press, back in 2022. I guess it is “free” — it’s bleeding money, and they’re desperately seeking investors, and you can predict that they’ll get money from some billionaires somewhere, so they’ll continue to be “free,” although they’ll also be “owned” at the same time by, probably, some pro-Trump fanatical Zionist, because that’s what Weiss is. What will be published won’t be what I would consider journalism — we need a new word. Journanalism? Jourge? Jourbarism?
Anyway, Weiss went on Twitter (heh, she still uses Twitter) to plug the latest article on her glorified blog, titled The People Who Rage Against the Machine, which I’m sure Tom Morello appreciates. It’s an account by Suzy Weiss (any relation? I don’t know, don’t care) of a hyper-weird, tiny meeting of 50 people, by invitation only, called “The Machine and (Human) Nature” retreat. The headline says An emergent coalition of Catholics, preppers, localists, Luddites, and farmers is determined to resist modernity. They call themselves Doomer Optimists.
It’s illustrated with this photograph:
Even if you’re not convinced that thermonuclear war, or widespread political violence, or an AI overlord is coming for us in the near future, you can probably recognize what the Doomer Optimists are seeing. The signs of decline are everywhere.
Are you confused yet? What is the point of this article? Does the author have a perspective on this strange cult-like ideology?
She does not. Except maybe that she thinks it’s cool.
Now try to actually read the thing.
If the American political scene is divided between the liberal establishment—the domain of Dick and Liz Cheney, and Kamala Harris—and the renegade rebel alliance—which includes Donald Trump, RFK Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard—this conference represents the intelligentsia, or the culturati, of the renegades. They code right—although it’s noted at the conference that the left-right political divide is a “foreign French import,” and doesn’t apply—but only because the left is the establishment now, and they are antiestablishment. They see themselves as the vanguard of whatever comes after the establishment finally collapses under its own weight, and they call themselves by a paradoxical name.
“We’re excited to have the Doomer Optimist scene here,” McNiel, 42, said, on the first day of the conference. “Whatever it is.”
That’s…that’s incoherent. Dick Cheney is the liberal establishment? Donald Trump and RFK Jr. are the rebel alliance? What kind of cartoon world is she living in?
This is a self-selected gang of raw milk drinking, goat-farming, conservatives patting themselves on the back over their iconoclasm, that is, their wildly backwards reactionary freakishness, and Weiss is calling them the intelligentsia
? Keep those insightful articles coming, The Free Press!
Worse, Bari Weiss has a rather inflated perception of her own cleverness. She also retweeted this cartoon.
That’s jerbalism for you.
I’m guessing this “article” was written by AI.
Oh really?
If that is true, Bari Weiss is one of those signs of decline.
She is part of the problem, not the solution.
What will collapse the USA isn’t nuclear war or AI overlords. It will be right wingnut attacks on our democracy by the GOP, Donald Trump, and Fox NoNews.
The other major driver of any sort of US crisis is rising economic inequality and the relentless rise in the cost of living, notably of housing.
This is also something the GOP has made worse by continually enabling the ultra-rich oligarchies.
It seems to me that as the cost of living keeps going up, that the US population is getting poorer in buying power per hour worked.
Strangely enough, the economic data says this isn’t the case. Supposedly, the data says US buying power is slowly increasing.
I’m not in any position to argue against the data.
What always shocks me though is how recently, house prices on the US West coast have gone way up.
Cthulhu, this is SF Bay area class house prices.
It’s that way all the way from Seattle to Los Angeles and San Diego.
That $820,000 doesn’t even buy you that much of a house.
I wouldn’t want to be young and looking at housing prices like that.
No wonder people decide not to have children any more. No place to raise them.
Oh, we are definitely in a decline that will lead to our inevitable extinction, just not for the reason that this fascist dipshit thinks. It’s not modernity that’s killing us, but the rejection of progress by liberals obsessed with maintaining the status quo and the right’s fanatical devotion to “tradition.” It’s the dismissal of science and reason, fueled by capitalism and theism (especially Christianity), that will lead us to ruin. Our doom will come because we spurn education and expertise in the name of populism and equality; the elevation of the common dumb-fuck off the street or celebrity bubblehead over properly-trained scientists, academics, and other people of the mind.
Sadly, I don’t think either party or any of the “acceptable” political movements that Americans tolerate (i.e. “centrist Democrats to Neo-Nazi) will stop this doom.
The only reasonable response to the chaos of Bari Weiss is: WTF?
These are the same people who think that centrist Dems are “communists” because they want to infinitesimally raise taxes on the rich. These are the clowns who believe that seat belt or vaccination requirements laws are some nefarious form of totalitarianism.
To them. Harris snd Cheney represent the old order, the traditional politics of compromise and backroom dealing that they’ve come to loathe. Trump and Junior seemingly oppose this with their promises of going around this system and “getting things done.”
Whilst I certainly dislike our current political system (and that’s putting it mildly), the horror lies in what these “rebels” want to get done.
What they want is a cross between Medieval feudalism with bucolic “The Andy Griffith Show” Maybury aesthetics. A society with no wicked, cities filled with sin and corruption. No universities that deny God and “common sense.” Just a green and pleasant land of church-going farmers and ranchers ruled by a wise king-like-figure who gets his wisdom directly from Gawd.
Oh, and no darkies or queers, either.
Laurie Penny’s You Are Not a Rebel never goes out of date.
PZ @ OP — “What will be published won’t be what I would consider journalism — we need a new word.” The old word “propaganda” won’t suffice?
@8
Good article!
It’s a lie.
We are old enough to remember the term “yellow journalism” nowadays you could call it tabloid news or the sad inevitable rise of the 24-hour news cycle or whatever bland and utterly useless metonym or apposite phrase that the oblivious are using nowadays.
Just because the term ‘fake news’ was first used by the fascist nutjobs, doesn’t mean it isn’t fake news if the fake news is fakely newzed by fascist nutjobs fakely newsing loudly and fakely instead of the people they are currently screaming at (usually but not-always-us, they don’t need a real target). Misinformation and disinformation is what it is but people shirk at these words.
It’s ‘gaslighting’? No, it is lying.
Thou shalt not lie. sighs
“This is a self-selected gang of raw milk drinking, goat-farming, conspiracy theory believing conservatives.”
The rise of the conspiracy theorists over the last 20 years has been the most alarming trend in my opinion. The decline in religious belief in conservatives appears to have accelerated the trend as they discover that reality doesn’t fit well with their conservative worldview.
“Reality has a well known liberal bias.”
“fake news” was Trump’s name for news Trump doesn’t like. I don’t acknowledge it as having any value as it’s on the one using it to create the value and that just doesn’t happen.
Propaganda doesn’t work because that’s a form of gossip and gossip can be true. It’s just not smart to rely on the propaganda on one’s side.
When it comes from a lying news organization or someone offering it, it’s an assertion. An opinion. It’s on the accuser/liar to show more and reputation matters.
Technically I deal with gish gallops via reputation. Once I hit the first lie/dishonesty that’s reputation for the rest of the list. They are a liar/deceiver until acknowledgement of the lie/deception. Acknowledgement and change is the only thing they can do outside of trying to shut you up or find people who don’t know their reputation.
You know she’s intelligent, because she think she is. /s
How about “journonanism” because its a mindless wank.
Hmm, she might have used ‘liberal’ in the sense it’s used outside the US – as in everything between free market fetishists and libertarian whackjobs, as opposed to ‘anyone to the left of Attila the Hun’.
Then again, I’m probably giving her too much credit.
So, I’ve regained consciousness in a freakishly unchanged alternate universe EXCEPT that war criminal Dick Cheney is not only voting for Kamala Harris but IS a Liberal – or is this person so batshit stupid she might as well be insane?
What self-made horrible human monsters they are. At least Dick Cheney’s horribleness makes basic sense in the reality I unfortunately share with him. Ms Weiss here does not. She’s from Htrae.
I’m guessing this article was written by Truth Social’s new offshoot “ANI” – “Absolutely No Intelligence.”
That photograph belongs in the middle of a poster with text above it saying “The Cabin in the Woods II” and text below it saying “Coming this Halloween” along with a bunch of fine print and logos.
Note the one looming threat that a) is already causing catastrophe-scale damage in many places and b) isn’t mentioned in that list at all: climate change.
Obviously, a version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism
What are the AI overlords going to do? Modify humans so we all have six fingers?
I’m not sure which is doing more harm: the pandemic of covid or the pandemic of narcissism. What happens when you have a room full of people who think they’re the smartest person in the room?
@ 12
I think 9-11 was the primary motivator for that. Sure, you had Neo-Nazis raving about “Zionist Occupied Government” and Jesus-freaks who believe that the Antichrist runs the UN, but they were a minority compared to the “resectable” conservatives wouldn’t entertain such paranoid nonsense. Then a crew of Islamic terrorists armed with box cutters leveled the Twin Towers and nearly destroyed the Pentagon. That CAN’T be what happened! America is the strongest nation in the world! There must be some other explanation!
And thus the mainstream right’s trip down the rabbit hole begins.
An emergent coalition of Catholics, preppers, localists, Luddites, and farmers is determined to resist modernity. They call themselves Doomer Optimists.
In other words, a bunch of escapists retreating from the hard work of higher cognition into the fantasy-world for which our most basic instincts are wired. As Akira @7 said, tribalism/feudalism in an imagined Costwold-esque utopia, with a beneficent king who need never be doubted or disputed, from which they can safely, smugly and happily watch our much more complex real world collapse in flames. Someone needs to remind that lot that “The Shire” isn’t a real place, and the real place it’s (loosely) based on was never as wunnerful or prosperous as they want to think it was.
This reminds me of a junior-high teacher of mine, a smart, caring and interesting person who got “Born Again” and became less intelligent and less decent, and started blithering about the End Times (as then predicted by Hal Lindsey’s “The Late Great Planet Earth”) with a vapid uncaring smile that I found not at all pleasant.
It all sounds to me exactly like the sort of thing Carl Sagan tried to warn us against.
We are getting past this point.
Point 1: On many measures, the world is actually getting better – life expectancies are longer, a smaller proportion of people are in extreme poverty, fewer people in total are actively affected by war (none of that is to diminish the sufferings of those still suffering)
Point 2: Commentators on both ‘sides’ (not a construction I fully accept but it’ll do here) think the world is getting worse, but blame different things
On the broad Right the causes tend to be identified as immigrants and taxes and people of different races, sexes and sexualities gaining a voice in society
On the broad Left the causes tend to be identified as climate change, environmental degradation and economic inequity
Anyone who regularly hears from me knows where I’d place myself, but there’s one other point that’s important: one of those sides uses measurable, quantifiable data and the other does not
@Raging Bee:
I’m reminded here of this passage from Greg Egan’s Diaspora:
Um, the protagonists therein are post-human. Religious loonies are not post-human.
[heh]
https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/1231-warning
@15. garydargan : “How about “journonanism” because its a mindless wank.””
Yes! I really like that word for it – spot on and will be yoiking that.
Akira MacKenzie @#23:
The approach to the rabbit hole had been greased for years by folks like Ailes who, after Nixon resigned so he wouldn’t be impeached, decided that the real problem was that the news actually reported on what had happened and made Nixon look bad. Ailes helped st up Conservative Talk Radio for years, and then Fox News once enough of an audience had been established.
That said, yes, 9/11 caused a lot of previously apparently-attached-to-reality people to jump off the deep end as they couldn’t process the idea that somebody had managed to use something that low tech to exploit standard responses to hijackings and manage to do that much damage. Obviously there had to be more to it than just America’s decades of interventionism and bankrolling terrorists in other countries.
John: I believe BB was referring to a fictional future where religious loonies started using technology to (apparently) reprogram themselves to become what they’d previously only wanted to pretend to be, or were badgered, manipulated or coerced to pretend to be. So the comparison of that to present-day religious zealots is valid. And yes, if any sect or cult ever gets that sort of technology for real, the result will probably be even more hellish than the mere snippet quoted above implies. (If Satan is real, he’d surely have to dig a whole new bolgia of Hell for whoever inflicts that on humanity.)
PS: If I ever meet that former teacher of mine again, I’ll have one question ready to jam in his face: “What was your reaction when you realized the world wasn’t going to end when you so smugly predicted it would?”
@3
But I am! :)
The whole article glossily elides any real facts or analysis. “the average individual in this sample was 42 as of 2019 and 47 in 2024.” Really? What was the actual breakdown of age and income levels of the subjects? I suspect that that particular set of data will paint a considerably less rosy financial picture. What are the endpoints of the data set? Did you sample any 14 year old migrants working illegal jobs? How about the elderly, who either aren’t working or who work small jobs to supplement flagging incomes? Any 68 year olds who are underemployed or who retired and are running out of money? We’ll never know because that data isn’t provided.
The authors laud the “tight employment market” without ever once breaking down the data into unskilled, skilled, full-time, part-time jobs, etc. While I have no doubt that the 25 year working 3 part time jobs to afford food and rent works more than 40 hrs/wk, I bet they don’t have a hell of a lot of purchasing power. I’ve seen countless businesses pissing and moaning about how they can’t get anyone to take their jobs–have you tried throwing money at the problem? Try that and get back to me. If there was a silver lining to the pandemic, it was that a lot of people decided that risking their lives for $9/hr and no benefits just wasn’t worth it and quit. Good for them.
But the one I like the best is
Notice the smaller spike in Figure 1, which covers April- July 2020 and the much larger spike which covers April-July 2021? Both those periods correspond to the US Economic Impact Payments (stimulus payments). The payments maxed out at $1200.00, $600.00 and $1400.00 per person for the first, second and third payments with corresponding sized purchasing power spikes.
Then notice that in teeny tiny letters next to the dotted lines in Figure 1 that denote what the actual purchasing power was without the stimulus payments and boosted unemployment insurance. Don’t forget that regular unemployment checks were considerably enhanced by federal funds to the states, specifically to increase the amount of unemployment. The added bonus was that $10,200.00 of unemployment was not taxed, so it was a straight-up actual income increase. Those dotted lines don’t paint such a rosy picture now, do they.
And then we have Figure 2 in which the halfwit authors blithely proclaim “Figure 2: Black and Hispanic individuals have experienced gains in purchasing power above those of White and Asian individuals.”
Let’s break that down, shall we?
Again, the spikes in purchasing power track pretty well with the stimulus payments and again, take away the increased unemployment benefits and stimulus payments and the picture is pretty grim.
Yes, it’s true that Black and Hispanic populations benefitted the most–comparatively speaking. As population subgroups, Black and Hispanic populations tend to be have lower incomes as compared to Asian and White populations. So that $2800.00 that a White or Asian married couple with income of $150,000.00 a year doesn’t really buy them anything they couldn’t really afford before, Sure, it’s nice to have that money but it isn’t necessary to survival. Compare that to the Black or Hispanic married couple who makes maybe $40,000.00 a year, where $2800.00 isn’t just nice to have, it’s practically life-changing. If any of those couples have kids, add even more money–the 2020 payments for kids 16 and under netted their parents a max of $1100.00 per head but the purchasing power really spikes with the third stimulus payment, in which the cutoff for the wealthy kicks in a lot sooner but parents can now claim any dependent regardless of age, so that includes kids in college, grandparents living with their adult kids and grandkids, etc. Poorer families tend to have several generations living in one household, due to financial limitations, so the $1400.00 per head adds up fast.
And yet, to the two overprivileged knobs who wrote this subpar analysis (I use the term loosely), it’s a fucking mystery as to why Black people had relatively greater purchasing power than White people. Key word being relatively. To their normal purchasing power, which is otherwise virtually nonexistent.
The real kicker is that the people at the top never had a bad month. All those stimulus payments that were spent rather than saved spiked the investor class income. Netflix (as one example) had its highest income years ever during the pandemic. The stimulus payments only helped them indirectly–through consumer spending. By themselves, the stimulus payments were barely a blip on the radar for the rather better off and the truly wealthy didn’t qualify for them at all but in the end, they actually benefitted the most, not from take home pay but from investments.
tl;dr, the bottom line is that Jamie Dimon shits from the mouth and the actual article reads like an all-nighter group paper written by some less-than-gifted sophomores. The authors probably make ten times more than I do for writing this useless drivel.
The data (such as it is) presented shows relative purchasing power. Real world purchasing power has declined relatively steadily for the middle and working class since the 50s. Hell, the inflation of the past couple of years really took a bite out of the income of anyone who wasn’t already wealthy. A lot of the elderly who retired at the peak of the market? Plenty of them had to rejoin the workforce because inflation so drastically outpaced their fixed income.
Thank you for sharing the link in your post. I think it brilliantly illustrates the power of inherited and/or investor wealth, as opposed to people whose income comes from actually working. The two dimwits who wrote this drivel aren’t smarter or harder working than the rest of us, they were just born into the right families, went to the right schools which renders them immune to their subpar work performance. They are being financially well compensated for spewing comfortable lies to people desperate to believe them. Black people are doing better than Whites! Now we can stop caring about racial and economic injustice!
There’s always a market for that.
[Raging Bee, I’ve read the book]
[OT]
Raging Bee, I’ve read the book; here:
“Inoshiro is another of Yatima’s earliest friends, whose icon features metallic, pewter-grey skin. A native of Konishi but a frequenter of Ashton-Laval, a polis of great artistic merit, ve proudly considers verself delinquent. Inoshiro frequently attempts to attract Yatima away from philosophical Konishi and into more aesthetic and avant-garde pursuits. It was Inoshiro who suggested visiting the fleshers of Atlanta in ancient gleisner’s bodies.”
Posthuman, as I noted. Not a flesher.
@8 Nice! And thanks for sharing.
Try this one.
silvrhalide @25
The overall point you’re making here is, I believe, factual but $2,800 isn’t changing anyone’s life. It certainly may keep their life from getting much worse if they’re barely treading water, but that’s it. For instance, It’s still isn’t enough to enable them to move to a better neighborhood or to put their children into a private school.
That is to say, they’re not moving into a different socioeconomic bracket from a mere $2,800.
Sorry my comment was addressed to #35
@40 I think we agree on the general principles but differ on the details
aha, but on paper they are
For the US poverty guidelines, the 2021 federal poverty level as per HHS guidelines for a single mother with one child is $$17,420. For a single mother with 2 kids, it’s $$21,960. I have no idea how one person survives on $$21,960, let alone three, but that’s what the nattering class on Capitol Hill set as the poverty level guideline, so that’s what we’re running with here. The HHS link is below.
https://www.ed.gov/sites/ed/files/policy/highered/reg/hearulemaking/2021/povguid.pdf
below is the ASPE (Office of the Assistant Secretary of Planning and Evaluation) which has a number of handy links
https://aspe.hhs.gov/topics/poverty-economic-mobility/poverty-guidelines/prior-hhs-poverty-guidelines-federal-register-references
but the devil is always in the details
https://aspe.hhs.gov/topics/poverty-economic-mobility/marginal-tax-rate-series
Most recipients of benefits must file a federal tax return to show that they qualify to receive the benefits. The standard deduction for head of household status in 2021 is $18,800.00. Since the poverty guidelines, in most cases, use the adjusted gross income from the federal tax return. So in 2021, a single mother with one kid could make up to $36,220; with two kids it’s $40,760. (Still no idea how three people survive on $40,760 a year or two people on $36,220.) So that $2,800.00 or $4,200 ballparks around one month’s income.
How much of a difference would an extra month’s income make in your life?
Add in that extra $600 per week (later reduced to $300) in unemployment benefits and suddenly you can actually afford to stay home when you are sick or to prevent getting sick from Covid 19.
Thanks White Savior Biden! Those stimulus payments, increased unemployment benefits and bizarre advances child tax payments goosed a LOT of people over the federal poverty line. On paper anyway. (Although the last really fucked over a lot of people at tax time.)
https://www.pandemicoversight.gov/news/articles/how-much-money-did-pandemic-unemployment-programs-pay-out#:~:text=The%20Federal%20Pandemic%20Unemployment%20Compensation,was%20later%20reduced%20to%20%24300.
From the Congressional Budget Office
https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2020-06/56387-CBO-Grassley-Letter.pdf
I absolutely agree with you about how it isn’t enough to move out of working class or poverty into the middle class.
But it is the difference between trying to survive on $2/day on TANF and actually being able to afford a variety of food.
It’s the ability to fix a car into reliability or put down a down payment on a better one.
Even in poverty, there are different levels of poverty. You can be poor and still live in an apartment or trailer vs. living in your car or being homeless.
So yeah, the article from raven’s link is confused about why the relative purchasing power of Blacks and Latino is higher than that of Whites and Asians. When you go from “no purchasing power” to “I can actually buy stuff”, sure, that’s an improvement.
It would be nice. More bills would be payed on time and I could dine out bit more but it wouldn’t drastically change my life in any meaningful way. I should note that I’m far from rich, not far above the poverty line in my area.