Category Archive 'Huffington Post'

30 Jan 2019

“It Would Take a Heart of Stone Not to Laugh.” — John Hinderaker, Quoting Oscar Wilde

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Columbia Journalism Review managed a bit of anger between the sobs.

Last week was brutal for American journalism. By one estimate, BuzzFeed and media properties owned by Verizon and Gannett made plans to lay off more than 1,000 people between them, then got to work carrying them out. On Saturday, the president of the United States rubbed salt in the wound, tweeting that “Fake News and bad journalism have caused a big downturn.” As well as being wrong, the tweet was, as Ben Smith, BuzzFeed’s editor, replied, “a disgusting thing to say about dozens of American workers who just lost their jobs.”

The combined genius of Iowahawk and a Twitter contributor prevously unknown to me set a kind of new record for brilliance of response and spoke for all of us.

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via GIPHY

26 Jan 2019

Karma Visited Buzzfeed & HuffPo This Week

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Jim Treacher is on karma’s side this time.

Colin Dwyer, NPR:

    BuzzFeed has announced that it plans to lay off 15 percent of its overall workforce next week. In a message to employees on Wednesday, CEO Jonah Peretti explained that although revenue has grown rapidly, “unfortunately, revenue growth by itself isn’t enough to be successful in the long run…”

    BuzzFeed says it employs about 1,450 people and has offices in 18 cities around the world. More than 200 people across the company are expected to lose their jobs in the coming round of layoffs — just over a year after another restructuring effort resulted in about 100 lost jobs, mostly on the business side of its operations.

The Huffington Post is also laying off a bunch of people, as is the Gannett newspaper chain. Even DC Comics is laying people off this week. It’s a tough time for the publishing industry.

I’m not glad to hear about anybody who works for a living getting laid off. It’s happened to me before, it’ll probably happen to me again, and I don’t wish it on anybody. But if it needs to happen, there’s one subset within this group of unemployed scribblers who have not earned my sympathy: Anybody who joined the mob against those Covington Catholic kids. …

There you are just minding your own business, rage-mobbing a group of children, and 48 hours later you’re out on your ass. No good deed goes unpunished, huh?

Sorry to pick on that guy, but… damn. If that were me, if my karma were that instant, I might take some time to think about the life decisions that brought me to that point.

Some of these “journalists” stopped tormenting those kids when the truth came out. Some of them have pivoted and are now coming up with different angles of attack. And maybe some of them have learned something from their enormous mistake with very serious real-world consequences. Anything’s possible, I guess.

But this is going to follow that kid for the rest of his life. He’s always going to be the “Racist MAGA Hat Kid.” Our betters haven’t stopped Trump, but at least they showed that guy.

I guess that’s where I draw the line, attacking kids for the red hats they bought that same day and dared to wear in public. If you saw the hats and instantly knew everything you needed to know about those boys, maybe you’re a lousy journalist and you need to find a new job anyway.

Is that too cruel? Is that spiking the ball? Well, sorry if you don’t like me speaking truth to power. And these people have very real power, which they’ve abused to spread a disgusting lie so widely, so quickly, that those harmless Catholic schoolboys are now scared for their lives. If these people had their way, that kid — who did literally nothing but smile while an old man banged a drum inches from his face — would’ve been expelled already.

If you’re one of the people who has done this to those kids, sorry I’m not sorry you’re looking for a new job. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

When the Weekly Standard shut down last month, a lot of Trumpkins rejoiced along with their idol because the magazine had dared to stand up to him. That’s not what this is. I have no love for Trump. But attacking a bunch of kids just for daring to put on his hats? What the hell is wrong with these parasites?

I’m not jumping for joy about anybody getting laid off. But after watching the behavior of these self-appointed guardians of the truth over the past week, if you could see the look on my face right now…

I guess you’d call it a smirk.

17 Jun 2017

Not Too Much for HuffPo

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CNN reported:

Doctors caring for released North Korea detainee Otto Warmbier said he has not spoken or moved on his own since he arrived in the United States on Tuesday, a condition they described as “unresponsive wakefulness” or persistent vegetative state.

The 22-year-old has suffered extensive loss of brain tissue in all regions of the brain, doctors at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center said in a news conference Thursday.

Also known as persistent vegetative state, the syndrome’s symptoms include no voluntary movement or awareness of surroundings. Warmbier opens his eyes and blinks spontaneously but shows no signs of understanding language or responding to verbal commands, said Dr. Daniel Kanter, professor of neurology and director of the Neurocritical Care Program.

The news shed light on the Warmbier family’s statement that their son suffered severe brain damage at some point in his 17 months of detention.

His parents said they learned of their son’s condition — what North Korea called a coma — only last week.

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On HuffPo, La Sha posted this humanitarian response.

[Otto Warmbier is a] young white man who went to an Asian country and violated their laws, and learned that the shield his cis white male identity provides here in America is not teflon abroad.

As shocked as I am by the sentence handed down to Warmbier, I am even more shocked that a grown man, an American citizen, would not only voluntarily enter North Korea but also commit what’s been described a “college-style prank.” That kind of reckless gall is an unfortunate side effect of being socialized first as a white boy, and then as a white man in this country. Every economic, academic, legal and social system in this country has for more than three centuries functioned with the implicit purpose of ensuring that white men are the primary benefactors of all privilege. The kind of arrogance bred by that kind of conditioning is pathogenic, causing its host to develop a subconscious yet no less obnoxious perception that the rules do not apply to him, or at least that their application is negotiable.

Headline after headline has highlighted that Otto Warmbier is a student. His LinkedIn profile states that he is majoring Economics with a minor in Global Sustainability and is a Managing Director of an “alternative investment fund.” A man reared in this country who studies the globe as a part of his higher education curriculum must have been at least passingly aware of the notoriously strained relationship between the United States and North Korea. Surely he had read the stories of Jeffrey Fowle and Matthew Miller, other white American men arrested in North Korea for “petty crimes” who were subsequently sentenced to hard labor.

Yeah, I’m willing to bet my last dollar that he was aware of the political climate in that country, but privilege is a hell of a drug. The high of privilege told him that North Korea’s history of making examples out of American citizens who dare challenge their rigid legal system in any way was no match for his alabaster American privilege. When you can watch a white man who entered a theatre and killed a dozen people come out unscathed, you start to believe you’re invincible. When you see a white man taken to Burger King in a bulletproof vest after he killed nine people in a church, you learn that the world will always protect you.

Coming from a country filled with citizens who lambaste black victims of state sanctioned violence by telling us that if we obey the law, we wouldn’t have to face the consequences, Warmbier should’ve listened. If he had obeyed North Korea’s laws, he would be home now. In fact, if he had heeded the U.S. Department of State’s strong advisement against travel to North Korea, he would be home right now. And if Eric Garner is to be blamed for his own death for selling loose cigarettes or if Sandra Bland is dead because she failed to signal when changing lanes, then Otto Warmbier is now facing a decade and a half of hard labor because he lacked both good judgment and respect for the national autonomy of a country which has made its hatred for and vendetta against America unequivocally clear.

And while I don’t blame his parents for pressuring the State Department to negotiate his release, I wonder where they were when their son was planning a trip to the DPRK. Didn’t they impress upon him the hostile climate that awaited him? Didn’t they rear him to respect law and order? Did they not teach him the importance of obeying authority?

What a mind-blowing moment it must be to realize after 21 years of being pedestaled by the world simply because your DNA coding produced the favorable phenotype that such favor is not absolute. What a bummer to realize that even the State Department with all its influence and power cannot assure your pardon. What a wake-up call it is to realize that your tears are met with indifference.

As I’ve said, living 15 years performing manual labor in North Korea is unimaginable, but so is going to a place I know I’m unwelcome and violating their laws. I’m a black woman though. The hopeless fear Warmbier is now experiencing is my daily reality living in a country where white men like him are willfully oblivious to my suffering even as they are complicit in maintaining the power structures which ensure their supremacy at my expense. He is now an outsider at the mercy of a government unfazed by his cries for help. I get it.


La Sha

It’s always a bit astonishing for a normally sane person to discover just how vehemently racist some African Americans are, and a bit appalling as well to catch a glimpse of the lurid and extravagant thought world of self-indulgent paranoid fantasy that many of them inhabit.

And it is obviously a very bad thing that so many people make a habit of seeking self-gratification by wallowing in delusions of persecution and projecting vicious prejudices onto everyone unlike themselves, but the kind of people guilty of this sort of thing, at least, have the excuse of being enabled and encouraged by a kind of pathological group think. I don’t see though how anyone can excuse the editors at places like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and Huffington Post who routinely publish these kind of hydrophobic ravings, treating them as some kind of legitimate editorial perspective,

17 Jun 2017

Too Much For HuffPo (At Least in the Context of the Alexandria Shootings…)

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Washington Times:

An op-ed posted June 11 by Huffington Post contributor Jason Fuller was pulled by the website after Wednesday’s attack on congressional Republicans.

“Impeachment Is No Longer Enough; Donald Trump Must Face Justice,” a call for the prosecution and execution of the president, was published just three days before 66-year-old gunman James Hodgkinson shot Rep. Steve Scalise and three others on an Alexandria, Virginia, baseball field. A reporter for The Daily Caller noticed the deletion late Wednesday and found a cached version still available.

“Trump’s impeachment and removal from office are no longer enough,” the HuffPo contributor wrote. “Draining the swamp means not only ejecting Trump from the presidency, but also bringing himself and everyone assisting in his agenda up on charges of treason. They must be convicted (there is little room to doubt their guilt). And then —  upon receiving guilty verdicts  —  they must all be executed under the law. Anything less than capital punishment  — or at least life imprisonment without parole in a maximum security detention facility  — would send yet another message to the world that America has lost its moral compass.”

The writer then asserted that Republican leadership should face the same fate.

“Nothing would do more than to convict them of the highest offense defined by our Constitution, and then to deliver the ultimate punishment. Donald Trump deserves nothing less,” the author wrote. “Mitch McConnell, Steve Bannon, and Paul Ryan should also share Donald Trump’s fate, for they have done more than practically anyone to protect him and to throw our country under the proverbial bus. In order to survive, we as a nation must deliver the ultimate punishment under the law to all involved in its current destruction.”

Jason Fuller was mendacious, but not repentant, in the aftermath of the removal of his posting. Medium

17 Apr 2017

HuffPo Removed Column Urging White Men Be Disenfranchised

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“Shelley Garland” — Not a real person

Not surprisingly, the recent HuffPo South Africa editorial calling for white men to be denied the vote was pulled, Milo Yiannopoulos reports, apparently because HuffPo finally figured out that Google turned up no such person and the alleged photo of “Shelley Garland” didn’t look like a real human being at all.

The Huffington Post has retracted a column suggesting white men should not be allowed to vote, claiming the piece’s author “appears not to exist.”

…[T]he original article (archived here), titled “Could It Be Time To Deny White Men The Franchise?” was credited to a HuffPo contributor by the name of Shelley Garland.

Garland’s profile – which has since been deleted – described her as an “activist and feminist” who is “working on ways to smash the patriarchy.”

Her article suggested denying “toxic white males” the right to vote for 20 to 30 years as a means of “seeing a decline in the influence of reactionary and neo-liberal ideology in the world.”

Describing the article as “extremely sexist and racist,” Breitbart’s Oliver JJ Lane states that it quickly received backlash from several people. …

Huffington Post SA [South Africa] has removed the blog ‘Could It Be Time To Deny White Men The Franchise?’ published on our site on April 13, 2017,” it reads.

“We have done this because the blog submission from an individual who called herself Shelley Garland, who claimed to be an MA student at UCT, cannot be traced and appears not to exist.”

The statement goes on to declare that the Huffington Post has now “strengthened” its standards related to identification.

HuffPo goes on to state that it will be submitting the problematic article to an ombudsman for analysis of its opinion.

The statement also includes an excerpt from the South Africa Press Code decrying the use of “discrimination and hate speech,” although the Huffington Post’s statement does not explicitly describe the problematic article as such.

“We apologise [sic] for the oversight,” the statement concludes. “We welcome further discussion. Please email blogs@huffpostsa.com.”

This retraction comes following Huffington Post South Africa’s Editor In Chief Verashni Pillay actually defended the article’s place on the site.


Verashni Pillay, Huffington Post South Africa’s Editor In Chief

Pillay stated, “we hope, as reads continue to rack up on this blog, that those who are tempted to fire off an angry email to us would first engage with the underlying analysis in Garland’s blog.”

Pillay also declared that “Garland’s underlying analysis about the uneven distribution of wealth and power in the world is pretty standard for feminist theory.”

Despite SA HuffPo’s Editor-in-Chief’s agreement with the editorial’s thesis, my own guess is that the editorial was written by some Alt-Right troll to pull HuffPo’s chain.

08 Feb 2010

Palin Turns Palm Notes into a Joke

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Palin mocks hand notes story

The big news of the day (from the perspective of the left blogosphere) was the HuffPo photo taken during her speech at the Tea Party Convention revealing some talking points jotted on the palm of Sarah Palin’s left hand.

This one did not impress many people outside the left, but it did provoke derision from Ann Althouse and a humorous response (see photo above) from Sarah Palin herself.

11 Jan 2010

DC Launches Today

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Roger Simon and Charles Johnson never got those Ferraris everyone thought they’d soon be driving back when Pajamas Media launched.

PJM, at least, survived, but nobody got rich. Heck, Charles Johnson even lost his good sense, changed sides, and now devotes his blogging activity to defending Warmism, enforcing political correctness, and bashing conservatives. Sad, very sad.

Let’s hope Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller, launching today, proves more fortunate.

DC has been described as intended to represent “a conservative answer to Huffington Post.” Arianna Huffington responded to the launch with a gracious post, observing amusingly that her own Huffpo was founded as “the progressive answer to Drudge.”

24 Jun 2009

Obama Angry at the Press, Answering Planted Question from HuffPo

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Walter Shapiro finds that Barack Obama’s customarily deft public performance deteriorates markedly when he encounters negative questioning.

(I)n response to the next question – about the potential consequences if Iran continued to suppress demonstrations – Obama said with a sharp edge in his voice, “We don’t know yet how this thing is going to play out. I know everybody here is on a 24-hour news cycle. I’m not. Okay?”

Now I am not going to claim that the First Amendment requires presidents always to wear smiley faces when taking questions from reporters. Nor am I going to deny that occasionally – very occasionally – the short-term mindset of the press pack can be irritating for presidents with a more transcendent view of global events.

Instead, I am bringing this up because I want to tentatively advance a larger theory about the president’s public moods. Obama tends to drop his cool veneer and sound exasperated when he knows that he is in the wrong.
When it comes to Iran, Obama has at times spoken in particularly mealy mouthed fashion because he is fearful (as he has repeatedly explained) that his words could be hijacked by the Iranian theocrats. Even during Tuesday’s press conference, Obama ducked condemning the Iranian election as totally fraudulent by carefully saying, “We didn’t have international observers on the ground. We can’t say definitely what happened at polling places throughout the country.” Obama – who more than most leaders understands the power of inspirational rhetoric – has been forced to keep his most potent weapon (his moral outrage) sheathed through most of the Iranian crisis.

But it was on a far smaller matter (and not one that often comes up during his morning national security briefings) that Obama really put his ire on the fire. What set the president off was a question trying to link Obama’s own smoking history with new legislation giving the FDA the power to regulate nicotine. In response, Obama claimed that the reporter just thought that it was “neat to ask me about my smoking, as opposed to it being relevant to my new law. But that’s fine. I understand. It’s a interesting human — it’s a interesting human-interest story.” (Words alone cannot convey Obama’s mocking tone and his obvious disdain for this “human-interest story.”)

Smoking, of course, is the secret vice that humanizes Obama. He cannot be that perfect – that in control of himself – if he cannot kick his yen to inhale carcinogenic smoke. Obama, in fact, likened himself (maybe a bit melodramatically) to “folks who go to AA.” Small wonder Obama becomes annoyed when he is asked for a monthly update on his cigarette consumption.
The truth is that the Obama White House certainly does not resist human-interest stories when they portray the president in a favorable glow. Obama’s grumpiness about the smoking question was not about an intrusive boxers-or-briefs press corps, but about the president’s own frailties.

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Which probably explains why the President preferred, with respect to the sensitive topic of Iran, to answer a previously-arranged softball question from an editor of the Huffington Post.

In what appeared to be a coordinated exchange, President Obama called on the Huffington Post’s Nico Pitney near the start of his press conference and requested a question directly about Iran.

“Nico, I know you and all across the Internet, we’ve been seeing a lot of reports coming out of Iran,” Obama said, addressing Pitney. “I know there may actually be questions from people in Iran who are communicating through the Internet. Do you have a question?”

Pitney, as if ignoring what Obama had just said, said: “I wanted to use this opportunity to ask you a question directly from an Iranian.”

He then noted that the site had solicited questions from people in the country “who were still courageous enough to be communicating online.”

“Under which conditions would you accept the election of Ahmadinejad, and if you do accept it without any significant changes in the conditions there, isn’t that a betrayal of the — of what the demonstrators there are working towards?”

Reporters typically don’t coordinate their questions for the president before press conferences, so it seemed odd that Obama might have an idea what the question would be. Also, it was a departure from White House protocol by calling on The Huffington Post second, in between the AP and Reuter. …

The Huffington Post reporter was brought out of lower press by deputy press secretary Josh Earnest and placed just inside the barricade for reporters a few minutes before the start of the press conference.


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