Comments on: Fight Em or Join Em by Jukin the Stats and Creatin Reality

By: Adam

Adam — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 11:51:15 +0000

hey buddy… I just wanted to say that my C64 is freezing when I click on the text… are you using some js or something?

By: heru-ur

heru-ur — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 18:04:19 +0000

My my, the intelligent ones are in short supply here today, eh?

One wonders why the deluded “Bill” decided to deny that the group spends most every thread attacking some person. It could be someone that Glenn has written about or a troll. I could be a lady who does not type well. It could be anyone, so long as the bonding occurs.

Then Bill gets mad when people notice.

Too bad, so sad.

By: Bill

Bill — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 17:34:02 +0000

“On another note; please notice the tread at UT today. People are having a gay time trashing other humans and calling them all sorts of names. Jebbie is as bad as anyone. Why? It is ‘teamwork’. Everyone is bonding by showing that if only we could rid ourselves of this or that total asshole then things would be so much better.”

You sanctimonious little prick. No one is better at trashing both other posters and threads in general than you and your 911 nutcase friend who claims he’s from London.

You can kiss my ass, Heru-ur. Teamwork? Hell, all one has to do is take a look at the spit swapping going on between you and LondonAss today and the spitswapping between you, LondonAss, and Sinnard (before he left) to see “teamwork” to the extreme.

None of you can let one single thread go without trying to bring either a 911 conspiracy into play or to denounce all persons who disagree with you regarding anything on topic or not. Neither of you have offered anything constructive to a thread at UT in ages…just your tired old complaining, bitching and moaning about how unfair life is. At least adnoto occasionally gives people something to think about but you guys never, ever do that. All you do is bitch and disrupt threads with your petty personal squabbles. Now you’re on my case. Before that, it was ommexx. Next week it will be someone else.

Grow up.

Sorry, Hag.

I’ll take it down the road now.

By: heru-ur

heru-ur — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 09:59:08 +0000

There is a problem in replying to a comment once the level nests too far down; so, I will post here. This is to the lovely Hag mostly, but also to rmp.

We were talking about our “system” and reached some agreement that it is broken in many ways. The full nature or degree of the breakage seems to still be a matter of contention. Our problem was summed up, in a way, by the German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer wrote that there were fundamentally two, and only two, paths to the acquisition of wealth. One route is the production of a good or service and its voluntary exchange for the goods or services produced by others. This method – the method of the free market – Oppenheimer termed “the economic means” to wealth.

The other path, which avoids the necessity for production and exchange, is for one or more persons to seize other people’s products by the use of physical force. This method of robbing the fruits of another man’s production was shrewdly named by Oppenheimer the “political means.”

Throughout history, men have been tempted to employ the “political means” of seizing wealth rather than expend effort in production and exchange. It should be clear that while the market process multiplies production, the political, exploitative means is parasitic and, as with all parasitic action, discourages and drains off production and output in society.

To regularize and order a permanent system of predatory exploitation, men have created the state, which Oppenheimer brilliantly defined as “the organization of the political means.”

Our “democracy” has plundered weaker peoples for the entire life of the State, starting with the natives and continuing today as we plunder the planet. We are a nation of groups; all of which seek to obtain from others the goods, services, laws, perks, and anything else we desire.

We are “the other” writ large.

By: OSR

OSR — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 09:19:33 +0000

I imagine that it started well before 9/11, but crisis seems to make these things more apparent. Honestly, I’d written Obama off, as a potential change agent, when he selected Bankruptcy Reform Biden. The current perversion of the representative republic ensures that the electorate only gets corporate stooges as choices. Go to fec.gov or opensecrets.org for an afternoon of pure depression and angst.

While I’ve kissed off the system, I’m still on the fence about the people. For years, I eagerly awaited this crisis, thinking that it would be the catalyst that forced the public to wake up and demand reform. What the hell was I smoking? Even after their jobs, retirements, and houses are sacrificed to appease the Profit Gods, teabagging is the best that we’ve seen. Apparently, our appetite for assraping is insatiable.

By: cocktailhag

cocktailhag — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 01:59:15 +0000

Exactly. Lead paint poisoning is part of a bigger story of how a powerful industry kept its poisonous product on the market so long, and how. (With money, of course) In the book I read about Knight-Ridder, now McClatchy, the author told a story about how due to unfavorable editorial content, one of their papers was boycotted by the car dealers, and suffered huge drops in revenue for a year or so because of it, but they held firm. Eventually they came back, because of intramural competition.
Even worse, here the Oregonian went nuts trying to stop the Snake River dams from being removed, so nuts that they spent a ton of money showing how Idaho spuds, through the magic of the Columbia/Snake River barge canal, made us an important part of Tom Friedman’s “flat” world, as though selling french fries to Asia were the key to our future.
The series, “The French Fry Connection,” won a Pulitzer Prize. Would that they cared about something worthwhile.

By: rmp

rmp — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 01:44:51 +0000

Simon put it this way:
“…but one of the problems with journalism was, they really– even the highest ambition of the people at my newspaper, was to bite off a small morsel of the actual problem. Surround one little thing. You know, lead paint poisoning. We’re going to do a series of articles about lead paint poisoning and show you how bad lead paint poisoning is. And maybe we’ll get a law passed. And we’ll write the react to our stories. And then we’ll submit it for a prize. And that was the highest ambition of people who were regarded as very good journalists.”

I agree that the large papers have lost sight of the goal of serving their readership. I was an editor and supervisor of several base newspapers and learned the power of putting the readers first. Readers want to know that you care about them and their lives. IF you are doing a corruption story, it should not be written to win a Pulitzer Prize but because people are being screwed and their tax dollars wasted. It’s often the little things that count for example if you are writing a story about some new amusement park and then don’t provide very clear map instructions and all the details a family wants to know before deciding to go or not, you have just frustrated them. Finding places is no longer a problem, but that doesn’t mean the paper shouldn’t provide all the details a family would need. Or like I did in Japan, putting together a publication that had all the details needed to Enjoy Japan which is what the weekly column was called.

The pedestrian can be very important for your readers and they could care less about winning some journalism prize. Big papers should be the same as dynamic small town papers.

By: cocktailhag

cocktailhag — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 00:48:10 +0000

I suppose I am. I’m given to judging things by their quality, which is more measurable in my business. Still, I was reading just recently about the LATimes fiasco, which I’d written about, and the writer pointed out that Newspapers, or any press organ, have two different “customers,” with two different needs. Advertisers are buying readers. Readers are buying content. Without the latter, whither the former? Further, the quality of the media outlet is directly linked to the quality of its readers, who do leave in droves when the product is crap.
In Seattle, for instance, both the PI and the Times were locked in a stupid competition over cover price, and the papers got thinner and thinner, while they “competed” to see who would charge more than a quarter. You could still buy two newspapers that barely added up to one for fifty cents until about two years ago. None ever thought that by being a better paper it could vanquish its rival. Do you think that the Times will suddenly become good? Nope. Too late for that.
I think what Politico is missing out on is that it could become something great by being something good. Instead Allen and friends are choosing to be as bad or worse than their competition. Nice new media model, but there’s an awful lot of competition using the same model straight down the toilet.

By: rmp

rmp — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 00:03:33 +0000

Your judging his performance by your standards and not his bosses. They probably love what he does. If he wasn’t meeting or exceeding their standards he wouldn’t be the top paid employee. He has to put bloggers down to help his rationalization of how he has sold his soul for money and power.

In regard to off the record, I always told the commanders I worked for that you should never say anything that you can’t stand to have in print. With the different form of “journalism” that exists today, I probably wouldn’t be providing tht advice.

By: cocktailhag

cocktailhag — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 23:38:37 +0000

Well, unfortunately the dismal economics of journalism as a profession preceded the current unpleasantness and will persist. But Allen seems far too willing a tool for a lot of sympathy. Burson-Marsteller is always hiring, and at least is an honest propaganda outlet.
Allen’s “response” to criticism by Glenn and others is completely self-discrediting, and I hope it succeeds, at least a little. Yes, he needs a paycheck, but not unconnected to performance. Were I to such do a shitty job at work, I wouldn’t get paid, much less recommended to others, so I don’t. Even though it would perhaps be easier, pride is involved, too. I guess for the right amount of money, Allen and a lot of others are able to set aside their pride.