The Common Ills: On circle jerks, sell outs and censorship

Saturday, January 23, 2021

On circle jerks, sell outs and censorship

That's from HARD LENS MEDIA and I've got some comments but first let's note the credits for the video:

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I like HARD LENS MEDIA, we've been noting it for a couple of weeks now, and think the anchor of the segment's hair cut is a big improvement. I do like it when you identify yourself either with a name on the screen or by saying, "Welcome, I'm ----" I don't have the time or the interest in finding out your name. I went to the website. I went on "About us" and then on "our team" and there are no photos just a long list of names.

So we'll be saying "HLM" in this entry. And, for the record, when I do actually "view" the streams I post here (most I don't view, I don't have that kind of time), I'm listening, I'm not viewing. I'm doing other things on the computer while I listen.

I like Briahna Joy Gray but we didn't post her conversation with Sam Seder. I know Sam Seder and this site will never promote him. HLM did a good overview of the conversation that Briahna had and praises her rightly for a number of things -- including being willing to have a conversation with someone you disagree with.

Where I have a problem with HLM is when he goes on to ascribe motive to Sam Seder.

Sam's just wants this, Sam just wants that. And Sam's motives are so pure and true.

Bulls**t. I'm not in the mood, people. I'm not in the mood.

Consider this an explanation of how this site works. I don't ask for a dime, no one gives me a dime. I post content here that I hope raises awareness and keeps conversations going.

I don't have to like the person.

For example? Today, "#WellnessWednesday #ElieMystal #KarenHunterShow Th..." went up. I do not like Eli Mystal. I find him to be a reactionary and his thinking to be reductive, not expansive, on most topics. I do like Karen Hunter. I did like the topic. I did hope -- I didn't stream the video -- that the discussion would be worthwhile (I think it's one of the topics Eli can be very insightful on). I do not like Eli but it went up.

Thursday night, Friday morning, "#FoxNews #Ingraham Glenn Greenwald slams the media..." went up. That's Glenn Greenwald on FOX NEWS. Glenn's been on Tucker Carlson's program and we didn't put the clips up. In part because the topic they were discussing seemed to me to be covered in other Glenn interviews we'd already noted. The one we highlighted was from Laura Ingraham's program. We highlighted it because it was an important discussion -- I did make a point to listen to that before posting it. We need to be paying attention to the censorship taking place, to the stripping of our liberties etc.

I don't have to like you to post you.

I'm not sure where I stand on Glenn, honestly. I think it was very brave what he did with regards to THE INTERCEPT. However, an idiot (Bill Scher) posted a piece of garbage recently and Glenn Tweeted it out (weakly) and then quickly did another Tweet praising it and Bill.

What parts of Glenn don't I like? His inability to think for himself in many cases. That's why he supported the Iraq War. Another reason he supported that war? It goes to his sexism, by the way, and that's because he is part of The Circle Jerk. Even now, he still belongs to it.

That's why he rushed to rewrite his take on Bill Scher's hideous article -- that preaches everything Glenn is against.

The Circle Jerk.

Too many are too young to remember it and maybe that's true of HLM and explains the garbage promoted in the video at the top?

The Circle Jerk started early on, around 2002. It continued for some time. We pop up in November of 2004.

I could have been part of The Circle Jerk. I could have been one of the token females like Jessica Valente who was one of The Mud Flap Gals -- I don't remember the name of their site, I just remember it was the most pathetic dumping ground online. "Oh, let's talk about a hot topic and we'll say it's feminism because we're feminists." It never had a feminist analysis and was usually either just whining or bitching but, because it was typed by a female, it was passed off as 'feminism.'

If you're new to criticism of that site, see 2007's "What Would A Mud Flap Say If A Mud Flap Could Flap Could Say?" which I just read over and it's very strong -- that whole week's edition of THIRD is very strong and still very appropriate to what's going on right now today -- and see 2007's "Parody: Mud Flap Gals" which is a parody of that site but it's funny because it's spoofing the garbage they actually posted under the pretense of being feminists and being informed.

We're a serious site here. We eat the vegetables. We just don't dig into the candy, we eat the vegetables. We address real issues. And, I'm so sorry to surprise so many faux feminists online, but real issues are more than abortion.

Now I'm sorry for men who can't grasp it, but abortion is a real issue. Still I'm sorry for the girls -- I don't consider them women -- online who can't grasp that real issues are more than just abortion. That's why I couldn't stand most of the so called feminists blogs. I don't know if Anne Zook of Peevish (her blog doesn't exist anymore, I believe) was a feminist but we were happy to highlight her because she wrote about real issues. You can't just write about abortion and then do all these pieces on who is hot and what clothes to wear and say, "Look at me, I'm doing a feminist blog."

I'm sorry how do you live in the world that's not effected by war and destruction? Look at the idiot Jill Flip-a-f*ck. She's posting bikini photos of herself while people are fasting trying to force Congress to end the Iraq War. She's posting bikini photos of herself and blathering on, having just graduated from an expensive college, in all her White entitlement, about the mad and crazy vay-cay she's having!!!! You go, girl, you go useless piece of crap girl!

Iraqi women have their rights and lives destroyed by a US-led war and White privilege Jill I Have A Vag So Anything I Say Is Feminism and her ilk can't be bothered with that or the plight of Palestinians or the attack in the US on civil liberties. They were an embarrassment.

And they were seen as such by male bloggers including three in The Circle Jerk that attempted to bring me in. No.

I don't want to be part of the male Circle Jerk. I am not your token. Nor will I be seduced into silence.

Yes, we were noted early on by THE DAILY KOS, ALTERNET, BUZZFLASH, CJR, Bill Scher's LIBERAL OASIS and others. But I didn't ask for that and I don't do greatest hits. You can applaud for whatever you want, it's not going to make me sing it again.

The Circle Jerk is basically Vegas, after you strip it of its sexism.

You get famous off a hit or two and you can make money in Vegas, good money. But you're not growing as an artist, you're just repeating yourself and trotting out your hit to live off your past.

To be a member of The Circle Jerk is to have had a hit and know that you must never stray from that song (post) and never criticize a member of The Circle Jerk. (You saw them admitting to that truth on Ezra Klein's Journolist.)

I don't do hits. I don't do the same act every night. I don't shut off my reasoning abilities to avoid calling someone out or to avoid reviewing an issue to see if I'm wrong.

I tried to be nice about rejecting the invitations to The Circle Jerk -- I know Markos didn't understand and didn't find me nice but that's fine -- and I asked many sites to pull links to this site. I was not going to owe anyone anything.

If in this comics-are-everything age, you need to a comic book character to understand what I'm going for, it would be the BATMAN RETURNS' Catwoman. I'm not waiting for anyone to save me and if Batman's helpful at one moment and Penguin the next, fine. I don't owe anyone anything, I am an independent actor.

Glenn was part of The Circle Jerk and is still a member. Doesn't make him a bad person but it does make him far less independent than he could be. The Circle Jerk promotes one another. They would link to each other, they were friends with each other, they actively recruited media as friends so they could get media links. (Friends at NPR, THE WASHINGTON POST and THE NEW YORK TIMES linked to this site and when I would learn of it, I would ask them to please stop. I've never asked a friend to link to this site. When I asked friends for favors, it was for them to cover War Resisters. A favor, for example, got Ehren Watada in ROLLING STONE.) They had this whole hidden relationship that most people didn't know about. CJR editors, for example, didn't know that their CJR young staff were just doing links to their friends at the website. When they found out, they were furious because the COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW is a watchdog that covers ethics and there is nothing more unethical than using CJR's website to daily promote your friends and not even disclose that your their friends.

To this day, I exchange e-mails with one of the big Circle Jerk guys and he gets mad because I talk about the sexism in The Circle Jerk. (Otherwise, he agrees with my critique of The Circle Jerk.) He points out that he and his two friends offered "you acceptance and promised to build your blog but you said no and it's not right to call us sexists when we tried to make you part of the group."

Is he right, is he wrong?

My opinion, he's wrong. Margaret Kimberley's a woman. She has a blog -- has had it for years. They didn't link to her. (Maybe Margaret turned them down too? I could see her seeing The Circle Jerk, like Vegas, as the graveyard of one's career.)

Look at MEDIA WHORES ONLINE -- the site many of them aped and admired. They had a list of journalistic heroes and a list of journalistic whores. It's amazing how many men were heroes but no women. Strangely, women outweighed the men on the whore list. Their work couldn't be noted as heroic but they were over-represented on the whores list. Hmm.

Over and over, The Circle Jerk made choices of who they'd let in and who they wouldn't. Maybe I would have been more than their token but I doubt it.

What I would have been? Silenced. Oh, I can't criticize so and so, we're part of the same secret society, we pledged during rush week!!!!

I can criticize anybody and I will.

Glenn's addressing important topics, so we note him. Do I like him? I'm really not sure, honestly.

Caitlin Johnstone really pissed me off when she went after Justin Raimonodo. Once would have been enough, to go after him, once would have been enough. Justin and I exchanged a few e-mails but we weren't friends. I was offended, as a survivor (hopefully, a survivor, I'm off the chemo again), that she was going after someone who was on chemo and who was not going to survive. Mike wrote about that at his site when I told him. It was obvious reading Justin's columns at that time that he was dying. The same way I told John Grisham, after reading A TIME TO KILL, that his own self-love ruined the book for me. (He toned it down somewhat in PELICAN BRIEF.) I'm very good, when reading, about picking up on what someone is going through -- the same when looking at art.

Now Caitlin had no way of knowing that Justin was going to die. But she had to have known he was on chemo and there was no reason to pick a fight with him.

I'm also not keen on foreigners who focus on the US while ignoring their own country -- that's the hideous Luke who couldn't call out John Howard while blasting Bully Boy Bush daily (even though Luke was Australian), that's Naomi Klein, etc.

Caitlin is seriously covering serious issues. So we're noting her. But, yeah, there was a time when we wouldn't. We gave her a time out for the Justin attack.

I love Margaret Kimberley's writing but she got a few weeks time out as well when she was bemoaning and glorifying a victim of murder. I'm fine with calling out a murder. I'm not fine with turning a grotesque monster into a saint. The man in question targeted many -- including the LGBTQ community in Iraq. To this day, most people in the US don't know about that or how awful that reign of terror was (and it hasn't completely ended). That murder victim led it. He also led attacks on Sunni men, women, boys and girls. He was not a saint. He was disgusting and vile person.

Guess what?

That doesn't mean the US government was right to murder him.

But the US government being wrong in resorting to murder didn't make the victim a saint.

I don't like that nonsense. And far too often, we do that, we glorify someone because the US government did something against them. I don't mean Hugo Chavez. I think Hugo was good for Venezuela and earned the support of the people. But there are leaders -- and a Nobel winner in the last 20 years -- who the left has glorified despite their homophobic statements -- their deep hatred of gay people. We've looked the other way as, for example, Amy Goodman's praised them and held hands with them.

I don't do that. I don't whore. If I'm praising a homophobe, you can be damn sure that I don't know that they're homophobic.

Sam Seder is trash. I'm so sorry that so many of you are confused. That I knew people involved with AIR AMERICA RADIO is not a new disclosure. I wrote about it at the time and I wrote about Sam at the time. No one liked him at AIR AMERICA RADIO. He almost got fired in the first two months of THE MAJORITY REPORT but Janeane Garofalo stood by him. Why did he almost get fired?

Because THE NEW YORK TIMES believes in censorship and they know how to use their money to get it. He was doing a blog called Ad Nags spoofing one of their reporters and he was also attacking them on the air. They bought air time -- a big buy -- and did so only to tamp down on criticism of the paper. How so? You give 'em a ton of money and then you threaten to pull it. That's what they did.

Sam then watered down his criticism of NYT and shut down the Ad Nags blog. (A real shame because there were some funny posts. Usually not by him but in the comments by someone pretending to be Cokie Roberts.) (I know the someone, she's a female comic and a friend and she was brilliant in the comments. I've asked her before if she'd saved any of her writing there before it got taken down and she didn't. :( )

Now that part you can feel sorry for him.

But that part also goes to how he owed Janeane. She was the star of THE MAJORITY REPORT, not him. She says she's forgiven him and she may have (I know Janeane, she's a forgiving person) but I haven't. He was a little Eve Harrington -- Eve, Eve, evil, plotting and scheming to take over the show. And working to destroy her. That's not just my take, that's the executives and two on air hosts' take on the way it went down. He seized the show by insulting her and distorting her on air. He launched attacks on her.

This is not a nice person.

Once he became the sole host of the show, he was known for his tantrums and for his abuse of staff. That's Sam Seder. He's not a good person.

What about politically?

Sam is a conservative Democrat who knows that conservative doesn't sell. So he pretends to support things and then works to undermine them.

Like Medicare for All today and like progressive politics in 2005. That's why he championed Simon Rosenberg. And if you don't know he championed him then don't talk about Sam Seder.

In other words, HLM, you came off like a f**king idiot when you went into ascribing pure motives to Sam Seder.

And his Green Party 'criticism'? Total bulls**t as well. HLM? Do you have no knowledge of events beyond the last five years?

Sam pulled that s**t on the air in 2004, the fall of. That's when he attacked Ani di Franco on air. And even if you don't know about that, you should grasp that "Green should focus on local races" was imposed on the Green Party in 2004 by a bunch of 'progressives' who didn't care about progress. It's a reactionary position -- one that their 2004 'candidates' for president and vice president embraced.

The Green Party needs to run to win. There should be no safe strategies. They do not need to be the kid sister of the Democratic Party. I'm not a Green. I say that as a non-Green. You can't be a national party if you're not willing to fight on the national stage. Jill Stein was willing to fight Hillary Clinton. She wasn't willing to fight Barack Obama. She was a joke to me as a result.

Sam Seder seems 'smart' to dumb people. Those of us with degrees in political science have never found him informed. He knows a few terms -- most of which he knows but doesn't know their meaning -- and he puts on airs. He's not educated. He's not informed. He's not left.

Now I owe HLM a thank you for the segment. Along with offering a strong analysis of the interview -- when not ascribing pure motives to Sam Trash Seder -- HLM explained that PEACOCK is carrying Sam Seder. PEACOCK is a worthless service. Probably the most worthless. Don't launch a new streaming service if you have no content -- no original content -- to share. But because Ava and I cover media for THIRD, I subscribe to it (I subscribe to all the streamers for that reason). Guess what? I don't pay for trash like Sam Seder. I cancelled my subscription this evening.

And that's what I do. I'm not calling for Sam to lose his job. But I'm not paying his salary. I saw that, in the 2007 edition of THIRD that I was noting above, that Ava and I were calling out Bill Maher. Didn't realize we'd been doing it that long -- for his sexism and racism. We haven't called for HBO to fire him. We have called for them to offer more voices and also pointed out that at some point they might want to come into the 21st century and realize that non-White males can host talk shows -- White women, people of color. The key is more voices, not less.

When Brett Easton Ellis published AMERICAN PSYCHO, there were people up in arms. I didn't buy the book. I didn't join the protests calling for the book to be censored. There are no books that need to be censored. If you don't want to read it, don't read it. I didn't want to read AMERICAN PSYCHO and I didn't. It was that simple.

I like Debra Sweet but we stopped supporting her when she was protesting a film, trying to silence it. Not only do I not support censorship, I don't support stupidity. Debra had never seen the film in question. No one had. The attacks for it were actually launched with Harvey Weinstein money. That doesn't mean the film was good, it doesn't mean it was bad. But that's how Harvey finally sealed his fate. For years, Harvey got away with rape and assault. What finally brought him down, what ruined the protective net that had been in place, was he pissed enough people with his yearly campaigns to destroy other films in his hopes to clear the path for MIRIMAX's latest offerings. He tried to turn the Academy Awards into a blood sport -- because that's how trashy he was.

Debra wasn't paid by Harvey. Debra didn't even know Harvey was part of it. Some 'veterans' did know and they did take his money, but that's a story for another day. Debra didn't know.

But she knew she hadn't seen the film. And I don't support censorship. Love you, Debra, but when you called for a film to be censored without ever having seen it? No. I can't support you. I can't support The World Can't Wait for calling for censorship -- especially of the arts.

The country is in trouble because there are less voices, it is not in trouble because there are too many voices. (Though I'm sure corporate media will continue to insist that there are too many voices and that's why we have 'disinformation.' I'm old enough to remember when that laughable term was pushed by Republicans and I'm old enough to be sad that the left now uses the same non-word. It grates on me in the same way that some people are bothered by the non-word irregardless.) I don't favor censorship and I didn't take part in The Circle Jerk for the same reason: We need more voices, not less.

We try to present a variety of voices here. But I'm not presenting Sam Seder or anyone else that I personally know is a fake and a fraud. There are plenty of voices out there -- ones who are genuine, ones who struggle to be genuine. We'll emphasize those. Big Fat, remember her? In that last phone call with her where she turned on her hero Glenn Greenwald and praised her new 'discovery' Sam Seder? Big Fat's an embarrassment. My question is what is HARD LENS MEDIA? Are they an embarrassment, a whore or just uninformed?

No one's forcing you to do a program. If you're going to do program, you need to take responsibility for what you're saying. And it's a little late in the day to be unaware of Sam Seder's past.

The following sites updated: