#original: clickhole headline

[the-last-teabender]

I know we're all seeing this on Time's Twitter, but I want to point out a few things about the actual article.

First, this is not the headline of the article on the site. I'm not sure as I've not seen proof for myself, but I'm led to understand that it was never the headline on the article, but was a Twitter choice.

Second, the article itself is well researched and has input from people in Ukraine.

In other words, this is not a bad article through and through. And while there are tons of journalists out there who absolutely do a bad job, it's worth recognizing (especially for something this huge) when they are doing their job, and are hindered in getting their words out there accurately through other factors.

Speaking as a journalist myself, I have had my headlines changed without warning. It hasn't happened much recently, and I'm an anime news writer so it's basically never anything this globally relevant. But I have absolutely been dragged up and down the thoroughfare, labeled as ignorant of my readership (and the field in which I write), because an editor chose to make the headline of one of my features more "clickable." Which is absolutely what's going on here.

In the mid-2000s, I had to endure the rise of clickbait, where we went from telling everyone what an article was about in headlines to assuring readers they wouldn't believe what they saw if they'd just give us a cheeky little click. I watched this change happen in real time during my desk job. I heard my manager insist, when I protested, that all that mattered was the number of hits going up, so that we got our ad revenue.

In recent years, and absolutely in the wake of ClickHole, news sites have shifted away from vague clickbait and into more targeted clickbait, accuracy be damned. Now we'll tell you what the article's about, but we'll add a modifier that shoots this article straight through the roof. It's no longer "You Won't Believe What This Bay Area Woman Does to Scrambled Eggs," it's "This Award-Winning Scrambled Egg Recipe Uses an Ingredient You've Literally Never Heard Of" and the ingredient is like salsa or something. And in nine out of ten of those situations, I guarantee the journalist's original headline was "Bay Area Woman Wins Cooking Competition with Spicy Scrambled Eggs."

Maybe the breathless pursuit of clicks is bad actually.

[donnerpartyofone]

I don't like it but at least I sort of get why people take the captions and credits off of image posts; I know it's because of an idea people have about a certain kind of stream of consciousness aesthetic they want to maintain on their blog, I had a similar attitude when I was starting out a million years ago. Now I don't follow anyone who does that, because I always wind up wanting to know the origin of the content and then I'll just get all frustrated (or I'll see uncredited art from alive people who are not famous and whose only crime was the foolish generosity of posting their art online for people to enjoy, I hate when I see that) . But anyway I do understand it--the one thing I don't understand at all is people who repost images from The Onion and Clickhole and stuff. It would be better and easier to post a link to the piece, you'd get about the same preview image plus the rest of the content. And like...do the people who swipe that stuff think that their followers will believe they made it themselves, just because the logos are missing? That no one will know they got the graphic with its hilarious headline from one of the most successful comedy sites alive? What's the point? I'm clearly from Mars because I never have the slightest clue what anyone is thinking about.

[incorrectx-menquotes]

Every parent wants to see their child do well, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit that watching my loser son fail at everything he tries has been pretty entertaining.

Erik Lehnsherr

[comicweek]

"Zack Snyder's Justice League" runs four hours and two minutes. That's 242 minutes. That's longer than "Avatar," "Avengers: Endgame," "The Irishman," "Dances with Wolves," "Malcolm X," "Lawrence of Arabia," or any of the "Godfather" movies. If it were released to big screens, it would tie Kenneth Branagh's 1996 adaptation of "Hamlet" for being the longest major studio theatrical release in history.

And reader, if it ever does get released to theaters, I'll go see it again, just as long as it's in IMAX and there's an intermission.

Some other time, perhaps, we can talk more about the road that led to this moment, along with its implications for the major studio relationships to the more entitled or belligerent elements in fandom. My own feelings are summed up in the Clickhole headline, "The worst person you know just made a great point." Bottom line: I don't see how it's possible to put this version of the project next to the 2017 version and not recognize that it's superior in every way.

This four-hour cut is the kind of brazen auteurist vision that Martin Scorsese was calling for when he complained (rightly) that most modern superhero movies don't resemble cinema as he's always understood and valued it.

The backstory: "Justice League" was meant to be the third in a series of Zack Snyder superhero films after "Man of Steel" and "Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice," but Snyder and his chief collaborator and wife, executive producer Deborah Snyder, stepped down during postproduction to grieve for their daughter, who had died unexpectedly. The releasing studio, Warner Bros., was already pressuring the Snyders to add humor, following the relative box-office disappointment of the figuratively and literally funereal "Batman v. Superman," which ended with Superman's death. Joss Whedon (writer/director of the first two "Avengers" films) was brought in to take the project over the finish line, contain the running time to two hours, and make sure things were kept light. Whedon ended up rewriting and reshooting most of the movie, Whedon-izing it with deadpan quips and shooting new action scenes that, while competent, lacked the turbocharged delirium Snyder is known for. According to some behind-the-scenes accounts, less than 20% of what ended up in the final release was directed by Snyder.

The recut—it feels more correct to call it a "restoration"—contains zero Whedon footage. It's broken into seven chapters with titles, each of which has a serene self-contained quality, reminiscent of issues of a monthly comic (as well as old-fashioned episodic television; the Snyder Cut is as much of a medium-blurring, "Is it TV or is it a movie?" project as "WandaVision," "Small Axe," and season three of "Twin Peaks"). Only a sliver of what's onscreen is wholly new, notably a forward-looking "teaser" conversation between Batman and the Joker; but Snyder generated so much material originally—much of it shelved by Warner Bros. without being properly finished by visual effects artists—that the totality still feels like a new work.

[arcticdementor]

The hilarious headline in the Daily Beast yesterday read like a cross of Clickhole and Izvestia circa 1937: “Is Glenn Greenwald the New Master of Right-Wing Media? FROM HIS MOUTH TO FOX’S EARS?”

The story, fed to poor Beast media writer Lloyd Grove by certain unnamed embittered personages at the Intercept, is that their former star writer Greenwald appears on, and helps provide content for — gasp! — right-wing media! It’s nearly the exclusive point of the article. Greenwald goes on TV with… those people! The Beast’s furious journalisming includes a “spot check” of the number of Fox items inspired by Greenwald articles (“dozens”!) and multiple passages comparing Greenwald to Donald Trump, the ultimate insult in #Resistance world. This one made me laugh out loud:

In a self-perpetuating feedback loop that runs from Twitter to Fox News and back again, Greenwald has managed, like Trump before him, to orchestrate his very own news cycles.

This, folks, is from the Daily Beast, a publication that has spent much of the last five years huffing horseshit into headlines, from Bountygate to Bernie’s Mittens to classics like SNL: Alec Baldwin's Trump Admits 'I Don't Care About America'. The best example was its “investigation” revealing that three of Tulsi Gabbard’s 75,000 individual donors — the late Princeton professor Stephen Cohen, peace activist Sharon Tennison, and a person called “Goofy Grapes” who may or may not have worked for Russia Today host Lee Camp — were, in their estimation, Putin “apologists.”

…

For years now, this has been the go-to conversation-ender for prestige media pundits and Twitter trolls alike, directed at any progressive critic of the political mainstream: you’re a Republican! A MAGA-sympathizer! Or (lately), an “insurrectionist”! The Beast in its Greenwald piece used the most common of the Twitter epithets: “Trump-defender.” Treachery and secret devotion to right-wing politics are also the default explanation for the growing list of progressives making their way onto Fox of late, from Greenwald to Kyle Kulinski to Aaron Mate to Jimmy Dore to Cornel West.

The truth is, Trump conservatives and ACLU-raised liberals like myself, Greenwald, and millions of others do have real common cause, against an epistemic revolution taking hold in America’s political and media elite. The traditional liberal approach to the search for truth, which stresses skepticism and free-flowing debate, is giving way to a reactionary movement that Plato himself would have loved, one that believes knowledge is too dangerous for the rabble and must be tightly regulated by a priesthood of “experts.” It’s anti-democratic, un-American, and naturally unites the residents of even the most extreme opposite ends of our national political spectrum.

…

Follow the logic. Isikoff, who himself denounced the Steele dossier, and said in the exchange he essentially agreed with Meier’s conclusions, went on to wonder aloud how right a thing could be, if it’s being embraced by The Federalist and Tucker Carlson. Never mind the more salient point, which is that Meier was “ignored by other media” because that’s how #Resistance media deals with unpleasant truths: it blacks them out, forcing reporters to spread the news on channels like Fox, which in turn triggers instant accusations of unreliability and collaborationism.

It’s a Catch-22. Isikoff’s implication is a journalist can’t make an impact if the only outlet picking up his or her work is The Federalist, but “reputable” outlets won’t touch news (and sometimes will even call for its suppression) if it questions prevailing notions of Conventional Wisdom.

These tactics have worked traditionally because for people like Meier, or myself, or even Greenwald, who grew up in the blue-leaning media ecosystem, there’s nothing more ominous professionally than being accused of aiding the cause of Trump or the right-wing. It not only implies intellectual unseriousness, but racism, sexism, reactionary meanness, greed, simple wrongness, and a long list of other hideous/evil characteristics that could render a person unemployable in the regular press. The label of “Trump-defender” isn’t easily removed, so most media people will go far out of their way to avoid even accidentally incurring it.

…

The consistent pattern with the Trump-era press, which also happens to be the subject of so many of those Greenwald stories the Beast and the Intercept employees are complaining about, is that information that is true but doesn’t cut the right way politically is now routinely either non-reported or actively misreported.

Whether it’s Hunter Biden’s laptop or the Brian Sicknick affair or infamous fictions like the “find the fraud” story, the public increasingly now isn’t getting the right information from the bulk of the commercial press corps. That doesn’t just hurt Trump and conservatives, it misinforms the whole public. As Thomas Frank just pointed out in The Guardian, the brand of politicized reporting that informed the lab-leak fiasco risks obliterating the public’s faith in a whole range of institutions, a disaster that would not be borne by conservatives alone.

But this is only a minor point, compared to the more immediate reason the constant accusations of treachery and Trumpism aimed at dissenters should be ignored.

From the embrace of oligarchical censorship to the aggressive hawking of “noble lies” like Russiagate to the constant humbugging of Enlightenment values like due process to the nonstop scolding of peasants unschooled in the latest academic jargon, the political style of the modern Democratic mainstream isn’t just elitist and authoritarian, it’s almost laughably off-putting. In one moment it’s cheering for a Domestic War on Terror and in the next, declaring war on a Jeopardy contestant flashing the “A-OK” sign. It’s Dick Cheney meets Robin DiAngelo, maybe the most loathsome conceivable admixture. Who could be surprised a politically diverse group finds it obnoxious?

During the Trump years conventional wisdom didn’t just take aim at Trumpism. The Beltway smart set used the election of Trump to make profound arguments against traditional tenets of democracy, as well as “populism,” (which increasingly became synonymous with “the unsanctioned exercise of political power by the unqualified”), and various liberal traditions undergirding the American experiment. Endless permutations of the same argument were made over and over. Any country in which a Trump could be elected had a “too much democracy” problem, the “marketplace of ideas” must be a flawed model if it leads to people choosing Trump, the “presumption of innocence” was never meant to apply to the likes of Trump, and so on.

…

By last summer, after the patriotic mania of Russiagate receded, the newest moral panic that the kente-cloth-clad Schumers and Pelosis were suddenly selling, in solidarity with famed progressive change agents like Bank of America, PayPal, Apple, ComCast, and Alphabet, was that any nation capable of electing Trump must always have been a historically unredeemable white supremacist construct, the America of the 1619 Project. The original propaganda line was that “half” of Trump supporters were deplorable racists, then it was all of them, and then, four years in, the whole country and all its traditions were deemed deplorable.

Now, when the statues of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt came down, there was a new target, separate and apart from Trump. The whole history of American liberalism was indicted as well, denounced as an ineffectual trick of the oppressor, accomplishing nothing but giving legitimacy to racial despotism.

The American liberalism I knew growing up was inclusive, humble, and democratic. It valued the free exchange of ideas among other things because a central part of the liberal’s identity was skepticism and doubt, most of all about your own correctitude. Truth was not a fixed thing that someone owned, it was at best a fleeting consensus, and in our country everyone, down to the last kook, at least theoretically got a say. We celebrated the fact that in criminal courts, we literally voted to decide the truth of things.

This new elitist politics of the #Resistance era (I won’t ennoble it by calling it liberalism) has an opposite view. Truth, they believe, is properly guarded by “experts” and “authorities” or (as Jon Karl put it) “serious people,” who alone can be trusted to decide such matters as whether or not the Hunter Biden laptop story can be shown to the public. A huge part of the frustration that the general public feels is this sense of being dictated to by an inaccessible priesthood, whether on censorship matters or on the seemingly daily instructions in the ear-smashing new vernacular of the revealed religion, from “Latinx” to “birthing persons.”

In the tone of these discussions is a constant subtext that it’s not necessary to ask the opinions of ordinary people on certain matters. As Plato put it, philosophy is “not for the multitude.” The plebes don’t get a say on speech, their views don’t need to be represented in news coverage, and as for their political choices, they’re still free to vote — provided their favorite politicians are removed from the Internet, their conspiratorial discussions are banned (ours are okay), and they’re preferably all placed under the benevolent mass surveillance of “experts” and “professionals.”

Add the total absence of a sense of humor and the inability of “moral clarity” politics to co-exist with any form of disagreement, and there’s a reason why traditional liberals are suddenly finding it easier to talk with old conservative rivals on Fox than the new authoritarian Snob-Lords at CNN, MSNBC, the Daily Beast or The Intercept. For all their other flaws, Fox types don’t fall to pieces and write group letters about their intolerable suffering and “trauma” if forced to share a room with someone with different political views. They’re also not terrified to speak their minds, which used to be a virtue of the American left (no more).

From the moment Donald Trump was elected, popular media began denouncing a broad cast of characters deemed responsible. Nativists, misogynists and racists were first in line, but from there they started adding new classes of offender: Greens, Bernie Bros, “both-sidesers,” Russia-denialists, Intellectual dark-webbers, class-not-racers, anti-New-Normalers, the “Substackerati,” and countless others, casting every new group out with the moronic admonition that they’re all really servants of the “far right” and “grifters” (all income earned in service of non-#Resistance politics is “grifting”). By now conventional wisdom has denounced everyone but its own little slice of aristocratic purity as the “far right.”

[thefabulousfulcrum]

The Land of the Large Adult Son

via TheNewYorker

By Jia Tolentino

n January, 2015, shortly after Mike Huckabee announced that he was exploring a second bid for the Presidency, a Twitter user with the handle @JuliusIrvington posted an old Huckabee family photo in which the politician, wearing a blue-and-white striped shirt, sits next to his wife on a wooden bench. Behind them, three kids smile at the camera. On the right is a young Sarah Huckabee (now Sanders). Next to her are her two brothers, John Mark and David, who are the same size as their father and wear matching striped shirts. “My favorite thing in the world is that Mike Huckabee literally haslarge adult sons,” @JuliusIrvington wrote. 

This seems to be roughly when the large-son meme went more or less mainstream. It had been germinating in arcane corners of the Internet for a couple of years by then. In 2012, the Twitter user @MuscularSon, who eventually deleted his account, started tweeting in character as a beleaguered father of several mythically rowdy boys. “i cant control my enormous nerd sons. they force me to cosplay as a police box from Dr Who and take turns paintballing my enormous nude torso,” he wrote. And later, “my two awful big sons got into the 20 quarts of hummus i have and now their heading toward The City.” In November, 2013, @dril, the ur-account for this genre of absurdist online humor, tweeted, “i have trained my two fat identical sons to sit outside of my office and protect my brain from mindfreaks by meditating intensely.” In 2014, he tweeted, “please pray for my sons Thursten and Gorse, who have just glued themselves to a curtain.” By then, the image—a tornado of havoc around a couple of big, rambunctious sons—had somehow solidified as a comic trope.

The galaxy of large adult sons contains many constellations, and sons don’t necessarily have to be adults to belong. In November, 2014, the parody Web site Clickhole posted a BuzzFeed-style quiz called “Which One of My Garbage Sons Are You?” “I’ve got some shit boys,” the intro read. “My huge beautiful wife gave me children who think and speak like the toilet. I have four garbage sons: The first son is named Royce, the second son is named Preston, the third son is named Lance and Blake (two names for just one son), and the fourth son is the dreaded Laramie. Which one of my toxic sons are you? Take this quiz to find out!” My result: “You are a real trash mountain of a son who came marching out of my huge beautiful wife on the worst day to ever happen.” I was working at Gawker Media when this quiz was posted, and it derailed all operations for about an hour.

Once you’re made aware of the preponderance of large adult sons in our culture, you will start seeing large adult sons everywhere. Like all the best memes, it is essentially good-natured: “large” is a proud but gentle word, used in this context the way a gardener might talk about a beautiful butternut squash. The meme is also highly flexible, as Barry Petchesky, the deputy editor of Deadspin, pointed out to me over e-mail: “Literally every man in America is someone’s large adult son.” Sports media, in particular, has adapted it as a term for what Tom Ley, the managing editor of Deadspin, calls “big lovable galoots.” In April, SB Nation ran a piece unpacking “the myth of Aaron Judge, our large adult baseball son.” Sports Illustrated responded, arguing that the Cubs leftfielder Kyle Schwarber was the true large adult son of the M.L.B. (“How can anyone be said to match Schwarber in terms of being a big beefy boy?” Jon Tayler asked.)

But the Huckabee sons remain the poster boys for the meme. “They are very large, they are adult, and they are so clearly Huckabee’s sons,” Petchesky noted. They also fully fit the archetype. David, notoriously, once killed a dog at summer camp, and John Mark once acted in a low-budget film in which he smoked cigarettes while assuring a female character that it was normal to “suck a little dick to get a part.” This is classic large-adult-son behavior: alarming, with a whiff of the surreal. The Huckabee boys also remain cloaked by the cartoonish piety that undergirds their father’s politics. The situation resembles a 2014 @dril tweet: “my big sons have made a mess of the garage again after being riled up by the good word of the Lord.” The definitive quality of the large adult son is that he is endlessly excusable: though he does nothing right, he can do no wrong.

These days, it’s getting harder to separate the large-adult-son meme—one of the few reliably good things on the Internet—from the larger hellscape of adult-male behavior in which we all live. The Times recently ran a trifecta of pieces from writers across the ideological spectrum who all believe men are acting too much like boys. In a column titled “Before Manliness Loses Its Virtue,” David Brooks argued that it is embarrassing—for the country, but also for the institution of masculinity itself—that the President and several of his top advisers are openly needy, puerile, and immature. Senator Ben Sasse, of Nebraska, wrote a column about how, as a teen-ager, he used to perform hard agricultural labor on summer breaks: without the hard-won discipline he honed in the cornfields, he argued, kids these days will take too long to grow up. Jennifer Weiner wrote a column about the men who simply never have to, linking childish YouTube personalities to men like Billy Bush and Ryan Lochte, and—alone among these three columnists—to Donald Trump, Jr., the President’s oldest son.

Don, Jr., is generally portrayed, as he was by “Saturday Night Live,” as the more adult of Donald Trump’s two large adult sons—who are, like the Huckabee sons, prone to taking interesting photos together. But this summer Don, Jr., has become the rowdiest son of all. In July, after the Times reported that he had taken a meeting, in the spring of 2016, with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer in the hopes of obtaining negative information about Hillary Clinton, Don, Jr., confirmed the report by tweeting screenshots of the e-mail chain that led up to the meeting. “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer,” he wrote, replying to Rob Goldstone, a British music publicist who had dangled “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary.” Christopher Wray, Trump’s pick for F.B.I. director, pointed out that Don, Jr., should have taken this offer to the F.B.I. On Thursday afternoon, Reuters reported that grand-jury subpoenas had been issuedin connection with the meeting.

At thirty-nine, Don, Jr., is old enough to conduct himself with basic integrity—or, barring that, with basic competence in his plans to deceive. Many people have pointed out the painful absurdity of large adult sons in political families (Don, Jr.; Billy Bush; Ted Kennedy) being excused for shocking behavior well into their thirties when twelve-year-old Tamir Rice was deemed enough of a threat by Cleveland policemen to be shot dead on the sight of his toy gun, in 2014. Donald Trump, Jr., is a mere ten days younger than the French President, Emmanuel Macron. And still, President Trump dictated Don, Jr.,’s original statement and excused him after the scandal broke, calling Don, Jr., a “good boy.”

The large-adult-son meme takes wing from the idea that men overcompensate when they are humiliated, and that a primary source of this humiliation is interdependence—sons act out when they are defined by their fathers, and fathers are disgraced by the oafish flailing of their sons. But it’s memes all the way down with this Administration: Trump, the father of the large adult son of the summer, is himself, clearly, a large adult son. He is the loudmouthed, mischievous, and disorderly child of a presiding father. He loves to get behind the wheel of a truck and pose for the cameras like an important birthday boy. The Web site Gossip Cop recently ran an earnest post headlined “Donald Trump Does notWear ‘Adult Diapers,’ Despite Speculation.” These are strange times we live in. The seas are warming, the summer is ending; each day lasts a century, and we are everywhere ruled by large adult sons.