Slate = Fail

My original plan was to quietly take Slate online magazine off of my Blog list 'o links. Slate has long been a guilty favorite of mine. Many of their regular contributors (Fred Kaplan, Jacob Weisberg, John Dickerson, and Daniel Gross) share their founder's (Michael Kinsley) unfortunate penchant for partisan hackery. The usual article from any one of them for the past 8 years has had the same basic same formula: Choose any problem currently getting press, presume that the current presidential administration is evil, stupid, always wrong, and all the all-powerful cause of all that's wrong in the world, from that premise prove the current presidential administration is wrong and that they caused the problem in question through their mendacity, stupidity, and persistent wrongness.

Slate makes no pretense of ideological balance. No Fox News-like claims of fairness or balance. The editors seem to get a special kick out of crafting inflammatory and misleading headlines to get you to click on stories that are only marginally about what's promised (advertizing $$$). The Fray (their message board, like ALL internet message boards) is an utter waste of electrons (they, of course devote a regular column to tracking it). Bruce Reed seems to have some sort of horrible learning disability that makes everything he writes come out as pointless, shallow, and ugly.

Yet there are several features and writers I generally enjoy. Dahlia Lithwick, Witold Rybczynski, Chris Hitchens, Emily Yoffe, The Explainer, The Green Lantern, and Anne Applebaum come to mind. I may agree or disagree, but they are at least often worth reading. Slate also introduced me to some I follow despite their moving on: TMQ and David Edelstein for instance.

But as presidential/congressional race polling data begins to trend toward inevitability, I am beginning to sense emanations of liberal entitlement and pomposity from Slate writers (similar to Rush Limbaugh is 1994), particularly the less talented ones listed in my first paragraph. Seemingly, as a result, the dumb articles are getting dumber. To my eye anyway, as the masturbatory back patting grows more frenetic within their partisan bubble, the idea that thought, evidence, or even the occasional clever turn of phrase might be necessary (or even desirable) in political writing has been jettisoned in an avalanche of pent up hubris, nastiness, and schadenfreude.

Anyway, finally came along the article that was so stupid, shallow, wishful, and mindless, that I had to remove the tacit Sarcastic Weasel endorsement that comes from being linked on my blog:

Libertarianism is Dead, by Jacob Weisberg

Not that Slate benefits from my 3 readers.

Not that I wanted to make a big deal about it.

Not that I even planned a post.

I really don’t have time to put together my own refutation... something about 3 journal papers and one month to write them.

But the article was really ridiculous. And I don't seem to be the only one to find it to be an especially regrettable example of diminishing standards.

But, since Brink Lindsey (Cato@Liberty) took the time, I’ll point you over to his post.
If you want the quick version:
-Economic meltdown causes and effects still unknown.
-Most likely though:
-Public policy failed to stop the problem
-Private actors failed to stop the problem
-Public policy exacerbated the problem
-Private actors exacerbated the problem
-Weisberg = idiot

Bad NFL Reporting

Another story about how a team with a lot of question marks hanging over it at the beginning of the season has dispelled a lot of doubts by embarrassing an opponent in the season opener:

http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/recap?gameId=280907001&campaign=rss&source=NFLHeadlines

The problem is, of course, the opponent was the hapless Official NFL Team of the Sarcastic Weasel, more commonly known as the Detroit Lions. No achievement, no matter how seemingly impressive or record breaking, counts when it is achieved at the expense of the Detroit Lions. They are, simply put, the worst, most pathetic excuse for a professional sports franchise in modern sporting history (I'm hedging with "modern history" since there may have been some kind of Roman Gladiatorial team that got massacred on a regular basis more frequently than the Lions... but I suspect that the only contestants in Rome's Coliseum to fare as poorly as Detroit's NFL franchise were actual lions).

The Sarcastic Weasel, knowing in advance what the outcome would be, owing to an advanced technique known to its practitioners as "guessing", did not watch the game, nor will he be watching any Lion's games this year (employed the same technique to correctly predict that the sun would appear to rise in the East this morning too). He has stated for years that the fools that buy tickets to Lions' games are simply rewarding the NFL for allowing such a poor and predictable entertainment product to waddle desultorily onto the field every year. It's very difficult to reward/punish any individual team in the NFL by your economic behavior due to the League's revenue sharing practices, so the NFL as a whole are the only ones who might be brought to bear through any kind if Lions boycott. As a non-ticket/merchandise buyer, the best I can contribute to such a cause would be to avoid watching the games on TV. Truly, in such a manner, I am confident that I will become an instrument of positive change (HA!).

There is something to be said for being a loyal fan, sticking up for you team in fair or foul weather. But there's something about this level of professional incompetence, continuing unabated for so long that, to me, is unacceptable and, dare I say it, un-American (now is not the time to bring up Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Countrywide... the American banking sector in general... hedge funds, people with MBAs being put in charge of anything... I'm on a roll talking about football and bringing real reality into the conversation will just ruin it... damn).

So this year, as usual, I will be looking for a secondary team to follow. Due to geography and, my own stupidity, I will probably always be a Lions fan... so much as it is possible to be a fan of such a sad assortment of pathetic, undisciplined failures. But, to keep some level of interest in the NFL season, I have to choose a secondary team to root for, one whose fate does not seem so indelibly preordained. I know a lot of Lions fans that do the same thing, though they often have permanent secondary teams whereas I choose a new one each year. This year though, I just can't seem to choose one. I'm dangerously close to a confluence of emotional and intellectual realizations. Intellectually I've known, seemingly forever, that professional football is nothing more than an entertainment product produced by different branches of the same corporate entity that employ grown men to put on silly costumes and roll around on each other (a statement that, with minor modifications, can be applied to any spectator sport). But, emotionally, I've been willing to set that aside and believe in various fantasies relating to civic pride and redefining the bounds of human accomplishment. As Ish has said in the past, there is considerable enjoyment, even spiritual humanist enrichment to be garnered from "watching people who are the best at what they do accomplish amazing things" (well, I gussied it up a little, but it's essentially what he meant... I think... he'll correct me if I'm wrong). It's becoming difficult to continue to indulge in that emotional fantasy where the NFL is concerned though, when you own team, year after year, demonstrates that uncompromising ineptitude and incompetence are also perfectly acceptable in their realm as well.

Other Lions fans, how are you holding up?