To modify the headline on Thomas Friedman’s latest article, how did a Luddite end-up with a Times column? Presumably, in this case, it’s to deflect attention away from Obama’s failed economic policies:
Here is a typical evening at a major cable TV network: arrive at Washington studio and be asked to sign in by a contract security guard. Be met by either a young employee who appears to still be in college or an older person who seems to have hung on with tenure. Have your nose powdered by that person. Have your microphone attached by that person. Be positioned in the studio chair by that person, and then look directly into a robotic camera being manipulated by someone in a control room in New York and speak to whoever the host is wherever he or she is. That’s it: one employee, a robot and you.
Think of how many jobs — makeup artist, receptionist, camera person, producer-director — have been collapsed into one.
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Here is a typical evening in a suburban household: arrive home and park the car in the garage. Eat dinner, and then catch up on world events. Read the news from your favorite blogger via a Web browser on a PC or iPad. Think of how many jobs — paperboy, printers, deliverymen, TV anchorman, makeup artist, receptionist, camera person, producer-director, robot camera builder, preening New York Times columist — have been collapsed into one. Not to mention the men who once cleaned the manure out of the streets and shod horses, because everyone in your neighborhood drove a car instead of riding a horse and buggy home.
Incidentally, is Friedman cribbing column ideas from watching Chris Matthews these days? That might be his first mistake, right there.
But in any case, what’s the problem? John Kerry, Claire McCaskill, and others who pay lip service to radical environmentalists have argued that Obama-recession has been a positive one because lack of industrial production helps reduce Goreball Worming. The L.A. Times has argued that it’s not unemployment anyhow — it’s funemployment! The Gray Lady recently joined them by finding yet another benefit hidden in the disastrous last three years: “The recession was bad for everyone, but women experienced at least one silver lining: Their median earnings edged a bit closer to men’s:”
Median earnings for men, adjusted for inflation, fell by $2,433 — or 6 percent — from 2007 to 2010, according to the analysis, by the American Human Development Project, a social research organization. Women’s earnings, meanwhile, fell by just $253 in the same period, a drop of 0.9 percent.
For men, it was another sad chapter in the painful tale of the recession, which officially ended in June 2009 and battered them more ferociously than it did women. For women, whose economic fortunes have been on a slow but steady rise relative to men’s since the 1970s, it was a small, if unsatisfying, victory.
“The recession was devastating for men,” said Kristen Lewis, co-director of the project, which is part of the New York-based Social Science Research Council. Women, on the other hand, “have come through it with no significant change in their buying power,” she said.
And anything that’s bad for American men is always good news from Pinch’s perspective:
Not long ago, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the 41-year old publisher of the New York Times, was greeting people at a party in the Metropolitan Museum when a dignified older man confronted him. He told Sulzberger that he was unhappy about the jazzy, irreverent new “Styles of the Times” Sunday section. “It’s very”—the man—paused—“un-Times-ian”
“Thank you,” Sulzberger replied. He later told a crowd of people that alienating older white male readers means “we’re doing something right.”
To keep the brand-name consistent, as we’ve just seen above, that same worldview carries through to unemployment statistics.
Well I for one welcome our new robot NYT columnists.
Y, the old adage said that if you sat a billion monkeys in front of a billion typewriters, one of them would type “War and Peace.”
Well, they’d either produce one “War and Peace” or a billion Friedman columns.
Alienating older White male readers means he’s doing something right? Now where could Pinch have gotten that from? Oh yeah. His female readers, and staffers, and wife, and so on.
There is great deal of disdain to hatred directed against Straight White men who are not Alpha Males by Straight White Women. Generally, they just don’t like their male counterparts. Who remain competition for them, in scarce jobs and resource/spoils allocation, and the enemy for the political and cultural alliance of rich people, Media/Entertainment elites, non-Whites, and Middle Class White women. Pretty much everything from voting patterns, Obama’s popularity among demographic groups, entertainment/news consumption, and so on relates to the real, marked, disdain to hatred that White women generally have for White men.
[Note, Alpha Males from Bill Clinton to Gavin Newsome to Roman Polanski can get away with anything, because White women always excuse them. The matching double standard for men that women embrace, against the double standard for women that men embrace.]
Modern PC, Liberalism, Leftism, Multiculturalism rests on the alliance and the keystone/swing group of White women, in the eternal alliance against non Alpha Male White guys. It is that way culturally, economically, socially, and politically. BUT … with a hook-up culture, delayed or never-happen marriage, single motherhood, all those men remain outside the interests and alliances also of White women.
The NYT is failing because they depend totally and completely on White women alone. It has not been enough. The WSJ by offering stuff for men and women, and critically just not CHASING AWAY White Male readers to cater to the hatreds and prejudices of White women concerning non-Alpha White men, has been eating the NYT lunch. The WSJ remains the only profitable print edition newspaper. [It is estimated that women influence about 80% of consumer spending, however that data seems to me to be seriously flawed, in that pretty much every newspaper save the WSJ has done their best to chase away White guys and have ... fallen into red ink as a result. Marketing theories to be judged should be judged on results.]
Just think how many entrail readers, diviners, and astrologers those new-fangled economists have put out of business. Repent, Harlequin! said the Ticker Tape Man.
He later told a crowd of people that alienating older white male readers means “we’re doing something right.”
Indeed he is … He’s turning older white male readers into older white male former readers! They don’t want our business, and we can grant their wish!
Funemployment n.
What happens when entire Obama Administration is put out of work.