Outrage-for-traffic

Slate declares 2014 as the year of outrage. A number of Slate writers contributed their insights into the subject. Betsy Woodruff looked at the differences between the way a man like William F. Buckley discussed subjects and the way Tea Party activists do so. She claims that conservatives like Andrew Breitbart are the true inheritors of the Saul Alinsky mantle.

Conservatives know how to channel their outrage into wins — even if those wins are entirely symbolic. They’ve eaten from Alinsky’s Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and, David Brooks be damned, they aren’t going back.

Conservatism, as understood by Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, and William F. Buckley, is the opposite of radicalism. It eschewed the mob impulse, the scalp-hunting instinct, and the bellowing ire that’s come to be business as usual in some quarters of the right.

Dan Kois points out that women have been coming forth with accusations about being sexually assaulted by Bill Cosby since at least 2005. So why did it all finally come to a head in 2014?

first and foremost, I think, is the robust culture of outrage in which we now live.

Because every step in Cosby’s downfall this year has been accompanied by a storm of social media attention.

The outrage built and built, and each new tweet or post or status update encouraged media organizations—who, in 2014, run in part on the heat and energy of Internet anger—to report more, write more, and feed the story. And so the machinery of outrage ground Bill Cosby up—at first slowly, then all at once.

Read more here.