We don't need your help!

Oregon Muse writes in part,

I'm thankful that C-SPAN has a YouTube channel that provides the proceedings without commercials and, more importantly, without any yammering commentators. Attention talking heads: I can think of few things in this world more useless than you. I don't need you, I don't want you. I do not need to you tell me what I just saw. I don't need you to explain it to me, I can figure it out for myself. And if there is anything I don't know, I can easily look it up. I have the internet, too, just like you. You may not have realized this, but the flow of information has gotten a lot more decentralized over the past 2 or 3 decades. So it's not like you're sitting on a bunch of stuff I don't have or can't get to. And I can't begin to count the number of times you professional journalismists got out-scooped by bloggers, autistic 4chan nerds, and guys wearing pajamas in their basements.

False stories about Trump

In her blog Sharyl Attkisson documents errors and outright lies of various journalism outlets in covering President Trump. She is up to 96 false stories and counting. Read them here.

"We are the press! We need to be protected!"

The Des Moines Register sort of made an apology to Iowans and fired a shoddy "journalist." That got Ace of Spades to thinking about the state of journalism today.

they're a Guild who asserts the Absolute Right to attack and destroy any non-journalist citizen in the world, but which shrieks "We are the press! We need to be protected!" when the same treatment is suggested for them.

They're currently shrieking merely about criticism -- true criticism, as they full well know. They know they're liberal. But if high-ranking Republicans say they're crusading liberal partisans -- which they know they are; they give each other awards in recognition of this -- they shriek that we're "endangering the press" and trying to "chilling the First Amendment."

And meanwhile, they just keep adding to their bloody pile of citizen scalps.

They really do believe -- and intend to codify it as law -- that the First Amendment exists only for the credentialed liberal professional class. They're just hesitant to say it until they're sure they have the power to impose that law.

Read more here.

True!

Triggered and fat-shamed!

Google maps had a new feature that showed how many calories you would burn if you walked somewhere instead of driving. Ace remarks,

Thus begins the newest internecine squabble on the left, between the environmental zealots who don't want you to drive anywhere, and the Fat Acceptance Tumblrinas who get #triggered at the thought of hoofing it a few blocks.

Keshia Hannam reports at Fortune,

Google‘s mapping team has reportedly ditched an experimental feature for its iOS Google Maps app that estimated how many calories users could potentially burn by walking a route. The calorie count revealed itself when the user called up a driving route that covered a short distance, in order to promote the option of walking instead. If a walking route was chosen, calories were displayed in the step-by-step directions, but not on the map itself. The calories were communicated in equivalence to the amount of “mini cupcakes.”

The attempt at what looks to be a promotion of healthy lifestyle choices was castigated online, where people took to Twitter to suggest the feature could “shame” and even “trigger” those with eating disorders (which in the U.S. is said to be around 30 million people).

Ace writes,

Welcome to the Brave New World where neuroticism and hysteria are valorized as positive traits of a virtued person, and "#science" consists of militant parody-religious lunacy.

...All these "reporters" #Triggered and starting an online outrage mob.

Mediocre intellects sometimes long to be considered great intellects. We have an entire pseudopolitics which teaches the mediocre they can become smarter if they just become neurotically hysterical about every damn thing.

It's an easy way into the intellectual elite -- just become a basket-case who cries over nothing at all and you're in the #SmartSet.

Progressive culture is valorizing lunacy, and little wonder we get more lunacy in a system rigged to bestow social capital to lunatics.