FUTURE SCHLOCK. For years most of my own work has been online, and the subject by which most of my readers know me has been the blogosphere. I know as well as the rest of you that online is not only the present, but also The Future, because it is tirelessly presented as such by people like Jeff Jarvis on websites and in well-compensated speeches.

I've always been annoyed by that kind of talk, and most of the time if you ask me why I'll say it's because I'm a miserable old curmudgeon who likes newsprint and daguerreotypes and LPs, and for whom everything has to be old and in black and white. But that isn't wholly true, as this Reason article by up-and-coming libertarian Katherine Mangu-Ward and some interns reminds me.

The article is a kind of guide to online stuff, a popular favorite -- why, I've done that sort of thing myself, pimping mostly small local blogs of diverse agenda.

But the premise here is that these Randian super-genii will instruct you in "kicking your dead tree habit." No, there's no Kindle promo tie-in -- the object of ridicule here is not longform dead tree, but newspapers. The intro is all ha-ha-stupid-foolscap-people:

Newspaper. Personally, I never touch the stuff. But rumor has it there is a certain amount of distress about the impending doom of the news-on-dead-tree industry...

We assumed for the sake of the experiment that The New York Times would be the last to go. Since I refuse to sully my delicate hands with filthy newsprint, Jesse and Robby paged through Wednesday’s edition in search of facts and insights that would need replacing in the event that print news goes kaput.

Though I don't know much about mockery myself, the tone seems a little forced to me -- as if KMW were not trying to summon a new audience of strangers not yet educated to the superiority of the internet, but instead trying to stroke and signal the usual true believers, who are always up for a round of ragging on paper-pushers.

It reminds me of the preemptive gloating of folks like Roger L. Simon, who tells his readers all the time that the MSM is a dinosaur, dying, on the ropes, in extremis, etc. (We're still waiting for the body to fall, but never mind.) For years this has been one of the key tropes of the rightwing online community -- which came out of the rightwing offline community's contempt for the offline equivalent, the impudent snobs of the lying liberal media, usually short-handed as the New York Times.

The Times, it just so happens, is mentioned several times in Mangu-Ward's article, mostly derisively ("New York real estate obsessives have long since left the Times behind... the Times tech reviewer, appropriately enough, senses his own irrelevance...").

Mangu-Ward does give the online edition a left-handed head-pat at the end, though. Clearly the Times and whatever it represents will be part of The Future -- just not so big a part. If years of yap have yet to completely displace the Times, they have opened up some space for an alterna-press which, like alt and indie vendors since time immemorial, not only hopes but asserts that it's The Future, your future. And they mean it, man!

In reality, when the smoke clears you are likely to find that the main effect of such a revolution has been to transfer some power -- not so much to you, though, as to those who have positioned themselves to profit from revolutionary sentiment. Here's who Mangu-Ward recommends for opinion journalism:

As for the Opinion pages, Reason should meet your needs there. But if you must, it could be supplemented with the columns aggregated at RealClearPolitics, or you could enjoy a firehose of opinion at Huffington Post or Daily Kos. Want to come back over and over to a name you trust? Hit up brand name bloggers like Glenn Reynolds, Matt Yglesias, Megan McArdle, and more.

Glenn Reynolds, Matt Yglesias, Megan McArdle! That's some groovy revolution right there.

That's the real reason this stuff bugs me. It's not that I like the Times and newsprint so much. I don't, really. And I like the internet fine. But I've also seen some come-ons in my time, and The Future is one that never gets old.

SHORTER JOSEPH BOTTUM: Higher education is a liberal conspiracy to fuck your daughter.

UPDATE. Bottum's commenters are a joy for the expected reasons -- I particularly like the one who warns the Opus Dei wannabes who read First Things about the scourge of Jesuitism at Georgetown, and the one who thinks the knocked-up heroine did right to keep her baby because now she'll have someone to open jars for her in her old age. But my very favorite is the one who asks:

How do the girls who don't get to college get knocked up?

HE SAID SHE SAID. Moe Lane sniffs sex scandal!

Fun game for your morning: see how far you get into this report before you develop this sudden and burning need to go find a rock, and throw it at Al Gore. I personally made it to page 13.

Of course it's very different when something like this happens to a respected figure like Nikki Haley.

IT'S ARTHUR JENSEN'S WORLD -- WE JUST LIVE IN IT. Grab yer shootin' ahrns, morons -- Rupert Murdoch wants to make them Mescans legal so's they can bundle his papers or sumpin'!

In a model the AP compares to his coalition against gun violence, [NYC Mayor Mike] Bloomberg is rolling out a group of big city mayors and powerful CEOs called the Partnership for a New American Economy. The group will lobby Congress for comprehensive immigration reform at the federal level, arguing they need amnesty for those here illegally in order to run their cities and businesses effectively.

This won't play well with the Tea Party, but Mayor Mike is being joined by big business CEOs, and Republicans hate telling the heads of HP, Boeing, Disney and even News Corp. that they don't know what's good for America. Rupert Murdoch is on board, and he and Bloomberg even went on Fox News to hawk their plan this morning. (Murdoch may be the boss over there, but he's smart enough not to roll out this position on Glenn Beck or Hannity.)

The Castillo Chronicles has already bitten:

Murdoch the traitor who prefers to coddle illegals instead of help Americans take back their country especially since he has the bully pulpit to make a difference.

They can't grasp that while the ringmaster of the Fox News circus is happy to keep them riled up with titrated doses of jingoism, Uncle Rupert is not so much a citizen of the United States or of the (snort) "Anglosphere" as he is a citizen of the world -- as much at home in Red China as in Mexico City, provided his accommodations are suitably luxe.

But they'll forget about it soon enough. Psychologically they'll have to. We now live in a world where Lonesome Rhodes' unmasking would cause only about one or two news-cycles' worth of outrage before everyone began talking about his comeback. And anyway, most of the rubes think not at all about the men behind the cameras and the presses; they remain convinced that the guys and gals on the sets and in the byline photos are making it up as they go along.

UPDATE. Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

THE KIDS FROM GLEE IN THEIR DEGENERATE PHASE. The most productive McArdle Summer Replacement wonders why we should care about American ironing board manufacture gone to China:

Econ 101 aside, though, there's a more compelling moral reason to condemn this kind of tariff that should help break deadlocks like Matt's: Jobs lost at home are usually jobs created elsewhere, typically in poorer countries. If anything, jobs are likely to be gained when an industry moves to China, where more aspects of the manufacturing and assembly process are done by hand. They just won't be created here. If that's your focus, you have to make the case that American jobs are intrinsically better or more valuable than Chinese jobs.

I examined this from every angle, and find no evidence of a joke (which is not Ms. Mangu-Ward's strong suit in any case). She really thinks local (that is to say, American) suckers will just have to tough out a creative destruction phase, in which the Chinese get their jobs at a fraction of their wages, and the suckers get unemployment for a while and then whatever they can scrounge up. Some (okay, many) of them aren't going to make it, but who wants them around anyway -- they're not on Twitter and Foursquare and wouldn't have fun things to say if they were. But many of their kids will probably become New Technocrats. That should be some consolation to their parents in the hobo camps!

And as to them being Americans? There are no nations, there are no peoples; there is only money.

I'm beginning to think Mangu-Ward was raised in a Skinner box.

UPDATE. In comments, Freshly Squeezed Cynic explicates Mangu-Ward's use of Whataboutery; AC in BC suggests, "Surely the Atlantic can find an Indian to write something this stupid at one quarter the cost?"

SHORTER JONAH GOLDBERG: Farrrrrrrrt.

Jesus, the guy keeps topping himself. And he keeps announcing, basically, that he doesn't know what he's saying ("This isn't the best comparison because Petraues is no dictator") -- and yet keeps going.

This passage in particular will live in the annals of dumbassery:

Maybe a better comparison is to the experienced sergeant who may be formally outranked by the new lieutenant, but when the bullets fly, everyone looks to the sergeant for leadership.

Yes, Goldberg is explaining the Petraeus assignment with old WWII movies. Hopefully the General will bring a major offensive, so Goldberg can enact it on YouTube with Army Mens.

Also among my favorites: "Petraeus is a servant to his nation and history at this point" -- as opposed to, I don't know, when he was seven. And the ending! You have to imagine it followed by the stage collapsing and Goldberg climbing up out of the wreckage with a flowerpot on his head, hollering, "Uh-oh, Spaghetti-os!"

You know the drill.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, reader Donald alerts me that Jonah Goldberg is reviving the old Megan McArdle "you never had it so good" routine (i.e., you have iPods, why are you complaining?). I guess he didn't get the memo that they're supposed to shut up about this now that Obama is President.

I eagerly await a counter-post by one of his colleagues explaining that the Obama recession has destroyed capitalism, and Goldberg's 2,000 word walkback.

WHY I AM NOT A LIBERTARIAN, PART 4,229. Normally I don't respond well to baiting (I tend to throw my food dish and plead for dignity) but this National Post column (by our old friend Katherine Mangu-Ward!) that Adam Serwer dished me must be dug:

At first glance, any comparison between the gentle beeping of a Brooklyn mom dialing 311 on her iPhone and the roar of the Taliban pickup truck seems absurd. But it remains true that both want the same thing -- a targeted ban on ice cream.

The article actually compares an Afghan Taliban interdiction against ladies eating ice cream with an anti-Mr. Softee drive in Park Slope.

The Taliban (as reported by that great libertarian journalist Eve Ensler) disapproved of girls who dared eat ice cream. The Brooklyn moms complained of the incessant jingle of ice cream trucks in their neighborhood.

The Taliban killed and/or whipped the girls. The moms called 311. Don't you see the similarities? Mangu-Ward sure does.

This is why the Taliban and the Brooklyn moms can come to the same conclusion about ice cream bans. While they disagree on the parts of the self that need to be checked or limited -- and the Brooklyn moms prefer democracy to determine those limits -- they agree that state intervention to limit highly personal choices will make people better, and even freer.

In addition to the Taliban, the Park Slope mothers are also like "Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx and John Rawls," and Mangu-Ward is like Isaiah Berlin.

Those who lobby for and approve of such restrictions don't see the ever-growing list of banned behaviours as an infringement of liberty. Instead, they are a convenient and practical solution to the problem of what Berlin called "the divided self."

Now, I have myself twitted the anti-ice-cream-truck nannies of Brooklyn for the Voice -- not as neo-Taliban, but as dorks. I did not go the full Mangu-Ward distance there, nor in my other Nanny State items at Runnin' Scared, partly because I have a sense of humor, and partly because I recognize that neighborhood associations are within their rights to agitate against what they consider public nuisances and, in their formalized state, even use legal power to deny a liquor license to a restaurant, limit the number of street fairs on their blocks, etc.

Being an arty-farty and an anti-social, I generally prefer fewer rather than more restrictions on both art and commerce. And I think in the Bloomberg era the City's gotten way too protectionist. But I also live on planet Earth. I do not think every attempt to use legal means to alter the public space is automatically the equivalent of a Taliban death threat, for the same reason I do not think Big Gummint is being unfair to poor little BP: because I am neither a libertarian nor a fucking nut.

WHO'S TODAY'S KING OF THE CRACKPOTS -- THOMAS SOWELL OR JON VOIGHT? Sowell:

When Adolf Hitler was building up the Nazi movement in the 1920s, leading up to his taking power in the 1930s...

Yep, right out of the motherfucking gate.

Just where in the Constitution of the United States does it say that a president has the authority to extract vast sums of money from a private enterprise and distribute it as he sees fit...

Technically, it has not been confiscated by Barack Obama, but that is a distinction without a difference.

With vastly expanded powers of government available at the discretion of politicians and bureaucrats...

Clearly he refers to the Power to Cloud Men's Minds, with which Congress invested Obama in 2009.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt arbitrarily took the United States off the gold standard, he cited a law passed during the First World War to prevent trading with the country's wartime enemies. But there was no war when FDR ended the gold standard's restrictions on the printing of money.

At about the same time, during the worldwide Great Depression, the German Reichstag passed a law "for the relief of the German people"...

You know, even in wingnut writing, there is such a thing as trying to do too much. Equating FDR with Hitler calls for a post of its own, surely. (Sowell also refers to both "czars" and "useful idiots," putting Obama on both wrong sides of the Russian Revolution.) Just feed the talking points to Glenn Beck and have him do a DVD, TS!

Voight:

Dear President Obama:

You will be the first American president that lied to the Jewish people, and the American people as well, when you said that you would defend Israel, the only Democratic state in the Middle East, against all their enemies.

That promise to defend Israel was in the Oath of Office you didn't get to see: The one they had later in the basement, with body shots!

You have done just the opposite. You have propagandized Israel, until they look like they are everyone's enemy - and it has resonated throughout the world.

That was a hell of a thing -- who'd have thought that such hotbeds of philo-Semitism as France, the UK, and especially Turkey could be turned against Israel by one measly Presidency?

The Jewish people have given the world our greatest scientist and philosophers, and the cures for many diseases, and now you play a very dangerous game so you can look like a true martyr to what you see and say are the underdogs.

Yeah, they're scientist and philosophers, and you play with that baby toy See 'n Say like a little baby. (In fairness to Voight, this may be a corruption of his original; we understand the Washington Times no longer has proofreaders, or editors, or a dictionary.)

Your destruction of this country may never be remedied, and we may never recover.

Way to rally the crowd, Joe Buck! "To arms, citizens -- we may get out of here alive yet!"

I give it to Sowell. Voight has been soaking his brain in Hollywood for decades, and so has an excuse. Also, unlike Sowell, Voight has a useful skill.

MORE N00BS. I lost interest in the Kids from The Atlantic Megan McArdle Summer Replacement series, which is no big deal, as they seem to be working Summer Fridays every day of the week.

But go over there yourself and see what you think -- you don't need my help to find the obvious qualities in stories like

• "The Growing Geek iPhone Backlash";
• Katherine Mangu-Ward's pretense of concern that statists are forcing paupers out of the banking system (since the Obama people have messed with overdraft fees, "protecting" indigents from overdraft ass-raping whenever their desperate checkbook juggling goes wrong -- now how are they ever going to learn that poverty doesn't pay? -- the cash-starved banks have been forced to charge everyone for checking, which is socialism);
• Courtney "Is It Time For My" Knapp ripping the lid off that Slovenia-United States soccer match. Was the U.S. victim of a bad call? The story they don't want you to see!

Alternately, if you value your sanity, you can let TBogg substitute Susan of Texas guide you through the work of Fatherhood Expert Tony Woodlief ("Excuse me, I seem to have something caught in my throat. Cough*bullshit*cough. There, that’s better").

LOOK, I HATE TO SAY IT, but the Facebook Fox News Discussions Page...

...doesn't it just prove everything?

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the Joe Barton fiasco and the rightbloggers' insistence on making it worse. They -- ugh, you know what, read the thing; I can't provide a gloss here because that would require a new, more retarded version of I LOVE OIL GUYS MORE THAN U.S. BECAUSE IS LIKE REAGAN JESUS ME IS, IS TOO! and so far even conservatives (hopped up on whatever catecholamine killing one's own soul produces) are too worn out to provide one.

UPDATE. There's nothing for me here, so I will disappear:

If BP cut corners on safety and if the cut corners greatly increased the probability of this disaster, it deserves every legal penalty we can throw at it. But let's not forget that a prostitute can be raped, church-going family men can commit rape, and you're more likely to get away with rape if everyone thinks the victim deserves it.

If she turns up while I'm gone, please let me know.

TRAIL OF TEARS. Jesus Christ, these guys are still crying that BP got hosed by the U.S. Government. Reihan Salam goes the extra distance:

Shakedowns of this kind have a long and undistinguished history... During the westward expansion of the United States, the federal government “negotiated” with sovereign Indian nations in a similar spirit.

Yes, he's actually comparing BP to the fucking Indians. Soon I suppose Tony Hayward will have to watch his yacht races from a reservation.

UPDATE. Also, "the Muslims who were burned alive in Gujarat in 2002." Jesus.

SHORTER CRAZY JESUS LADY: Jimmy Carter Jimmy Carter Jimmy Carter Jimmy Carter Jimmy Carter Jimmy Carter Jimmy Carter Jimmy Carter Jimmy Carter.

JAY NORDLINGER SENILITY WATCH, JUNE 18. Since his Bloomberg post yesterday:

Thursday, 3:25 pm: Public high schools teach nothing but enviro-communist propaganda these days!

Thursday, 11:06 pm: Remember my earlier post mocking some guy who said "staid and formal hockey mom"? No? Here, let me tell it again.

Thursday, 11:18 pm: Unions are still angry at Thatcher. Good!

Friday, 2:21 pm: Classical musicians are a bunch of communists! You remember when I complained about this before, right? Well, now that Obama has sent back Churchill's bust, I wonder if these communists, the British ones, I mean... Classical musicians are a bunch of communists!

Friday, 3:22 pm: I hate that "serial" music they've been making us listen to. Give me Brahms, I say! The other day, I thought someone was making a joke about it. Turned out they weren't. But if they had, how I would have laughed.

GREAT MOMENTS IN VOLUNTEER PUBLIC RELATIONS. Rightwing reactions to Joe Barton's BP apology are just getting funnier. Though everyone in the Republican Party (including Barton himself) has run away from his comments, several conservatives yet endeavor to keep hope alive.

Jazz Shaw at Pajamas Media insists that while Barton's characterization of the Obama-BP agreement as a "shakedown" was "politically tone deaf," it was also correct. The escrow funds are "President Obama's demand," a "pound of flesh demanded by an elected official," "simply order[ed]... by fiat," "lawless, creepy, and dictatorial," etc. It makes Shaw think of Cuba, Venezuela, the Godfather, etc.

And then the punchline:

True, BP may have been under no legal constraint to follow Obama’s dictate.

This is akin to ending a prosecutorial peroration with, "While the accused's crime was not, strictly speaking, against the law..."

Thereafter it's all Shaw running around with a bucket on his foot. One evasive maneuver: By using legal action to get restitution from BP, Obama will only enrich the lawyers! Plus, the undeserving poor will show up to dip their beaks, as well:

If a blind, 84-year-old grandmother with a leaky rowboat showed up next month claiming that the spill may have prevented her from taking up shrimping next month as a retirement career, BP might very well fork over the requested cash.

Fuck that blind 84-year-old gangster bitch! BP is the injured party here, and Jazz Shaw is here to tell the truth to all the rightwing nuts who go to rightwing nut sites. And he doesn't care how politically tone deaf he is. In fact, judging from the evidence, maybe politically tone-deaf is what he's going for.

PLEA BARGAINING. The rightwing defense of Joe Barton's and other Republicans' solicitousness of BP is that Obama is criminally assaulting the oil company. Cf. the American Spectator's Ross Kaminsky:

I am rarely at a loss for words, but I was briefly stunned into silence by Barack Obama's words during his Tuesday night speech that he would "inform" BP's CEO that he "is to" create an escrow account. The president has no authority to do such a thing -- but neither did he have authority to cram down Chrysler and GM bond holders for the benefit of the UAW. Law is irrelevant, probably not even considered as an afterthought, by this president.

One would think Obama had his goons frog-march Hayward to the Capitol and, when the police attempted to intervene, he blew them away with his tommy gun.

Any of these aggrieved parties might have said no to the President's plans, and accepted the consequences. They chose not to, almost certainly because they didn't want to take their chances with other authorities.

This is one of the few cases I've seen where a suspected malefactor cut a deal with the forces of justice and conservatives complained those forces were too hard on the skels. Aren't they supposed to be law-and-order types?

SHOTER DAVID BERNSTEIN. Rand Paul was right the first time, but he didn't use enough words to say so. Still not convinced? South Park!

UPDATE. Commenters show a reluctance to get out of the boat. Who could blame them? Some choice bits:

But antidiscrimination laws are unlikely to provide much protection to a minority group when the majority of the voting population is hostile to that group. America’s landmark civil rights legislation was enacted and implemented in the 1960s, when racial attitudes of whites had already liberalized substantially...

Even the 1964 Civil Rights Act did not noticeably accelerate the pace of liberalization of whites’ racial attitudes...

If that doesn't mean anything to you, forget it and we'll make it this:

Even a generally sober commentator like George Will...

SHORTER JAY NORDLINGER. I have forgotten, in my dotage, that conservatives are supposed to hate Nanny Bloomberg for hating guns, and judge him a superman who can and must immediately apprehend those beastly thieves who mugged an ABT ballerina. In Manhattan! I mean, it's not like it happened in one of those neighborhoods to one of those people.

UPDATED SHORTER: You folks still go for the cab driver bullshit, right? (The Anchoress: Yes!)

IDIOCRACY. This is the most depressing thing I've read today (but then, I got up late):

President Obama's speech on the gulf oil disaster may have gone over the heads of many in his audience, according to an analysis of the 18-minute talk released Wednesday.

Tuesday night's speech from the Oval Office of the White House was written to a 9.8 grade level, said Paul J.J. Payack, president of Global Language Monitor...

Though the president used slightly less than four sentences per paragraph, his 19.8 words per sentence "added some difficulty for his target audience," Payack said...

It's depressing on several levels. It's like a parfait of suck.

First, that someone at CNN gathered this opinion, and someone else at CNN said, "Let's use it, but find a way not to say out loud that people are idiots."

Next, the widespread reports that nobody likes the speech because it proposed long-term solutions to our oil dependency when everyone just wanted Obama to announce he had developed a giant oil tampon in his secret laboratory.

There's also the diligent repetition of the "Rahm Emanuel said never let a crisis go to waste which means Democrat treehuggers supertax skree" mantra. (And that's just in the trad rightwing news sources -- as usual, their blog operatives are better at mindlessly repeating it.) Thus you get guys like Lamar Alexander telling constituents about "the advice of the White House Chief of Staff which has been so often quoted," which 99 percent of them, not being poli-sci nerds, never heard of before he told them -- but will probably go away remembering that it's supposed to be a famous saying, having something to do with Obama and skree.

Worst of all is the presumption that even in the face of vivid, horrible consequences of our oil culture, these people continue to insist there's no point in even trying to change it. Erick Erickson makes this "argument" about as well as anyone:

Most oil goes to fueling our cars. Windmills, nuclear reactors, and solar panels will not fuel our cars. If we don’t extract the oil, we will grow more and more dependent on Hugo Chavez and Iranian President I’manutjob. I realize he doesn’t want a crisis to go to waste, but his priorities are clearly not those of the rest of the nation.

Well, no one will accuse him of writing to the 9.8 grade level.

Did I say that was the worst of all? Actually the worst of all is that this horseshit might actually go over.

UPDATE. Aw Jeez, Joe Barton:



(My homeboy! Well, Texas ain't all Willie Nelson and chicken fried bacon.)

Astonishingly, this is the GOP talking point on the issue. At first I was surprised their schtick wasn't to investigate the corrupt deal between Obama and BP -- but then I realized that would require them to say something bad about an oil company. Not fucking likely. So they have to apologize to BP on behalf of the real America (i.e., lobbyists and nuts).