To what degree is Sarah Palin trolling us?

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 1 Comment
Sarah Palin tries out her ultimately discarded catchphrase, "I'm a bad wittle sublimation of wacism."

Sarah Palin sublimates a nation’s racism in her adorable voice.

As the respectful absence of Combat! blog reminded us, yesterday was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. I celebrated the way Dr. King called on us all to do, by remaining silent, but every American observed the holiday as he or she saw fit. Sarah Palin, for example, called on President Obama to stop playing the race card. As usual, she used Facebook to communicate her argument, but she was uncharacteristically to the point:

Happy MLK, Jr. Day!

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

Mr. President, in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. and all who commit to ending any racial divide, no more playing the race card.

That was the whole thing, and it raises an important question: to what degree is Sarah Palin trolling us?

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Facebook is a cadre, not a service

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 1 Comment
Facebook

Facebook

A fun thing my brother and I talked about during Combat! blog’s long rest was that Facebook use is declining among teenagers. For whatever reason—we posited that it was because Facebook is all pictures of babies now when it used to be cool bands and people you hooked up with, although that may just be our user experience—kids prefer Snapchat or Vine or Twist or Goob. Which is interesting, because Facebook sold itself as a service. It arguably just pulled off a multibillion-dollar IPO as a service. Facebook is the premiere social network, as we all know from that movie Citizen Kane. But maybe it is the perennial social network of a certain group of people. Facebook isn’t a service; it’s a cadre.

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Here’s what’s wrong with the Daily Kos

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 6 Comments
Commentary

Commentary

Thanks to Facebook’s policy of allowing entities my friends have “liked” to post articles to my news feed, I saw this story in the Daily Kos, headlined “Teen Kills 4; Judge LITERALLY Lets Him Off Because He Is Rich!” First of all, you will know your objective news sources by their uses of exclamation points and capital letters in headlines. Second, you’ll be glad to hear that a Texas judge did not literally let off 16 year-old drunk driver Ethan Couch, because he was not literally on a hook. Certainly, Couch being sentenced to probation after he killed four pedestrians while driving with a blood alcohol content of .24 is infuriating, especially in context of the defense’s claim that he had lived a life of such privilege as to not understand the consequences of his actions. But there is a difference between the local CBS report and the one in the Daily Kos, and that difference seems to be between news and something else.

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News media goes willfully ignorant over Obama selfie

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 3 Comments
The leader of the free world bites his lip to look sexy.

The leader of the free world bites his lip.

AFP photographer Roberto Schmidt took this picture of President Obama, British PM David Cameron and Danish PM Helle Thorning-Schmidt posing for a selfie at Nelson Mandela’s funeral. Not in selfie: Michelle Obama, who remains sternly otherie. In his account of the image, Schmidt notes that he took the picture approximately two hours into the service, when much of the crowd was dancing and singing. Quote:

The atmosphere was totally relaxed—I didn’t see anything shocking in my viewfinder, president of the US or not. We are in Africa.

So start using “African funeral” as a euphemism for a really fun party. Also get ready for some top-flight outrage from such deeply investigative outlets as Fox News, which has already declared the photo an “international incident.”

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DC circuit court in process of deciding net neutrality

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 1 Comment
The Internet

The Internet

Back in 2010, Congress passed the the Open Internet Order, which authorizes the FCC to prevent internet service providers from blocking particular applications—such as file sharing or telephony—and from charging content providers to make their sites load faster than others. This broad set of rules is called net neutrality, and Verizon hates it. On Monday, lawyers for Verizon and the FCC delivered oral arguments before the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in an attempt to overturn/protect the Open Internet Order, respectively. You can read a broad summary of their positions here. Probably you should read it now, because by the end of the week Ars Technica could load really slowly as your ISP encourages you to get your news from Yahoo.

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