I’ve had similar thoughts on newspapers. Brecher’s maybe the best columnist in the world, and his employment is just as mechanically unthinkable, by any “moral”ly imbecilic institution in our grotesque world. Ames is up there. His bits in the eXile book (and beyond) are probably the best autobiographical novel shit I’ve ever read. I’m pretty sure I’m the best novelist of the generation, but very uneven essayist. I’ve written for this fine publication, and nobody will publish what I’m actually good at. Let Them Die.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Swvf3w6hcY4

But why are you bringing up Israel? WHAT THE FUCK DOES ANYTHING HAVE TO DO WITH VIETNAM?!?!? I mean what do you want? It’s a “moral” trainwreck, like this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlaFJvW74Wc

Israel and Palestine are worthy of Keyboard Cat, nothing more. Big moral narratives are grotesquely stupid.

Ames at his best finding bad people in our government and destroying their public images, ideologies, reputations (or what’s left of them). Hard work of a post-industrial information age warrior but somebody has to do it.

Damn straight. I have had no pity whatsoever whenever these nonsensically pious discussions about the demise of the newspaper come up. Newspapers could save themselves any time they felt like it by being newspapers and instead they are a maddening form of advertising which you must pay the advertised party for.
People didn’t go to blogs just for an echo chamber, they went to get away from our detached and antidemocratic ruling caste’s echo chambers in the mass media. Newspapers have the resources to trump nearly any blog with investigative reporting and international offices and instead they choose to run Israeli propaganda so lazily thrown together it makes Jews throw up and human interest stories that might propaganda be from anti-human robots.
The loss of the newspaper is tied to that phony Fearless-Nazi-Hunter pseudo-moral superficially-liberal culture, the kind that worships meaninglessly vague Twilight Zone episodes about “fascism” being “bad,” and clucks in a superior manner about how relevant that is today. This moralistic rather than moral mindset was in part behind all of the worst American crimes of the latter half of the twentieth century, from the health care scam to Vietnam to the war on drugs and the Reagan Revolution.
Until AT&T kills the internet it must terrify our masters to think about the simple variety and depth of information available for free online.

If you can’t afford to pay someone to do this, send your articles and straplines to me and I’ll do them for nothing.

‘Reign in’ indeed. It’s not the first, you know.

Ames has spite to draw from!

My take is reading patterns stay Sunday School and tribal. Just look at the talking-points culture of political debate. And then people have this subconscious belief they’re “bettering” themselves by reading. There’s such a pious tenor to most people’s conception of reading that it magnifies moral violations, makes people puff up their orthodoxy-detectors. Unless the content’s utterly trivial.

What’s not untrivial: the swine picture. The old Bertrand Russell “liberal” misanthropy’s been barred from liberal critiques, implicitly, for a long time. Even though powerful people being corrupt, self-satisfied, self-interested, incompetent, ignorant scum was the best “liberal” critique available. But who the fuck knows what liberal or conservative mean anymore. The Daily Show and alterno-columnists are freely taking shots at Obama, now, even as Republican reptiles are being revealed as grotesquely ideologically-constrained hacks of the sort one always imagined they were.