The New Republic is on life support? Good. #TNR is trash

Really, TNR died long ago.

It died when Marty Peretz inflicted his ultra-Zionism, plus his racism, on the journal. That's why, contra this former intern's claim, it's far, far away from "heterodox liberalism." Hell, Vox isn't the first place to halfway note that, as I blogged a few years back. Well, if you're on the Council for Foreign Relations, it's probably flat-out liberalism.

And, Mr. Greenberg, if it's impolite for me to email you calling Marty Peretz a racist? If you'd had a Twitter account, I would have done it more publicly, so consider yourself lucky.

And, if I had wanted to be impolite, I would have called Peretz a fucking racist, not just a racist.

Besides, The Nation publicly called you out. So did Gawker (insert irony, since new TNR owner Chris Hughes wants a new Gawker or something), but with more snark.

But, back to TNR's nearly 40 years of history being owned by ... a racist.

Instead, it had a nearly 40-year history of racism, racism fueled in part by a particular version of ultra-Zionism that is part of why some blacks have long been less than fully trusting of all Jews. Sorry, but I went there.

And, for Jews, especially with some degree of Zionism, to stay on, and to stay on not just through Peretz's craptacular management in general, but his racism, well ... it's no wonder that a lot of black journalists like Ta-Nehisi Coates feel little sadness for your loss.

Hell, I wouldn't blame them if they had a shade or two of schadenfreude. It would be well-deserved.

That said, back to the racism.

It's racism that was only further fueled when Andrew Sullivan (anybody calls him a liberal, I'll kick you in the nads) devoted a full issue of the magazine to singing a paean to Charles Murray's and Richard Herrnstein's love song to racialism, "The Bell Curve," a move that inspired my bit of Photoshopping at left. And a bit of punditry about that Photoshopping.

Dylan Byars at Politico has the inside-the-Beltway mourning for the mag, which is cutting its print issues in half, looking to go digital first, and ... moving to New York!

Quelle horreur!

In reality? TNR was a training ground for some neoliberals, and even more a lot of neoconservatives.

You know, the type that, at various levels of alleged liberalism, worked to give Shrub Bush pseudointellectual, pseudoliberal "cover" for invading Iraq.

Yes, since Peretz finally let go of the paper, it's gotten better on not being racist. But, the inside-the-Beltway thinking otherwise? From the occasional articles I've grokked online, little has changed there.

For those who claim TNR wasn't racist, an old cover.
Via Ta-Nehesi Coates' Twitter feed.

Who, outside the Beltway, would mourn that, or call it "heterodox liberalism"? Speaking of, I wonder how national Democrats will pontificate. Or national bloggers? Why am I not surprised that Josh Marshall called TNR, Peretz version, "really good"?

Additional serious points about its current status.

The Daily Beast nails one other angle.

Current owner Chris Hughes is a co-founder of Facebook. He's been a partner in Gawker.

You can form some idea of what the new TNR is going to look like just from that.

Clickbait articles. Political gossip. Political picture. A bit gussied up, still. Commentary to hold that together.

In other words, a kinder, gentler version of the UK's clickbait newspaper, The Daily Mail.

On the other hand, for the Dylan Byars types and beyond? Some people at TNR, and probably starting with Leon Wieseltier, probably did need some kicking around.

As for what this does, or does not, say about #JournalismIsDying, political/opinion mags have been money-losers for decades. Ask National Review and The Nation. Rich benefactors is the only way they stay afloat.

Chris Hughes will either become a rich benefactor, or his Facebooky click-bait model will fail without his wallet, and he'll move on. If we're lucky, Hughes will screw up enough to kill it.

That said, said failure will be blamed on anything and everything else but neoliberalism, and Net 2.0 related items.

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Corey Robin has some interesting thoughts. While acknowledging that TNR was racist and warmongering, he says that's not what's caused its semi-demise. Rather, in what's probably going to be infuriating to Sully of my Photoshopping, down through the sacked Franklin Foer and everybody who quit in sympathy this week, Robin said that it ran out of intellectual steam.

I would modify that. I'd say that it was rather that its intellectual steam got adopted by so much of the modern GOP, as well as neoliberal Democrats, that its one big idea became an inside-the-Beltway commonplace.

#SciAm has a #MOOC-ed up fail

The August Scientific American has what must be its worst special section since the one it ran a few years ago about electric cars. That one was a journalistic ethics failure on multiple counts. First, it was sponsored entirely and only by General Motors. Second (what a shock!) it tried to claim that GM's hybrid car, the Chevy Volt, was a full electric.

I blogged about that, including the "refusing to accept there's a problem" comments of Scientific American's blogging managing editor/SEO guru Bora Zivkovic, here.

The new #fail? A breathless touting of massive open online courses, or MOOCs.

Most of the stuff in there is either written by, or influenced by, Obama/Democratic neoliberals like Arne Duncan (he has a piece himself) or Silicon Valley-type neolibs like Salman Khan of Khan Academy fame and a senior Google executive, Peter Norvig, director of research. The Democrat-Silicon Valley pair-up is exactly the type of stuff that makes a Yevgeny Morozov barf.

I've blogged a bit before about how MOOCs in the US are likely to be a nonstarter, other than to enrich the bottom lines of university chancellors and presidents who will see them as an opportunity to replace yet more professors with adjunct faculty.

But, going for the feel-good angle, much of the section talks about the bloessings MOOCs will bring to India, or even to sub-Saharan African.

Well, lemme see.

First, you have to have adequate electricity to power your online device.

Second, you must have an online device.

Third, to adequately watch video, you must have an online device big enough for adequate video viewing. No smartphone or smaller sized tablet.

Fourth, you have to have the money to pay for all of this.

Until Google, Microsoft, or Apple address all four of these, who's going to be attending MOOCs in Uganda?

But, that's not all.

The biggie is ....

What will the content of these MOOCs be? Will it be purely "utilitarian" education, designed to make the workers work better, and perhaps be better consuming budding hypercapitalists? Or will there be a Ugandan or Indian version of a humanities and liberal arts education?

C'mon, you already know the answer to that one. Because a Peter Norwig ain't writing about how engaging a MOOC can be for his health.

Instead, it's the "personalization" of Net 2.0, about how you can "individualize" everything.

Wrong. State U., with an adjunct overseeing 700 ppl in a MOOC, ain't individualizing anything. And certainly, no Western(ized) company in Uganda is doing anything like that.

You want a "personlized" MOOC? Pull your wallet out a second time.

File this as another in my "dark side of the Internet" dispatches.

===

But this is far from the only problem.

Rather, stuff like this reflects a deeper decline in Scientific American.

Twenty years ago, it was still a semi-technical magazine with in-depth articles about science first, technology second. It was kind of like Science News, but in long-form journalism style.

By 10 years ago, it had lost a fair amount of that.

And today? Pure pop science. And perhaps not even on the same level as Discover.

The special section, as far as the science/technology divide, is 100 percent on the technology side.

But, even that's not the real problem.

Rather, the special section is first and foremost a public policy section. True, it's public policy as reflecting advances in technology and their potential to change this area of public policy. But, it's first and foremost a public policy special section.

Honestly? Between that fact and the exact political positioning?

This belongs in the New Republic.

What Obama should do in Term 2 -- and won't

Some of the staff at the under-new-ownership New Republic, on the grounds that President Obama has at least a 50-50 shot at re-election, offer up a laundry list of what he should do with that second term.


It's actually kind of laughable.


Civil liberties? From the Dear Leader who flip-flopped on telecom snooping immunity in the middle of the 2008 campaign? Talk like a liberal? Fat chance, if he's not already. Political reform? Won't happen, and fake "reform" wouldn't be extended to third parties, anyway. Fiscal policy? Well, his Catfood Commission has already proposed that. Real liberals shouldn't want more of the same.

Isn't this just one more exercise in "projecting" stuff onto Obama?


That all said,  the new ownership probably won't move TNR off its current neoliberal focal point. And, how do you "triangulate" off neoliberalism and Democratic Party policy?


Meanwhile, per the first link, I think all opinion journals would be smart to transition as much as possible to web-based publishing, given ongoing problems to be likely with second-class postal rates, delivery, paper costs, etc.

Marty Peretz - bigot, Zionist nut, more.

NYMag has a good, but occasionally flawed in-depth profile on the man who has gotten ever more extreme in his Zionism, even while dissing not only all Arabs but claiming even upper-income blacks don't go to classical concerts or museums.

His fixed-idea nuttery on Israel? Here's how wrong he is:

"Obama has committed himself to a contiguous Palestine: Gaza and the West Bank. That means a discontiguous Israel.”

That said, Benjamin Wallace-Wells "fluffs" TNR as a magazine with the claim that, since he's taken it over, he's generally kept its politics well to the left of his own.

HUH?

It's neolib dreck, if it's that liberal, on general politics.

More specifically, can we talk about Andrew Sullivan's "Bell Curve issue"? Oy.

Why I despair of The Nation

Yes, Eric Alterman is right in that Obama has faced a ton of GOP obstructionism. But, even with that, he could have done better, even a lot better, than she has.

Barbara Ehrenreich DOES get it. In one of the pieces in response to Alterman's subscription-only "Kabuki Democracy," she says:

Alterman acknowledges the problem only tentatively, observing that "one might argue that this [Democratic] faith in government's ability to improve people's lives is misplaced." You betcha. The role of the left should not be to uphold or defend the government, meaning, for now, the corpo-Obama-Geithner-Petraeus state, but to change it, drastically and from the ground up. That may sound overly radical to Alterman, who seems to want "progressives who think of themselves as left of liberal" to abandon even that tiny distinction. But as the Tea Partyers keep reminding us in their nasty and demented ways, these are revolutionary times.

Beyond that, what's with Norm Ornstein getting to write in The Nation? Is it going to become The New Republic five years from now?

Of course, without considering third-party progressive alternatives, we already know that, after a modicum of hand-wringing for show, The Nation will endorse Obama for re-election in 2012.

Somebody get Marty Peretz a rabies shot

The publisher of The New Republic is the latest winger to claim left-liberals want to exclude Christians from government. His “proof”? Objections to Obama’s naming Francis Collins to head NIH. The worry is not about Collins as a Christian. It’s that, among other things, Collins might use his particular evangelical beliefs, since he is very open about his religion, to influence genetic research decisions, federal funding for genetic research, etc. We saw exactly that happen under President Bush’s bioethics council, with stem-cell research.

The fact that, per Wiki, Collins believes in a “gOd of the gaps,” with gOd itself above gap-investigation, makes this problematic. Essentially, Collins’ metaphysical beliefs are mush, pure mush. And, if that makes his science soft, that’s problematic. What if he, without religious beliefs, but with the same mushy thought, signs off on spending more money on alt-medicine?

Michael and Ted’s not-so-excellent anti-enviro adventure

Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger are at it again with their anti-environmental stereotyping and stupidity, all in the name of a “New Environmentalism” or whatever. It’s no shock that The New Republic is their vehicle of choice.

This time, they claim that enviros are nothing but snooty elitists and that’s why environmental support is on the downturn again.

First, they ignore the recession.

Second, according to a new Gallup poll, a strong majority support Obama’s new CAFÉ standards, directly refuting Michael and Ted’s anti-enviro adventures.