One thing I haven’t done on this trip is to look at HuffPost. But, like a dog returning to its vomit, I couldn’t resist a peek this afternoon, as there’s not much doing on the ship.
The site is still pretty much the predictable farrago of Regressive Leftism, but also flaunts an announcement that the site is changing the way it covers the news (click on screenshots to go to stories). Check out the story below that argues that because the world changes, the site must change the way it covers—indeed, “redefines”—the news. (What kind of logic is that?)
What they’re doing:
As always, you’ll find the latest news: what’s happening at the White House and beyond, as well as the big stories that shape our lives. That includes the quiet housing crisis and the struggle for voting rights, and battles over health care, inequality and gender discrimination. And of course, the history-making presidential race.
But you’ll also find a lot more stories about what’s happening at your house: raising good kids, finding a therapist you can afford, managing your student debt. We know the day-to-day challenges of life are serious news too, and we are here to help.
Above all, you’ll find stories about people. Manar Hussein, a Muslim woman who stood up to those who tried to intimidate her for wearing a modest bathing suit, and Jo Etta M. Harris, a Black woman who had the police called on her while nursing her child in her car. Or David Ledbetter, the teenager who had the bright idea to register people to vote while they waited in line for a coveted Popeye’s chicken sandwich. People who, like you, want to make their lives and the world better.
Less real news, more stuff about your own life and about people, especially those from oppressed groups. In other words, HuffPost is tired of doing journalism and is becoming Woke People magazine.
Some pressing stories. First, the euphemism of the month:
Enough of that; we’ll leave Ms. Watson to her self-partnering in the hopes that she and herself don’t become consciously uncoupled.
Then the obligatory holiday joy-killing. First they disposed of Halloween (see below) and then they came for Thanksgiving:
The main tip is to ditch the turkey!
Consider Taking The Turkey Out Of The Turkey Dinner
Meat and meat byproducts (cheese, butter and heavy cream, for example) have a larger environmental footprint than plant-based ingredients. According to research done by Carnegie Mellon University, the carbon footprint of a 16-pound turkey creates a total of 34.2 pounds of CO2 — the same amount produced by turkey gravy, cranberry sauce, roasted Brussels sprouts, mashed potatoes, rolled biscuits and apple pie combined.
And don’t substitute other meats, either, because they’re worse.
As for Halloween candy, fugeddaboutit: it’s often wrapped in plastic, which is hard to recycle. The implicit answer to the question below is “You betcha!”
From the article:
We need to talk about Halloween candy.
Public awareness of our plastic pollution crisis is at a high, plastic straws and bags are getting banned in cities and states across the country, and yet there has been almost no discussion about the massive environmental problem that Halloween candy creates.
When I read that first sentence, my automatic response was, “No we don’t!”
In his superb collection A Mencken Chrestomathy, H. L. Mencken famously defined “Puritanism” as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” That’s what we’re seeing here. Of course I’m worried about the environment, and I recycle scrupulously, but enough is enough. I’d tell HuffPost to get the hell off my lawn, but at the moment all I have is a patch of deck.
Soon as they claim to provide the news that real people need, that is your key to run the other direction. If they only write for real people I get this funny feeling I don’t want to know these people. I also don’t need that news. To write about what people should be doing or eating on Halloween or Thanksgiving is about as exciting as watching the clothes go round in the dryer. I’m sure running the dryer creates way too much C02.
I wonder if HuffPo is going to ask for more “user-generated content” (stuff submitted by amateur writers)so they don’t have to provide actual reporting—and thereby cut costs.
Also: “self-partnering.” Does that involve some kind of new cloning technology?
Regardless, that has to be the most grotesque euphemism I’ve ever heard. “Single” is a lot more dignified.
To me, “self-partnering” implies self-fertilization, which is of course impossible in humans.
We should all turn into soybeans. However, the price is low and that’s another story.
Even the Blessed Virgin needed the seed of the Holy Ghost. 🙂
Not in the nasty way. In the nicest possible way.
Ummm.
“Impossible”, or “unknown”? Or even more restrictedly, “unknown in nature”.
Why on earth anyone would want to self-fertilize, and presumably self-reproduce, is a question I’ll leave for someone who can answer why some people want to reproduce at all. But, we have this scare trotted out every time there is a “first cloning of [another species]” story. Getting Bill Gates (4), (5) and (6) out of a test tube. Not that Gates himself has ever mentioned any such intentions, but he’s probably shed enough hair, skin etc in Apple meeting rooms that there is a secret research project in some underground lair in a dormant volcano. My inner “muwahahahah” is tickled.
Aidan,
Let’s say it is impossible in humans as long as anything of the current laws lasts.
Otherwise, I am dreaming – but not of more Bill Gateses but of “resurrection” of extinct species. What if we could have back the thylacine? The Steller’s sea cow? The dodo? The auroch? (The latter is almost realistic, because much of its genome could presumably be assembled from various cattle breeds.)
The genetics of recreating an extinct species are very interesting. The ethical problems are horrible – possibly insoluble.
Obviously you’re only going to clone one member of a social species … and you’re going to have to work hard to get that past the ethics committee.
Where is it going to live? Second item on a long agenda.
You are right. But if human population declines in number, as it should, it will vacate some land for other species.
A population reduction might free up some land. But knowing humans, I doubt it. Once grabbed, it tends to stay grabbed. Then fought over. Then, blood having been spilt, it becomes “holy ground” suitable for further investigations in the agricultural benefits of sanguinary irrigation.
In my country, we have a lot of abandoned villages, where nature is returning. Not only is population declining, but it is also getting more concentrated in urban centers. Nobody wants anymore to be a subsistence farmer in the middle of nowhere.
I think that there are a lot of folks, single and married that “self-partner” as it were 🙂
Is self partnering about putting some commitment into previously casual self-pleasuring?
Perhaps questioning oneself if I enjoyed it as much as I did?
I suspect Bill Maher is self-partnered but I doubt he’ll admit to it.
I submit my headline in Puff Post style :
“Reading an article online? You just increased Earth’s temperature by 0.07 degrees.”
How about “Jerry Coyne Claps Back at HuffPo”?
Nope: Top 10 ways the your internet use is killing the planet.
You forgot the LIST! 🙂
Reading a Huffington Post article? You just reduced your life span by a minute.
Speaking as somebody who is single, I can safely say that the first meaning that comes to my mind* when I see
is not “single”. I suspect she’ll quietly drop the idea when her friends inform her of the meaning that I and, no doubt others, have thought of.
*which is clearly a gutter
“Speaking as somebody who is single…”
My goodness you *do* have an optimistic view of marriage…
Seriously though, one hopes she had the decency to take herself out to dinner a few times before partnering up. Also can’t help but wonder if she “breaks up just to make up”, as the song goes.
It’s a nice gutter, room for everyone!
This gutter is getting crowded! First thing that came to my mind too.
Lends a whole new meaning to ‘do it yourself’…
😎
cr
It’s a superior gutter, which any self-respecting (if not self-partnering) pig would be happy to be seen in.
Oh, nice.
😎
cr
… so a fool returneth to his folly.
Always go full Proverbs 26:11, man. Always. 🙂
🙂 (Catholic school as a kid? 🙂 )
The Halloween stuff is over the top. IMO, not so much the turkey. Beyond the CO2 question, if you want some good holiday killjoy, Google how Butterball turkeys are forced to reproduce: manual masturbation of the toms, who have breasts so big they can’t even mount the females, and a horrific method of inseminating the females. I first read about this in Peter Singer’s Ethics in the Real World (highly recommended, but prepare to have at least a few of your basic ethical tenets poked at painfully). Hard for me to give up foul or meat, but it has made me look harder for free-range, cruelty-free sources, which are not always so easy to find.
Fowl or meat ? So, birds aren’t animals?
I never did get the distinction some see between being a carnivore, a piscivegetarian a poulovegetarian, and a vegetarian. They’re all types of meat.
Singer had (has? Is he dead yet? Nope, so “has”.) a very simple question – can they suffer? If they can suffer, then it’s immoral to cause them suffering. If you deliberately cause suffering to organisms, then you’re an immoral person. It’s not complicated.
Emma Watson did not make this up, it is a “thing.”
“Self partnering is realising that you need to go within yourself to self soothe rather than do anything to try to escape how you are feeling,” Sarah Hirigoyen, counselor and psychotherapist.
Or it is about “Narcissism and Relationships” with Melanie Tonia Evans, Narcissistic Abuse Recovery Expert and Healer.
But, whatever it is, it is a thing.
“..to go within yourself..”
Inquiring minds wish to know: Via which orifice?
A snake swallowing its own tail in a dream was the info for inspiring the decoding of the chemical/physical structure of benzene (I think??), so there is some some respectable vintage to that.
Orifice, or orifices? I bet Googling that will lead to some DeepFake sites pretty rapidly.
Agreed. Is this ludicrous locution going to become the new shibboleth of the woke? Will one be dissed, doxxed, and cancelled if one calls someone single because that’s now an offensive slur against the ‘unpartnered’? And since binary gender pronouns are now being proscribed, where does this stop? Oh, dear, we guess we shouldn’t have used “one” above.
Don’t forget that marrying oneself/themselves is also a going thing, https://www.bbc.com/news/business-42415394
“dissed, doxxed, and cancelled”
That would be a really good title for a book about social media shaming and online activism.
The Chris Morris TV series Jam (from 2000)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jam_(TV_series)
featured a sketch where a man “married himself”.
At the time this was obviously exaggerated, surreal and ridiculous…..
“Chrestomathy” — there’s one of ol’ Henry Louis’s odd, winking locutions, if ever a one I heard.
How would Huff Post handle and report this bit of news from last night at a Popeye’s establishment in Maryland. Long lines everywhere due to some sandwich at these facilities. Some guy cuts in line, gets into an argument with another guy, and gets stabbed to death. Is this just another day in the fast food business in America or is there something wrong here? And to end the story, the guy who did the killing got away.
If one is not inclined to “covet” a Popeye’s sandwich, is he (in my case) “irrelevant” and “tone-deaf”?
Farrago, word of the day: a confused mixture
Hahaha, self-partnered. Am I wrong but I seem to remember singles putting on singles weddings. Maybe I’m imagining that.
I mean, I’m not against any of these things they cover, and would agree with many of the messages… I’m gonna start introducing myself that way from now on. Self-partnered.
I think Halloween itself is dying, and not for the razor blades, either. The reason is that traipsing for candy has lost its allure since there’s already a sack of the stuff at home that parents have hauled back from Wal-Mart.
But wasn’t that already the case? Everybody’s parents gave out candy. The point of trick or treating was to get a VARIETY of candy, while each house dispensed (when I was a kid) only one or two types of candies.
We’d go to the rich neighborhoods where some people gave out BIG (regular) candy bars.
We had three mom and pop bakeries in newport news in the 1950’s and all three moms and pops lived in our neighborhood. They gave out confections freshly baked in their bakeries on halloween each year. Doesn’t get better than that.
“We’d go to the rich neighborhoods where some people gave out BIG (regular) candy bars.”
Exactly what we did, and I’m 20 years younger than you. I’m sure that strategy is still a thing.
It is. Fresh report from 10-13 year olds.
BIG (regular) candy bars…
I toss my head back and remember…ah yes! One was enough. Now, you suck ’em down like popcorn ’cause they’re so small (Not that I actually eat any nowadays. Oh no).
I don’t know what “self-partnering” is, but I expect a) it is a sin and b) keep doing it and you’ll go blind.
Or grow hair on the palms of your hands??
“..we’ll leave Ms. Watson to her self-partnering in the hopes that she and herself don’t become consciously uncoupled.”
I love that turn of phrase: A every clever and entertaining way of saying what it is saying!
..a lot more stories about what’s happening at your house: raising good kids, finding a therapist you can afford, managing your student debt…
The way to implant advertisements into articles/news nowadays, called Native Ads. Makes it hard to sift out the news.
One way to manage your student debt better would be to not hire a therapist.
My wife (for some reason I cannot fathom) continues to look for that “miracle food” or supplement to lose weight.
The bread and butter (so to speak) of the phony health industry, along with placebo effect, confirmation bias (the big one), and all the traditional tricks of advertising.
She was listening to some lecture (and just the smug tone of the lecturer put me right off) and the woman says, “supplements will not make you lose weight”, and then, maybe one minute later is saying which supplements will make you lose weight and that you can buy them at their shop.
Somehow, she just will not put 2 and 2 together on this. (Hence that industry.)
Some day (red flag warning) I’m going to mention to her that it is illegal for doctors in the US to sell the drugs they prescribe. Do you understand why that is? *duck quickly*
Or hire yourself out as a therapist?
Jesus Christ. I am a christian, but now I frequently find myself banding together with irreligous people to weather the storm of ‘woke’ culture that has descended upon us (its deleterious effects having laid waste to many religous circles as well).
Remember how a little over ten years ago large pockets of cyberspace consisted of making fun of Bush and/or arguing over religion? Those were the days.
Interesting comment. I would have thought that religion might inoculate against wokeness a bit. Is that not the case?
What do you think of the exclamation, pervasive across the fruited plain, “Oh My God”? (I hear elementary students ululate it not infrequently.) I take it that it is uttered by the religious and non-religious alike. Regarding the former, I should think that they would take offense at fellow believers spouting it in response to the least little whip-stitch. Instead, why not “Oh My Zeus!,” or “Oh My Mithras!”?
(Would it be “cultural appropriation” for a non-Muslim to utter, “Oh My Allah!”?)
I suspect one could reduce the environmental footprint of the TG meal and still serve meat if one used fish …
The article on Thanksgiving seems to be at the bottom of The President’s claim that “some people” don’t want to call it “Thanksgiving” any more.