Where does Wired find these nincompoops?

It must be a difficult task to write an entire article about net neutrality where nearly every “fact” or assertion is outright wrong or a gross exaggeration. I won’t refute them all point by point because I really have much better things to do with my life. Suffice it to say nearly nothing in this article resembles reality in any way, not even “and” and “the.”

This guy by the way is a shill for the telco monopoly. I looked up this motherfucker and it ain’t pretty. He wrote a paper supporting the Comcast/TWC merger. He is almost certainly in their employ though I can’t find and direct evidence of that (though that is not the way they get paid; usually it’d be 3rd-party consulting to claim they are “neutral”).

Wired has always been on the wrong side of this and similar issues. Their advertising depends on it — so I am sure that is the reason.

But if I worked for Wired I’d be incredibly embarrassed professionally to be associated with such outright and blatant shilling.

This made me laugh, especially the headline “A Masterpiece Without a Genre.”

“Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel in 10 years is a sad, remarkable fantasy set after King Arthur’s death.”

And it features scenes like:

Here, in no special order of importance or chronology, are some things that happen in Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel: An old man uses a hoe to fight off thousands of pixies who have attacked his wife as she floats down a river in a basket; an enchanted mist envelops a country, causing an entire people to forget its past; an ogre is found in a ditch, gravely indisposed, having killed and partially eaten a poisoned goat; an ancient widow prosecutes a grievance with a mysterious boatman by methodically slitting the throats of rabbits and spilling their blood on the floor of his childhood home; a past-his-Green-Knight-beheading-prime Sir Gawain faces off against a hell-dog in an underground chamber.

Of course no matter the quality if someone who’d started out writing fan-fic or in the pulp paperback ghetto had written the exact same thing it would have been relegated to the fantasy bin and never spoken of in polite company again.

I always laugh when incidents like this occur; some “important” author writes fantasy or sf — usually poorly and behind the leading wave of the genre by 25 years — and is praised for it, meanwhile actual genre authors are writing better, more nuanced work that is never considered other than to laugh at.

I don’t much care for the literary establishment. Luckily, it is much-diminished in importance (and they hate that).

Novels only don’t have a genre (as this Slate tripe claims) when the literary mandarins want to re-heat something that has been old hat for a few decades and present it as something unstained by those genre ties.

Pretty disgusting if you ask me.

Here’s a more balanced review of American Sniper, rather than all the liberals soiling themselves over how it glorified violence or whatever else.

I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I will, as most of the reviews sounded very probably wrong to me because I’d never seen Eastwood helm a movie pointed the direction that one was accused of heading ideologically.

So American Sniper a war movie.

It is not a pro-war movie.

It’s not a particularly political movie.

The little politics Eastwood lets slip in are isolationist.

The only connection made between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq is chronological. The attacks happen and nineteen months later the war happens and Chris Kyle finds himself in Iraq. In between, he gets married. Eastwood makes no use of it for emotional effect, never mind using it to make a political point. It’s exposition. We don’t even see it happen. We see Kyle see it happen on TV.

That’s about what I expected. Eastwood is about as likely to make a pro-war movie as I am to vote for Rand fucking Paul. And of course one can’t really make a movie about Iraq and ignore the politics of it all — but still, I care about stories, and telling the story of a man doing a dangerous and dirty job in a bad situation is more interesting than explicitly political movies. Even if the job itself is very probably on balance evil, but situational evil.

I considered becoming a sniper in the military, and changing my job to that when I was offered the opportunity. I’m a very good shot and have the mentality for it. But in the end I am glad I did not, and declined because I did not trust (rightly) the military to want to kill the right people insomuch as anyone deserves death.

Note: I did not and do not support the Iraq war, do not think we should invade any country pretty much ever and am fully opposed to America’s past and future imperial ambitions. I am a liberal, and a far left-wing one at that.

If only the great body of people reacting to American Sniper had done so against the Iraq War — well, it probably would’ve still happened but this still seems a bit hypocritical. But criticizing in bad faith American Sniper is an easy reputation boost whereas inveighing against the Iraq war in the propaganda run-up was a huge risk.

So that’s why we see what we see today.