AOL Buys Huffpo

Off topic…but timely,

“…football is an interesting game to watch, in many ways and on many levels.

I won’t go through all of those, but I do want to point out one that I haven’t often seen mentioned: despite its reputation among people who don’t know any better, football is a thinking person’s game. It’s deep and strategically complex, on offense and defense. I’ve always described it as the chess of mainstream sports (compared to the checkers of baseball or the tic-tac-toe of basketball). It takes years to fully appreciate everything that’s going on during any given play of a game, and even after you’ve spent years watching it you can’t really take in every aspect of every play. At any given time I might be paying attention to the line, or the secondary, or the backs, or the receivers (and even that just scratches the surface, since within those divisions I might be watching the safeties or the defensive backs, the running backs or the tight ends, etc). Or I might follow something else entirely, or take it in as a whole instead of focusing on any of the parts.

And I’m always impressed by the casual genius of the design of so many elements of football. Take the scoring: you get 3 points for a field goal and 7 for a touchdown—both prime numbers, so the least common multiple is their product of 21, which makes ties less likely and adds major strategic implications to any given score. Two field goals are just one point short of a touchdown, which makes touchdowns much more desirable, but a touchdown isn’t an automatic 7 points—you have to essentially kick a short field goal to earn the extra point, and if you miss it you’ve effectively scored two field goals. See what I mean?

Then there’s the ball itself. A football is oblong so it can be thrown through the air farther and faster, of course, but that shape also means that when a football hits the ground you have no idea what it will do. Unlike the pickup games my friends and I played after school, most of professional football is planned to the last detail, but no planning can overcome that little piece of chaos at the center of the game. In one second this carefully planned and scripted game can turn into a Three Stooges free-for-all, and often does.

I don’t begrudge a person hating football for any number of reasons, even as I feel sorry for anyone who can’t appreciate the unique beauty of a perfectly-thrown spiral perfectly caught. I watch much less of it than I did as a kid, actually, and I agree with a lot of the criticism I’ve read of football in particular and professional sports in general (and I’ve got plenty of my own gripes). But the notion that disliking football is some badge of ideological purity, and the particular brand of condescending dimestore psychologizing you see in the annual spate of Super Bowl-bashing exercises like Lipsyte’s, are just the kinds of things that push people away from the left.

ADDING: Go Packers.”

The non-profit economic structure of the Green Bay Packers would be an instructive contrast to what Ariana did — or failed to do — with HuffPo.

Michael O’Hare made the requisite points about the subversive nature of the Packers, as a firm.
http://www.samefacts.com/2011/02/economics/super-bowl/

Why don’t we call football what it really is instead of hypocritically beating around the bush. It’s a well-disguised, or not so well-disguised, homoerotic sadomasochistic orgy celebrated by a broad cross section of Americans, including a sizable percentage of Fundamentalist Christians who publically excoriate homosexuality.

I have nothing against such endeavors, but let’s at least call it for what it is. It’s an Ernst Roehm wet dream fantasy. A bunch of grown men brutally groping, and salivating over, one another in carefully crafted costumes. Men are so peculiar when it comes to showing their affections and sexual predilections towards other men. They have to disguise it in the form of brutality and naked, or uniformed, aggression…..and so we get football…. and war….and so on.

Personally, I stopped watching it years ago when I finally realized it for what it was. Still, I’m amazed at the audience this absurd spectacle draws. It just goes to show, sheep will be sheep, tautologically speaking.

Onethng that bears saying. Over the past 10 lus years nobody has done a better job of losing shareholder value than the stuffed shirt boring creeps at Time Warner. At the Time of the AOL merger, the combined company was “worth” $350 billion. Now, with AOl being spun off, the two parts are worth $23 billion total.

The creeps have ruined the CNN brand, screwed up AOL and continued to produce third rate dead tree products. But they are among thbe very best at back stabbing and behind the scenes maneuvers. HuffPo may stand a chance as it will be part of a separate AOL not run by these overpaid morons.

The left’s web presence is melting. HuffPo was by far the biggest presence. Viewership since 2008 has really tailed off and right wing blogs, once seriously behind in page views, have better Alexa ratings as a whole now. Open Left closed this weekend. Huffington Post sold out on Monday. Who else later this week?

Arianna built that site on the backs of unpaid writers. A commenter over at FDL said that this cements Huff Po’s standing as the China of media empires — and that’s exactly right. How wonderful that she gets her $300 million. Mayhill Fowler, for example, was never paid even one dime.

Lambert over at Corrente used to ask, with respect to sites like Kos and TPM: how do you build progressive politics on a platform of misogyny? (Still a revelant question.)

With regard to Huff Po: how do you build progressive politics on a platform of labor exploitation?

A gem Bruce Wilder, while one poster inflects he has nothing against football after spending a paragraph in using slanderous conjecture and then follows with two more paragraphs of viperous prose, it’s good to see some truthful criticism.

The Green Bay Packers are a special team. A good town too.

Years ago I remember driving by a shopping mall parking lot and dozens of men were chasing a man running with a purse. Most didn’t have a chance, as I pulled a U’ey to cut the guy off, a man broke from the pack and tackled the thief. He laid the guy out good too, fortunately for the shithead, the cops arrived in time to save his sorry ass

Can’t speak for all, but the party I was at, was laughing at the over the top patriotic jingoism, so crude, so detached, so far from the game, a parody really. Why does any feeble fool think it’s part of the game? It’s not just football, they’ve been appending that stupid shit to every national venue for years.

Thanks Bruce for reminding folks why Green Bay is special….and as the youngest team, they may have another chance to shove corporate America’s face in it’s own poop. And while the wussy brigade thinks that’s just awful, I like seeing corporate.inc getting smacked around by a town of a 101,000 with temerity to stick together and fight.

Peter Daou is suing Huffington et al for stealing the business model for the site, which he claims was a joint enterprise:

http://peterdaou.com/2010/11/our-response-to-ken-and-arianna-on-our-agreement-to-build-the-huffington-post-together/

Would not surprise me if this is true.

Just something to consider: what if the right understood that the best way to quiet dissent and any progessive view was to control the medium?
— just saying

Don’t tell me you didn’t see this coming. Afterall, her ex-husband was the Republican. She was only a “progressive” to build up her site’s “value” for some sucker like AOL to come along with a boatload of cash. Now she can go back to her true values. Kinda like Obama after he got elected.

S. Brennan — yes. This is a big problem. I’m reading/hearing a lot of comments now from that Democratic/Obama nexus that take the form of outraged betrayal — we were conned by Obama!

But I have not yet seen anyone in that nexus reflect on what enabled that con to take place.

There are studies which indicate conmen are actually more successful with the more educated, because those people have come to be so sure of their own judgments and so unquestioning of their own assumptions and impressions. Meaning: they never doubt themselves.

I think it’s past tiime that what passes for the left in this country, or rather, the “left” that elected Obama, move from their sense of outraged betrayal to some deep self-examination of what in themselves allowed them to be so easily and willingly conned.

As you note: misogyny, elitism and classism.

And what kind of a left is it, anyway, if it suffers from classism.

I’m not bothered by what Arianna did. Net, the world would’ve been the worse off without her or without Huffington Post. Even its soft progressivism (if you will) I know challenged or irritated some closed minds on the right. And it provided a watering hole of sorts in the comment threads for a good number of liberal folk (and who cares about the goofy rating system). Those of us in California or Los Angeles I’m sure have a special fondness for Arianna’s project.

I don’t need purity, and I see the purity fights as an almost complete waste of time. Imperfect is just how the world is, get used to it. There are strange bedfellows everywhere. It keeps life interesting.

Now, I’m a lot more concerned about the shuttering of something like OpenLeft, over a mostly celebrity gossip rag like HuffPo. Miniscule in comparison to HuffPo, the quality of thought far outshone HuffPo and its vast stable of writers on any day of the week. I hope everyone involved lands on their feet and pops up soon online somewhere.

I was amused that the deal with AOL was seen (if I read the reports right) as bolstering AOL’s “dial up division”. HuffPo was often a pig to load, even with broadband. It’ll crush anybody still on dial-up. It wouldn’t surprise me if HuffPo will be the acquisition that ate the host, and its moribund business model.

Sounds like sour grapes, to be honest. Were someone to offer, say, a million dollars for this blog, I have no doubt whatsoever that the author would take it and run.

We don’t know what’s going on inside Arianna’s head. For all we know, she’ll take that money and invest in some other form of liberal media. HuffPost was getting weaker and weaker, more commercial, by the minute, and perhaps she decided that it wasn’t a good enough vehicle for what she wanted to convey anymore.

Let’s leave the “insight” for another day, for when when we see whether Arianna has really cashed out, or whether she’s made a damn smart move by taking the huge amount of corporate money and using it to fight for what she believes in.

Funny, I just came to this post after reading Felix Salmon’s take on it.

I don’t much care what she does or AOL does. I liked the Huffpo for the first couple months, then only went to read her posts, then…. I don’t even know how long it’s been since I’ve read anything there. Any time I follow a link and Huffpo shows up, I get turned off. It”s like “where the hell is the article I came for? what the hell is all this other crap? I’m outta here” Funny, but some of the blogs mentioned here are ones I used to read a LOT for a while and got turned of by or lost interest in: Kos, FDL, Kevin Drum. Part of it I think is that only having mainstream newspapers and magazines to get political commentary from every week or month, I just didn’t get that much exposure to certain perspectives. So I found people with interesting new perspectives and backgrounds, but eventually outgrew or found myself losing patience with some.

Others like Digby took me a long time to come around to just because her posts used to be so damned long. Paradoxically two of the few blogs I read every day now are Digby and the maddeningly brief Eschaton. After 8 or 9 years of reading blogs, besides them, my only must reads are down to Krugman, Wolcott, Calcualted Risk, Baseline Scenario, and Ambrose Evans Pritchard (he’s a bit absurd, and being a hardcore Keynesian I disagree with a LOT of what he writes, but I always want to see his take) and just in the last year the Agonist.

Anyway, I doubt what AH did will matter that much one way or the other. It’s not like when Ted Turner, the only kinda sorta liberal media mogul cashed out of CNN. He got what he deserved when the TimeWarner stock tanked. He could have countered Fox with a liberal network. Or at least a reality based network that might have kept Fox in check by actually countering it’s outright lies. Instead CNN is now Fox-lite.

Of course, the police can match the Genius of the Crowd any old time, as this video illustrates. Message to the burglars. Next time, pack some heat and kill your marks, because you’re going to pay the same price, regardless, so you may as well go out in a blaze of glory.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=R-StFkbSGGE#t=134s

S Brennan, loved your little disquisition on football, one of the most beautiful games ever invented. And I have long admired the Packers and what they are and do, and am delighted that they won the big game (full disclosure: as a Ravens fan I am contractually obligated to root against the Steelers, but I would have rooted for Green Bay whoever they played, except for my beloved birds of course).

As for HuffPo and Arianna, in my view she lost all her credibility long ago and I have often found HuffPo to be a tired Salon retread. Not sure what to think about the AOL venture/sale, will have to see what plays out.

Don’t tell me you didn’t see this coming. Afterall, her ex-husband was the Republican.

just to be a pedant, but i don’t judge people by their marriage partners. unless i have specific information about their relationship. i’m of mixed ‘race’ and it’s always amusing to hear what people think was the cause/environment/orientation/whatever of my parents’ relationship. mom has very amusing stories about their time in the civil rights movement, back when that sort of coupling was considered ‘controversial.’ i do know arianna’s ex is gay, and i will speculate about how that may have had an impact on their relationship and her politics, but that’s all i know and beyond that i won’t assume.

on topic:
-i’m not so sure HuffPo has had much of progressive policy “impact.” someone above thinks so in the case of CA but i don’t know why. but even if that’s true, one blogger i respect likes to say “this blog is not a vehicle for organizing and activism.” did HuffPo expressly begin as an activism/policy blog? i can’t recall that if so. but afaic: blogging =/= activism. nor reporting, with the exception of actual meatspace or research type journalism.

-otoh in sheer moral terms, it’s pretty disgusting to know that huffpo is what it is because of all that unpaid effort at the beginning. just as a moral act of decency Arianna should take some of that money and say, reward the top ten thousand from those early days, the ones who brought in the traffic. it’s not like she needs the money, she was rich to begin with (by any progressive standard of “how much is enough” that is).

-while i actually doubt that Ian would take 1M for this blog, speaking more generally, it’s a valid point. blogging is a little bit like gambling, in a way. you put your shit out there and see if any sucker wants to pay you for it, if only as an aside because you know sometimes that happens. i, unlike the valiant and highly moral Mr. Welsh, would take a million for my trademark or whatever. the point i’m making is that implicit in the minds of many bloggers who blog for free is that like in a lottery, some of them are going to cash out. are we bitter when that happens to someone else? maybe. but i don’t think anyone who blogs hasn’t had the thought of hitting the cash out jackpot cross their minds at least once.

Man, I like football but some of these comments are funny. OTOH, we have the usual tirsome line about homoerotic subtext and otoh an almost worshipful pean to Green Bay and the Packers.

Both are off for different reasons. One is silliness straight out a bad “Gender Studies 101” class while the other notion that Green Bay’s victory represents a “little guy” FU to corporate.inc is kind of absurd. You’d be hard pressed to find a more corporate.inc institution than the NFL or corporate.inc event than the Superbowl. Green Bay is a cornerstone franchise in the NFL. Heck, the championship trophy of the corporate.inc NFL marquee game is named after their legendary coach. They are part and parcel of the league and not some underdog “little guys from a small scrappy Midwest city…..insert rest of mythology…..”

Now if you want a more likely FU-to-corporate.inc candidate in the NFL, I’d suggest the Oakland Raiders.

DancingOpossum,

I didn’t write the piece, John Caruso did, it was in response to Robert Lipsyte’s self congratulatory commentary. Apparently, like our “Morama”…Lipsyte is:

“….still bitter all these years later over the “high school jocks” who “shouldered him in the halls”, decides to take a ride on the reliable left hobby horse of football bashing. It’s a by-the-numbers bit of doctrinaire liberal cultural analysis that hits all the points you’d expect to see: vicarious proxy war, sexism, testosterone, soccer rejectionism (which he somehow fails to link explicitly to homophobia, though the subtext is certainly there), and even dog fighting to give the whole exercise some currency. I won’t bother excerpting it since I’m sure you can predict what it’s going to say as easily as I did before I read it…”

All people have to do is go up thread to find out you can’t post with lying…for those lazy.

“Why don’t we call football what it really is instead of hypocritically beating around the bush. It’s a well-disguised, or not so well-disguised, homoerotic sadomasochistic orgy celebrated by a broad cross section of Americans, including a sizable percentage of Fundamentalist Christians who publically excoriate homosexuality….I have nothing against such endeavors”

-Morama

On his first post on this thread using the gay bashing/baiting technique. Next he makes a innuendo that reveals his racist inclination and then returns to gay bashing. What a charmer.

Morama, is today’s liberal, he’s got misogyny, racism, gay bashing, elitism, class based entitlement all wrapped up in a sissy package. What’s not to like?

I said this in that post up thread, S Brennan, but apparently you can’t read.

Personally, I stopped watching it years ago when I finally realized it for what it was.

I also said this, and it’s not gay bashing, it’s calling out hypocrisy. You appear very defensive about it. The shoe must fit quite nicely.

I have nothing against such endeavors, but let’s at least call it for what it is. It’s an Ernst Roehm wet dream fantasy. A bunch of grown men brutally groping, and salivating over, one another in carefully crafted costumes. Men are so peculiar when it comes to showing their affections and sexual predilections towards other men. They have to disguise it in the form of brutality and naked, or uniformed, aggression…..and so we get football…. and war….and so on.

All I’m asking is that you, the football players, and all the fans just come clean and call it for what it is. I’m not saying give it up. I don’t want the economy to collapse any further, I just want you all to be honest. Study your history, S Brennan. Being homoerotic didn’t have such a stigma attached to it. There was no need to pretend back in the good old days. If you all come out together, you don’t have to pretend either. It’s okay, really. I’ll hold your hand if you like, and if you’re good, I’ll even smack your backside.

I’ll refrain from typing out my venom towards the Green Bay Packers and their fans…and this is something i know a bit about, given that there’s a giant Packers helmet made of snow on the corner. But i will say that i’ve grown tired of the attempt to link GB to some socialist experiment within the NFL.

American politics already resembles NFL fandom too fucking much, let’s not tie politics directly to teams, ok?

Oh, and S.B. overstates the intellectualism of football greatly. I’m not saying that there isn’t strategy or that there’s no intellectual interest to be found, just saying that it is not such a great, thoughtful game. The attempt to paint football as chess vs. baseball as checkers is particularly laughable.

But whatever, America’s deeply infatuated with handegg because it televises well and even idiots “get it”. Rubgy is a far more interesting game to watch. Baseball is much more intellectually stimulating. Hockey is far more beautiful (and at least as violent).

I’d rank football as the least interesting sport, which probably explains why American’s love it so much. And i like football. I particularly like college football, but the NFL is utterly boring.

Lex,

I mentioned this twice, maybe 3’s a charm

“I didn’t write the piece, John Caruso did, it was in response to Robert Lipsyte’s self congratulatory commentary.” Apparently, like our “Morama”…Lipsyte is:

“….still bitter all these years later over the “high school jocks” who “shouldered him in the halls”, decides to take a ride on the reliable left hobby horse of football bashing. It’s a by-the-numbers bit of doctrinaire liberal cultural analysis that hits all the points you’d expect to see: vicarious proxy war, sexism, testosterone, soccer rejectionism (which he somehow fails to link explicitly to homophobia, though the subtext is certainly there), and even dog fighting to give the whole exercise some currency. I won’t bother excerpting it since I’m sure you can predict what it’s going to say as easily as I did before I read it…”

Go read it, John Caruso and the criticism that follows all of it pretty good.

http://www.distantocean.com/2011/02/footballism.html