63 Replies to “Not So Incredibly”

  1. Damn, Kate. I just had breakfast and your link took me to a site with an image of that old crone Atwood, a warning would have been appreciated!
    😉

  2. Quote : “IMAGE: INCREDIBLY, THIS RIGHT-WING BLOG IS VERY POPULAR”
    Some glad I had just swallowed my sip of coffee before I read that line. Coffee can be a real pain to get out of laptop keyboards!
    I wonder why it is incredible that this place is popular?

  4. Wow, we’ve made THIS Magazine. Like, wow! Cor. Super.
    I didn’t know it was still [strike]getting taxpayers money[/strike] in print.

  5. “that old crone Atwood”
    Yes, the picture was scary but remember, this whole “margaretatwood” thing is just a myth, used to frighten chldren into becoming liberals. (listen to the cbc, kids, or the atwood will get you!!!)
    She/It doesn’t exist. I believe there are similar creatures in folklore.

  6. ‘Nice try, dean 😉 but my kids once went to the same school as her daughter.
    I found myself singing impromptu Christmas carols–those were the days!–in the hall right beside her. (BTW, she sings seriously out of tune!)

  7. Ummmmm. I went to their home page,and the top banner is of Dr.Fruitfly,stating how he runs the Kyoto scam…errrr…why electronic media scares him. Great laugh for a Sunday AM.

  9. Loved the comments section. Did you guys know Canadian newspapers are all right wing rags? Wow, I have been so wrong about the Toronto Star all these years…

  10. Incredibly it’s not a deliberate parody but it’s oh-so revealing of those who spend their entire lives talking to others with the same, er, limited view of the world, and no coincidence that much of that type of dialogue is subsidized by the taxpayer.

  11. Oh my, Kate! This is rich: the great Prophet Suzuki speaketh! (see link)
    1. ironing
    Deliberate substitution for irony. Stems from a quote by Bart Simpson in the episode “Grift of the Magi”. Rarely appears outside the phrase he uttered: “the ironing is delicious”.
    Bart: Lisa’s in trouble. Ha! The ironing is delicious.
    Lisa: The word is “irony”.
    Bart: Huh?

  12. Loved that “Incredibly,this Image is popular”.
    Wouldn’t occur to them that the “image” is of secondary importance to the content.

  14. …”INCREDIBLY, THIS RIGHT-WING BLOG IS VERY POPULAR.”
    Even more incredibly, I never knew that rag mag existed till this incredible right-wing blog spoke of it.
    May that magazine rest in piece (sorry for the Freudian slip)

  15. So typical of the neo-com left. Another condemnation (out of hand) for anything deemed “right wing”.
    They still don’t get it. They don;t get the fact that they are NOT Liberal or progressive…the new left embraces the dogmatics of militant intrusive collectivist statism and social policy which is anti-individual, anti capitalism, anti freedom and they call the right radical?
    From ny perspective as a life long classic liberal (Libertarian) it is the new right which has built a home for dispossessed classic liberals, individualists, populist progressives and other sundry proponents of individual freedom, laissez fair capitalism and unintrusive responsible government. The Left has become a haven for every bad idea regurgitated by post modernist nihilism …and is actually a supporter of centralized corporate feudalism.
    And they wonder why people gravitate to blogs/ideologies which do not denounce them as “selfish” for having rational self interests.
    The left drifted away from the center in the 30s into the uncharted waters of statist collectivism….now they support statist corporate feudalism and they wonder why people are rejecting their propaganda-spewing media.

  16. …obviously this rag mag needed a boost, so by indirect marketing scheme they nail SDA with an article.
    Should create a buzz in their circulation office for say, oh, 2 minutes.
    The attention span of the typical leftie.

  17. “Loved the comments section” (Phantom)
    Weren’t they a hoot? Probably more than half were SDA people!
    “They still don’t get it. They don;t get the fact that they are NOT Liberal or progressive…”
    Damn right. What does “Left-leaning-Liberal” have to do with “Progressive”? The 2 terms are exclusive of one another.

  18. I particularly love the endorsement from author and academic Mark Kingwell at the top of the page, which essentially boils down to “Only smart people read THIS magazine; I’m smart, you’re smart, but everyone else is so stoopid.” The elite patting its own back double time.

  20. “Is this a comment on the reach of the left in general?”
    Er, yes; yes it is. Wow. Is there anything else you’d like to know?

  21. Quote : “IMAGE: INCREDIBLY, THIS RIGHT-WING BLOG IS VERY POPULAR”
    I can tell them why. Just go to the June poll of readers “What is your primary occupation”? That’s why.
    Cheers!

  22. Hell, no wonder the left can’t function on the internet. They can’t even form a thought based on facts in the comfort of their own blogs:
    “Conservative blogs just have a large American support system in the blogging world.” – saskboy
    Feelings presented as fact.
    “the primary reason conservative blogs are so popular is because the writers know they are in the minority.” – saskboy
    That’s why there’s a Conservative government in Canada and Bush is in the process of serving his second term in the US. Once again, feelings presented as fact. Actually, a statement that makes no sense whatsoever.
    “IMAGE: INCREDIBLY, THIS RIGHT-WING BLOG IS VERY POPULAR”
    Not incredible, just unfortunate.” – saskboy
    Unfortunate in the way that democracy, freedom of speech, individualism and capitalism are unfortunate for socialists, I’d imagine.
    The above comments represent exactly why the left cannot crack the internet – where dialogue and debate thrive, facts are separated from feelings and intelligence is tested.

  23. Not incredible, just unfortunate.” – saskboy
    And yet, like an annoying insect numbed by early cold, he keeps buzzing and bumping against the window screen.

  24. good work Kate, the left is blaming you.
    you will get the order of Canada when we finally dismiss Borat Dion , Taliban Jack , and Dizzy Miss Lizzie May.

  25. Prof. Richard Landes (Augean Stables) calls it “Cognitive Egocentrism”, the tendency to project ones own values onto others; or expressed negatively the sheer inability for liberals to imagine another world view. So, despite the modern tendency toward linguistic inflation “incredibly” here is not an example: it is an accurate descriptor of a mental disability.
    Does anyone here have the particulars of a famous female MSM journo quote from a few decades back in reaction to a Nixon win: “I just can’t figure out how he won … I don’t know ANYBODY who voted for him”.

  27. Incredibly, I’ve been able to answer my own question through the good offices of google.
    “How could such a destructive man be so popular with the American people?” singer Barbra Striesand asks about George W. Bush’s popularity. After all, she didn’t vote for him. This arrogant mind-set is reminiscent of theater critic Pauline Kael’s reaction to Richard Nixon’s landslide presidential victory over George McGovern in 1972″ “How can that be?” she supposedly said. “No one I know voted for Nixon.”

  28. The infamous Kael quote might be a bit of an urban myth. According to her Wiki entry (yes, I know, I know):
    “Kael is frequently quoted as having said, in the wake of Richard Nixon’s landslide victory in the 1972 presidential election, that she “couldn’t believe Nixon had won,” since no one she knew had voted for him. The quote is sometimes cited by conservatives (such as Bernard Goldberg, in his book Bias), as an example of allegedly clueless New York liberal insularity. There are variations as to the exact wording, the speaker (it has variously been attributed to other liberal women, including Katherine Graham, Susan Sontag, and Joan Didion), [1] [2] and the timing (in addition to Nixon’s victory, it has been claimed to have been uttered after Ronald Reagan’s re-election in 1984.) [3]
    “There is, in fact, no record of Kael making such a remark. The story may have originated in a December 28, 1972 New York Times article on a lecture Kael gave at the Modern Language Association, in which the newspaper quoted her as saying, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”
    If you’ve read Kael, you’d know that she had a remarkable impatience for liberal pieties, long before they became cast in stone, so it never really rang true for me.

  29. Thanks rick mcqinnis. Knew nothing about Kael so didn’t know about her impatience for liberal pieties either. I’m not surprised to hear it may be mere urban legend.
    Heh, “fake but accurate” tho eh?
    Evidently it’s also an urban legend that Bush said “the French don’t have a word for entrepreneur” which I found hilarious despite my fondness for Bush the man.

  30. The real quote is far more interesting to me – I’ve lived in that “special world,” where I assumed that people who voted conservative, doubted that big government would save us all, didn’t assume that the U.S. was the real villain in everything, etc. etc. were strangers living somewhere else. It was a shock to me when, chatting with the editor of a (short-lived) magazine that was about to publish an article of mine, someone I’d come to quite like, he admitted that he was pro-life. I’d never actually heard anyone admit such a thing in years and years. A bit of a watershed moment for me, in a lot of ways; made me re-examine more than just my own beliefs.
    Considering the world where Kael lived, from my perspective today, I think Kael might have been surprised, if she was really curious. And that’s the problem with elites – in spite of their own image of themselves as questing intellectuals “speaking truth to power” and dissenting from the mainsteam yadda yadda, they’re not really that curious.

  31. I recently had to explain to a friend who lives in rural Atlantic Canada, who drives a red pickup, has a dog, is anti-abortion and vehemently anti-gun control, that he, er, probably wasn’t a “liberal” but probably an transnational progressive on auto-pilot.
    I’ve since turned him on to the venerable FEE (Foundation of Economic Education) and Hayek, and, er, he has now concluded that, whilst excoriating me for my libertarianism, he is in fact a “classical liberal”. I tell him he’s confused. 🙂
    He is also a maniacal RonPaulian, and I try to explain to him that it’s probably because Paul seems to believe that the US is responsible for all the ills of the world.
    So, the conversion is a bit volatile, a bit of a back and fill operation … 🙂

  33. Actually I have heard of “THIS” magazine.
    I had a subscription in the mid-1970’s, back when it was required reading for the NDP “waffle” crowd.
    I’m totally flabbergasted to learn that it still exists. I often think it was the kind of thing that high school teachers who wanted to cultivate a veneer of radical hippie chic foisted on impressionable students.
    Thanks for reminding me why I am thankful that I eventually grew up, got me a brain and stopped voting socialist.

  34. Irwin quotes me,
    “”the primary reason conservative blogs are so popular is because the writers know they are in the minority [and have nothing to lose by being outlandish].”
    (Then Irwin says,)
    That’s why there’s a Conservative government in Canada and Bush is in the process of serving his second term in the US. Once again, feelings presented as fact.”
    Irwin, you may “feel” that Bush and Harper have majority support, but the fact is neither of them do. The only reason that Bush has control of the government is due to election fraud and Harper because of FPTP elections.
    Do you deny that Kate’s blog is popular in part to the entertainment value of a large cult following? Most interactive websites I’m aware of thrive when there are enough commenters to keep conversations going at nearly any time of the day, regardless of the politics discussed.
    “They can’t even form a thought based on facts in the comfort of their own blogs:”
    Considering that This Magazine isn’t my blog, I suppose you should consider yourself lucky I responded to you at all.
    “And yet, like an annoying insect numbed by early cold, he keeps buzzing and bumping against the window screen.
    Posted by: dean spencer – fox”
    Buzzzzzz. I won’t give you West Nile, just Inconvenient Truths.

  35. “The only reason that Bush has control of the government is due to election fraud and Harper because of FPTP elections.”
    I doubt that you would be complaining if Al Gore had won in the exact same manner.
    “Do you deny that Kate’s blog is popular in part to the entertainment value of a large cult following? Most interactive websites I’m aware of thrive when there are enough commenters to keep conversations going at nearly any time of the day, regardless of the politics discussed.”
    So, why do you think there are ‘enough commenters’, then?
    Maybe because the site is actually interesting and relevant?
    “Considering that This Magazine isn’t my blog, I suppose you should consider yourself lucky I responded to you at all.”
    Because ordinary people are not deserving of your rare wisdom.
    If you can’t take the heat, then don’t stoke the furnace.

  36. “Most interactive websites I’m aware of thrive when there are enough commenters … ”
    And a pile of readers !!
    I would bet that for every commenter on sda there is about a hundred readers. (a lot of them media types who have absolutely no comeback. Something like a passive Preacher)
    Blog “operators” who do not allow comments will never know how ‘out to lunch’ they are — until someone hits them over the head with a 2X4.

  38. ‘This Magazine’ was the magazine of choice for my leftie roomates in the ’80,s during that period there were quite a few articles on the success story of East Germany and other Eastern European countries, when the Berlin Wall came down the magazine went into a state of shock for a few years, then Naomi Klein was brought in, to bring it back to the masses.

  39. “I doubt that you would be complaining if Al Gore had won in the exact same manner.”
    Then you’d be wrong. Electoral fraud is wrong whether Metis governments, American governments, or any government benefits from it.
    “Maybe because the site is actually interesting and relevant?”
    Interesting, of course. Relevant to me? Rarely. It’s relevant to many of those thousands of hidden readers Ron mentioned because it’s where the action is, not because it’s always politically palatable to them.
    “Because ordinary people are not deserving of your rare wisdom.”
    No. Because someone touting fact as being so important, sure made a lot of errors. Enough to suggest that they are unwilling to think or even listen to a reply.

  40. Why so few left wing blogs you ask? It takes a bit of work,writing stuff, monitoring the site and well, housekeeping. Not too difficult is it?
    Well by the very definition, the Left expects SOMEONE ELSE to do it! So the lazy fucks don’t have too many of their style blogs to choose from.

  41. The thing is that socialists do not have discussions; they follow the ‘big head’. What ever the ‘big head’ says, they follow without question. They seem to live in some kind of otherworld as per one specific commenter on ‘This Magazine’. The commenter uses key words without context, like, the commenter feels that ‘Bush and Harper have minority support’, it seems that he is so convinced by his feelings, that it must be so, anyone that thinks different is wrong because thinking does not qualify for a valid position. A strange way of looking at the world.
    Another comment similarly silly is about ‘cult following’, another couple of key words without context. The truth is that there is no context that would make sense, therefore just use the key words and leave it at that, what ever they may mean.
    The free thinkers on the other hand question, think and conclude; they may agree or may not. Those who are free do have an opinion and have a say, if someone else likes it or not. This would be absolutely, categorically against socialists idea, their house of card would crash if questioned.
    Phantom’s comment makes very much sense and covers the subject well.

  42. Bolshevik, “The commenter uses key words without context, like, the commenter feels that ‘Bush and Harper have minority support’, it seems that he is so convinced by his feelings, that it must be so, anyone that thinks different is wrong because thinking does not qualify for a valid position. A strange way of looking at the world.”
    It’s strange to use scientific polls, including election polls, to look at the world? I think it’s strange you’d say that.
    “‘cult following’, another couple of key words without context.”
    “Cult following” is a well used term to describe someone who has rock star status and thus has acquired groupies who would back them no matter what they do or say. (Just like a cult leader and followers there) It doesn’t need additional context if you know what “cult following” means.

  43. If ‘cult following’ definition is as described above, then the use of it is as described in ‘key words without context’ is appropriate.
    Surprising as it may sound, there is no star or status thereof, if there was, there would be nobody around. People that comment have opinions on events, politics or nonevents, some agree some don’t, the socialist diktat does not allow for that, therein may lay the confusion.

  44. I wonder how much of This Magazine’s revenue comes from paying readers and advertisers and how much comes from government subsidies. Could it exist without those subsidies? Would anyone outside of a third rate arts college even notice if it vanished? Maybe more to the point, would its readership exceed that, of say, Canadian Lawnmower Magazine?

  45. Wow saskboy you sound like a real paranoid wierdo. If you are on meds, take them before you spiral down the rabbit hole for good.

  48. …Canadian LawnMower Magazine
    Hey! I subscribe to that journal! Great articles on hazardous vortex’s created by spinning blades, suction energy to overcome gravitational pull, Global Warming resulting from gas induced engines, pro’s and con’s of cutting angles verses traditional lengthwise, the history of the plastic wheel, and what the rabbit and turtle means on the throttle control.
    Really fascinating read, and I think there was an article on time management too!

  49. Me No Dhimmi:
    “the French don’t have a word for entrepreneur”
    Heh. They used to, but then we borrowed it and they just never felt the need to ask us to return it!

  50. It used to be called “This Magazine is About Schools,” back when it was a left-wing organ of the teachers unions. Then it aspired to a broader market and changed the name to “This Magazine.” It’s still a left-wing rag, however. The good thing is, you’ll likely never see it taking up space at your local newsstand, most leftist moonbats preferring to get their news from the Toronto Star.

Proudly powered by WordPress & Skyrocket Themes

MENU

Navigation