#david weigel

[universitybookstore]

Everyone has that one friend who loves prog rock—King Crimson, Styx, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd, et. al. Now there is finally the perfect book for them, The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock by David Weigel, who you might recognize as a regular commentator on MSNBC and a political reporter for The Washington Post. Of course, your friend may never let hear the end of how Emerson, Lake & Palmer are truly great and there was that one concert....

[nprbooks]

David Weigel is known primarily as a political reporter for The Washington Post and a regular commentator on MSNBC. But in The Show That Never Ends, he spins his love of prog rock into a detailed, affectionate history of a genre that's never completely gone away. 

Critic Jason Heller says, “[Weigel’s] knack for lean, efficient music analysis is refreshing ... and his obvious passion for the music elevates the narrative without spilling over into fatuous flag-waving.”

Prog Rock Gets Some Respect In 'The Show That Never Ends'

Image: Claire Harbage/NPR

[planetofsnarfs]

[arcticdementor]

(link)

[hasanabiouttakes]

David Weigel | Semafor

[arcticdementor]

Actual grown-up newspaper suspends top reporter after terror campaign from woke harridan

David Weigel should not have been suspended — but if they’re going to do that to him, then what the hell are they going to do about Felicia Sonmez, who went public attacking not one but two colleagues? Sonmez has had a tough life — she was once sexually assaulted — but actual non-narcissistic professionals don’t go after their colleagues in public like this, not when something can be handled privately. She was determined to make an example of poor Weigel.

See, this is why you should never, ever, ever hire woke people. Ever. Especially in journalism!

Honestly, I cannot imagine why any smart, capable young person would want to go into mainstream journalism today. I feel so lucky to have gotten in during the last good years, before woke blew it all up. At the college paper, just about everybody drank to excess, half the people smoked, and everybody cussed and made improper comments, and then went out to the bar when we put the paper to bed at night. It was awesome!

And grown-up journalism was like that too, except when I started, in 1989, a lot of the reporters had been to rehab. Still, the idea was that you got into journalism because it was fun, filled with characters, and sometimes you could even do some good in the world. In one of my early journalism jobs, there was exactly one reporter who was what you would call today “woke,” and everybody avoided her, because she was utterly devoid of humor. You wondered why somebody like that would even want to go into journalism.

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I don’t know Dave Weigel, but I do know that he’s one of the best young reporters the Washington Post has. If they can make an example of him over tweeting a dopey joke, and let that harridan Felicia Sonmez who publicly persecuted him get away with her witch hunt, it’s a terrible sign to anybody with creativity and humor and flawed humanity. Only wokesters and cringing conformist robots need apply at the Washington Post.

Ever read H.L. Mencken? He was a terrible person. A real bigot. He was also a genius and an American treasure. They would never let him in the door of an American newspaper today. Tom Wolfe? He was a courtly gentleman, but I bet his opinions would cause the Fragile Felicias of the world to scream bloody murder. Truman Capote was one of the century’s great magazine writers, and he was extravagantly gay, but surely not p.c. enough for the Fragile Felicias.

I cannot stand these people. They are ruining journalism. It used to be disreputable and therefore alive. Now it is agonizingly prissy, and dying from suffocation beneath the whalebone corsets and losing its circulation because of the too-tight mind-forg’d manacles. With Fragile Felicias and her woke tribe running newsrooms, it’s no place for creative, flawed geniuses. She’s no Molly Ivins, that’s for sure. As a well-known contemporary philosopher put it (NSFW):

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Fragile Felicia indeed. What kind of privileged twit takes her boss to court because she doesn’t get an assignment she wants? This person is trouble. The Post should fire her for insubordination over the way she went after Weigel and Jose Del Real, who had the temerity to defend Weigel. One of the conservatives I follow on Twitter said that he doesn’t understand why conservatives are falling all over ourselves to defend Weigel, who is not one of us. It’s because Weigel was treated unjustly here by the woke, in a way that either has happened or could happen to any of us. I don’t know Dave Weigel, and I don’t care what Weigel’s politics are: wrong is wrong. We don’t stand up for people who have been wronged because we like their politics, and we don’t fail to stand up for them because we dislike their politics. Felicia Sonmez is a bully, and she’s part of a class that bullies people constantly within professional journalism. Bullies have to be confronted.

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UPDATE.2: Here’s the 2019 story of what happened to Jon Kaiman, the journalist whose career she helped destroy with a spurious claim of sexual harassment during the #MeToo era. Excerpt:

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You have to read the whole thing to fully grasp the viciousness of what Sonmez did to this poor man.

[grandhotelabyss]

A reminder of the historical situation subtending this discourse:

In her devotion to what Moser calls the idea of her own “exceptionality,” Sontag was faithful to modernism. The first artistic explosion against the Victorian bourgeoisie, the naturalism and neo-romanticism of the fin de siècle, was a male-oriented revolt against domestic woman and her literary corollary in the sentimental realist novel—against what George Moore pointedly called “literature at nurse.” But women could be said to have piloted the revolution’s second generation—Wilde and Conrad gave way to Woolf and Stein—and modernism’s female artists exemplify the genius resisting the tyrannical moralism of an overly regulated and schematized society. Sontag was heir to this tradition of the exceptional woman, was in this modern sense a feminist.

But feminism, as the legitimating ideology of momentous economic and social changes, went, in Sontag’s lifetime and still more in our own, a different way. This may be (now I am speculating and historicizing) among the reasons why Sontag never quite reliably affiliated with the movement, and distanced herself especially from the irrationalist variant associated with the likes of Adrienne Rich, whom Sontag all but directly called a fascist. As Sontag saw it, Rich’s supposed radicalism was just an updated variant of an old, bad form of emotional coercion that would not prove emancipatory to women, barred as they had already been by the grandees of the canon from their share in reason. (Moser, despite his otherwise thoroughgoing anti-radical liberalism, takes Rich’s side in their dispute on identity politics grounds and resorts to psychological and even verbal cliché to do so: “Sontag’s furious response suggested that Rich had touched a nerve.”)

After the anarcho-modernist interregnums, the artistic eruptions, of the 1920s and 1960s, after the ages of Woolf and Sontag, middle-class women were put back into their old Victorian role as guardians of virtue and rectitude, concepts updated (i.e., superficially de-Christianized) as “appropriate conduct” for the state/corporate neoliberal bureaucracy typified by the postmodern university. The angel in the house became the angel in HR. Women were not, as the feminism of Woolf’s time promised they would be, freed from the moral strictures and emotional limits of the domestic sphere with their entrance into culture and the professions; rather, culture and the professions became the new domestic sphere with female “emancipation.” Adrienne Rich’s “disloyalty to civilization,” because of its hierarchal coldness, was translated into universal over-socialization, a kind of communism on capitalism’s behalf, or capitalism with a human (i.e., female) face.

—Rev. of Benjamin Moser, Sontag: Her Life and Work

[votenet-blog]

The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: Just(ice) in Time for the Midterms

The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: Just(ice) in Time for the Midterms

Author: Lena FeltonTaylor Hosking / Source: The Atlantic

Carlos Barria / Reuters

-Written by Lena Felton (@lenakfelton) and Taylor Hosking (@Taylor__Hosking)

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