The neocons take over in the expected putsch after the New Times bought them.
I assume the OC Weekly is on the list for the same treatment. Should be easier here, since finding someone who isn’t a right-wing loudmouth is nearly impossible.
Nothing is enough for these people. They’re not satisfied with owning the national news media outlets, the cable TV news, the newspapers, the magazines. They have to go after the free weeklies where seldom-read lefties tag along after the entertainment listings, and root that out too. It’s not like Harold Meyerson et al. were hugely influential — everyone reads a paper like that for the listings and the ads — but the Big Right-Wing Crusher Hand has to get everyone.
And now the New Times neo-con talk-radio-style tabloid monster has eaten almost all the notable free weeklies in the country.
These people want more than a voice. They want to reverse and destroy every single thing about the rebellion of the 1960s, go back and win every argument they lost about the war and Watergate and race and gender, eat and shit out every pop culture item that might contain subversion, and burn down the universities where their professors confused them with suspiciously foreign intellectualism.
Welcome to Talk Radio Nation: Boomer sell-outs, ignorant neo-cons, privileged post-literate suits, and their slaves.
Long live the LA City Beat.
Be My Blog 
I lost my ability to get into a lather about this stuff some years ago. After a while, riteous indignation just doesn’t have the same kick to it, and it just leaves a bitter, sort of metalic tang. Thankfully, the places where one can go to hear ideas have grown exponentially with the internet and such, and I just cross myself and hope that those whose opinions are still in the maleable stage are not collecting all of their information from The Register and all it’s little clones.
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I’ll take a good rant over passiveism any day.
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Believe me, so would I. Thank goodness for those who can continue to fight the good fight. And I’m pleased whenever I’m reminded that I’m not the only progressive in Orange County. I wish that I could get passionate about it. I always feel that I should be passionate about it. But in my profession, I work all day against social injustice, and when I get home, I just can’t seem to muster the energy to take up arms there, too.
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Well, as long as you’re working all day against social injustice. Can’t fault you for that! ^_^
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You forgot the camp followers of thugs, pimps, junkies and whores that congregate just outside of the campfire, swarming over the carcass of the leftovers like starving dung beetles… specifically, I’m thinking of the loser typefied by “Chronic Cantina” guy… hard to believe we went to high school with these semi-literate, mouth breathing sycophants and oxygen-deprived sollopsistic me-monkeys… it’s a wonder we’re sane at all…
mojo sends
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Paragraph 5 is spot fucking on.
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We’ve seen this kind of mentality in action before.
“These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly – done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated – we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas’ new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.” —President Lincoln, February 27, 1860 at the Cooper Institute in New York
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Wow. I’m not sure what you meant to say with that.
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Yeah, I probably could have been more clear.
What I’m trying to say is that the mentality that wants to take over existing alternative media and remake them into yet another corporate media outlet without any spine for afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted is an outgrowth of an older and broader element of bad mojo in America.
You called them “neo-cons” but I think they’re just American falangists, basically.
Your fifth paragraph reminded of that quote from the Lincoln speech I offered above, because it describes the phenomenon at hand. It stems from the same source that Lincoln talks about in his speech. Conservatives cannot be satisfied with a merely neutered counter-culture. The counter-culture must be destroyed and everyone must be assimilated into the corporate nation, where labor and management are joined into the cultural hegemony a unified authoritarian system. The opposition must be made to submit, to declare that this is good, that we like it, and that we repudiate the counter-culture that once disparaged their authoritarianism. That’s why they can’t be satisfied with just starting up their own alternative newspaper— they have to take over the existing one and repurpose it for their ends. It’s just a tiny part of the larger program.
It always seems to come as a surprise when the conservatives take this approach with us. I don’t understand why. This style of thought is not new. In previous centuries, it gave rise to indenture, then slavery. Unchecked, it will do so again. We never seem to believe they really mean it when they say they hate us and want us to be humiliated, fired, evicted, beaten, deported, indentured, drafted, enslaved, raped, eliminated, exterminated, etc. They do. They really do.
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one of the things that bums me out the most about this kind of thing is that the apathy of my generation is to blame. the 60’s rebellion you mentioned is something my generation only looks to for pop culture icons and bad fashion, they (we?) completely missed the point.
it makes me sick.
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