Howdy, Elon-
Barrett Brown here. I'm launching a project with the intention of bringing greater attention to the failures of certain parties amongst the mainstream media, such as Thomas Friedman, Charles Krauthammer, Richard Cohen, Howard Kurtz, David Broder, and those who still employ them despite their backlog of failed predictions, poor analysis, contradictory musings, and all the rest; to a lesser extent, we'll also be going after such prominent bloggers as Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds, the Powerline gang, and everyone else who gets to go on the ol' teevee despite their nonsensical and occasionally genocidal output. All of this is to be accomplished by way of an invitation-only network of bloggers who will be asked to coordinate on occasion in order to reach the critical mass necessary to prompt certain mainstream media outlets to cover a given travesty - Friedman's record of terrible predictions, for instance. As it is now, when one of us point out the demonstrable failures of some respected pundit, a couple people might link to it, but for the most part we're only reaching people who are already relatively savvy and well-informed and who thus aren't particularly susceptible to flawed commentary to begin with. On the other hand, if we take advantage of the manner in which at least some editors and reporters with the traditional pubs are likely to address a topic if it's being talked about by a great number of bloggers at once, we can use the "herd dynamics" of the media in such a way as to reach those who consume information largely from print and television - which is to say, a relatively huge number of people who would benefit more from learning that their favorite pundit has no idea what he's talking about. This will all be facilitated by software that a friend of mine is writing and which will be released under an open-source license upon completion, and which will involve significant improvements to the means by which bloggers acquire, evaluate, and disseminate important pieces of information, among several other features that we expect to be of some assistance to both bloggers and their readers.
I mentioned the project briefly in my most recent piece for Vanity Fair and will be making a more formal announcement on Huffington Post, True/Slant, and Daily Kos soon. So far I've got Allison Kilkenny, Charles Johnson (he's very reasonable now), and a few other folks on board; Juan Cole is considering joining up as well, as are a couple of other commentators I've spoken to over the past couple of weeks. I'm also meeting with the execs of True/Slant on Wednesday, as they're interested in promoting the project and perhaps adopting the software across their network, among other things. All in all, we think this is a viable means by which to help reduce the influence of those commentators who have contributed to the national decline by way of their undeserved influence over the electorate while also increasing the influence of those commentators - mostly bloggers - who have shown themselves to be intellectually honest and insightful.
If you'd be interested in getting involved, please let me know, as I'd like to have you and Instaputz as a whole on board if possible, and hopefully list you as a participant when I make the formal announcement. More details will be forthcoming when I have that piece published (I may wait till after the meeting on Wednesday to run it), but in the meantime I can answer any questions you may have, and would also like your input on any features you'd like to see from the software or any ideas you may have regarding the project in general. E-mail me back or give me a call at your convenience if you think this is something in which you might like to participate.
Thanks,
Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302
On Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 7:26 PM, Barrett Brown
<barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
Elon-
Thanks for the shout-out and blog roll addition. Also, not sure if you've seen this, but it's shaping up to be a perpetual motion machine of hilarity, complete with some fellow threatening to sue me:
Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 3:32 PM, Barrett Brown
<barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
Elon-
Good point about NR and WS. He does write for American Spectator, though; it'll be interesting to see if they quietly put a stop to that at some point.
At any rate, I'm trying to drum up the critical mass necessary to get McCain thrown out of polite society, but I'm still a rather obscure person with little influence. If you know any other bloggers or pundit-types who might be interested in bringing this to the attention of more people, it would be wonderful if you could pass along this info to them; I'd be happy to send anyone as much evidence as they need - and there's tons of it as this point, thanks to the hard work of Sergey Romanov, Johnson, and a few other folks. Same offer goes to you, of course.
Just to reiterate, the main reason I'm determined to bring McCain down is that, even aside from his poorly-concealed racism, he's been doing actual harm to people who don't deserve it by way of unethical journalism practices. I spent a good portion of the weekend talking to Jonathan Farley, whom I mentioned in my last e-mail, and he's absolutely convinced that McCain's ridiculous article basically finished off his otherwise brilliant career in the U.S. (he now teaches in Austria). That McCain was coordinating with neo-Nazis while writing "news" pieces on a neo-Nazi target is, frankly, a scandal in and of itself; I'm finishing an article on this particular item today and will hopefully get it run in some or another pub with a different audience than the one I've been haranguing about this for the last few weeks. But again, I can only do so much. If the existing info on McCain's behavior could be brought to the attention of someone like Duncan Black, for instance, we could very well discredit him enough to prevent him from doing any more damage to anyone.
At any rate, thanks for having taken the time to look into this as well as for getting back to me and listening to me rave about my latest obsession; I know you guys are busy, so I really do appreciate it. Also, love the blog.
Thanks again,
Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302
On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 2:01 PM, Elon Green
<misterbones@gmail.com> wrote:
Barrett,
Can't speak for the others, but I think this piece was just about the sharpest thing I've yet read on McCain. Unfortunately, your push-back (and, to his credit, Charles Johnson's) is necessary. McCain is a nasty piece of work and, to our increasing dismay, increasingly "respectable".
McCain has made a calculation that a smattering "ma'ams" and "sirs" and "I married the prettiest girl in Mayberrys" is sufficient to paper over his beliefs and reap the reward of thousands of Glenn Reynolds' readers.
So far, he's been pretty successful.
However: I think it says something that the National Review and Weekly Standard still treat him like a leper. Maybe they're not as stupid as we think they are. Subject to change, of course.
best,
e
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From:
Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 10:20 PM
Subject: The Other McCain's Other Persona
To:
instaputzen@gmail.com,
gin.tacos@gmail.com
Hi, guys-
Robert Stacy McCain, the former Washington Times editor who co-authored a book with Palin biographer Lynn Vincent and now serves as a popular blogger and all-around pundit, has been discovered to have written dozens of blatantly racist forum postings as well as at least one article for the proudly white supremacist outlet American Renaissance, all under a pen name taken from some Confederate hero. Last week he threatened to go over to the offices of the Charleston Gazette and beat everyone up or some such thing and wrote that I'd get mine "in turn." Plus he accused me of "sucking Charles Johnson's dick," which probably isn't even true. And then he wrote me this flamboyant open letter in which he accused me of forcing him into a Maoist re-education camp, I suppose metaphorically.
In all seriousness, McCain has a range of proven neo-Nazi ties and, as I've recently learned, in 2002 wrote a
Times piece on the black professor Jonathan Farley, who himself had recently called the Confederates traitors who ought to have been executed in an op-ed while teaching at Vanderbilt and thereby caught some flack from the local crackerjacks. McCain wrote a piece during the same period in which he was linking to neo-Nazi sites like
overthrow.com and posting racist comments in forums under that assumed name - which is to say he was cooperating and communicating with the same groups that were at the time sending dozens of death threats and hundreds of racist e-mails and phone calls Farley's way.
Here's a good starting point if this interests you.
Thanks,
Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302