Donald Trump is a bloviating, toxic buffoon. On this, we can all generally agree. But how did this perpetual failure of a man
Absolutely anything you want. Because Donald Trump is everyone’s fault. (Not yours, though. You’re great.)
21. Numbers
20. Obama
19. The Voters
18. David Brooks
17. Silicon Valley
16. Andrew Sullivan
15. Idiots
14. Paul Ryan
12. Twitter
10. The Media
7. Not TV
5. Ted Cruz
4. Memes
3. Angst
Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.
Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all. The former curators, all of whom worked as contractors, also said they were directed not to include news about Facebook itself in the trending module.
In other words, Facebook’s news section operates like a traditional newsroom, reflecting the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation. Imposing human editorial values onto the lists of topics an algorithm spits out is by no means a bad thing—but it is in stark contrast to the company’s claims that the trending module simply lists “topics that have recently become popular on Facebook.”
These new allegations emerged after Gizmodo last week revealed
“Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” said the former curator. This individual asked to remain anonymous, citing fear of retribution from the company. The former curator is politically conservative, one of a very small handful of curators with such views on the trending team. “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.”
The former curator was so troubled by the omissions that they kept a running log of them at the time; this individual provided the notes to Gizmodo. Among the deep-sixed or suppressed topics on the list: former IRS official Lois Lerner, who was accused by Republicans of inappropriately scrutinizing conservative groups; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker; popular conservative news aggregator the Drudge Report; Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL who was murdered in 2013; and former Fox News contributor Steven Crowder. “I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news,” the former curator said.
http://gizmodo.com/want-to-know-w...
Another former curator agreed that the operation had an aversion to right-wing news sources. “It was absolutely bias. We were doing it subjectively. It just depends on who the curator is and what time of day it is,” said the former curator. “Every once in awhile a Red State or conservative news source would have a story. But we would have to go and find the same story from a more neutral outlet that wasn’t as biased.”
Stories covered by conservative outlets (like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax) that were trending enough to be picked up by Facebook’s algorithm were excluded unless mainstream sites like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN covered the same stories.
Other former curators interviewed by Gizmodo denied consciously suppressing conservative news, and we were unable to determine if left-wing news topics or sources were similarly suppressed. The conservative curator described the omissions as a function of his colleagues’ judgements; there is no evidence that Facebook management mandated or was even aware of any political bias at work.
Managers on the trending news team did, however, explicitly instruct curators to artificially manipulate the trending module in a different way: When users weren’t reading stories that management viewed as important, several former workers said, curators were told to put them in the trending news feed anyway. Several former curators described using something called an “injection tool” to push topics into the trending module that weren’t organically being shared or discussed enough to warrant inclusion—putting the headlines in front of thousands of readers rather than allowing stories to surface on their own. In some cases, after a topic was injected, it actually became the number one trending news topic on Facebook.
“We were told that if we saw something, a news story that was on the front page of these ten sites, like CNN, the New York Times, and BBC, then we could inject the topic,” said one former curator. “If it looked like it had enough news sites covering the story, we could inject it—even if it wasn’t naturally trending.” Sometimes, breaking news would be injected because it wasn’t attaining critical mass on Facebook quickly enough to be deemed “trending” by the algorithm. Former curators cited the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 and the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris as two instances in which non-trending stories were forced into the module. Facebook has struggled to compete with Twitter when it comes to delivering real-time news to users; the injection tool may have been designed to artificially correct for that deficiency in the network. “We would get yelled at if it was all over Twitter and not on Facebook,” one former curator said.
In other instances, curators would inject a story—even if it wasn’t being widely discussed on Facebook—because it was deemed important for making the network look like a place where people talked about hard news. “People stopped caring about Syria,” one former curator said. “[And] if it wasn’t trending on Facebook, it would make Facebook look bad.” That same curator said the Black Lives Matter movement was also injected into Facebook’s trending news module. “Facebook got a lot of pressure about not having a trending topic for Black Lives Matter,” the individual said. “They realized it was a problem, and they boosted it in the ordering. They gave it preference over other topics. When we injected it, everyone started saying, ‘Yeah, now I’m seeing it as number one’.” This particular injection is especially noteworthy because the #BlackLivesMatter movement originated on Facebook, and the ensuing media coverage of the movement often noted its powerful social media presence.
(In February, CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed his support for the movement
When stories about Facebook itself would trend organically on the network, news curators used less discretion—they were told not to include these stories at all. “When it was a story about the company, we were told not to touch it,” said one former curator. “It had to be cleared through several channels, even if it was being shared quite a bit. We were told that we should not be putting it on the trending tool.”
(The curators interviewed for this story worked for Facebook across a timespan ranging from mid-2014 to December 2015.)
“We were always cautious about covering Facebook,” said another former curator. “We would always wait to get second level approval before trending something to Facebook. Usually we had the authority to trend anything on our own [but] if it was something involving Facebook, the copy editor would call their manager, and that manager might even call their manager before approving a topic involving Facebook.”
Gizmodo reached out to Facebook for comment about each of these specific claims via email and phone, but did not receive a response.
Several former curators said that as the trending news algorithm improved, there were fewer instances of stories being injected. They also said that the trending news process was constantly being changed, so there’s no way to know exactly how the module is run now. But the revelations undermine any presumption of Facebook as a neutral pipeline for news, or the trending news module as an algorithmically-driven list of what people are actually talking about.
Rather, Facebook’s efforts to play the news game reveal the company to be much like the news outlets it is rapidly driving toward irrelevancy: a select group of professionals with vaguely center-left sensibilities. It just happens to be one that poses as a neutral reflection of the vox populi, has the power to influence what billions of users see, and openly discusses
“It wasn’t trending news at all,” said the former curator who logged conservative news omissions. “It was an opinion.”
[Disclosure: Facebook has launched a program that pays publishers, including the New York Times and Buzzfeed, to produce videos for its Facebook Live tool. Gawker Media, Gizmodo’s parent company, recently joined that program.]
Update: Several hours after this report was published, Gizmodo editors started seeing it as a topic in Facebook’s trending section. Gizmodo’s video was posted under the topic but the “Top Posts” were links to RedState.com and the Faith and Freedom Coalition.
Update 4:10 p.m. EST: A Facebook spokesperson has issued the following statement to outlets including BuzzFeed and TechCrunch. Facebook has not responded to Gizmodo’s repeated requests for comment.
“We take allegations of bias very seriously. Facebook is a platform for people and perspectives from across the political spectrum. Trending Topics shows you the popular topics and hashtags that are being talked about on Facebook. There are rigorous guidelines in place for the review team to ensure consistency and neutrality. These guidelines do not permit the suppression of political perspectives. Nor do they permit the prioritization of one viewpoint over another or one news outlet over another. These guidelines do not prohibit any news outlet from appearing in Trending Topics.”
On Monday, the Associated Press reports, North Korea expelled three BBC journalists for allegedly insulting the country’s dignity, shortly before the authoritarian state’s first congress in 36 years bestowed a new title upon Kim Jong Un: “Party chairman.”
The BBC’s coverage of the congress had distorted facts and “spoke ill of the system and the leadership of the country,” O Ryong Il, the secretary general of the North’s National Peace Committee, said.
Correspondent Rupert Wingfield-Hayes was detained on Friday and questioned for eight hours, the New York Times reports, before being kicked out of the country on Monday. Producer Maria Byrne and cameraman Matthew Goddard were also expelled.
Altogether, about 100 foreign journalists had been invited to cover the North Korean congress, but only 30 were granted entry on Monday. The Los Angeles Times Beijing bureau chief, Julie Makinen, wrote on Twitter that she and her team were not admitted because their reports over the weekend “were not beautiful.”
According to Bloomberg, this is a somewhat more thoughtful response than the usual answer North Korean minders give to journalists’ questions, which is: “This is a difficult question.”
Prior to Monday, Kim was already head of the Workers’ Party of Korea, but his title had been “first secretary.” His father, Kim Jong Il, will keep his title of “eternal general secretary” and his grandfather, Kim Il Sung, will remain “eternal president.”
We are, right now, in the midst of a digital media upheaval. What was previously conventional wisdom—that a media company with hopes of turning a profit needs, above all, to achieve scale—is being proven false. The new conventional wisdom is that video will be digital media’s savior, but it is only a matter of time before this is proven false too.
The Digital Content NewFronts are being currently being held in New York, and your favorite media and media-adjacent companies are pitching their upcoming projects to advertisers, practically begging for sponsorship or mutually beneficial branded content opportunities or something or other. It’s all about video: “To qualify as a NewFronts presenting company, presenters must create original content in video format that is available online.”
BuzzFeed—the digital media company which has invested the most in video—presented last Monday, and of course talked about their wildly successful rubber band watermelon explosion, watched by 807,000 people at its peak on Facebook Live. CEO Jonah Peretti said the video’s popularity brought BuzzFeed into the realm of television:
For context, last year CNN averaged 712,000 viewers in primetime. Brands, according to the argument BuzzFeed is implicitly making, should therefore pay something like the same to message and tell stories against BuzzFeed’s next smash hit as they currently pay for commercials during the evening on CNN. Right? Well, no.
The number in the corner of the Facebook Live window that you saw going up while BuzzFeeders strapped rubber bands onto a watermelon—or while the Try Guys spent 83 minutes failing to pop a giant balloon last week—represented the concurrent number of people watching the video (or, more specifically, who had the video playing in a browser window) at any given time. At its peak 807,000 people watched that damn watermelon explode, which is actually orders of magnitude fewer than the average of 712,000 people watching primetime CNN last year.
Television ratings are measured by the privately-held Nielsen Corporation, which pays a small amount of money to around 25,000 of the 116.4 million “TV homes” in America to install People Meters. Using special remote controls, these People Meters measure what is being watched, by whom, and for how long. Nielsen then uses statistical techniques to extrapolate this sample and calculate the ratings—how many people are watching—of each TV show.
The TV ratings Nielsen reports aren’t concurrent viewers, but rather “average minute audience,” which is exactly what it sounds like. It measures the average audience watching across each minute of the show.
If BuzzFeed’s watermelon video had been measured the way a TV show is, its viewership would’ve been closer to zero than the 807,000 it trumpeted to advertisers. Viewership started off low and took 45 minutes to build to that 807,000, and few people watched the entire video; many tuned in for five or 10 minute blocks at the end. Facebook’s metrics also wildly inflate the number of people watching a given video, as they count somebody as a viewer once they have been watching for just three seconds, and by default Facebook videos autoplay as you scroll to them in your feed.
The conflation of digital and traditional viewership metrics has gotten under the skin of TV people, and for good reason. If advertisers can be hoodwinked into believing that a sizable number of people are actually watching things on Facebook Live, they will direct their money online, where the ad rates are much, much lower than they are on TV. The thing here is that the TV people are right—even serious online video hits deliver numbers that would barely register if measured the same way TV programming is.
Here, for instance, is Nielsen explaining how digital numbers lie:
In our second example, the 2014 World Cup on ESPN had an average-minute TV audience of 4.6 million persons, and received 115.5 million digital views. But 4.6 million for TV and 115.5 million for digital is the wrong comparison—if we translate digital viewership into a TV metric, the average-minute digital audience of the World Cup on ESPN was 307,000, representing just 7% lift of the TV audience.
Since it was broadcast live, the watermelon explosion has been watched by 10.7 million people, per Facebook’s count. If those people were as engaged as online World Cup viewers—and I’d venture that, on average, they were less engaged than people watching the most popular sporting event on the planet—those 10.7 million digital views would translate into an average-minute TV audience of 28,563 persons. If Peretti brought that number to advertisers at the NewsFronts as evidence of wild success, they would’ve laughed in his face.
FX’s research chief got testy making just this point:
Specifically, Piepenkotter spoke about last week’s Facebook Live video that featured two Buzzfeed employees wrapping rubber bands around a watermelon until it exploded. Buzzfeed bragged afterward that the video had 880,000 viewers at its highest point.
“That’s like the two-second view that we see in digital currency right now, which is creating an extraordinarily false narrative and a meaningless narrative,” Piepenkotter said. Applying the same metric to her network’s offering, “The episodes of ‘O.J. Simpson’ to date would have been 143.9 million hours viewed and 259 billion views.”
Leaving aside digital video’s low viewership when measured like TV, advertisers don’t even look at TV ratings the way everybody else does. They buy ads based mainly upon C7 ratings, which measure how many viewers watched commercials as they aired and up to seven days after. And more precisely, they care about the number of a specific type of people watching the commercials—the key demographic. Most generally, the key demographic is people 18-49 (or 25-54), as they’re the ones with disposable income to spend on whatever advertisers are selling.
That’s broad; things get more finely-tuned than this. Nielsen collects demographic data on the people in its approximately 25,000 homes with a People Meter, and can tell advertisers how many people who fit various criteria related to age, gender, race and so on are watching. This data is necessary for advertisers: A cosmetics company wants to know specifically how many women will be watching, for instance.
Facebook can’t tell you this; more precisely, they can, and someday will, but currently won’t. Were those 807,000 people concurrently watching BuzzFeed’s watermelon explosion young? Old? Men? Women? Facebook won’t say.
None of this should be read as supportive of Nielsen, a private, for-profit company whose ratings are absolute garbage. Its statistical methodology is opaque; its sample of homes isn’t anywhere close to truly random; its ratings rely to some degree on self-inputted data; its ratings don’t take into account communal television viewing at places like bars and airports; and Nielsen struggles to capture the entire universe of “television” so far as it takes in DVRs, streaming services, mobile devices, and so on.
One day—maybe soon—video viewership will be measured much more accurately than it is now. Facebook doesn’t have to rely on a sample; it can measure every single person watching a video. And, in an advertiser’s wet dream and a privacy activist’s worst nightmare, it can provide much better data about viewers than Nielsen. Rather than advertising based upon how many women are expected to watch a video, advertisers will be able to advertise based upon how many women aged 18-29 who live in the Dallas area, are single, and say Shawshank Redemption is their favorite movie, are expected to watch a video.
It is worth considering, though, whether the availability of more precise metrics is beneficial to media companies. In some ways, the huge disparity between ad rates for print and digital is because online we can better measure exactly how ineffective advertising actually is, while in the past it was enough to know a Vogue reader might’ve looked at an ad. For years TV has relied upon suspect data—20 years ago Nielsen ratings were even less accurate—and it seems that the more precise the metrics are, the less everything is “worth.”
None of this should be read as a criticism of BuzzFeed, either. However poorly their viewership compares to routine CNN programming, getting 807,000 people to watch something on Facebook Live at the same time is legitimately impressive. If Gawker’s Facebook Live interview with a small child
But if digital media companies want to command anywhere near the same lucrative ad rates as TV networks, they’ll have to prove their videos consistently get the same audience as television networks. Which they can’t, because they don’t.
For all that, Facebook Live and its ilk are (as of now) bullshit, which is why the only thing anybody will talk about is the best case scenario for online video. The other week, Facebook decided to put a new metric front and center. It’s called Peak Concurrent Viewers, and it might be the greatest vanity metric in the history of vanity metrics. It doesn’t measure anything useful about the viewership insofar as being able to sell it to advertisers, and only works if it can trick them into believing that a significantly greater number of people are watching the video than actually are.
Video is the future of online media. People are spending an increasing amount of times on their phones, and phones are becoming terrifyingly powerful, able to flawlessly run the largest video—though data plans and cell networks remain a bottleneck. Some online media companies can ignore it, just as some print media companies have remained successful mostly ignoring the internet. The vast majority cannot. As the newspaper industry painfully learned a decade ago, evolution is necessary.
But just as many newspapers have died and even the most powerful are still struggling to evolve—hey, look, in the past three months the New York Times added digital subscribers but still lost a bunch of money—the emphasis on video is going to produce way more losers than winners. The first losers are digital journalists paid to write, not make video (hi!), but soon many digital media companies that have bet heavily on video will be losers too.
http://gawker.com/welcome-to-the...
While the media is more broadly retrenching, and digital media growing only slowly, demand for video journalists is outstripping supply. Everybody this side of Harper’s is building out a video team, without any idea how they will pay for it in the long term. In their pivot to video, for instance, the VC-funded Mashable went from eking out modest profit to burning through cash.
Just as publishers rushed to achieve scale under the naive assumption that scale would somehow free them from fundamental economic precepts, today they are rushing into video. It has the makings of a panic, with companies more focused on not being left out than an actual strategy for making money. This is a gold rush, with little evidence that there is anything more to rush for than a few flakes. To put it more pithily, video is the future, but just because you make video doesn’t mean you will survive.
Facebook is nobody’s friend, and especially not journalists’. They want to make live video look as attractive as possible to suck news organizations into providing high-quality content that users will engage with more than Grandpa Edwin’s latest rant about Benghazi. They are giving live video priority in your feed and push notifications about videos are sent to followers, all of which serve to get more eyeballs onto videos.
Facebook can pull the rug out from publishers at any moment. One of the reasons your favorite media companies are suddenly embracing Facebook Live is because Facebook is paying them to do so (Disclosure: Gawker Media is now part of this program
http://gizmodo.com/want-to-know-w...
I sure as hell don’t know how to fund modern journalism on a broad scale, but I have been around just long enough to understand not only that live video isn’t a silver bullet, but that there is no silver bullet. A few publishers will figure out how live video can improve their reporting and make them money, but most won’t. It is worth noting that the most successful Facebook Live videos so far have essentially been gimmicks; the type of things more palatably referred to as “content” than “journalism.”
And that, right there, is likely to be the future of digital media, and increasingly its present too. Multimedia production shops that very much resemble TV studios—and make no pretense at having a wall between reporting and advertising—thriving, while more traditional journalism shops attempt to eke out a hardscrabble existence.
Of all the stories to emerge about the horrors of life on Rikers Island in recent years, Candie Hailey’s is among the most horrifying. For two years, Hailey was kept in solitary confinement for a crime for which she was eventually acquitted, a time she says was filled with physical and sexual abuse from guards. Now, Hailey is filing a lawsuit against the city seeking $10 million in damages, the New York Daily News reports.
http://gawker.com/woman-spent-tw...
Hailey was arrested in 2012 for the attempted murder, and was found not guilty in court three years later. She spent the interim period on Rikers, the vast majority of it in solitary. An Associated Press story earlier this year detailed Hailey’s time there, which included multiple suicide attempts. “I would say I’ve been through hell and back,” she said. “My soul died but my body is alive.”
http://gawker.com/woman-could-go...
In a notice of claim filed recently, Hailey and her attorney allege in graphic detail that guards regularly abused her in jail. From the News:
Hailey also said she tried to commit suicide “more than 100 times” after being groped and threatened by guards and forced to submit to “gratuitous strip searches.”
In one February 2015 incident, a Rikers captain allegedly punched Hailey in the head and put his finger in her anus, according to the notice of claim, which is filed before a lawsuit can be initiated.
A New York City Department of Correction spokesperson told the News the department was looking into the allegations. “Commissioner (Joseph) Ponte has zero tolerance for sexual assaults of inmates, and we take these allegations seriously,” the spokesperson said. “The vast majority of our officers carry out their duties with care and integrity, and we are taking many steps to ensure that all staff adhere to the highest professionalism.”
Last week, the Justice Department gave North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory until the end of the day on Monday to scrap the transphobic “bathroom bill.” Instead, he’s filing a lawsuit against the federal government.
McCrory defended the decision Monday, saying transgender bathroom use is a “a national issue that applies to every state and it needs to be resolved at the federal level.”
The Justice Department had threatened legal action against North Carolina if it proceeded to enforce the regulations, which required state employees to use bathrooms based on their biological sex, as identified by their birth certificates. According to the DOJ, this would constitute a “pattern or practice” of discriminating against transgender state employees.
In turn, McCrory’s lawsuit, filed in North Carolina’s Eastern District Court, accuses the Justice Department of “baseless and blatant overreach.” By taking this stand, the Associated Press reports, the governor could cost the 17-campus University of North Carolina more than $1.4 billion in public funding.
“I’m not going to publicly announce that something discriminates, which is agreeing with their letter, because we’re really talking about a letter in which they’re trying to define gender identity,” he protested on Sunday. “And there is no clear identification or definition of gender identity. It’s the federal government being a bully.”
America’s well-manicured universities are supported by an entire academic underclass of very smart and very poorly paid people: the adjunct professors
We are publishing true stories from adjunct professors about the realities of their jobs and the inherent inequality of the higher learning industry. This is worth considering before you take out all those student loans.
Patriarchy
I have been an adjunct for about 5 years. First did it for experience and to supplement my already low wages as a social worker. Then I tried to go into private practice and needed some additional work to supplement. If it weren’t for my husband’s salary, I would not survive.
I teach two classes with are each 3.5 hours. For 16 weeks, I make under $6,000. Each month, I make about $1,150 and spend approximately 40 hours a month working sometimes more. The only reason I only work that much is because I put a boundary around how much time I spend and use lesson plans from previous semesters.
The real problem is aggressive men in class. If they don’t like me or what I have to offer or when i give them a bad grade, they will harass me endlessly until the end of the semester. I have been yelled at, intimidated and threatened by them because they can’t handle the fact that education is not something you purchase. You invest in it and the work is how you succeed.
I have tried to get the school to address the problem. They have no counseling program and refuse to refer students out for help with their anger issues. I have told them repeatedly that one day, there will be a school shooting and when that happens, I will not be surprised. I only hope I will not be there when it happens. Patriarchy!
Motherhood as an adjunct
I’m an adjunct English professor at a school in NYC... I have only part-time childcare, 20 hrs a week—the job pays so little that I really can’t justify additional hours, since I’m already at a net loss if only my salary is considered. I also value the flexibility that lets me collect my children from school each day and have them home with me a few days a week. But, this means nearly all my childcare hours are taken up with teaching and commuting and I don’t have enough time to prep my lessons, keep up with my grading, or meet with students. I grade late into the night and wake very early in the morning to teach. I prep lessons while my kids swarm around me during our spare half-hour at home before I make them dinner. And I am never on campus outside of teaching or my one office hour per week. (Fitting dissertation writing into this schedule was another beast. I’m glad that’s behind me). I struggle with the fact that I don’t give my students the time and attention my professors gave me as an undergrad. But I’m also aware that all of the hours I put into my courses on my own time not only come at the expense of something else (sleep, time with my family, my own research and writing)—they’re also totally uncompensated.
My story’s not a dark or depressing one— I’ve got various forms of privilege. Yet even with all that, I can barely make this schedule work. And unlike the busy corporate mom who has to work on deals late into the night around her family’s schedule, I’m literally not paid for the work that keeps me up until 1 am. I’m not going to stay in it for the long haul— a year or maybe two until my kids are in school full-time and then, if I haven’t landed a TT job, I’m leaving academia, possibly for high school teaching, possibly something else. I just hope I’m able to find something outside it— I worry that employers will see the PhD on my CV and decide I’m too over-educated for whatever job I’m trying to get.
Life as a for-profit adjunct
I work as a rep for [a large] for-profit provider of post secondary education. I work remote from home office and attend recruiting events at high schools. Not working in an office is the only reason I stay with this company.
I recently attended a high school college fair where my campus ‘allowed’ one of the adjunct faculty to go with me. The shit he told me that he has to deal with in the office is PSYCHO. And I got the eerie feeling that the company doesn’t like to let the adjuncts out of the office to attend events for fear they’ll say too much to other employees about what goes on...
As an adjunct faculty member every second of every day is monitored by a system the company has set up on his computer - every time he gets up from his computer he has to give his reason and clocks back in when he returns.
He’s not allowed to step out for lunch! He has to eat crap from the vending machine. And restroom breaks are fucking clocked too! If he steps away from his computer too long he gets ‘dinged’ from the timer on his computer and is immediately reprimanded by the campus President or HR Director and their report goes to corporate.
This company has been through several rounds of lay-offs during the last couple of years and employee turn over in the office is churn and burn. Every time there’s a lay-off there’s more work expectations thrown on the adjuncts. I think the majority (if not all) of the faculty is adjunct, to keep cost down and shareholders at bay. He said his emails are off the chart, hundreds a day from students, from corporate, and he must respond to all of them in between teaching classes. His time on the phone is monitored as well.
He often works 12-14 hour days, didn’t say what his salary is or if he’s paid overtime. He’s been with the company for awhile but says everything has gotten much worse in the last couple years
Treated like less than janitors
I have been an adjunct faculty at [a university in Massachusetts] since 2000 in the finance department. I always did that as a hobby because I could never justify the hourly pay given the time I spent. I do it because I love teaching and interacting with young minds and I love to talk about finance.
I get paid 5,000 per class but this number used to be much less until we started to talk about union 3 years ago. Since then, the number has not moved.
After a vote where we lost by 2 votes, we voted 2 to 1 last year to unionize. Since then, the administration has been doing all they can to stonewall us. Every tactic you can think off, they use it. “We do not have the money, you are not worth it, etc.” The kicker is that they are about to build a brand new hockey rink. And this is D2 ball. The size and pay of the administration is out of control. But we are worthless.
It is to the point where we are using a mediator because the talks are going no where. I believe we will end up having to involve the NLRB.
Adjuncts here are treated like less than janitors in the administration’s eyes (because janitors have a union). You are never guaranteed a class until the first day of school. If they assign you a class, you do the prep work and they cancelled it last minute, you get nothing. This happened to me after 14 years. I basically had to get mad and they gave me the most entry level class they had that semester to keep me happy. The kicker is that I found i lost my class because I could not find it on blackboard to post my syllabus. No one bothered to tell me.
Last year, I lost my inbox but somehow regained it this year. I used to have an office in the finance department but now it is someone I am not sure where. I talk to my students after class or meet in a public area.
We are portrayed as professors to our students but not treated like ones. I once told my students how much they paid me and my students could not stop laughing. It is a true labor of love for me.
Insanely bleak
I have taught at four different schools: a community college (where I also taught in a local high school as part of their early college program), a private four-year, and a public four-year. I tell people that when you’re an adjunct, you’re basically a whore. You take what they’re willing to pay you and you lie about what you’re able to teach. I have never said “no” to a teaching job. So, outside of history, I’ve also taught composition courses and public speaking, and I reckon I could “teach” just about any course offered. But that doesn’t mean it’s a pleasure, and it doesn’t mean that students are getting the best education, but it’s the grind.
The average you cited sounds high (I am from Northwest Ohio). The average I’ve seen is around $2,000 per class (cost of living is down). The only way it makes economic sense for me is to double up on classes, teaching as many as four times in a day at one place or taking online courses on the side.
I can lie and tell myself that this is temporary (and I do!) and that when I finish, things will be different, but it’s insanely bleak. There has not been a moment wasted in my doctoral program, but making ends meet by teaching courses all the time means that you’re always prepping courses, grading, communicating with students, commuting, and that doesn’t make for a lot of time to write. To show for it, I will soon have a doctorate, but it’s increasingly clear that many institutions frankly don’t value the work I’ve put into it, and they don’t value the students whose pockets they’re robbing.
That part IS depressing. I used to believe in the liberal arts tradition, and in the value of the humanities (I still do), but it dims all the time because of self-interested decisions made by administrators and government officials that minimize what we do.
Obscene
I just read your article on adjunct professors. I teach English—3-4 courses in spring and fall and 2 during the summer. These are grading-intensive courses, and I spend so much time marking papers and doing class prep. Last year I barely cleared $20k. I spend 10-12 hours a week just commuting to and from my college, so a not-insignificant chunk of my pay goes into my gas tank just to get me to work. I have over $40k in student loans and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to repay them. I hate summer because it means less money. In the fall, we start working in August and don’t get paid until mid-October. In what other profession does one work for two whole months before their first paycheck? They do this because they’re afraid we’ll quit a month in and walk away with a little bit of money, heaven forbid. I can’t tell you how stressful this life is, especially for someone who has no financial support from elsewhere. If I could be happy doing something other than teaching, believe me, I would get out. Unfortunately, I love my work and my students, and I feel like my life has some meaning. But I don’t know how much longer I can suffer like this. I am always one unexpected bill away from total financial crisis.
Here’s the deal: administrative positions (Assistant to the Assistant Assistant) have exploded (something like 250% in the past couple decades) and administrative salaries have skyrocketed. Administrators who have far less education than faculty, and whose jobs frankly serve very little purpose, make six figures. Meanwhile the faculty—the backbone of higher ed—try to keep from starving. This is obscene.
Thank you to all the adjuncts who have written in with their stories. We will run more of these in coming weeks.
The propaganda that flows out of the Islamic State is typically of two kinds: Extreme, shocking violence (lynchings, shootings, stabbings, beheadings), or boring scenes of feigned domestic stability (a hummus factory, crops, a bus stop). But the fitness routines of ISIS constitute a third, bizarre form of media terror. Should we be scared of them?
There’s nothing intimidating about gymnastics, and yet, I can’t help but feel a little freaked out by the above video, released earlier this spring by an ISIS media office. It’s not the first workout video the militants have published, but it’s still a marked departure from the standard video fare of grisly executions, GoPro battlefield footage, religious ramblings, and suicide-bomber goodbyes. Where other ISIS productions have stated simply You should fear us because we are bloodthirsty or You should fear us because we’ll drive an explosive-laden car into your barracks in the middle of the night, this video says Fear us because we’re in fantastic shape.
The feats of strength you see above do seem to be exactly that. Jihadis are seen cranking out crunches, squats, and toe-touches. They swing across monkey bars while getting shot at by an instructor. They’re also kicked in the balls and made to literally jump through hoops as part of “exercises” that seem as much (if not entirely) for show as they are for fitness.
And when you see one trainee inexplicably do a backflip off a short tower while wearing his own GoPro, only to have the video cut to a choreographed gun-dance routine that’s as much jeté as jihadi, it might be hard to take this fully seriously.
I mean, really!!
To evaluate what exactly we’re dealing with here in terms of brawn, I spoke with two fitness professionals. The first, a Washington, DC-based trainer, would only speak on the condition of anonymity so as not to connect his employer to any discussion of ISIS. “Overall,” he told me, “the level of athleticism and violence demonstrated there is terrifying.” At the start of the video, “until the guns come out (literally) and people started getting kicked in the genitals, this is a fairly typical CrossFit warm-up: squats, windmills, jogging, and so on.” Which is to say, this is the sort of workout the yuppie Americans ISIS so detests would eat up: “If they were here in the city instead of fully robed and in the middle of the desert, all this would be $300 a month, unless you had GroupOn.” The “choreo” on display is “simple, but well executed...the content is functionally the same as you’d get in an advanced parkour class.”
Later components of the workout are “basically [from] a Tough Mudder...typical entry fee of $200, without t-shirt.” In sum, “the total value of this workout on a monthly basis in Washington, D.C. is well over $1000,” though he noted “there seems to be a lot of hitting, of the abs, of the legs, of the pelvis region...I don’t know that the latest research in physical fitness science would back this much hitting.”
Sami Fanik, a Brooklyn-based trainer, echoed this last sentiment: “I don’t understand why they keep hitting [their] abs with sticks and shit.” But it wasn’t just the canings that Fanik found suspect: “Some of their stretching is just going hurt their lower backs rather then help,” and their “sit-ups are very old-school and do more damage to the back then help.” Unlike me, Fanik was completely unimpressed by the GoPro backflip, describing it as “random and for show, nothing else.” But he makes a good point, overall: “training is all about working out for the sport or for the action soon to take place—I don’t know what jumping through a circle flame will help them do.” This ignores the propaganda value of sweet flips and flame-crawls, but suggests that perhaps we don’t need to be as afraid of these men as they’re hoping we will be. They may be practicing some of the same aspects that a Bethesda triathlete might enjoy in a CrossFit gym, but they’re spending at least as much time wasted on silly stunts. That is, unless Operation Inherent Resolve ends in a JSOC versus ISIS episode of Syrian Ninja Warrior, in which case, I fear, all is lost.
But should you be scared by this video? It’s unnerving not just because they’re ostensibly training with a vision of someday doing somersaults and high-kicks as blood runs through the streets of Berlin, Rome, and New York. It’s particularly unnerving because it’s so thoroughly strange, an uncanny combination of violent athleticism and patent silliness. A man who can sprint towards you with a knife across a great distance is scary, but the man crazy enough to do a backflip first is even scarier. There’s no debating that the ISIS exercise regime is goofy in its impracticality, and makes its adherents look sort of like goons who think they’re in a Zack Snyder flick. The D.C.-based trainer too remarked that “this seems more like fighting you’d do on a movie set than in real life.” But it’s easy to forget, from our Western office seats, that propaganda videos are intended to recruit new waves of young men who want to get kicked in the balls, hit in the abs, and jump through flaming hoops on their way to the establishment of a blood-soaked global caliphate. One of the greatest strengths of ISIS has been its ability to give terrorism sex appeal: Not since romantic images of 1980s freedom-fighting in Afghanistan turned middle-class men into mujahideen has an extremist group so effectively wielded “Jihadi Cool.”
So, yes, backflips and all the rest of the physical, absurd-looking gratuitousness in the workout video is laughable to us, but it’s not meant for us. It’s not meant for the men doing the flips, either—but if the hokey, movie-machismo reaches an alienated kid in a Paris suburb or depressed Algerian burg, it might just do its job. And that is what should scare you.
This morning, Donald Trump called in to CNN for an interview, where he proceeded to blithely bend New Day anchor Chris Cuomo to his will for almost 19 minutes.
Cuomo, bless his heart, tried to confront Trump right off the bat about calling Hillary Clinton an “unbelievably nasty, mean enabler” of adultery at a rally Friday.
“You are attacking Hillary Clinton for the sexual indiscretions of her husband, calling her an enabler,” Cuomo said, by way of introduction. “We have a panel of independent voters. They are smart as heck and most of them don’t like it. They see it as a distraction, as hypocritical coming from you and mostly they see it as potential proof you may have no real ideas to offer as president. What is your thinking on this line of attack?”
And Cuomo has a point about it being hypocritical. Trump knows first-hand the ill effects of adultery: His first and second wives once got into a public brawl over him when he took them both on vacation in Aspen.
http://gawker.com/remember-when-...
But Trump chose not to address the question, instead demanding Cuomo congratulate him on becoming the presumptive Republican nominee as a prerequisite to the interview. Cuomo, incredibly, acquiesced.
Trump: This is a nice way to start off the interview. First of all, you should congratulate me for having won the race. I thought you know, at least there would be a small congratulations, but I’m not surprised with CNN, because that’s the way they treat Trump. It’s the, you know, they call it the Clinton network and I believe that. So, you know
Cuomo: Wait. Hold on. Mr. Trump, I did congratulate you the last time we spoke. I said, “Congratulations on winning the big race.”
Trump: Thank you very much. So warm and so well-felt.
Cuomo: Hold on. Get this off on the right foot. I’m trying
Trump: Starting off with a question, we haven’t spoken, last week, towards the end, I was the, essentially the nominee of the party, and you start off with this question which is not surprising, because I understand CNN perhaps a lot better than you do.
Cuomo: Okay, okay. Let’s—you know what? Sometimes it’s good to restart. Here’s the restart. You are going be your party’s nominee because all accounts. You are going to carry the standard for this party. You have said once you get into the general, people will see what you have to offer. The first thing you’ve come out with hot and heavy out of the box are attacks on Hillary Clinton.
Trump: That wasn’t the first thing. The first thing I came out if you watched, trade. We’re making horrible trade deals, losing your jobs, losing manufacturing. the next thing I came out with it’s trade. is rebuilding our military, because our military is absolutely being decimated. We’re not spending the proper money. We’re not buying the proper equipment. We’re not taking care of our soldiers. We’re not taking care of our vets, by the way. We’re not taking care of our military at a time when we just about in the history of our country need it the most. So I talk about that. I talk about the border. I talk about the fact that we have to stop the drugs from pouring into our country. Those are the things i talk about in a very long speech, in Washington, actually Nebraska, which was unbelievable. Every one of them had tens of thousands of people.I mean, there were massively, they were massively attended, of course you don’t mention, nor does CNN ever show the crowds. very interesting. I could be making a speech for an hour and they never show the extent of the crowd.
And that was it for that question, and every other question after that. Here’s the full interview:
Donald Trump has announced that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie will serve as chairman of his transition team, identifying personnel who would become part of a Trump White House. Christie will be working closely with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner
http://gawker.com/in-keeping-wit...
Just months ago, Trump accused Christie of having committed a federal crime in covering up the Bridgegate scandal. Now, NBC News reports, Christie will bring “substance” and “seriousness” to the Trump campaign:
Sources familiar with the planning say the transition team appointment shows “the role the governor is playing as the serious person around Trump who is trying to provide some discipline” to his growing organization.
Christie also continues to act as “a conduit between the establishment and Trump” based on Christie’s relationships with Republican elected officials across the country, sources said.
The New York Times reported last week that Kushner—Trump’s son-in-law and a real estate heir in his own right—would be a part of the very forward-looking transition team. (President Obama didn’t announce his Transition Team Chariman until the day after he won the 2008 election.) In 2005, as U.S. Attorney for the state of New Jersey, Christie successfully prosecuted Kushner’s father, Charles, for “crimes of greed, power, and excess.”
There does not seem to be any bad blood between Christie and Jared Kushner, however: In November, New Jersey awarded $93 million in tax breaks to a Kushner Companies high-rise in Jersey City.
Asked why the Trump campaign was directing press inquiries about the transition committee to the governor’s office, a spokeswoman for Christie told Gawker, “We’re trying to figure that out ourselves.”
Less than 24 hours after Beyoncé premiered her visual album Lemonade on HBO, a conversation that initially centered on the project’s artistic depth
The Beyhive’s sometimes laughably menacing activities have earned them a reputation for being crazed, as well as an inordinate amount of media attention. Articles surface anytime Beyoncé-related emojis (bees, crowns, and now lemons) and negative comments appear on a famous person’s page, which is often. Infamous, relentless, devoted and, often, self-certified trolls, these so-called fans are active participants in what’s become a social media sport: attacking, in their own comical, psychologically damning way, anyone who dares to critique Beyoncé.
But these emoji-bombers who incessantly cape for Bey remain largely anonymous and impossible to quantify, in spite of their nonstop visibility. I wondered: Who are they, and why do they go so hard?
Like any habitual social media user, I’m way too accustomed to seeing garbage comments on celebrity pages (Instagram often attracts the worst of them) without thinking twice. But the comments on Roy’s page post-Lemonade (“home wrecker,” etc.) made me wonder what kind of person goes that far, though, and how many of them were human (possibly in multiple senses of the word). For a long time, I’ve assumed that the Beyhive consisted of bored teens and the type of adult trolls whose primary interaction with society is online. But when I investigated personally, the picture started to get bafflingly diverse.
Of the more than 30 Instagram users I messaged over the course of a week (all of whom had publicly commented on a Rachel Roy-related photo at some point), 13 of them have private accounts. Their follower counts range from 0 to 10,000. Their profiles include descriptions like “makeup artist,” “fashionista” and “vegetarian.” Two users had hundreds of followers but no photos at all. One person agreed to talk before writing back, “Actually no.” Another, with whom I spoke on the phone, left me with more questions than answers. The others I communicated with were an mix of men and women in their 20s and, seemingly, sane.
The latter characteristic surprised me—sort of. I’ve long been aware of how passionately the Beyhive reacts if anyone so much as blinks at Beyoncé wrong. I was curious how they’d treat me, an inquiring non-celebrity. But as I attempted to suss out their identities, I found more than a few people willing to talk to me—despite hitting some walls, and receiving some adolescent retorts. When asked to comment for this piece, for instance, one user—who I messaged through Instagram Direct—shot back, “I don’t know u.”
Fair enough. Theoretically, no one knows anyone on the internet, which is a wasteland of unaccountability that’s helped birth a nation of anonymous Beyoncé fans who’ve earned a reputation as the most aggressive fan base (some say bullies
An abridged list of past subjects of Beyhive rage—through an attack strategy familiar to many as “dragging”—includes Amber Rose (targeted for asking why Beyoncé doesn’t get called a slut), Rita Ora (for getting too physically close to Jay Z in a photo), Keyshia Cole (for criticizing Beyoncé’s single “Bow Down”), Kid Rock (for having the audacity to imply Beyoncé isn’t an icon), Keri Hilson (for dissing Beyoncé in a song and then shading her in a red carpet interview), TLC’s Chilli (for jokingly banning the terms “Bey, B or Queen Bey”) and Karrueche (for making a crack about Blue Ivy’s hair on TV). More recently, they went after Rachel Roy’s daughter Ava Dash, just for being Rachel Roy’s daughter.
The Beyhive is everywhere, but since Instagram is the main source of the latest attacks—and since Instagram’s messaging option is less restrictive than Twitter’s—I set my sights there.
Among the more reasonable users who responded to me with sincerity in the course of this investigation was a 20-year-old who preferred to remain anonymous. The standard millennial collage of selfies, cat pics and nature photos appear on her Instagram page, which has over 200 followers and isn’t private.
Her YouTube account, which is linked in her Instagram profile, contains videos showing her face, meaning she appears to be someone who’s not disguising her real identity. In our back-and-forth messages, she comes across as a young, articulate Beyoncé fan who decided to one day comment on a Rachel Roy photo—one of the many IG users who only posted a series of bee and lemon emojis with no words. (A note that some of the Instagram messages I’m posting here have been cleaned up for grammar when necessary.)
In a response to me on Instagram (she later declined to speak over the phone), she wrote, “It’s mob mentality if you look at it. The Beyhive wanted to let her know what she did was wrong. So I showed my support for Beyoncé by commenting.” Amusingly, she says that on a “0 to 10 scale of 10 being psycho fan, I’m a good 5.”
This hedging suggests she (I’ll call her Non Psycho Fan) draws a line with her protectiveness. “I love Beyoncé, but I’m not someone who obsesses over her every second of the day. I just listen to her music and enjoy her performances. I think the emojis are decent. It gets to be too much when the fans start to attack [Roy] on her appearance, outfit, her career, or comparing her to Bey,” she writes. “Also, they’re too much when they constantly tweet, or follow Beyonce’s every move/location. They make their entire lives to be about her, which is ridiculous. Go outside, enjoy the sunshine.” When I ask if she ever thinks she’s gone too far herself, she responds, “No.”
The Beyhive is but the largest among the many online fan collectives with impressively lame nicknames. Ed Sheeran has his Sheerios. Lady Gaga has her Monsters. Rihanna has her Navy. In 2012, I edited a feature for VIBE about superfans titled “Crazy Stupid Love: When Twitter Stans Attack.” The writer, Tracy Garraud, shadowed a Rihanna fan named Airy who considered herself part of Rihanna’s Navy, ran a Rihanna fan account, had a framed photo of Rihanna in her home and told the writer, “Rih is family.” Essentially, Garraud wrote, these fan armies were serving as unpaid extensions of a record label’s marketing department.
While the majority of the Beyhive’s most zealous commenters are most likely “genuine” in the way that teenagers genuinely do what they do, Azealia Banks (always the skeptic) made a conspiratorial claim on Twitter, suggesting Beyoncé’s team is deploying spam bots to attack accounts, which is a compelling thought. Non Psycho Fan suggested to me, “the ones who actually type out comments are more than likely just trolling. But the ones with emojis are both fans and bots.”
So fans and bots here are indistinguishable even to one of the Beyhive’s own. This is the power of this particular kind of fan-spamming: they can say nothing, get attention, hurt some feelings, even tarnish a reputation—all without Beyoncé ever publicly scolding them, or people even being able to tell if they’re real.
The fans I spoke with generally consider dropping a few emojis to be relatively harmless. Another 20-year-old from L.A. who posted emojis on a Roy photo told me, “Sometimes they go too far when people start to give harsh threats or just say really nasty things in general. I feel like the simple 🐝🍋 says enough.”
A simple 🐝🍋 isn’t really too crazy. What we’re dealing with, for the most part, is slightly nasty behavior that gets overwhelming en masse. This is teen territory, or at least young people’s territory. But the internet allows for an extension of teen tactics: the Beyhive, of course, is not just teens.
One male fan, aged 32, described himself to me as a huge and “fanatical” Beyhive member. He has over 2,000 followers on his Instagram page, which features selfies and boxes of motivational quotes. He appears to be a working professional and says he attended Beyoncé’s Formation Tour show in Miami. Mr. Formation decided to comment on Rachel Roy’s page—posting bee/lemon emojis and a remark that implied Roy brought this on herself—after seeing a blog post about Roy’s ill-advised “good hair, don’t care” comment and her subsequent statement in which she detached herself
“At the time she posted her selfie, Beyoncé’s album was the biggest thing trending on social media. And everyone wanted to know who Becky was and if everything was OK with her marriage because of the emotion in the lyrics,” he wrote to me, in defense of his Roy comments. “Given the history she has, she didn’t use better judgment when posting the good hair don’t care comment. If you’re going to be messy then just be messy, don’t backtrack and act as if you didn’t intend it to come across that way.”
Sure. But at what point does anyone stop and ask themselves, “What is the point of all this?” Ganging up on people on behalf of your fav is fun, and if anything, the Beyhive’s plan is to make famous people reconsider coming after Beyoncé, to whom the fans feel deeply connected. But do these fans think terrorizing social media pages makes a difference?
“My point is she should use better judgment,” Mr. Formation says of Roy. “I want her to know that I didn’t think it was cool to try to backtrack after she made that decision. Beyoncé didn’t refer to her directly or even mention her. She pulled herself into the drama. But I’m sure she learned a valuable lesson.” (That lesson is: don’t do it to yourself.)
Still, he doesn’t condone the comments that he thinks border on abusive. “Some of the beehive’s behavior is very reckless and disrespectful,” he writes. “When I found out they were attacking her daughter, I was really heartbroken because I felt like she has nothing to do with that. At that point I stopped commenting and it even made me think about my own actions and how they would negatively affect her life. I agree with [Rachel’s] comment when she said bullying is not acceptable. However, I also believe it’s important that people are authentic. If you are being messy just say you were being messy. We are all humans and we all make mistakes.”
There seems to be a divide between rational, protective Beyhive members and the rabid ones who take their comments to the extreme. From what I’ve seen, the highly trafficked Beyoncé fan accounts—@BeyonceLite on IG, @TheBeyHiveTeam on Twitter—restrain from this type of fandom. Some of these fans even get tips from Beyoncé’s team (@TheBeyHiveTeam tweeted an exclusive about Lemonade a month before its release), so perhaps they don’t want to risk losing that privilege.
An Instagram user with the handle @Queen_bey267, who identifies as 25-year-old and male (he has 13 followers), commented under a photo of Roy’s daughter Ava: “You look just like yo thot momma.” When asked what motivated him to post that, he responds on Instagram, “I felt that if we don’t say something she would want to be like her mother and I’m a Beyonce stan.” I ask whether he’s regretted any of his comments, and he admits: “The only attack I felt bad for participating in was the accidental Rachel Ray thing.” (Some fans, including @Queen_bey267, went after food guru Rachel Ray, mistaking her for Rachel Roy.)
I ask @Queen_bey267 if he’s willing to hop on the phone, so I can get some sort of verification that he’s a real person. When he answers, the voice sounds not at all 25—more like a teen. I tell him I have more questions and his responses, like the Instagram messages, are brief. I ask if he wonders who the other people are who leave negative pro-Beyoncé comments on celebrity pages and he says, “No.” I ask if he thinks about how the Beyhive victims are affected by these comments and he says, “Not really.” The phone call is, for me, a strange, Catfish-like experience.
Another IG user, @Slay_Hive, who claims to be 24, proved hard to crack, even with low-level sleuthing on my part to try to determine an identity. At the time I messaged, the account had 0 followers. Comments from the same username appear on Beyoncé-related posts on sites like Rap-Up and That Grape Juice (and there’s an inactive Twitter account), but that could be a coincidence. After an initial request for comment, @Slay_Hive messages back: “Well i’m a huuuugeeeee Beyonce fan. She’s just ammmazzinggg. I love everything about her. About Ava, well her mama should’ve kept her mouth shut regarding the whole Becky hair thing. You play with the hive you gonna get stung. 🐝🍋.”
This response sounds both rehearsed—like something a person thinks a Beyoncé fan might write—and totally genuine. The user adds, in response to whether the Beyhive attacks can get out of hand, “Well it’s a jungle out here. But we have to put down people hating on our queen. Idc if its their child. People have to be shown you don’t mess with Queen Bey whatsoever.”
I ask, “Do you think some of the comments are just people trolling who are not actually Beyonce fans and do you yourself consider it to be trolling?”
The response: “No. I would kill for Beyonce. She is my idol.” It continues:
Me: Would you be willing to get on the phone to discuss?
Slay_Hive: No
Me: Fair enough.
Slay_Hive: Ok.
Me: “I would kill for Beyonce” is a bit drastic, right? What do you think of people saying Beyonce wouldn’t encourage these types of social media attacks from her fans?
Slay_Hive: Idc what they think. Everyone has their own opinion… All i did was send emojis of lemons and bees i didnt send death threats.
It’s hard to tell what kind of a person I’m dealing with here.
On the trollish end of the spectrum are the people who swarmed Roy despite not being particularly zealous fans of Beyoncé. They simply seem to take pleasure in being part of a trend. Instagram user @That’s.king, who has over 5,000 followers and a private account, left lemon emojis on a photo Roy posted of a model wearing clothes from her line. “Actually I’m not a Beyonce [fan],” he writes me over DM. “She’s actually a disgrace to society by brainwashing the masses and being used as a puppet to push agendas but I thought it was funny so I left a few lemons.”
He claims he commented more for the thrill of the ride. “For Beyoncé to have millions of followers [who] attack Rachel Roy proves what they’re capable of. Imagine if she criticized someone else who doesn’t take negativity lightly and commits suicide,” he writes, seemingly (and dispassionately) intrigued at this idea. “But Beyoncé never told her fans to attack her. That shows how much power [celebrities] really have and influence over the masses. These people praise them as Gods. They don’t even read the bible but they wake up to Beyoncé so yeah it’s kind of fucked up.”
I ask if he feels bad for participating. “No because all that’s irrelevant,” he responds. “I just focus on my relationship with Jesus.”
Roy called her Beyhive situation bullying, which my colleague Jia Tolentino disagreed with last week in an essay: she thoughtfully explained why comparing online harassment to bullying is a faulty argument, writing that bullying “describes a situation in which powerful people intimidate a less powerful person about something that the person in question cannot control.”
Is the Beyhive powerful? As a unit on the internet, sure. In the real world, hardly. More precisely, Roy and the other celebrities targeted by the Beyhive are being harassed—a situation that’s increasingly common on the internet, which can only be weathered with any kind of ease if you have people in your own corner. More than the frustration of seeing a load of Beyhive comments on your page, it’s celebrities’ social reputation that’s most at stake—the potential of a permanent association with a Beyhive dragging. The ones with thick skin, who place little to no value in that metric, are able to withstand a Beyhive attack. (Amber Rose and Rihanna, for example, are doing just fine.)
Then there are those like Roy’s daughter (an innocent bystander) and Keri Hilson, who never recovered from dissing Beyoncé. In 2013, Hilson talked about sinking into depression and tweeted, “You have no idea what your hateful words could do to someone’s spirit. Years of verbal abuse from strangers all day long. Enough is enough!” And: “I’m here for MY FANS! I’m stronger than you imagine, but waking up/goin to bed to your ugliness is just TOO MUCH.”
A London-based Twitter user, @RunThaWorld with 28K followers and “#Beyhive” in their profile, responded to Hilson’s tweet at the time with: “You stupid bitch. You dissed Bey for no reason, accept the consequences and apologise to her. Stop being a fucking pussy.” Three years later, Hilson continues to get dragged.
By my reading, it’s a conscience—or something like it—that separates the normal fans from those melodramatic trolls, to whom Beyoncé is so mythic they’ve stopped thinking of her as real. This aura of untouchability spreads to anyone in Bey’s orbit. An Instagram user with around 40 followers who’s 26, based in L.A. (L.A. Bee, I’ll call her) and chose to remain anonymous, writes to me: “I think it’s wrong to attack [Rachel’s] daughter. But when her mom makes comments that make her seem she’s ‘that girl,’ that’s what happens. Celebrity kids will have to live with their parents’ bad choices.”
Kolby, a 20-year-old from Missouri whose Instagram page isn’t private, left emojis on Roy’s photo and responded to another IG user who @’d him “can you not” with: “u better call Becky w/ the good hair.” He did it, he tells me, because “it’s a pretty money trend that the Beyhive has been doing haha. I’m a huge Beyoncé fan,” he writes. Asked if he feels protective of Beyoncé, he responds, “A little bit. Sure.”
“The Carters are really powerful people so it’s not too smart to get in their firing line,” he adds. “And I don’t think it’s too far, it’s simply just comments on an Instagram post. It’s not like we’re sleeping with her husband 😏.” His profile bio pridefully reads: “rachel roy has me blocked on insta.”
To some Beyhive members, Beyoncé’s choice to remain silent in public and abstain from interviews further justifies the attacks. They feel obliged to be her missing voice. “True or not true [Rachel] was asking for it and the beyhive is giving it to her,” L.A. Bee writes. “Beyonce is a private person that would never go on rants or Twitter war with r.r. or ppl she doesn’t like. No need, the beehive is here.”
It’s true. While Rihanna or even Taylor Swift are liable to scrap on social media, Beyoncé will not engage. She’ll likely never expound on the infidelity narrative of Lemonade in public. But the Beyhive can do this, by extension. They can take on the aggression they presume Beyoncé is suppressing, and bring her story into the world of petty Instagram where the mortals of this world live. By sheer force, persistence and teamwork, they’ve successfully become a part of their favorite celebrity, an invisible and unofficial arm of her agenda.
Beyoncé, in turn, shows them nothing but gratitude, aware for sure of their intensity but never critiquing their methods. “I have the most insane, incredible, loyal fans,” she told MTV in 2013. “I hope they know that they are part of everything I do.”
Illustration by Bobby Finger, source images via Shutterstock
With Donald Trump the Republican party’s all-but-guaranteed nominee, Ted Cruz is reportedly campaigning behind-the-scenes to ensure the party stays as terrible as ever.
The New York Times reports today that Cruz is mobilizing his supporters to exert their influence at the national convention in July, where the party will officially select its nominee. That’s going to be Donald Trump, but there’s more up for vote that weekend: The party’s convention rules and a policy agenda.
Cruz, who the Times reports “spent considerable time this spring” electing his supporters as delegates at the convention, is apparently spending his time not running for president to make sure the party stays conservative as hell. In an email Sunday, Cruz surrogate and former Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli instructed delegates to “advance the conservative agenda” by filling the Rules and Platform Committees “with strong conservative voices like yours.”
Mr. Cruz is planning a Monday evening conference call where, as Mr. Cuccinelli writes, Mr. Cruz’s former officials plan to “discuss what we can do at the convention to protect against liberal changes to our platform, and how we can right the wrongs in the rules from 2012!”
[...] But Mr. Cruz’s supporters and other conservative activists are also deeply concerned about Mr. Trump’s general election agenda, and want to ensure that he does not alter the party’s platform. Since locking up the nomination last week, Mr. Trump has made clear he intends to run a populist campaign against Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, indicating he is open to higher taxes and an increase in the minimum wage.
Cruz is still using the Cruz-Fiorina ‘16 logo in his emails, so it seems like he’s got a firm grasp on things.
An 11-year-old boy was charged with a hate crime for allegedly setting fire to a Jewish Yeshiva school bus in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, the New York Daily News is reporting. Surveillance video taken Sunday evening shows several young boys darting in and out of the bus shortly before a fire erupts within it.
The boy, whose name has not been released, was charged with criminal mischief as a hate crime and arson as a hate crime. Police told the News that they are searching for the other boys seen in the video, which was obtained and published by the website CrownHeights.info.
The video does not capture the full extent of the damage to the bus, but photos published by the News show its front end blackened and its interior charred. No injuries were reported.
It is unclear how police arrived at the hate crime designation: the News notes that the bus was not clearly marked as a Yeshiva vehicle, but that it was parked directly outside of Beth Rivkah, a private Jewish school for girls. Crown Heights, a neighborhood whose traditional demographic makeup is split between black and Jewish communities, has a history of racial tension, which culminated in three days of riots in 1991 after a Hasidic driver fatally struck a seven-year-old black boy who lived in the neighborhood.
One Beth Rivkah parent told the News that she was saddened to hear of the fire, no matter what inspired it. “I don’t know why they would do that. Maybe they were just bored, or maybe it really was about hate,” Chani Klein said. “Either way they blew up a bus. They need help.”
Speaker Paul Ryan still hasn’t endorsed world’s most accomplished internet commenter Donald Trump for president, and apparently, Trump could be waiting for a while. Speaking to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Ryan said that, should Trump ask, he would be willing to step down as the Republican National Convention’s co-chair.
Basically, because Ryan has yet to actually offer his support to Trump, he’ll “do whatever he wants with respect to the convention.” Ryan hasn’t completely dismissed the possibility of a future relationship, though (as wistful, lovesick teens often do), telling the Sentinel , “I never said never. I just said (not) at this point. I wish I had more time to get to know him before this happened. We just didn’t.”
This comes after Trump demurred during Meet the Press yesterday over whether Ryan “could” serve as chairman of the convention without actually endorsing Trump. Being not at all quick with his answer, Trump said, “I don’t want to mention now. I’ll see after. I will give you a very solid answer, if that happens, about one minute after that happens. Okay? But there’s no reason to give it right now, but I’ll be very quick with the answer. Let’s see what happens.”
http://gawker.com/5950879/paul-r...
Will Paul Ryan endorse Donald Trump? Will Donald Trump support Paul Ryan? Can someone arrange for another Time photoshoot, regardless?
[h/t The Washington Post]
Today in a Los Angeles court, a judge dismissed a suit filed by Manuela Herzer, widely described as a one-time “companion” of Sumner Redstone, the 92-year-old media mogul who is the controlling shareholder of CBS and Viacom. Herzer had alleged that Redstone, whose health is fading, is not mentally competent to control his own estate, but her argument was found unpersuasive. Her claim is certainly complicated by recordings published today by Radar that capture Redstone graphically arranging for threesomes with several unnamed women.
On the tapes, which are voicemails compiled by Radar into a seven minute video, Redstone can be heard describing his sexual desires in detail. Among them:
“Bob’s never done a threesome with two men. He’s done it with three women. So he’s a little bit nervous but he’s gonna come cuz I want him to,” Redstone tells the woman, before he explains what to expect next.
“So what will probably happen will probably really excite you. I’ll fuck her and she’ll suck Bob off and he’ll fuck her and she’ll suck me off,” maps out Redstone.
But the now 92-year-old media mogul isn’t done with his sex plans just yet. Radar has removed the voice of the woman.
“Before that, I’ll make her jerk off in front of Bob because she’s very hot when she jerks off,” he explains. “She’s better than what you do. She takes a long time and she moans.”
Though Radar doesn’t state the timeframe of when the calls were recorded, Radar Executive Editor Lachlan Cartwright told me via email that they were made within the “last two years.” Redstone’s health during that period was central to Herzer’s suit, which itself was just the latest battle in a war between Redstone and his ex-girlfriends and children over what will happen to him and who will get his fortune when he dies.
In court filings, Herzer said that Redstone was placed on a feeding tube in 2014 in order to prolong his life, but his ill physical health does not appear to have stopped him from telling one potential lover that he wanted to “fuck her ass off.” Via Radar again:
“Of course I love you. I wanna fuck your ass off,” he gushes. “You know what? I can arrange for you to participate on Friday. I think you want it. I know you’re shy but you said you want it…Sucking [another male partner] off. It would get me very happy if you did it. Then we’re gonna have a real future of sex. So let me know on my cellphone if that’s ok and I’ll arrange to have you picked up.”
The insatiable Redstone then continues his dirty talk in yet another message he left the woman not quite 24 hours later.
“Hope you don’t mind my language but I’m craving that hot cunt of yours. The way I like to suck it and the way I like to fuck it,” he says. “Lemme ask you a question. I know you say you’re not ready for a threesome with a man…but what about a woman? I think you told me you did threesomes with women.”
David J. Cowan, the judge who dismissed Herzer’s lawsuit, cited a deposition given by Redstone as evidence that the media mogul was sound of mind, but he also noted that Redstone has “very significant ailments, including inability to speak clearly.” But Redstone makes his wishes clear on the tapes obtained by Radar—he sounds like an old man growling about cum, certainly, but far from one on death’s door.
Redstone’s sex life was spelled out in Herzer’s legal filings, much to the anticipation. Wrote Vanity Fair’s William D. Cowhan in a long article about the tussle for the Redstone estate published a few months ago:
In Malibu, Herzer claims, Redstone became obsessive about wanting to have sex. After his wife Phyllis initiated divorce proceedings, in 1999, he had gone on a dating spree, meeting with a slew of beautiful women, often with Herzer’s help. According to the onetime close friend, one of those women remained on retainer with Redstone, getting $5,000 a month at the gate to Beverly Park whether she saw him or not. In Malibu, Redstone relentlessly called out for her, demanding that she come over. But she didn’t answer her phone. Back at Beverly Park, post-fumigation, Redstone continued to pine for her. She showed up, but “he can’t have sex, so it’s all in his head, right?” says the onetime friend. “How can a guy with a feeding tube who can’t move have sex? There’s no sex.”
Radar’s recordings don’t help answer that question, for better or worse, but probably for the better.
The Department of Justice is filing a federal civil rights lawsuit against North Carolina, Governor Pat McCrory, the North Carolina Department of Public Safety and the University of North Carolina as a result of the state’s “bathroom bill” known as HB2
“We are seeking a court order declaring HB2's restroom restriction impermissibly discriminatory, as well as a statewide bar on its enforcement,” said Lynch. “Now while the lawsuit currently seeks declaratory relief, I want to note that we retain the option of curtailing federal funding to the North Carolina Department of Public Safety and the University of North Carolina as the case proceeds.”
“The legislature and the governor placed North Carolina in direct opposition to federal laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex and gender identity,” said of HB2. “More to the point, they created state-sponsored discrimination against transgender individuals who simply seek to engage in the most private of functions in a place of safety and security, a right taken for granted by most of us.”
Lynch says that as a result of North Carolina’s decision to sue the Department of Justice
http://gawker.com/north-carolina...
Lynch’s passionate speech contextualized HB2 within the history of backlash against civil rights advancements in the United States. She said, in part:
This action is about a great deal more than bathrooms. This is about the dignity and respect that we accord our fellow citizens and the laws that we as a people and as a country have enacted to protect them. Indeed, to protect all of us. And it’s about the founding ideals that have led this country haltingly but inexorably in the direction of fairness, inclusion, and equality for all Americans.
This is not the first time that we have seen discriminatory responses to historic moments of progress for our nation. We saw it in the Jim Crow laws that followed the Emancipation Proclamation. We saw it in the fierce and widespread resistance to Brown v. Board of Education. And we saw it in the proliferation in state bans on same-sex unions that were intended to stifle any hope that gay and lesbian Americans might one day be afforded the right to marry. And that right of course is now recognized as a guarantee embedded in our Constitution. And in the wake of that historic triumph, we have seen bill after bill and state after state taking aim at the LGBT community.
Now some of these responses reflect a recognizably human fear of the unknown and a discomfort with the uncertainty of change. But this is not a time to act out of fear. This is a time to summon our national virtues of inclusivity, of diversity, of compassion and open-mindedness. And what we must not do—what we must never do—is turn on our neighbors, our family members, our fellow Americans for something that they cannot control, and deny what makes them human. And this is why none of us can stand by when a state enters the business of legislating identity and insists that a person pretend to be something or someone that they are not, or invents a problem that does not exist as a pretext for discrimination or harassment.
“This law provides no benefit to society, and all it does is harm innocent Americans,” said Lynch in a speech that dismantled all of the fear-mongering, compassionless nonsense that accompanied the passage of HB2. How refreshing it is to hear a public servant so eloquently slice and dice bigotry into confetti.
iTunes gift cards, NeverKink hoses, and a Hue accent light kick off Monday’s best deals.
Bookmark Kinja Deals and follow us on Twitter to never miss a deal. Commerce Content is independent of Editorial and Advertising, and if you buy something through our posts, we may get a small share of the sale. Click here
The supermassive version of our favorite surround sound system is down to its lowest price today on Amazon.
If you aren’t familiar, this VIZIO system offers true 5.1 surround sound by way of a wireless subwoofer and a pair of satellite speakers (which plug into the subwoofer), all without the aid of of a receiver, and without the need to run any cables from your TV to the back of the room. I own a smaller version of the same setup, and absolutely love it.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GSJROBA/...
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Vega plant-based supplements are some of the best things you can put in your body, and Amazon’s taking an extra 20% off their protein powders, bars, and more today.
http://gear.kinja.com/vega-a-better-...
The 20% coupon is valid on dozens of different Vega items, and will stack with any existing discounts you see on the product pages. Just add your selections to your cart, and you’ll see the final price at checkout.
Vega has a great calorie-to-protein ratio, but the best thing about their shakes is that they aren’t just about protein. Vega’s shakes typically contain six grams of fiber, 3 servings of vegetables, and good amounts of Omega-3, probiotics, vitamins, and illusive potassium. It’s like a protein shake, a multivitamin, and a bunch of bonuses all in one convenient package. [20% off Vega Protein Products]
Fitness trackers can help you ward off winter weight gain, but if you don’t want to commit to wearing a bracelet every day, the clip-on Fitbit One is is a great alternative.
http://gizmodo.com/5954563/fitbit...
In addition to steps, the Fitbit One will monitor calories burned, stairs climbed, and distance traveled, and you can even configure it as a silent, vibrating alarm clock so you don’t have to disturb your sleeping partner. If that sounds like an appealing package, you can grab a refurb on Groupon today for $40, one of the best deals we’ve ever seen.
Prefer a wristband? The Fitbit Charge HR is also down to $100 right now, matching an all-time low.
http://gizmodo.com/fitbit-charge-...
For times when a drill is too large, or just plain overkill, this $20 electric screwdriver earns its keep with an integrated wire stripper, as well as a live wire detector that can sense electrical currents from up to an inch away, before you find out by touching it. It even charges over USB, so you won’t have an extra charger to keep track of.
http://www.amazon.com/HAMMERHEAD-Rec...
$48 for a year’s-supply of razor blades is a great deal, especially from Dorco, the maker of Dollar Shave Club’s excellent blades. $24 for the same pack (with code DKJWAYFDP) is downright unbelievable.
That price includes a mishmash of products, but basically, it boils down to 28 cartridges, including a mix of three, four, and six-blade models. Obviously, it depends on how often you shave, but for many of you, that should last at least a year. It would probably last me like five.
You’re probably familiar with the color-changing Hue lights that screw into your existing lamps and light fixtures, but if you really want to paint your rooms with color, you’ll want to pick up a few Hue Bloom accent lights as well.
http://gear.kinja.com/how-to-get-sta...
These lights used to sell for around $80, and have sold for $60 for the last few months, but today’s $50 deal on Amazon is the best we’ve ever seen. If you’re already invested in the Hue ecosystem, you should absolutely pick up at least one.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS...
Panasonic’s Arc4 line of shavers is one of your favorites
http://co-op.kinja.com/five-best-elec...
http://www.amazon.com/Panasonic-ES-L...
If you aren’t a Prime member, or if Amazon sells out, the same deal is available on Best Buy’s eBay storefront.
WeMo switches and their ilk are great for controlling lights and appliances from your phone, and you guys have bought a ton of them. But if you’re primarily concerned with operating lights on a schedule, say, to deter robbers while you’re on vacation, this two-pack of mechanical switches will get the job done for a lot less money.
http://www.amazon.com/Woods-50006-24...
If your current garden hose isn’t getting the job done, Amazon’s running a Gold Box deal today on NeverKink hoses of various sizes, starting at $22. These are all-time low prices in every case, so if you’re in the market, be sure to grab yours before the deal runs dry.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...
Featuring a customizable LED light show that pulses along with your music, the JBL Pulse Bluetooth speaker is basically a self-contained party. Today at Haman Audio, you can get a refurb for $70 with promo code 70PULSEZ, which is easily the best price we’ve seen.
After a longer-than-usual layoff, PayPal’s eBay storefront is once again offering a solid discount on iTunes credit. This time around, it’s $10 off a $50 card, which works out to a 20% discount. With a few rare exceptions, that’s as good as these deals get.
If you like the idea of a Logitech Harmony remote, but don’t care about bells and whistles, this Harmony 350 is only $32 right now on Amazon. You won’t get a touchscreen, smartphone app, or charging dock, but it can control the same 225,000+ devices as the rest of the line. We’ve seen it cheaper as a refurb, but this is the best price we’ve ever seen on a new one.
http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Harmo...
Update: Sold out. If you missed out, Prime members can still get a 20% discount on the game. Discount shown at checkout.
If you were planning on getting Uncharted 4 anyway (and you really should
http://kotaku.com/uncharted-4-th...
http://deals.kinja.com/calendar-of-up...
This splash-proof, solar-powered Bluetooth speaker is ideal for anyone who enjoys the great outdoors, and it’ll even charge your phone in a pinch. Today’s $40 Gold Box deal is an all-time low, so be sure to grab it before the sun goes down.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B8PRRTS/...
Don’t care about the speaker? This solar-powered battery pack is also on sale, with promo code X74GZWGV.
http://www.amazon.com/Charger-12000m...
Even if you don’t own a Wii U or New 3DS to take full advantage of amiibo, this pixelated Mario would be a great little desk ornament for $9.
http://www.amazon.com/Classic-Amiibo...
If you usually work on a laptop, or just prefer a tenkeyless keyboard for ergonomics, this wireless number pad from Kmashi can save the day when it’s time to pound on some spreadsheets.
http://www.amazon.com/KMASHI-Wireles...
Need some more athleisure apparel? You can get Nike Dri-Fit shorts (in a variety of colors) for $16, or six pairs of Fila socks for $10 today on eBay.
It’s a rare thing to get excited about a vacuum cleaner, but this is legitimately awesome. The Bissell Symphony Pet looks like a standard upright vacuum cleaner, but with the press of a button, it turns into a steam mop to sanitize your hard floors. That’s a match made in heaven.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B014UM9N3I/...
We typically recommend buying knives separately, rather than as a set, but J.A. Henckels makes great blades, and this 10-piece block only includes the pieces you need: A chef’s knife, a santoku, a paring knife, a bread knife, shears, and some steak knives. If you’re still using the crappy knives you bought in college, this is a solid upgrade for just $80.
Everyone should keep an inverter in their glove box for powering laptops and other electronics in the car, and you’ve got two discounted options to choose from today, depending on how much power you need.
http://www.amazon.com/Inverter-Outle...
http://www.amazon.com/SNAN-Power-Inv...
In just a matter of months, our readers have bought well over 10,000 Anker PowerLine Lightning and microUSB cables
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01A6G0CTQ?...
http://bestsellers.kinja.com/bestsellers-an...
If you’ve been meaning to wall-mount your TV, you can save 50% on this articulating Cheetah mount on Amazon with promo code XPGXFOL7. This dual-arm mount is designed for 32"-65" TVs, which should be perfectly suitable for almost all of you. I got this exact model recently for my mother-in-law’s new patio TV, and it’s fantastic. [Cheetah Mounts APDAM2B Articulating Dual Arm TV Wall Mount, $35 with code XPGXFOL7]
Cuisinart’s 3-in-1 Griddler is one of the most versatile kitchen appliances
http://gear.kinja.com/cuisinarts-gri...
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B016B40XT6/...
Just don’t forget the waffle iron plates!
http://www.amazon.com/Cuisinart-GR-W...
Amazon’s Prime Pantry program is great for stocking up on household goods and non-perishable foods without actually having to visit a store, but the $5.99 per box shipping charge has always been a drag. This month though, if you buy five select items, you can get that fee waived.
http://gear.kinja.com/get-the-most-f...
Bonus: If you already have a no-rush free shipping credit in your account, this deal should actually stack, netting you an extra $6 discount.
They ran a similar promotion the last two months with different eligible items. Just add five of them to your box (plus anything else that will fit), and use code PANTRYMAY at checkout to get free shipping. [Free Prime Pantry shipping with five eligible purchases, promo code PANTRYMAY]
If you manage to spend $75 on your box, toss in promo code PANTRY75 at checkout to save $6 on your next Pantry order as well.
If you struggle to keep your dresser drawers organized, this $9 set should help.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00UM94L2C?...
Anker just released a new line of essential oil diffusers and humidifiers with built-in accent lights, and they’re discounting the 100ml model to an all-time low $20 today as part of a Mother’s Day promotion.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01...
Don’t forget the oils!
http://www.amazon.com/Aromatherapy-E...
Anker’s new robotic vacuum sold out yesterday afternoon, but if you missed out, it’s back in stock now, albeit with a backorder and mandatory $4 shipping charge. Considering it’s still listed at $200 though, or $60 less than usual, it’s still a great deal.
http://www.amazon.com/Anker-RoboVac-...
Commerce Content is independent of Editorial and Advertising, and if you buy something through our posts, we may get a small share of the sale. Click here
In a new interview with former Obama advisor David Axelrod, Jon Stewart offered a grim assessment of America’s political landscape, with harsh words for Democrats, Republicans, Hillary Clinton, the media and most of all Donald Trump, who he ridiculed as an “unrepentant, narcissistic asshole.”
http://gawker.com/jon-stewart-st...
“I’m not a constitutional scholar, so I can’t necessarily say, but are you eligible to run if you are a man-baby, or a baby-man?” Stewart told Axelrod during a live-taping of his Axe Files podcast on Monday. “He has the physical countenance of a man and a baby’s temperament and hands.”
During the hourlong interview, Stewart also criticized Hillary Clinton as a “a very bright woman without the courage of her convictions, because I’m not even sure what they are,” but was quick to clarify that her flaws were not on the same magnitude as Trump’s. From Politico:
“That is not to say that she is not preferable to Donald Trump because, at this point, I would vote for Mr. T over Donald Trump,” he said.
Stewart had some harsh words for the candidates’ political parties as well. While the Republican Party’s “sole purpose is to freeze the government and to not fix any of the problems that are associated with it,” the Democratic Party has failed to make government more efficient and opened the door to a Trump candidacy, he said.
On the other hand, Stewart praised the work of satirists like John Oliver and Samantha Bee during the election, suggesting their success made his commentary unnecessary.
“I am so impressed and amazed at the level of insight and wit that is displayed on television every day,” said Stewart. “There is no dearth.”
Watch Stewart’s full interview below:
