In addition, various blogs have been weighing in on the topic here and there. See, for example, this ringing defense that was posted on Sunday at Western Resistance (more on this at a later date).
Yesterday AMDG — who often contributes guest-posts here, but also blogs at La Yijad En Eurabia — sent us a preview of a post which will be up on his blog shortly. He gave us permission to post excerpts from it here:
The day when those bloggers in Pajamas put on the Loro Piana suits- - - - - - - - -
I do not remember how long I’ve been reading Gates of Vienna. I do not do it daily, but I use to accumulate a number of posts to I print so I could read them comfortably; that is also why I do not use to comment nor participate in the debates. I have also linked GoV very frequently in my own blog; as a matter of fact, in the Spanish skirmishes of the former controversy after the Counter Jihad in Brussels, I was blamed for using mostly GoV as the source for my arguments. Now, since a few months I have contributed with several posts to GoV.
I am also a regular reader of Pajamas Media (PJM). I remember when it was created because it forced the outing of Barcepundit, who is probably the Spanish blogger best known in the Anglosphere.
Pajamas has changed a lot since then: more info, more authoritative comment, and more appealing design. In brief, it has become a professional-quality media. Their motto is(,) nevertheless, the same: Sending the MSM down the river… It could be considered a little bit arrogant, but still legitimate, of course.
Under these circumstances, I was very surprised to read the news that GoV had been summarily ejected from the Pajamas group of blogs…
I contacted Pajamas but received no answer, and nor does GoV seem to have received an explanation.
As a contributor, I want to make public that I support my hosts at Gates of Vienna.
I have started to investigate on my own here and there. I have tried to find some kind of foundational manifesto by PJM, but there is not one, and the archive functions do not work as expected. I have found a number of articles from those initial days, but they were not what I expected.
- This one (A one-stop shop for the ‘best’ blogs) makes a couple of references to the higher advertising revenues of a joint approach to blogging, and a pretence to have not only conservative opinion but to encompass the complete political spectrum.
- This one (Three Political Web Logs Make a Run for the Mainstream) refers also to revenues and to the world-wide, round the clock possibility of a chain of bloggers.
- And again, this one (Will Pajamas Media Wake Up Blogs?) refers to the world-wide approach and to the encompassing approach to opinion:
Simon, however, stresses that Pajamas Media has no ideological leanings and that the group is trying to grab contributors from all over the political spectrum. “It’s not about right or left, it’s a different model,” Simon said. “There will be 70 different people with 70 different views.”
Well, now they are 69. I found also this recent article with and appealing title (John Wayne of blogosphere). I wondered which of those John Wayne values that the author wanted to emphasise in Mr. Simon. Independence? Courage? Well, the only thing I find, again, is concern for PJM’s business model:
In this Wild West online frontier, Mr. Simon might as well be John Wayne.
Along with Mr. Johnson and others, Mr. Simon founded PJM in 2005 in an effort, he said, to “monetize” the often unruly Internet world, where hundreds of thousands of readers each day go online to read and comment on the news, analysis and humour that arrive filtered through distinct personal perspectives.
The interview finishes with a contradictory statement on the dificulty of getting revenues from advertisers and winding up with a grandiloquent speech:Persuading advertisers to pay to reach that upscale online readership is still a tough sell.
“This is not just a problem for Pajamas Media. Going forward, it’s going to be a huge problem for all [online] media,” he said.
The man who heads a major new media concern (though he doesn’t talk specifically about the finances of the privately held firm) said it’s not money that motivates so many to participate in the online discussion.
“What’s great about blogging is that it’s humanity,” Mr. Simon said.
Wow, “blogging is humanity”. These pompous words have not moved me; on the contrary, it seems that the real purpose of sending the MSM down the river is to get their share of the ad business. A legitimate objective, it goes without saying, though very arrogant and pretentious. Entering the market making such a noise is not actually good manners.
Neither is it the best manners not to give reasons for a decision. Decisions should be motivated; in particular the decisions of public officials should never surprise the market, because they should be taken on the basis of rules and sine ira et studio; that is, without passion or unfair pondering.
Of course, everything changes in business: good companies are supposed to surprise the markets (positively); or in war: war is deception and some bloggers are using something worst than deception, flagrant lies.
But GoV is not competing with PJM nor is it at war with them. Then? Well, I suppose that PJM is only taking care of business, and GoV has become an inconvenient fellow traveler in a PC world. What can we say?
Those bloggers in Pajamas are now dressing up in the elegant Loro Piana suits and do not want to risk ruining them. They will simply lose the aura of independence, because they have demonstrated that they submit to politically correct opinion.
An alternative media joins the mainstream. Good luck.
But what was so outrageous in the post by El Ingles that moved PJM’s board to eject GoV? In the essay I only find articulate and sound reasoning…
This is what the post says. As indicated inAtlas Shrugs, using the word genocide, is NOT advocating for it. But I would go further; the mention of genocide by El Inglés is actually misleading, because what he describes is NOT genocide, but popular riots with massive killings. This is not the Armenian genocide, planned by the Turks; this is not the genocide of Ukrainian peasants, planned by the communists, and this is not the genocide of Jews and Gypsies planned by the Nazis. NO; this is just massive killings by the European peoples in the exercise of the natural right to self defence against the will of their political elites, who have not done their duty in due time to protect them from Islamic slavery and slaughter.
Therefore, why this scandal now? And why does PJM refuse to publish the motivation for their decision?
An afterword:Dymphna did some research for me and managed to find some Loro Piana sports coats at Nieman-Marcus. She notes:
Here is the best I could do on finding a Loro Piano men’s clothing image.
This is a sports coat for $2,995.00.
HAHAHAHAHAHA!
24 comments:
Is the Loro Piana jacket's missing breast pocket $5 extra, for a rounded out $3 grand?
Unless there's a DaVinci sown into the lining, I'll stick with frugal anonymity.
power corrupts. in the sense that as Pijamas Media grew more and more, it gives up on it's initial principles and goals and by fear of too many critics they start to blend in and adapt to what is most lucrative. becoming big becomes little by little the main reason for existing
PJM has gone downhill as of late. Untile recently I would make coffe, hit my local paper, then cruise PJM for a wide diversity of up-to-date news and opinion links.But now their links are has beens, their in house commentary bland and predictable, repetitious,and on and on about the same thing. They have lost their intellectualism.Enjoying their new cars and expensive coats, they are failing to read their own website and notice the downslide in reader interest. Just like the MSM.
pretty soon they'll have candid pics of britney spears and tell us her next move
Baron and Dymphna, please keep on.
The two major ethical virtues are firmness and generosity. Firmness not to submit when we are attacked; generosity to help others.
You show a great deal of both.
What makes Lora Piana so great? Go GoV!
I tend to agree tghat there does not seem to be much on PJM to turm one head. Much like many worn down newspapers.
They printed something by some liberal POS who commented in his blog words to the effect that "those conservative jerks are at least driving up my revinue".
That is what it is all about. Never expect someone like Simon to care more about conservatism than money. It is against his religion.
In the hippie era, it would be called "selling out": the decision to forgo your original principles in order to make money.
It's why the MSM tilts to the Left: Leftists are good at organizing boycotts when they get offended by an opinion, and advertisers do not want the hassle of being targeted by the Left because they are associated to controversial opinions.
Hey, i like this blog, don't let it die! Support from Portugal here.
This is just massive killings by the European peoples in the exercise of the natural right[link] to self defence against the will of their political elites
This is a fundamentally dangerous, unsound statement, linking to a fundamental misunderstanding of the political philosophy of John Locke.
The will of the European political elites can be overborne without resort to Kalashnikovs. It can be overborne through elections held in individual European nations, which are all Democratic in nature and have electoral systems that are designed to respond to the will of the voters.
The problem for the anti-Muslim European faction is that it has not convinced majorities of voters in any one nation to its viewpoint. Absent the ability to convince a majority of its fellow voting citizens to its viewpoints, the members of this faction have absolutely no right to instigate extra-political acts of violence. Those are the tactics used by our past opponents, the Nazis, Communists, Red Brigades, Baader-Meinhof Gang, and now, al qaeda.
If a clear majority of voters were to dump the current European political elites and THEN they refused to leave office, only then are the extra-political methods discussed by John Locke necessary and appropriate. The anti-Muslim faction has entirely skipped the first step in the Lockean equation - convincing its fellow citizens through the electoral process.
And now to tactics - the key problem with the anti-Muslim political faction in Europe, as epitomized by Fjordman in his columns here, is that the cause of protecting Western and European civilization is terminally polluted with individual nationalisms, whether they be Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Flemish, etc. The voters of Europe have learned, if they have learned nothing, that the past several centuries of European warfare and warfare-induced misery show that a return to the nation-state model that brought us World War I and World War II are a path not to be trodden. The Fjordmans and DeWinters of Europe must divorce nationalism and embrace a new Europe, with a new federal EU structure, with representatives from the individual European states that support BOTH European integration AND a European cultural and civilizational identity against assaults from the Islamic world.
Gordon, you make sense in general but you've contradicted yourself:
The will of the European political elites can be overborne without resort to Kalashnikovs. It can be overborne through elections held in individual European nations
and:
the key problem with the anti-Muslim political faction in Europe, as epitomized by Fjordman in his columns here, is that the cause of protecting Western and European civilization is terminally polluted with individual nationalisms
If voting in the national elections to reduce or abolish the power held by the EU isn't "nationalism" then I don't know what is.
We do not need a "federal" europe, or any sort of political union, to deal with this problem. We need strong borders. We need nationalism, patriotism, individualism and the right to defend our nations. You federalists don't understand the history of Europe, the reason why it's a stupid idea to try and squish us into any sort of union, federal or not. Europe doesn't have a single culture, or even the metaculture that the US has. I travel through the United States and I know I'll find differences but there's an overarching culture to it all which doesn't exist in over here. A german is not a spaniard is not an italian is not a bulgarian. They're as different from each other as you are from the chinese. That situation cannot support a political union of any sort for long because it will force compromise, not in detail but in fundamental issues that are brought about by cultural differences. Integration would be the death of those cultures and what would it achieve in return? Nothing! Those individual cultures are what we fight for - look at the countries that are fighting back the most. They're the ones that haven' sacrificed their culture on the alter of political correctness. Look at Sweden, where the very idea of Swedish culture is considered to be racist, or ehre in the UK, where even our nominally conservative politicians talk about the threat from the natives to foreign cultures. Your plan for the EU would cement that attitude across the entire continent by forcing those disprate individual cultures into a political straight-jacket.
I don't care how "federal" it might be. There are compromises that have to be made in any political union that ultimate alter the cultural balance of the nations making up that union. What we need is strong national identities and an allilance based on one thing: the right for a nation to choose its own path. We don't need an overarching government or any federal structures for that, we don't need a curency or a flag or a bloody parliament, or a senate, or a president or any of that. We NEED our individual cultures to be strong, to unite the people they encompass. No "federal europe" will ever have that power.
You're American. Your experience is with the United States, and long may it remain a positive one, but your experience is limited to a relative monoculture. You apparently don't understand that part of the problem is the very idea that disparate, opposing cultures can somehow function within a single society. They can't. That's what borders are for. That's what the fence around our garden is for, to keep out the neighbour's dog and stop him sh*tting in the pansies. I don't set up a sharing agreement or some sort of "union" with the neighbour and his dog and pull down the fence between us so we can collectively defend against the dog across the road. I put up a bigger fence, I advise him to do the same. Why should I let his dog crap on my lawn just because we're both defending ourselves against the dog across the road? I can lend him my hose to squirt at it, sure, but that's a trade agreement, an alliance, not a garden "union" because it's still my garden. If I tear down that fence, how long before we start arguing about where the dog is allowed to take a crap? He doesn't udnerstand why I get so worked up about a dog taking a crap on my nice lawn becuase he's always lived with dogs, he's used to it. That's his culture. My culture is to squirt water at them.
And then, of coruse, he might start to argue that perhaps letting the dog across the road enter our collective garden isn't such a bad idea after all. After all, it's just a dog like his. So he lets it in through his gate and then I suddenly have two dogs crapping on my lawn. Up goes the fence, but now we're arguing about whether I have the right to do that in our collective space...
See the point? A national border is just a bigger fence and an invasive culture is just a bigger dog. We can let that dog keep crapping on our lawn or we can send it back and close the gate. As a nation we can do that, as part of a federal european union there's suddenly 26 points of failure we have to consider, because that dog can enter any one of those 26 other nations, some oe whome might think it's to their advantage to let this invasive culture enter so they can knock back their competitors.
You see that's the thing you're ultimately dealing with here, Gordon. Nations, individual nations, with a history that goes back to the time of Christ in some instances, and certainly back to the early fifth century in most. These are cultures that are in some cases entirely incompatible with each other, the only difference is that they don't resort to exploding in market places. All those wiggly lines you see on a map of Europe represent the gradual establishment of those cultural boundaries though - yes- wars, trade, population movements and treaties. World War 2 could have been the last solidification of that, if only the people behind the EU - and behind the more general malaise affecting our nations - hadn't come along and decided to knock all the fences down and let in a new and invasive culture. Now we're facing probably another thousand years of upheaval and war because of people like that, and people like you, Gordon, blathering on about unions and federal structures and ignoring the fact that it's nationalism, an alliance of strong, unified cultures, that would defend us against the islamic invasion, and all the talk about "unions" and federations and so on weakens those cultures, just as much as mixing slag into iron weakens it.
Thus endeth the ramble.
Hey, i'm with Archonix!
Archonix, with all due respect you are a European who has apparently learned nothing from the history of your continent over the past several centuries. Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.
For you, and for all readers of Gates of Vienna, I would point out that there remains an example of aggressive nationalism on the European Continent. It is opposed to the dilution of its cultural core. It has ruthlessly suppressed and attacked Islamic terrorists, and anyone else (including its own citizens) who got in the way, on purpose or by accident.
The name of this nation is - RUSSIA.
That is the model for you, Archonix. Is that what you really want?
We need to be agressively nationalistic. The US and Western European countries. Otherwise we will be trampled by others, if not the Muslims, then the Chinese. Notice how they are now stomping around Zimbabwe, with no push-back from the rest of us?
If we lack the will to survive, we will not.
Actually, Gordon, I know my history quite well. It was Nationalisms that stopped most of those wars. In fact it was the strong nationalism of England that stopped, or helped to stop, nearly every major war on the continent since the 1500s. It was nationalism that rallied people to defence against hitler, against Imperial germany, against napolean, against the islamic invasions...
Nationalism doesn't have to be aggressive, which makes me glad you included that qualifier. Nationalism is concerned with the nation. It can be expansionist and aggressive, wherein it becomes not merely nationalism but a sort of internationalism, as exemplified by Imperial and Nazi Germany, or Napoleonic France, or Russia; or it can be defensive, merely concerned with independence and self-determination, as exemplified by the UK (in the past; not so much now), Israel, the United States, Australia...
let me put it this way. is it Israel's nationalism that causes the current troubles, or the repudiation of that nationalism by the arabs? Is it the US's nationalism that is causing friction with Mexico, or repudiation of nationalism - patriotism - by left-leaning media and government figures that is causing your immigration problem?
See the point?
Archonix - I don't agree (if I read you right) that the difference between the 'cultures' of some European nations is as great as that between America and China.
Where does 'the West' fit in to your world map?
A convenient label for a bunch of countries that, in theory, share some common features such as the rule of law. Like cars and trucks maybe. All cars and trucks have wheels, but try making a big-rig run with the tires from an austin mini. :)
There's a redefinition going on as we speak. People are starting to talk about the anglosphere now, as much as "the west", as in nations that share anglo-saxon legal and political traditions based in common law and the like, which would mean places like India, Iceland and parts of Africa as well as the obvious ones like Australia and the United States.
For most purposes "the west" is considered as Europe, America and the industrialised former colonies of european nations with GDP, educational standards and democratic institutions comparable to those parent nations. That's about all they have in common with each other. I'm not necessarily sure I would include Greece in "the west", though it's European, and I'd be tempted to include Brazil, Argentina and Chile in "the west" even though they aren't traditionally seen as such because they're relatively rich and have fairly high educational standards. on the other hand Greece has higher living standards.
I was probably exaggerating a little but, not much. The difference between England and Spain is huge, not just because of language but because of completely different history and cultural influences. The difference between England, Spain and an eastern european country like Bulgaria is as huge again as that first difference,. and all three of those are different again from Sweden.
European nations have their own identities, but there's a common denominator (and it's not just their geographical locations) that makes them European, Western.
I see a great irony of history on the horizon, although I suppose from the point of view of Europe's political elite it is more tragic than ironic.
It reminds me of Napoleon whose battle against the 'English spirit' led directly to that spirit becoming the dominant force in Europe. In this case the EU's assault on the nation state is giving rise to circumstances that will encourage strong nation states.
Islam plays its part too. A common enemy makes internecine squabbles a lot less likely.
European nations have their own identities, but there's a common denominator.
I've been looking for it. And find it in an interesting place, the first renaissance: the 12th century one, not the overrated 16th century version.
The inspiration for that was actually the Reconquista, and in particular the conquest of Toledo, where we recovered large amounts of ancient Greek and Roman litterature.
Wether that was the inspiration for democracy in the 12th century city-states of Europe is still something I didn't figure out. Input would be welcome.
Gordon,
I can understand your view, but it is not correct to state that Locke considered minorities do not have the right to rise against an oppressive government. They have of course the right, even if it may not be prudent to rise against an oppressive gov. that is much more powerful and that can suppress the minorities.
As regards the tactics. I would forget the EU, there is not a European citizenship. European nations should collaborate, but it is a big error to create an unaccountable political layer on top of them. I can not buy the argument that there would be new wars in Europe if the EU would not exist. It is just the opposite: it was possible to build the EU because in the current circumstances the European nations do not compete for territories anymore.
I can not buy the argument that there would be new wars in Europe if the EU would not exist.
Well, it worked in Yugoslavia, didn't it?
Until a certain limit, of course.
Henry, Yugoslavia was an EU and it broke down when territorial disputes started. The same could happen in the EU.
Concerning your previous post. In the centuries XI-XIII of the Middle Ages there was a very strong economic, demographic and cultural development, even in relation to the Ancient Times. There was an increase in the average life expectancy and a decrease in the price of iron. The technological progress has no precedents, only Neolithic revolution.
Concerning Toledo. The recovery was limited; the translation was a Christian initiative, etc. You may read this and the links.
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