Tag: media

A new milestone: 2.5 million

I have a good reason to appreciate the material contribution that McRapey and a few of his more rabid fans have made to this site. For the first nine years of the blog, I didn’t pay much attention to my site traffic. The traffic had grown steadily over time, but it never occurred to me to think much of it because most of my readership was at WorldNetDaily and the blog had initially been little more than a place for me to record my passing thoughts and address many similar emails in one fell swoop. I started VP in 2003, but it wasn’t until 2012, when some of Scalzi’s fans began repeatedly mocking the way in which my site traffic compared unfavorably with that of Whatever, that I began looking into the implied connection between Scalzi’s perceived success in the science fiction community and his reported traffic.

As Verne, a commenter at AG, put it: “Once upon a time there was a low level geek (gamma) who managed to get himself a wee bit of power and bragging rights by way of the stupid Whatever blog and a position in a Sci/Fi org that no rational man would seemingly want. He used that power to tear into man of greater station and talent. That better man had up to that time not taken his blog and many other forms of networking seriously. A angry bear was awakened and has been steamrolling all in his way ever since.”


That’s more or less how it went, although I’m not angry at anyone about any of this. I realize many people won’t believe it, but until 2013, the 10th year of the blog, I didn’t care much about its traffic because I simply didn’t believe it had any particular significance beyond simple vanity. After all, what difference did it make if you had 5,000 pageviews in a month or 250,000 when WorldNetDaily had 5 million, the Atlanta Journal/Constitution had 19 million, and your column appeared weekly in both? I have to conclude that my very modest amount of success in the old media and old publishing worlds misled my perception of the digital media’s importance.

That’s why I was late to ebooks, why I was late to Twitter, and why I was very late to the utility of site traffic. It’s also why I rather cluelessly ran for SFWA office.

But just because I’m late to the party doesn’t mean that I’m stupid, or that I’ve lost my ability to see things that most people can’t. As chronicled in SJWs Always Lie, once I started paying attention, I very quickly recognized that McRapey was significantly exaggerating his traffic. More importantly, I also came to understand why he was lying about it and how he was effectively using public perception of that “extraordinary amount of traffic for a writer’s website”.

And I was downright astonished to discover that my blogs were already seeing very similar traffic, as I learned after reading McRapey’s 2012 summary that, as  it later turned out, proved to be the high water mark for Whatever.

That looks genuinely impressive at first glance.  8.165 million views!  But the last number made me do a double-take. And then it made me laugh. You see, Google Analytics also tracks Vox Popoli and Alpha Game. Those two blogs happened to combine for 719,700 views in December.  719,700, if I recall correctly, happens to be a little bit more than 718,000.  Nor is it an anomaly, as that was actually down from 745,857 in November.  This inspired me to look further into the matter of comparative blog traffic.

Of course, it’s not much of a comparison anymore, as Whatever now averages less than 500,000 pageviews a month while Alpha Game alone sees more than that. July 2016 saw record traffic for both VP and AG, with 2,078,989 pageviews for the former, 510,093 for the latter, and a total of 2,589,082 for the month. It may not be a competition, but as long as Whatever exists, it will serve a useful purpose for me as both a goad and a scalp.

So, 2.5 million monthly pageviews, what does that matter? Isn’t that just vanity and ego-stroking? Well, no. That’s the same mistaken perception that I used to harbor. The truth is that engagement is the social media fuel upon which the engine of Internet influence runs, and pageviews are how engagement is measured. That’s why so many people try to fake engagement by click-baiting and buying fake followers and posting pictures of cute girls in bikinis and videos of cute animals doing cute things. If gold can be adulterated and inflated, then it should be no surprise that pageviews can be as well. As we know, they can even be entirely fictitious pageviews that are invented in interviews.

But as with gold, only pageviews based on genuine engagement matter in the end. And the sort of pageviews one receives on an old-fashioned, text-heavy site are 24-carat quality. I’d much rather have my readers, and their 2.5 million pageviews, than 10 million pageviews of the sort produced by the readers of a Gawker-style clickbait site. I think VP will eventually reach 10 million monthly pageviews, and it will probably do so sooner than any of us reasonably expect. But we’ll do it for real or we won’t do it at all.

Castalia House and DevGame and Brainstorm and Big Fork and other projects that you haven’t heard about yet all exist because there is a material difference between 5,000 pageviews and 2.5 million pageviews per month. That is why this milestone matters, and that is why I am pleased to be able to celebrate it with you today.

Two million page views monthly

VP just hit its two millionth pageview for the month. I’ll have a more detailed report once the final numbers are in, but it’s a particularly satisfying milestone in light of this section from SJWs Always Lie:

The discrepancies were starting to accumulate, and the increasingly wordy, increasingly elaborate defensiveness on Scalzi’s part made me increasingly certain that he was lying. But how to prove it to everyone else?

Then it occurred to me that anyone who was willing to shamelessly exaggerate in an interview with the New York Times was probably not doing so for the first time. In my experience, most people who are self-promoters never stop promoting themselves. They have a tendency to talk themselves up, and they will often exaggerate when they have no need to do so. Given that the New York Times is at the top of the U.S. cultural heap, I figured the chances were very high that Scalzi had similarly inflated his traffic in previous interviews with other reporters. And, sure enough, I found an interview he had given almost exactly three years before to Erin Stocks at a science fiction magazine called Lightspeed.

Anything you ever wanted to know about science fiction writer John Scalzi you can find online at the public and rather opinionated blog that he’s kept since 1998, Whatever.scalzi.com/. His bio page holds all the usual info—education, past jobs, present jobs, books published, awards won—and is wrapped up with the tongue-in-cheek coda: “For more detailed information, including a complete bibliography, visit the Wikipedia entry on me. It’s generally accurate.” But spend a little more time browsing, and you’ll learn that beyond the dry stats and quippy bon mots, there’s more to John Scalzi and his writing than meets the eye. For one thing, his blog gets an extraordinary amount of traffic for a writer’s website–Scalzi himself quotes it at over 45,000 unique visitors daily and more than two million page views monthly.

—“Interview: John Scalzi”, Lightspeed, September 2010 (Issue 4)

Extraordinary indeed. It’s fascinating, isn’t it? Three years before the New York Times interview that struck me as anomalous, John Scalzi had been publicly claiming to have very nearly the same number of readers, as well as an absolutely impossible number of pageviews. And how could Whatever possibly have had “more than two million page views monthly” in September 2010 when he later reported 5,131,194 pageviews for the whole of the year?

Alpha Game is seeing record traffic as well, and will hit 500,000 monthly pageviews later today. Thanks to all of you who made this possible by stopping by, and to those who have helped make it a destination by adding to the discourse.

I’d say on to 3 million, but I’ve been hanging around Cernovich too much and you know how he is about always thinking big. On to 10 million.

State polls vs national

Nate Silver of 538 addresses the discrepancies while explaining why his systems are, by his own account, “bullish on Trump”:

Another tricky question is how to reconcile state polls with national polls. For example, there have been no polls of Pennsylvania over the past two weeks, during which time Clinton’s lead has evaporated in national polls (and often also in polls of other states, where we’ve gotten them). The FiveThirtyEight model uses what we call a trend-line adjustment to adjust those those old polls to catch up to the current trend. That’s why our polls-only forecast shows Pennsylvania as a tossup even though Trump has only led one poll there all year. Those older polls came from a time when Clinton led by 5 or 6 or 7 percentage points nationally, and they generally showed her up by about the same margin in Pennsylvania. Now that the national race is almost tied, it’s probably safe to assume that Pennsylvania is very close also. Some of the competing models don’t do this, and we think that’s probably a mistake, since it means their state-by-state forecasts will lag a few weeks behind, even when it’s obvious there’s been a big shift in the race.

Bottom line: Although there are other factors that matter around the margin, our models show better numbers for Trump mostly because they’re more aggressive about detecting trends in polling data. For the past couple of weeks — and this started before the conventions, so it’s not just a convention bounce — there’s been a strong trend away from Clinton and toward Trump.

In other words, as I’ve been saying from the start, it’s too soon to tell anything from the state polls. The fact that the trend is towards Trump is apparent, but it’s not certain that it is the start of a cascade preference that will lead to the predicted Trumpslide.

However, it is the first required step in the process, so that’s a good sign for now.

Talking SJWs with Tom Woods

What exactly is the ideology of the “Social Justice Warrior”? What do you do when you’re targeted by one, whether at work or in general? Vox Day — popular blogger, author, SJW slayer, and polymath — joins me for background and strategy.

Tom Woods was kind enough to have me as a guest on Episode 703 of his podcast, Social Justice Warriors: Who They Are and How to Deal With Them. Tom is a sharp guy and I always enjoy speaking with him.

Of course, we were discussing the book that has been a political philosophy bestseller for nearly a year now, SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police. As its first year of publication comes to a close, it is still a top 2 book in the category, trailing only Plato’s Republic.

Which reminds me. How many people here would be interested in reading annotated editions of classics like the Republic or Aristotle’s Rhetoric, which would consist of the text with my commentary on the text woven into it. We could even do it with other classic works and commentators; I would love to have a copy of Clausewitz’s On War annotated by Martin van Creveld. I’m not promising anything, as I have three – no, four – books I’m already writing, but it’s an idea that might be worth exploring.

In defense of globalism

The Economist argues for openness, Hillary Clinton, and the corrupt anti-nationalist status quo:

Countering the wall-builders will require stronger rhetoric, bolder policies and smarter tactics. First, the rhetoric. Defenders of the open world order need to make their case more forthrightly. They must remind voters why NATO matters for America, why the EU matters for Europe, how free trade and openness to foreigners enrich societies, and why fighting terrorism effectively demands co-operation. Too many friends of globalisation are retreating, mumbling about “responsible nationalism”. Only a handful of politicians—Justin Trudeau in Canada, Emmanuel Macron in France—are brave enough to stand up for openness. Those who believe in it must fight for it.

They must also acknowledge, however, where globalisation needs work. Trade creates many losers, and rapid immigration can disrupt communities. But the best way to address these problems is not to throw up barriers. It is to devise bold policies that preserve the benefits of openness while alleviating its side-effects. Let goods and investment flow freely, but strengthen the social safety-net to offer support and new opportunities for those whose jobs are destroyed. To manage immigration flows better, invest in public infrastructure, ensure that immigrants work and allow for rules that limit surges of people (just as global trade rules allow countries to limit surges in imports). But don’t equate managing globalisation with abandoning it.

As for tactics, the question for pro-open types, who are found on both sides of the traditional left-right party divide, is how to win. The best approach will differ by country. In the Netherlands and Sweden, centrist parties have banded together to keep out nationalists. A similar alliance defeated the National Front’s Jean-Marie Le Pen in the run-off for France’s presidency in 2002, and may be needed again to beat his daughter in 2017. Britain may yet need a new party of the centre.

In America, where most is at stake, the answer must come from within the existing party structure. Republicans who are serious about resisting the anti-globalists should hold their noses and support Mrs Clinton. And Mrs Clinton herself, now that she has won the nomination, must champion openness clearly, rather than equivocating. Her choice of Tim Kaine, a Spanish-speaking globalist, as her running-mate is a good sign. But the polls are worryingly close. The future of the liberal world order depends on whether she succeeds.

The Economist correctly senses that the time for “the liberal world order” is rapidly running out. Notice how, like much of the conservative media and the cuckservative Republicans, the maintenance of the status quo is its only real principle and completely trumps all of their various ideologies. Everyone profiting from the current setup, from literal Socialist to small government Republican, is willing to stand shoulder-to-shoulder against anyone who would first stand for the benefit of his nation and his people.

The Economist is speaking with the voice of the transnational elite, who have no loyalty to any nation, who could not care less about Americans, or French, or British, or Chinese, or anyone else, so long as they are allowed to continue to prey upon them. It is not, as some would have it, an exclusively Jewish elite, but rather, an alliance of rapacious elites from every nation, who share an honor among thieves and defend each other at the expense of the various peoples they have been raping for at least four generations.

Globalism is an evil even greater than Communism, Socialism, Nazism, Fascism, or Feminism, because it is a trans-ideological meta-evil that can take advantage of any ideology except Nationalism. That is why Nationalism is the most effective response to it and that is why those who love either freedom or their own people should support the Nationalists of every nation and of every ideological stripe.

Alt Right vs conservative

The difference is material. As are the outcomes. On a not-entirely-unrelated note, Donald Trump answered 12 questions at The Donald sub-reddit yesterday. One of them was from Milo:

yiannopoulos_mMILO
America has a proud tradition of stealing the most brilliant and talented people from countries around the world for ourselves. Albert Einstein, Wernher von Braun, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Melania Trump… the list goes on and on. In recent years, however, H-1B visa abuse has become rampant. A program meant bring truly exceptional talent to America has been twisted by globalist politicians and corporations, allowing low-cost, short term labor to steal jobs from everyday Americans and take everything they learn back to their home countries. Will you curb H-1B abuse and make sure visas are going to people who want to become American, stay American, and make America great?

the-realDonaldTrump
I have put forward a detailed plan for H-1B reform to protect American workers which can viewed on the immigration paper on my website. My plan is the exact opposite of Crooked Hillary Clinton.

[–]MeowntainMan
For the lazy

  • Increase prevailing wage for H-1Bs. We graduate two times more Americans with STEM degrees each year than find STEM jobs, yet as much as two-thirds of entry-level hiring for IT jobs is accomplished through the H-1B program. More than half of H-1B visas are issued for the program’s lowest allowable wage level, and more than eighty percent for its bottom two. Raising the prevailing wage paid to H-1Bs will force companies to give these coveted entry-level jobs to the existing domestic pool of unemployed native and immigrant workers in the U.S., instead of flying in cheaper workers from overseas. This will improve the number of black, Hispanic and female workers in Silicon Valley who have been passed over in favor of the H-1B program. Mark Zuckerberg’s personal Senator, Marco Rubio, has a bill to triple H-1Bs that would decimate women and minorities.
  • Requirement to hire American workers first. Too many visas, like the H-1B, have no such requirement. In the year 2015, with 92 million Americans outside the workforce and incomes collapsing, we need companies to hire from the domestic pool of unemployed. Petitions for workers should be mailed to the unemployment office, not USCIS.

However, it was another answer that was more significant, as once more, Trump stressed the need to change both economic policy and foreign policy, linking both to the corrupt system of politics that is rigged against the interest of most Americans.


Americans in every party are tired of our rigged system and corrupt politicians, and want to reform our government so it no longer benefits the powerful at the expense of everyone else. They know I will fix it so it works for them and their families. Hillary Clinton’s message is that things will never change. My message is that things have to change, and they have to change right now.


We have to change a foreign policy that has led us to one economic disaster after another, and an economic policy that has failed our poorest citizens. We will never fix a rigged system by relying on the people who rigged it in the first place.


I am going to return the government to the people.


Together, we will Make America Great Again. 

Dud or warning shot?

Wikileaks releases 29 DNC voicemails:

Another shoe has been dropped by Wikileaks. On the night President Obama and Vice Presidential nominee Tim Kaine were scheduled to speak to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, the anti-secrecy whistle-blower group released hacked voicemails of top Democratic officials. Wikileaks put up a page containing 29 mp3 files of calls, identified by phone number, running approximately 14 minutes combined.

None of the messages listened to by The Washington Times contained anything immediately obvious as embarrassing or incriminating. However, the very fact the DNC voicemail system has been hacked is embarrassing and could augur the release of far more damaging material later.

 Given the way Wikileaks likes to draw things out for maximum media impact, one would assume that the release of these innocuous messages is a warning shot, especially in light of how the Democrats and the bitter #NeverTrump die-hards have been attacking Wikileaks as a pawn of Vladimir Putin.

On the other hand, it could simply be a bluff because they don’t have anything more. Only time will tell.

UPDATE: Warning shot.

Wikileaks’ Julian Assange said that the organisation plans to release a “lot more” leaked material on Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party in the run up to November’s presidential election.

What he doesn’t understand is magic

Jonah Goldberg is defeated and depressed, but he’s still not willing to admit that he chose the wrong side:

Personally, I thought Trump’s stentorian address was awful, albeit with a few effective bits, particularly at the end. There was no poetry, no arc, no uplift or modulation. It was like he spent 75 out of 76 minutes shouting the final conclusions on one PowerPoint slide after another. Over time, the sentences seemed to be getting shorter and more blunt. It looked like he might even devolve into just barking random vowels and glottal stops. His delivery reminded me of that old SNL newsroom skit when Garrett Morris’s head pops up in an oval and he just re-shouts everything Chevy Chase says for the hard of hearing.

Thematically, it was an anvil chorus minus the melody. There was plenty of conservative boilerplate, some of which I agree with. But the message last night had nothing to do with conservative litmus tests or checklists. No, the desired takeaway was, “Behold this Man of Strength! Cast your gaze Trumpwards, plebes, for our new Caesar is here to bring a New Rome (or restore the old one) through force of will.”

Nowhere in his speech did Trump give any sense that he knew — or cared — how he would get things done through his “sheer force of will.” That’s the thing about magical thinking, you don’t need to explain it. The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For get it, and everyone else never will.

All Goldberg manages to demonstrate here is that he will see what he’s determined to see. Trump’s speech was too long, but it was otherwise extremely effective. Poetry, arc, uplift, and modulation are merely tools of the orator, the objective of a political speech is to give the voters a reason to vote for you. Trump’s speech did that, and the polls have responded accordingly.

As has long been the case, Goldberg, the good conservative, is focused on HOW a politician does things rather than WHAT he is doing. These conservative tone police are happy to vote for collective suicide so long as the politician promising to kill everyone does so in well-modulated, gracefully-composed tones while dressed nicely. Goldberg’s reference to “magical thinking” is pure cuckservative projection given that he is one of the many conservative fools who thinks 61 million post-1965 immigrants were transformed into Real Americans through the application of Magic Dirt, and believes a 19th century poem is the Zeroth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Goldberg’s complete lack of business experience also shows glaringly here. The CEO doesn’t tell you HOW something is going to be done. That’s not his role. Steve Jobs didn’t introduce the iPhone by explaining how it was going to be manufactured in China, who would be writing the operating system, and how much RAM it would take up. If he had, it would have failed. The CEO’s job is to establish the vision and inspire others to embrace it. That Trump has done, extremely well, with his Make America Great Again, which is the best campaign vision since Reagain’s Morning in America.

In fact, Goldberg even admits that he is babbling and denying the evidence of his own eyes and ears, as this passage shows: By the normal rules the speech should have been a disaster. But as we all know the normal rules do not apply. I am fairly certain Trump will get his post-convention bump. I am less confident Trump is a guaranteed loser come November. In other words, it was not awful, it was effective.


But the deeper theme of Goldberg’s piece is his shock and despair that so many people are refusing to buy into the Noble Conservative Who Knows What is Good For You schtick anymore.

I hate everything about this year, politically and (not counting some great TV) culturally. It’s clear many of my friends on the pro-Trump right are giddy with resentment-justifying glee at the alleged comeuppance of Trump opponents. One need only listen to quite literally anything Laura Ingraham or Sean Hannity say about Trump critics to see how large a role spite plays in the now-unbreachable divide between the new nationalists and the old conservatives….

But the truth is conservatism has become shot-through with a kind of vindictiveness that reflects poorly on everyone, friend and foe alike. I hate that after 20 years of fighting what I believe to be the good fight, so many can’t muster the will or generosity to consider that I’m doing what I think is right.

I hate that after 20 years of fighting what I believe to be the good fight, so many can’t muster the will or generosity to consider that I’m doing what I think is right. I’m entirely open to the argument that my analysis and judgment is wrong. But I am resentful, furious and, most of all, contemptuous of the lazy and self-justifying assumption that my motives are malign.

That’s just it, Jonah. You didn’t fight the good fight. You fought the wrong fight. As a conservative opinion leader, you didn’t manage to conserve one single damn thing, and even more damning, many of your opinions changed over time with the progressive tide. Now you’re choosing to side with the globalists and the progressives because you were never on the side of Americans at all. You fought the wrong fight and now you’ve chosen the wrong side.

Through your open opposition to America’s nationalists, you have revealed that your motives and your objectives are, at the very least, opposed to the interests of Americans and the United States of America.

We don’t care that you think what you’re doing is right. We care that you have declared yourself to be an enemy of those who are trying to make America great again. We care that you have openly declared yourself to be an enemy of the American identity.

Frankly, I’m very disappointed in Jonah. I genuinely thought he was smarter than this. I defended him many times from those who regarded him with suspicion on the basis of his (((heritage))) and who considered him nothing more than a typical neocon. Unfortunately, when the time came to choose between America and his imaginary proposition nation, he chose the latter.

#GamerGate was just the beginning

#DNCleaks is the next big revelation in media corruption:

WikiLeaks released over 20,000 emails on Friday allegedly sent from the accounts of U.S. Democratic National Committee officials, including dozens of off the record media correspondence.

Dubbed the “Hillary Leaks series” by WikiLeaks, the leak is comprised of a searchable database of almost 20,000 emails with over 8,000 attachments and photos from the email accounts of top DNC employees.

Some of the most interesting emails to read are those exchanged by DNC staffers as they decide how to respond to media inquiries, and then their off-the-record and deep background responses to numerous national media outlets. The emails contained off the record correspondence with reporters at the Washington Post, Politico, and the Wall Street Journal, among others.

Many emails in the database were sent from the email accounts of DNC’s Northern California finance director, Robert Erik Stowe, communications director Luis Miranda, national finance director Jordon Kaplan, finance chief of staff Scott Comer, finance director of data & strategic initiatives Daniel Parrish, finance director Allen Zachary and senior advisor Andrew Wright, among others.

The emails, according to WikiLeaks, covers the period from January 2015 through May 25, 2016.

Wikileaks said this is just part one of the Hillary Leaks series.

Some of this is really bad. It turns out that, in at least one instance, DNC officials were actually giving instructions to television executives to take people off the air because of what they had just said on the show being broadcast.

#GamerGate proved how the game media was operating in collusion, then showed how the mainstream media established and stuck by a false narrative. #DNCleaks is the first step in revealing precisely who has been establishing those false narratives.

Milo banned from Instagram

The Ralph Retort reports:

I know I said I was done with this story for today, but I also said that I’d be back if more news broke. Well, that just happened. Controversial Breitbart Tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos was just banned from Instagram for reasons that are, as of now, unknown. All I know is that his Instagram was pretty mild when I checked it the other day, so this isn’t making a lot of sense.

Excessive Fabulosity, one can only assume. It’s rather remarkable. At this point, Milo is banned from more places than I am.