The Strategic Dinosaur

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

People have been baffled as to why Jimmy Kimmel didn’t just apologize and avoid being fired. Also why a lot of the left is doubling down on what’s obviously the 20% side of an 80-20 issue, like…. Oh, standing for illegal immigration. or the 10 side of a 10-90 issue, like outright standing for more criminality.

What you’re failing to understand is that there is a strategy to it. It’s a defective strategy that no longer works, but it was such a good move for so long that it got deep-embedded in the left’s culture and they no longer know the reasons behind the action. They just do it because it always worked before.

At the same time that people were coining “Get woke, go broke” to show that wokeness was not in fact a bottom-up movement, I was coining “Roll left and die” but it actually should be more appropriately named “Roll left TO die.”

They’re not the same thing, but since they happened at the same time they’ve gotten conflated and the first kind of massively took over, because it’s a caution.

Roll left to die is more a description of what I saw happen over and over, primarily n publishing.

Someone who was hard left would take over a magazine. Over the course of his (or more commonly her) tenure, the magazine would decline to the point of dying. Just on the point of death, the person in charge would roll even harder left. The magazine would, of course, go down in flames. BUT before the ashes had cooled, this person would be offered a bigger, better job, with a bigger, better magazine. Where the process repeated.

This was also true of writers whose career was dying. Make sure your next book is redder than Mao’s Red Book, and even though it sells almost nothing, people will line up to give you big advances/support your future endeavors.

Because I don’t like things that make no sense, I analyzed the phenomenon and realized while it was a bad strategy for magazines/institutions, it was a great individual career strategy. How?

Well, the first thing you have to understand is that the left doesn’t give a d*mn about “the thing” whatever “the thing is”: science, industry, endeavor, institution, art. They don’t care about “the thing” that they just took over. The only thing they care about now and forever is revolution.

Add to that that by the fourth generation of dominating certain fields and hiring only on ideological compliance ALL OF THEM ARE ARRANT INCOMPETENTS.

Sure, sometimes, by accident, they find one of their true believers who has talent and sometimes even genius. But they tend to destroy those, because well, because their ideology views envy as a cardinal virtue. Be too talented and suddenly there will be rape accusations, or someone will have heard you mutter a slur, or… (These might even be true. As we learned this last week, the left are the most amoral sh*theads in existence. They don’t even know what morality is and can’t find it with two hands and a seeing eye dog.)

So the fact that you just destroyed the magazine/enterprise/institution doesn’t matter to them. They do that all the time themselves, often without meaning to. What matters is that before the thing died, you virtue signaled as hard as you could to the left.

That means that they MUST support you and give you a bigger position. They can’t allow people to think you might get fired for being hard left. So they have to do whatever they can to make you BIGGER.

This strategy worked for close on to a 100 years which is why people did the roll left to die as hard as they could.

Signs it was breaking down came when people like Keith Olberman or Don Le Lemon started having to “go to vlogging from their basement” to obviously no attention whatsoever.

And now a days it’s a crap shoot whether rolling left to die will get you more money, or just ignored.

But people like Kimmel whose career was dying anyway instinctively do it, because it worked so well so long that it just became “the thing to do” like some sort of deranged ritual.

They do it because the strategy solidified into ritual. And because they don’t know what else to do.

This btw explains the Biden administration too. Everything they did was a disaster and they knew it, so they rolled left as hard as they could, so they’d be seen as martyrs of the revolution and have cushy jobs/donations after. The fact that the Biden library is not getting funded at all and that Kamala is giving up on political — crazy cakes — aspirations, like governor of California, tells you it’s not working there either.

However, watch for it to happen more. The dying dinosaur rolls hard left to die.

Because its walnut-sized brain tells it that it always worked before!

181 thoughts on “The Strategic Dinosaur”

  1. My favorite example: WQXR the classical music station in NYC. How can you screw that up, pardon the language. Play Beethoven, Brahms, Bach, not too hard. If you don’t play them or look for composers of color, you get junk. yes arrant incompetents.

    Liked by 3 people

    1. I finally gave up on the local classical station, that I used to love – I even part-timed there for a while, and I knew what a huge collection they had in the station library. But they went to streaming Minnesota Public Radio’s classical feed – and holy-cow-on-a-stick, did they go all woke. Every single composer of classical music who was identifiably of color got played, incessantly. William Grant Stills, mostly – and of course a double whammy for Florence Price because she was black and female … the handful of pieces by those few composers got aired over and over and over again weren’t really all that painful to listen to, but the pious lecture about them which led into EACH PIECE EVERY SINGLE TIME finally got too much to bear.

      Roll left and die, indeed. I felt like demanding back every cent that I had ever pledged to that station, just for the condescending lectures along.

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      1. Ah yes Florence Price, well of course she’s good she has at least what according to what they use to say on the radio, 3 degrees. 3 degrees. The question is does her music actually sound good. And as you pointed out you could have tolerated her without the lectures.

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        1. Wow, 3 degrees! Whoop-de-do!

          The 3 members of Rush have (had) about 30 degrees in music between them. And they had impressive musical talent. But no, they can’t be great because they’re 3 white dudes.

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    2. Since becoming an NPR affiliate a while back the (formerly independent commercial) classical station WCLV in Cleveland has begun cramming in the atonal post-WWII stuff that the late Sir Roger Scruton called “groans wrapped in mathematics” and that I call “Actuaries of the Planet of the Apes” with much greater frequency, justifying it with the sniffy tag line “Remember: all music was once new music.”

      Even the great Cleveland Orchestra (possibly the best there is) does it now and again too; in a three-piece bill the second piece is too often some random chromatic spew, especially in the summer series at Blossom Music Center.

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      1. So I’m not the only one to notice this. Strictly in classical music I mean. Because this was all encouraged by what was said in According to Hoyt. Thank you. And of course this is all public radio meaning you and I pay for it or we did.

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        1. No, it’s not you. I like “Sunday Baroque” because that’s it – Baroque. And yes, some modern classical won’t last to become classic.

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          1. Theodore Sturgeon was famously asked if 90% of scifi wasn’t crap. He famously replied “Yes, but 90% of everything is crap.”

            The “classical” we hear today has been through the Ted Sturgeon Filter. When was the last time you heard a piece by Ludewig Spohr?

            Liked by 2 people

            1. Oh, about forty years ago while driving West of Portageville to Buffalo. One of his symphonies which I was eager to hear as I knew who he was. Publiç radio in 1985.

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            2. This discussion kind of reminds me of an argument I got into some time back. I noted how banal the lyrics of some current “hit” song. They responded with “you mean like ‘she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah.”

              I responded with:You think you lost your love. I heard her yesterday. It’s you she’s thinking of. She told me what to say. She says she loves you…(and the rest of the lyrics)

              There’s a difference between a catchy chorus in a song with actual depth, and a song that’s nothing but that supposed “catchy chorus.”

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          2. Sirius has a Saturday morning (replayed Sunday evenings) program called, “Baroque and Beyond,” which is usually themed, and entertaining. Who knew the winter of 1709 was so cold some composers lost their lives, for example?

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      2. Yep, all music was once new music…including the crappy stuff. Some music, “new” is all it’s got going for it. In other groundbreaking news, we’re all naked under our clothes, man…

        If they want to do something new that’ll get people cheering, they should maybe try something like this (from a composer who has a degree in the subject, is still very much alive, and is playing onstage):

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      3. Long ago in my youth, my father-in-law bought my wife and me a (small) subscription to the Boston Symphony Orchestra. We enjoyed it quite a bit and in future years bought ourselves subscriptions. The then Head conductor was Seiji Ozawa. Mr Ozawa didn’t particularly like Classical (I.E. Bach, Mozart, Hayden, BSO tended to avoid Baroque and earlier to not step on the Handel and Hayden Society toes). However, the board required at least some classical and early romantic period pieces. As a sop, he’d get to toss in his beloved Mahler or other late Romantics as well as “Modern” more atonal folks such as Bartok or Stravinsky. This went on for a couple years until two things happened first, Seiji Ozawa got a major name as CDs took off as the media of choice for Classical music, and second, a much weaker board came in. And so it was Late Romantic and later all the time, including many “World premieres” of modern artists. My wife referred to these as “Dinosaur Fart Music” and we didn’t bother renewing our subscription.

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    3. Huh. Local one isn’t too bad. Yes, they’ll play some of the more obscure composers—usually on a theme day—but they’ll do the classics, and they’ll also do the new orchestral stuff, which is mostly soundtracks. (I mean, Danny Elfman wrote a ballet. That was unexpected.)

      I think my favorite from the last 50 years is “Farewell to Stromness,” which is a lovely guitar piece written when that particular island was slated for rare earths mining. They later didn’t go through with that, so it’s merely a lovely piece with no horror story behind it.

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  2. How many Lefties consider Conservatives the Dinosaurs?

    But they’re dying and Conservatives are winning. 😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀

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    1. The dinosaurs changed slowly – the variants evolved in small increments, and the basic form survived through millions of years of drastic change around them.

      Many other species evolved quite rapidly, gaining more advantages – until a large change came along, and they found that they had evolved themselves right out of existence.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. It’s also worth noting that dinosaurs are believed to have gone extinct due to a cataclysmic event that dramatically affected the entire globe. And that they were able to last, in one form or another, for over 160 million years. Absent the asteroid, they’d probably still be the planet’s dominant life form.

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    2. What’s that Far Side comic? “the world’s climates are changing, the mammals are taking over, and we all have a brain about the size of a walnut”

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    3. Remember Dinosaurs lasted 100s of millions of years and the last extinction event they upgraded to birds….so Dinosaurs are great survivors.

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  3. A thousand likes if I could leave them.

    BTW, Matthew Dowd is now feeling very sorry for himself because everyone’s supporting Jimmy and not him. Awwwwwwwww.

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    1. I wonder how much of that is because people know supporting Kimmel is pointless except to virtue signal? Word has spread that Trump was just the excuse, and the real reason was financial. Meanwhile, Dowd could, conceivably, get reinstated (though it’s not likely).

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        1. That’s my point. They’re publicly supporting the guy who’s doomed no matter who steps in to support him, while ignoring the guy whose job might theoretically be salvaged if there was enough popular support.

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          1. I would hesitate to assume that they put much weight on the reasoning process before making their choice.

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  4. One of the reasons the Left hasn’t died yet is that is the Left is supported by plenty of billionaires, dead billionaires money (foundations), as well as icebergs of tax dollars that got “mis-directed” to support their causes.

    Remove that source of income and 90% of the stupidity goes away because there is no funding.

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      1. The Reader believes the rapid growth of NGOs on the left in the last 15 years has been largely funded by the government, as DOGE, the work of Data Republican, and others has shown. However, it was seeded by Soros and other leftist billionaires. Now that the government tap has been at least severely restricted, those billionaires have to decide whether they are going to selectively fill the gaps where they think it will do the most good (damage!) or whether they will go quiet for a while. One of their key decisions will be whether they decide to fun a push of direct action. 2026 will tell. Keep your clothes and weapons where you can reach them in the dark.

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          1. The Reader sees the possibility that the loss of ‘jobs’ in those NGOs is going to create a decent sized pool of very angry folks; in fact a large enough number to push the economy into a major recession (BGE insert any thoughts here). And most? of them don’t have skills for the private sector. It is going to depend on how many of them cool to sanity in the next few months and whether Soros and his ilk are willing to seed the angry ones to try another round of Burn Loot Murder. We’ll see.

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            1. If the NGOs were primarily funded by taxpayer money and they are cutoff from it, that money does not exit the economy. At worst it goes to other govt folly, at best it is returned to the private economy. Either way there is no shrinkage of the economy.

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              1. The government money will end up somewhere. But the folks in those NGOs (likely hundreds of thousands based on the numbers kicked around) will have to play musical chairs between direct government jobs and the private sector and will likely be unemployed for a while at least. The transient unemployment will have an impact, particularly as it has become clear that the last 4 years of economic statistics were completely bogus. Recessions are transient shocks as the economy reallocates resources – yeah Austrian Economics.

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                1. Reader I think the effects will be localized to the areas where the NGOs/QaNGOs are most prevalent. Virginia, Maryland and parts of Delaware will be a mess. The New York/western Connecticut, Northern New Jersey metroplex will be a mess. Massachusetts with its 100+ institutes of “Higher” learning, has been running around with its hair on fire. California cities and the West Coast metroplex (Seattle, Portland etc) will be hurting. A few other deep blue enclaves (Chicago etc) will also get hurt. Politically, this is a nothing burger. Those areas that will experience the damage are already about as blue as they can be in electoral votes, congressional delegations, and state delegations. So they can vote harder, but they get nothing. They can’t/won’t move out, as you have noted, they have no useful skills. On top of that exile to say Texas or Florida, away from what they considered genteel civilized society, is unthinkable. I think the biggest threat is the one we have been seeing, which is malcontents (a la Garfield’s assassin) who feel they have been taken out of a job and will attack public figures and more folks joining Antifa or other parts of the Democrat SA.

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                  1. You are right about the impact being geographically restricted to largely blue areas. But the impact on the margin, where economics operates, will be large, and felt at the national level. Tens (maybe hundreds) of billions of dollars of salaries are going to vanish in a few months. Remember, a recession is when your neighbor loses his job, and a depression is when you lose yours. What is the condition when you and all your neighbors lose their jobs simultaneously? If the localized unemployment gets as bad as the Reader suspects it will in places like Northern Virginia, the outcry will spill over into the political arena and also generate a whole lot of anger among the unemployed. And they are people with ‘skills’ that don’t translate into the private economy. Radicalizing a small fraction of them to produce disruption and violence won’t be hard.

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                    1. True its the folks that are really bedroom towns to NYC that will hurt. The northwest corner (and much of the northeastern portion) aren’t directly dependent on the Brahmandirin class who are feeling the pinch.

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                    2. And yes Hartford. with Connecticut really beefing its taxes up in the 90’s and early 2000’s much of the Insurance Industry headed for cheaper digs. And the middle class mostly bailed from Hartford before I was in highs chool and thats a long time gone. So Hartford is just support for various state government sections now, You MIGHT see NH, VT and perhaps ME go solidly purple to pale red. CT MA and RI are just too dominated by their city and suburban (NYC bedroom towns) environs and will stay blue until they collapse. Given a Mamdani mayorship in NYC that may be sooner than one might expect for Greenwich, Danbury Etc. Wu hasn’t totally wrecked Boston yet (though not for want of trying). Providence is just in thrall to they utterly corrupt RI democrat party (makes MA dems look like angels… and not fallen ones).

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          2. Yes; and also see now-currrent tracings of “anti-Fascist” networks by people like X’s Datarepublican and friends (I mean in the last couple of days and ongoing). It’s very possible we see you now are about to become the scariest words ever heard, for the cozy-evil Left.

            So much of it is gov’t cash: ours, or Cuba’s, or Venezuela’s, or…

            Meantime, the still-avalanching preference cascade (it’s almost too obvious by now to be worth saying) is something the “other side” can see dimly if at all — their ideology simply forbids. It cannot be!

            Liked by 1 person

            2. And these days Cuban and Venezuelan cash is almost as easy to find as USAID cash. I love the smell of schadenfreude in the morning :-) .

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        3. I suspect that with the terrorist designations for both Antifa and the Cartels, Trump’s administration is about to start digging up the private funding routes.

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      2. I swear, though, if the Soros fortune/foundation was erased tomorrow, a LOT of lefty stuff would go up in sulfurous smoke!

        I won’t hope for anyone’s fatal misfortune, but gosh I wish economic disaster would strike that bunch.

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        1. I’ve mentioned it here before, but a few years ago I read an article that talks about three of Soros’s sons (I don’t know if he has more). The two oldest apparently had a falling out of sorts with their father, so his third son is his heir apparent, and will presumably be the one designated to take over when Georgie kicks the bucket.

          I have no real factual basis to back this on, but I suspect that the “falling out” was simply that the two older sons were their own men, and didn’t enjoy meddling from their father. If so, that would suggest that the heir apparent third son is likely a yes man.

          And yes men usually don’t do well once they’re in charge.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. And I believe the third son is the one who spent some ludicrous amount on a wedding Huma Abedin of Anthony Weiner and Hilary Clinton fame. She is late 40’s (48?) so heirs to this part of Soros’ money will be thin on the ground. Sadly that just means it will end up in some giant trust run by goody two shoes types. Maybe Huma can burn some of that money for him before she croaks (she’s 11 years his senior). I doubt a late 30’s yes man who chose Huma Abedin as a wife and has lived on Daddy’s money all his life has much business acumen (or for that matter acumen of any kind).

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            1. Plus odd taste. They had a photoshoot that was spread abroad and showed them apparently seeing themselves as sleepy “modern,” angular and vaguely sinister. Odd.

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          2. This is true.

            My biggest concern with the other two is that even if they had a falling out with daddy, it doesn’t mean they aren’t as evil as he is. (On the other hand, you never hear anything about them, so perhaps they just are living their own lives and bothering no one. I sincerely hope that is the case!)

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      3. Every time I hear some lefty whinging about the influence of the Koch brothers on politics, I reply, “I’ll see your Koch brothers and raise Soros & Gates”. That usually puts them off, for a bit, anyway.

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        1. The Reader believes the angst on the left about the Koch brothers was performance art to deflect what Soros et al were actually doing.

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          1. Always…always. Projection and misdirection. If the Democrats/the Left are accusing their enemies of it, you KNOW they’ve either already done it or desperately wish they could get away with doing it.

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          1. The Reader notes that in 2020, the assault weapons ban failed by one vote in the VA Senate, after passing the House. The Democrat who voted no was an old style Democrat who intended to retire. When asked about his vote, he noted that he wanted to retire to his home district and if he had voted for it, his constituents would have made his life a living hell. Since then, the current governor (Youngkin) has vetoed at least three dozen gun control bills in each of the last two years. If we get Abby Normal Spanberger this year here in the Commonwealth, all of those and more will be law by July 2026, Constitution be damned. And Abby is getting most of her money from out of state.

            The Reader finds it amusing that the Democrats here are busily attacking the statewide Republican ticket for being racist and homophobic (anti trans) when it is composed of a black woman immigrant, an openly gay white male, and a hispanic. The Reader’s ancestors (of which he has many on the Northern Neck) are probably turning over in their graves at the prospect of the Reader voting for them.

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      4. The billionaires (Gates, etc) get money from the government, too. It’s a big money laundering scheme. Bigger than you’d think. It goes from taxpayers to the government, from the government to NGOs and public-private partners and so on, every little org getting a piece of the pie. It’s been a while since they circulated the charts and whatnot, but the ones I looked into were accurate back when.

        The left does not build things, though. Not really. They take over existing structures and exploit what they can for as long as they can. They are, in essence, parasites.

        Well, outside of a few examples of creatives and whatnot that actually made something. Stephen King is not a billionaire, but donates to leftist causes. Bill Gates is, and does the same. And so on. Rich lefties exist. Do they exist because of the theft of public dollars and lots and lots of money laundering? Probably a lot more do than don’t, but I don’t have the data so that’s just a gut feeling.

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          2. Crook may be too strong a word. Certainly Gates was never an innovator, but as much as the Reader has looked at the history of Microsoft, he hasn’t seen outright theft. Admittedly, there hasn’t been much innovation either. The only Microsoft product the Reader knows of that didn’t have its origins in a sharp deal or the hiring away of staff from elsewhere is Excel – the bane of corporate IT departments everywhere. One of the ironies of early personal computer history is that Bill Gates actually connected IBM to Gary Kildall of CP/M fame. Kildall and IBM couldn’t reach an agreement to put CP/M on the IBM PC and IBM turned to Bill Gates (who bought a second rate OS on the cheap and resold it to IBM).

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            1. That ‘second rate OS’ was a hacked-on copy of CP/M-86. Gary Kildall gave demonstrations proving so.

              Once upon a time there was a tiny company called Seattle Microcomputer. They saw that nifty new 8086 chip and said “We can make a whizz-bang OS for that thing, with multitasking, protected memory, device independent I/O and all sorts of other Good Stuff.”

              So they went to work. Early on, they found the need for something to run the disk drives and display, load their latest version of the experimental OS kernel into RAM, turn control over to it, and then DIE. They had a copy of CP/M-86 lying around, so they pressed that into service. Wasn’t quite what they wanted, so they hacked at it until it did what they needed.

              Enter Billzebub Gates. Walking into IBM right after they failed to reach an agreement with Gary Kildall (he wouldn’t give IBM an exclusive license to CP/M), Gates ‘sold’ them an OS that did not exist. The term ‘vaporware’ hadn’t been coined yet, but that’s what it was.

              Gates used IBM’s down payment to buy Seattle Microcomputer, forced them to abandon their multitasking OS project and do some more hacking on that copy of CP/M-86. That is what wound up being delivered as MS-DOS.

              So Gates not only ripped off CP/M-86, but also deprived the world of whatever advanced OS Seattle Microcomputer would have come up with. A looter from the very beginning.

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              1. Yeah, same. I want to write fiction not grant proposals. Not that grant proposals aren’t fiction of a sort, mind you. Mostly. But most grant proposals don’t involve sci fi, or zombies, or high fantasy- even if some of them might qualify as fantasy anyway, and be written by zombies…

                Where was I again?

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                1. Space Opera Grant Proposals

                  ….

                  Accounting Station can save your space program!

                  It’s the Grand Auditor’s swarmfleet! Jump us out system now!

                  (grin)

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        1. Actually, paleontologists decided that any “group of sharp pointy things on the tail excluding the tip” is a Thagomizer. So Stegosaurids get them, but a few others do too. (I laughed hard when I read that in an otherwise rather dry chapter in a dino science book.)

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      6. “The Stegosarus of Consequences seldom arrives tame” perhaps?

        (Right then, I’ll just be quietly taking myself off to elsewhere, now.)

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        1. no, it’s okay. that’s clever and doesn’t require carp. Have you seen what these energumens have been doing?
          I’m out of carp, I tell you. Yours was clever. But given the subsequent discussion it should be “The Stegosaurus of Consequences rarely arrives dethagomizered.”

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          1. Literally LOL for minutes on end when I first saw this… elsewhere.

            “The Stegosaur of Consequences rarely arrives unthagomizered” is it, clearly the unique global maximum of fun.

            (Was watching Falcon 9 launch, dipping into X stream, analyzing book that might explain “it’s all about the feelz,” watching Karlyn Borysenko try to throw deep shade on Datarepublican and prove anew why friendly fire… isn’t.)

            Well bowled!

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    1. The way I remember that one meme:

      We the unwilling, led by the incompetent, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, for so long, with so little, that we are now qualified to do anything, with nothing, forever. 😄

      Liked by 2 people

  7. I worked at an answering service center way back in college. I really received an education by answering the Women’s Shelter number. The majority of the callers were the abusers who were absolutely frantic to speak to their wife/girlfriend. They knew they could convince their victim to come back if they could talk to them. Since I wouldn’t patch them through, I became the subject of their pleas, their begging, and then their increasing rage. “You get her on the line right now!” they’d finally scream. Because that always worked before, right? It always worked, and if their voice didn’t work, there was always their fists.

    I think the left is the abuser and they’ve gotten away with it so long that they just expect their victims to keep being victims. And we’ve stood up and walked away and they’re now using their fists. Keep packing, and stay frosty out there.

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    1. They wouldn’t have to riot, kill, cancel etc. if we would stop being Hitler.

      Baby, just come home and I will forget you have been making me hit you.

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  8. There is an old story (probably apocryphal) about researchers hanging a banana from the top of a large cage with a ladder next to it. They then put in a group of chimps. When one of the chimps tried to climb the ladder to get the banana the entire group would be spayed with a fire hose. Pretty soon the chimps learned not to try to retrieve the banana. The researchers then removed one of the original group and replaced it. The replacement chimp saw the banana and went to get it and was stopped violently by the other chimps. One by one the original group was replaced and the replacement chimp was taught not to try to retrieve the banana until none of the original group was left, and none of the new chimps tried to eat the banana.

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    1. The Reader observes that while that story may be apocryphal he first heard in in a management course in his MBA program, back when corporate executives taught a lot of the MBA courses.

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        1. I’ve been on the nozzle end of a full-bore fire hose (not aimed at anybody), and yikes! Ain’t gonna reattach those; they’re in the next county.

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  9. I mentioned over of Carol Furlong’s blog, I wonder if the music industry has also burned it’s seed corn too.

    Finally got around to listening to the No Man’s Land songs you’ve been generating. Thing is, I was doing it through the YouTube music app, not the video one. And, when your songs were done, it rolled right into one of the various Asian semi-pro circles I’ve been listening a lot to since I ran into that subset a few year ago.

    It hit me, they trained the AIs by ingesting all publicly and probably a lot of not publicly available music, and that is what surfaced as generally good. Not the contemporary big label stuff. It’s Bad Apple, not Mr Brightsides, despite one being an almost random Internet forum thing, and the other being blasted over every speaker for, what, a decade now? Two?

    It is a weirdly disorienting feeling…

    Weirder still, I went to go take a look at the current top label representatives for the genres. There’s almost nothing less than a decade old. I know Taylor Swift has been huge, but has the rest of the industry just died and been running reruns for the last twenty years?

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    1. The Reader thinks that that is pretty much true. It seems to him that rock stopped in the early 70s, country in the mid 90s, and even jazz (the Reader’s favorite) has gotten a little weird in the last 15 years.

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      2. I don’t know about those other genres, but rock didn’t stop. It just stopped getting *promoted*. Rock was huge in the 80s, through the mid nineties, then “the industry” abandoned it. Just suddenly pretended it didn’t exist anymore, as far as keeping it in the public eye. There’s amazing creativity going on in rock and metal, with a massive amount of different flavors and styles to choose from and live shows everywhere, but it’s mostly under the radar. The talent, creativity, and the millions of fans who love the music didn’t go away; the marketing push it takes to break any given act into the multi-platinum sales tier did. Heck, if you like the 70s rock vibe, the stoner rock scene is your oyster. More 70s-with-a-twist stuff over there than you can shake a stick at (it’s some of my favorite stuff to listen to, actually). If you’re looking for genre bending & blending, check out symphonic metal — Nightwish, later Kamelot, post-2000 Septicflesh, and many more. Anyway, I’ll stop now. Could go on forever.

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        2. Ooh yeah! Dark techno, folk metal, symphonic metal, pirate metal, Christian metal, history metal, metal on medieval instruments (and bardcore …), video game soundtracks. That’s just what’s in my collection. There are a lot of groups doing amazing stuff, some of it obviously influenced by baroque and classical music, and done by singers and instrumentalists with classical training. None of that gets air time on the major stations in the US, I wager.

          Liked by 2 people

      3. Yeah, but that doesn’t mean people have stopped making good music. Any number of those circles have stuff as good as the old greats, so certainly there are more beyond those.

        It’s just the system for surfacing them seems to have completely died.

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        1. It has died–but that’s in part, I think, because something else cropped up to take its place. YouTube, Spotify, Pandora, Sirius–those are the places I’ve found new artists to become fan of in the last 15 plus years. Most folks use Sirius as their radio these days (if they listen to actual radio at all and not just their Spotify playlists), so they’ve got hundreds of devoted-to-exactly-what-they-want stations to choose from! I tend to use my personal music collection, but when I listen to Pandora or Spotify (rarely, I tend to use Spotify for podcasts), if I encounter a new artist I jot down the name and go looking for their stuff to buy. If I stopped and thought about it, pretty much every “new to me” artist I’ve become a fan of (that I wasn’t already a fan of before) in the last 20 or so years has been because of coming across them on the internet, NOT traditional music industry channels! Kamelot, Adrian von Ziegler, Brunuhville, Ivan Torrent, Audiomachine, Beast in Black, Eurielle…there’s lots more but those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head that I encountered via social media/gaming areas on the internet rather than anything promoted by record labels. :D

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            1. We need to sit down with the intent to compare music collections sometimes. You know, like we compare bookshelves…

              Because exploring new things friends like is the best kind of homework!

              …ignore the fact that I *still* haven’t read the latest Barry Cunliffe and you have. It’s in my TBR pile! I just haven’t had brain yet!

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              2. The Reader hadn’t heard of Sir Barrington Windsor Cunliffe either. After a glance at Amazon and Wikipedia he thanks you for providing him a very deep rabbit hole to go down.

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                1. I’m not as happy with his book about North Africa as I am with his other work. I suspect part of it is my mild frustration that he is not able to call spades spades concerning the, ahem, ideological system that came to dominate the region after AD 700 or so. He has to be careful, and skirts around some topics I’d prefer to see covered in more depth. With that said, it is the best reference for a general history of that area by far, and well written.

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              1. Eurielle. I have the others you named.

                Nox Arcana is good for softly eerie background music. Their four Ebonshire/Christmas recordings are a nice antidote to too much “perky holiday music.” (I don’t care for The Raven as much as the Ebonshire set, and a few others.)

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          2. The wild thing is I recognize half of those. Maybe they’re not such a unique taste after all?

            if you like Audiomachine you might look up Two Steps from Hell as well.

            For the more rock/metal side, if I don’t mind nom-english lyrics, Stack Bros sounds like what Evanescence started like before they went sideways, and Demetory is metal without lyrics.

            Felt was an interesting case, they disbanded a few years ago, but they did pop rock, and had started doing their stuff in English as well. Definitely self-taught second language, but they also uploaded their entire diskography to YouTube, before they did. Their song Goodbye (Parallel Cross) hits like an emotional freight train.

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            1. And if you like Two Steps From Hell, you may like Jo Blankenberg’s solo stuff, as well as Ivan Torrent and Brand X Music.

              For symphonic metal, you might like Xandria!

              Liked by 1 person

              1. Definitely second Brand X and Jo’s solo stuff :D I haven’t heard enough of Xandria to have a strong opinion one way or the other on them.

                Triosphere is another good group, though they only have a few albums and I don’t think they’re around any more. Their singer is more Pat Benatar than diva, and they’ve got some really excellent songs. I recommend Exit Eden, too!

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                1. Thomas Bergersen’s American Dream is a neat piece, a la Aaron Copeland, exploring the idea of the American dream. There are folk and regional music elements in it.

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            2. The common term for a lot of that type of music used to be “trailer music”, because it was so often found in movie trailers. For the last decade-plus, however, it’s largely been called “epic music”, and can be found all over the ‘tubes.

              Also, if you want background music, bardcore and “inn music” have a lot to offer.

              Liked by 1 person

              2. Yes. As I understand it, they were primarily doing just that: music for trailers and adverts, when they discovered people were downloading and trading their music. So they decided to just to straight up sell the records.

                Liked by 1 person

                1. Heh. I remember when I was in college and the trailer for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe dropped, and I spent AGES looking for the song used in the trailer (“Here Comes the King” by X-Ray Dog) That was the first time I found out that you could actually find trailer music–but it was before they started selling albums.

                  I am very glad they all sell their music to regular folks nowadays. I like having an epic soundtrack to my not-so-epic life! :D

                  Liked by 1 person

            3. I actually think I started listening to Two Steps From Hell before I found Audiomachine :D I overall prefer Audiomachine–TSFH is great, but tend towards a lot of their tracks being very dramatic and bombastic. Which is great sometimes, but sometimes you just want something softer but still dramatac (Audiomachine’s “La Belle Epoque” is one of my all time favorites for that)

              I haven’t heard of the other group, though. Thanks, I’ll check them out!!!

              Liked by 2 people

        3. Now consider carefully what this means.

          Musicians making music, fans who want to hear it. Failed middlemen abysmal at connecting them.

          “Unmet market need” = “business opportunity” in a near-empty niche.

          Is it time to say “build under, build over, build around” yet?

          Liked by 1 person

    2. $SPOUSE is a serious country fan (I’m sort of, though Sabaton has swiped my braincells since I first heard “No Bullets Fly”), and we’ve been recording the Grand Ole Opry shows for close to a year now. (They were doing shows on Dish Network, but dropped that in favor of streaming. I don’t have the bandwidth for that, so we pick up the more-or-less weekly internet feed from WSM. (I strongly suspect money is tight for the Opry and WSM. Dish wanted to continue the shows, but they would be more expensive to put on than the radio feed.)

      About a month ago, the station came up with a New! Improved! Easy to use! panel for the feed. (They didn’t say “Reliable” or “Well behaved”…) They also added three new channels beyond the WSM simulcast. The results make me happy that I’m not in driving distance of Nashville; the creature who programmed the website is in dire need of a back alley design review. Barbwire bat or tire iron, either one would work.

      a) Set up to record about 20 minutes before the show. Select the WSM channel. At roughly 15 minutes before (exactly? Haven’t tried in real time), it automagically switches to another channel. Resetting it, and it’s fine. It’s spoiled a few of the better shows.

      b) It also turns out to hijack the screensaver settings. As long as Firefox is on something other than the station, it’s fine. Load the station, and the two screensavers available to me don’t trigger. “The computer isn’t idle.”

      Added to the fact that the better known stars are busy on the road tours and/or destination venues, and the shows are loaded with really new acts (Sturgeon’s Law in effect), or musicians who’ve retired (mostly) and show up on heavy rotation. I like the songs Don Schlitz wrote, and he’ll sing them, but I’ve heard “When You Say Nothing at All” and “The Gambler” a few dozen times too many. (I think he’s on half the time so far.) That and Connie Smith really should retire…

      [End rant]

      Liked by 1 person

    3. Funny you say that- I’ve been listening to Touhou covers for a while now too. Different genres and takes on familiar themes- what’s not to like?

      Liked by 1 person

      1. What taking the girls to their mother this morning. I’d been trying to figure out how to tell people how to find Felt, because it’s a pretty common name in music, so had managed to cue up Goodbye. So when my phone connected to the car, it just started auto-playing it. The 3yo was immediately, ‘Dad, I want this song!’ ‘Ok.’

        Liked by 1 person

  11. You’re so right. It must be hard for the liberals to admit their illogical efforts not only make them appear stupid, it promotes stupidity. Their shining examples of what they believe are failures, and stupid.

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  12. Or maybe it should be “roll leftier, to die gloriously” just to further underline the point?

    And if anyone’s just heard “The Glorious 17th Tractor Brigade of the Krasnoyar Collective Farm is leading its entire region in Overfulfilling The Plan!!” I’ve been successful in communicating that quality. Yes, that kind of ‘glorious’ is meant.

    This is, bizarrely to us, the Left’s intra-cultural, twisted verson of honor and fidelity to core values. And one of those core values is, “socialism cannot fail” of its own… it can never stumble or fall, it must always have been pushed. And so, as part of a fabled “arc of redemption” storyline, the high profile refugees from a sinking/sunk “ship” must be seen to go on and prosper (at least till the cycle has begun to repeat), simply to absolve them of any possible visible causative role. Make sure you’re high-enough profile, in a visible not-failure, to be Saved. You’re a victim, not a perp.

    Yes, this all tracks perfectly.

    See “We Are All Jimmy!” by Colbert as reported here last night… it’s positively tribal. “No, you’ve been ganged up on by the Evil MAGA Horde! You did right in accusing Them!” (Never mind how this might be exactly what convinces Those Outside the Tribe to exile Jimmy safely far, far away.)

    The Gods of the Copybook Headings, of course, still don’t care. Imagine Greta Thunberg, alone in the falling snow, yelling “How Dare You!” as the new-Ice-Age August snow just keeps piling up…

    Liked by 3 people

  14. I was thinking about Signal Propagation.

    The hardest part in a top-down system of information is disseminating the information.

    Especially with information or orders not easily or immediately understood from outside, making sure everyone knows what the plan is and how to execute it.

    The Progs rely heavily on being told what to think TODAY, and a large part of Trump’s success is getting outside their OODA loop and wresting control of the news cycle away from them.

    So to be party faithful, you have to be on top of who is Emmanuel Goldstein TODAY and what talking points we’re parroting today

    In order to do that, you have to have the center of a cell or social group able to check in with a set source at a set time, every day.

    ….that doesn’t take many people. But it may take a live demonstration, because their reading comprehension sucks, as does their critical thinking.

    Conclusion: The people funding and pushing the protests are not upset about Kimmel getting punished, they’re panicking at losing signal propagation.

    Liked by 3 people

    1. Yes; and it’s not just the loss of a top-to-many low-latency broadcast channel, it’s also loss of a multi-function channel of wide reach, carrying what amounts to semi-encrypted (sub-)content.

      It’s exactly what you say, setting The Truth of Today (Pravda!) for local retail “thought leaders” and/or leaders of day-after “struggle sessions” disguised as water-cooler gossipfests. Also a low-level drumbeat of Leftist News (Izvestiya!) and just as important, perspectives on events, for people who are ‘not political’ or only think they’re not… ‘even slowly dripping water wears away the hardest stone’ and all.

      There’s even a certain amount of ‘in-kind’ campaign contribution, though spread generically across Democrats and Greens and Naderites (and Communists and so forth) — as has been pointed out in a few places Netwards recently, the (huge) ongoing losses by parent companies on programs like Kimmel’s keep their ‘message’ alive in much the same way that overt, outright-bought ads for parties or candidates do (though see also “how did Bernie’s relatives get so rich??”).

      And all of the above flows from simply having a cooperative (likely eager) ‘partner’ in a position of high and regular visibility, on a ‘pure enitertainment’ show. At least, until it doesn’t..!

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  15. I was noticing that the 40 year old land whale the left has appointed its “y9uth outreach director” is pushing a protest for Kimmel. She wants them to arrange a national lunch walk out next week.

    she has no idea that the group they want to reach doesn’t even know who Kimmel is. They get their news from podcasts and TikTok and Kimmel is nothing to them.

    this is where Charlie Kirk was brilliant. He reached out to them where they are, not where they used to be.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Kimmel was noteworthy for hosting the late night show on ABC, and hosting the Oscars a few times (also being aired on ABC at the time) after it started getting more difficult to find someone willing to host that awards ceremony.

      The kids don’t watch either one of them.

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  16. The funny thing is Kimmel used to be too lowbrow for the Hollywood elites, with “The Man Show” trampoline slow motion stuff and all. But now he’s their best and brightest.

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  17. We had two classical stations that were associated with local universities and were PBS affiliates. The northern station switched programming formats and dropped classical because they couldn’t get the funding to continue with classical. Not sure what it plays now.

    The southern station (45 miles from the other one) gave warning they’d be switching programming too. Uproar was loud. So they told people, “We need to be fully funded to break away from PBS”. Had one last telethon, maybe. Not sure everything that happened but they are an all classical station that picks and chooses what it wants to play, including some PBS programs, but there are no more telethons and it is a fully functional classical station associated with the university and it has translator stations throughout the state.

    Liked by 3 people

    1. The college radio station of my youth (circa early 1970s) had a very diverse set of shows; ranging from rock to jazz to comedy to What the Hell? Now, it’s just an NPR feed.

      I miss the attitude that generated WTH shows. “Music to read Science Fiction by” was a shining example.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Here in Boston area WERS (Emerson College Radio, https://wers.org/ ) used to have all sorts of cool programming. Weekends included 3 hours of A Capella and 4 Hours (2 Saturday, 2 Sunday) of Broadway stuff. Haven’t listened lately may still be there. They did interject their own whiney news programming from time to time. Looks Like Broadway (Standing Room Only) expanded to eat the a capella. Disadvantage is here on the northshore they are hard to pick up as they are a pretty low power station at 88.9 FM.

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  18. Reminder that every time that Obama and Hillary denounce people getting fired for cheering Charlie Kirk’s murder, or the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel, that they had someone arrested for making a video so that they could avoid the fallout from their Benghazi perfidy. Both of them just need to shut the f*%k up already.

    Liked by 4 people

    2. The Obamas also interceded with Disney to get Roseanne Barr fired after the latter made some comments based on incorrectly thinking that Valerie Jarret is Iranian (she was born there, but to American parents).

      Liked by 2 people

    3. And if anybody missed (the above ‘bad actors’ tried to make this very easy), or needs a refresher on, their Benghazi perfidy (which was both very large and very personal), one good book and movie about all that was/is “Thirteen Hours” — though be prepared to be horrified and/or enraged.

      Some people (incl. the Ambassador) ended up dead; others experienced life-altering levels of, ah, perfidy.

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  19. Pingback: Instapundit » Blog Archive » A CONCEPT NEEDED TO UNDERSTAND WHAT THE LEFT IS DOING RIGHT NOW:  The Strategic Dinosaur.

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