You know this feeling when you are so embarrassed for people that you curl your toes in vicarious shame? This post on Shakesville did it for me today. I understand that everybody wants to feel important but there’s a line that separates this normal human vanity from complete and utter delusion.
26 responses to “Important”
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Well, I actually kinda agree with her…except the part about being personal scared by this.
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That’s the part I’m referring to. And the “immigrant husband”? He is from the UK. Trump is definitely not after British folks.
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Yes, Trump reads Shakesville every morning, right after he finishes watching Fox and Friends. McEwan and her pets will disappear into the night any moment now, and never be heard of again. Her husband, being an immigrant , will be fortunate enough just to be deported back to the Brexit-doomed UK.
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The saddest thing is when people start to believe the rhetorical devices they themselves invented.
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If the calendar on the wall read “1975” instead of “2018,” McEwan might disappear into the nearest state hospital for a prolonged involuntary psychiatric evaluation, after her husband or some other family member had gotten tired of putting up with her, and convinced the family doctor and a local judge to sign the necessary paperwork.
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Posted this comment elsewhere, but maybe it’s more visible here.
Don’t care much for the theme. The comments are not as compact as before, so it takes a lot of scrolling to get through a post with even a small number of comments. Responses to comments are also not too indented, making it harder to follow a comment thread.
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It also makes the ads way more prominent — it is almost hard to find text of post.
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“It also makes the ads way more prominent — it is almost hard to find text of post.”
That’s what free app programs like “Ad-Blocker” are for.
I started using the totally free “Ad-Blocker” app a couple months ago to make it reasonably possible to get through ad-infested nightmare sites like Salon.com. Thanks to that app, Clarissa’s old format only showed one major ad (just below the top posting ) on its homepage.
Clarissa’s terrific new format, combined with the original “Ad-Blocker” program, doesn’t show ANY ads on Clarissa’s pages at all.
Only a Luddite would want to go back to Clarissa’s old format. With her new layout, the text is bright and clear, the comments are as compact as in a modern word processor, and anybody who can’t see the obvious indention for the secondary replies needs to accept that fact that he/she has reached the age when it’s time to invest in a pair of dime-store reading classes.
KEEP IT!! Or admit that so-called “progressives” on Clarissa’s Blog are more afraid of updated technology than an elderly conservative like me!
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I don’t mind the format but I would hardly call this “cutting edge”. I think it’s a bit of a “vintage” look actually–made to look like printed paper. My biggest complaint is that, as Stringer Bell pointed out, the comment indentation is is very subtle on a computer screen and nonexistent on my phone. So it’s a bit harder to follow nested comments. But, having said that, I do think a change is nice. It refreshes the entire experience of reading the blog somehow.
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It was time for a change. It was probably not a good idea to start doing it in April when there’s so much to do at work and I’m constantly interrupted. I need an hour to sit down and play with all the settings and widgets. But it will have to wait because now Klara has a stomach bug and was throwing up all night, and I got no sleep, etc. I apologize for the inconvenience.
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Only a Luddite would want to go back to Clarissa’s old format. With her new layout, the text is bright and clear, the comments are as compact as in a modern word processor, and anybody who can’t see the obvious indention for the secondary replies needs to accept that fact that he/she has reached the age when it’s time to invest in a pair of dime-store reading classes.
This is simply false. I am nearly 74 years old. I often have difficulty reading low contrast text. But the new format/theme/whatever one calls it, is too high contrast; the bright white background is actually painful to my eyes.
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I’m still seeing issues with my ISP claiming it can’t find the site if I type the URL in the address bar. It redirects to a DNS error site which suggests websites and from there I can get to the site. I use Opera.
If I try the site from my phone, (Chrome) I don’t have problems but I see the old format, not the new one.
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I agree completely regarding the Shakesville comment. She actually pointed to a truly troubling development. But this development won’t affect her at all. She writes a little blog with a relatively small following. She’s not a cutting edge journalist bravely sacrificing her financial security to post “the truth” (and even if she were, that would still be an embarrassing statement to make). I agree with Melissa McEwan politically and I do learn about interesting news stories from her blog. But her insistence on her own precarity and the insane way she runs that blog (along with ridiculous statements like “men can have abortions too”) make me shudder.
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She is a talented person, which is why I keep reading. I have a weakness for talented writing. But yeah. . . everything you said.
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“But this development won’t affect her at all.”
I know that she’s worked with the Obama White House regarding message coordination for various government initiatives (not 100% sure of this), and for his reelection campaign (100% sure of this). If ‘internet grassroots’ blogs like hers — along with bigger ones like DailyKos — have been deemed influential enough by the white house press office, I don’t think she’s completely insane to feel troubled by this development.
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The ‘immigrant husband’ bit cracked me up, though. Anglos don’t identify themselves as immigrants no matter where they go. They’re ‘expats’.
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Some people are immigrants when it’s convenient. Plus, let’s be honest, Trump had nothing against white immigrants. So we are not in any danger. I don’t like it when people claim the suffering that is not theirs. The people who are getting hassled by ICE in the streets, even when they are completely legal and even citizens are all non-white.
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Well, when you write it like that, it makes sense. And if she had written that, I wouldn’t even roll my eyes. I actually did not know she had a roll in the Obama re-election campaign. I also truly think this move by the Trump administration is appalling.
But to call it “frightening to do [her] job” is silly. (And in my view she has a hobby–not a job). But even if she had just ended it with that statement, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But the false heroics of her final sentence were so ridiculous– especially that italicized “anyway”.
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Okay, I’ve had my TV running in the background all day, and I just realized what’s freaking out McEwan: She’s watching the “Sundance” channel’s current marathon showing of the old 1990s “X-Files” television series.
You won’t believe how utterly evil, cunning, all-knowing, and all-powerful the U.S. government is. In the episode that just finished, the FBI agent hero has discovered that during WWII the U.S. government ran sadistic Nazi-level experiments on human subjects. So the government has assassinated the agent’s father, tried to drive the agent crazy by pumping vaporized LSD into his apartment’s central air system, kidnapped a young Native American boy who helped the agent, and … well, this episode was part 1 of 3, so the situation probably gets much worse.
No wonder McEwan is terrified!
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I’m sure it does get much worse. 🙂 And it’s true that only communicating with a small bunch of fanatical supporters online does warp one’s brain making one exaggerate one’s importance in the world.
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Another reason to keep your new, bold website style! 🙂 Unlike your old, outdated style, this puts smiley faces 🙂 where you want them in your sentences!
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Really? That’s good news. I was always horrified the few times I saw what it did with my smileys.
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” only communicating with a small bunch of fanatical supporters online”
Not to mention pre-emptively prohibiting any disagreement. I got banned for mentioning an objective fact in the comments (the person identified as the lead assailant in the Rolling Stone rape-porn-story did not in fact exist).
This got labelled ‘rape culture’.Also a time or two regular readers raised small issues with her which provoked really nasty repsonses, the queen bee does not share her honey….
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After the death of Feministe, hers is truly the most boring discussion section online. How people can bear saying the same thing in 100 different voices is a mystery. It sounds like a religious cult and the comments like a ritualized part of religious service.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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