Posts Tagged ‘Deadspin’

Spin Dead

Monday, March 11th, 2024

Deadspin is dead. Again.

Sports news and commentary Deadspin has been sold again — and its entire staff has been laid off.

Let me use the meme that every single person talking about this story has used:

Deadspin, once owned by Gawker Media, became part of private-equity backed G/O Media in 2019. In a memo to company staff Monday, G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller announced that Deadspin was sold to European firm Lineup Publishing.

You can take the Deadspin out of Gawker, but you can’t take the Gawker out of Deadspin.

With the sale, the 11-person staff of Deadspin was pink-slipped. “Deadspin’s new owners have made the decision to not carry over any of the site’s existing staff and instead build a new team more in line with their editorial vision for the brand,” Spanfeller wrote in the memo. “While the new owners plan to be reverential to Deadpin’s [sic] unique voice, they plan to take a different content approach regarding the site’s overall sports coverage. This unfortunately means that we will be parting ways with those impacted staff members, who were notified earlier today.”

For those unfamiliar with it (which, judging from its serial failures to produce a profit, is the majority of Internet sports fans), Deadspin was a site that believed the biggest problem with sports reporting was not enough poisonous, radical left-wing social justice got injected into it. As far as I can tell, their biggest claim to fame was getting pwned by Ted Cruz on Twitter. Nor did then editor Tim Marchman follow up to boasts of willing to fight in an octogon when real MMA fighters chimed in their willingness to do so.

Deadspin was trash, and the people writing for it were trash, and it underlies yet again just few online reporting venues of long-lasting value the dotcom boom produced.

So what garbage leftwing site will be next to bite the dust without ever having turned a profit? Salon? Kotaku? Maybe we should have an online media deadpool…

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Posted in Crime, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court | 11 Comments »

LinkSwarm for November 1, 2019

Friday, November 1st, 2019

Happy Day of the Dead!

Is it time to decouple from China?

“Stealth War: How China Took Over While America’s Elites Slept,” a new book by U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert Spalding (Ret.), confirms this assessment. Spalding served as the chief China strategist for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as senior U.S. Defense official and defense attaché to China in Beijing, and later in the Trump National Security Council (NSC), where he was the chief architect of the NSS’s framework for national competition.

According to Spalding, even organizations that would seem to have a vested interest in exposing China’s malign behavior remain mum. Spalding writes that upon his arrival at NSC:

I made it a personal mission to meet with many leading think tanks, nongovernmental organizations, and law, auditing, and public relations firms that dealt with China. I was eager to seek their help in exposing the Beijing government’s influencing operations and sanctioning of illegal behavior. Additionally, I hoped they would help me explore policy options to counter China’s economic malfeasance.

Time after time, I was rebuffed.

People at these organizations would talk with me, and many of them even said they agreed with my concerns, but they claimed they couldn’t help. Doing so, some of the more forthright people said, might anger their Chinese funders or business accounts. The list of organizations that refused to engage with me publicly in my official capacity was stunning. Top white-shoe New York law firms. Organizations with mandates to promote democracy, freedom, and human rights would refuse to support my mission.

…They were, in essence, being manipulated by a foreign power that is America’s greatest enemy.

The willingness of American organizations to remain silent about Chinese Communist tyranny can be seen against a correlative backdrop of our burgeoning cancel culture, the censorship of Big Tech, and general decline of devotion to First Amendment principles alongside the Long March of political correctness through our institutions.

China is not the cause of the general erosion of American fidelity to free speech, but it is a contributor and one of its chief beneficiaries. As China poses arguably the greatest threat of any foreign actor to our liberties of all, the corruption resulting from our commercial ties is particularly acute.

  • Does the fact that Xi Jinping sent his daughter back to Harvard at age 27 indicate that his position is weaker than we think?

    For President Xi to start a dynasty, his only daughter has to get married. At 27, she is of the age when she should get married. But it can’t be to someone of peasant stock. It has to be to one of China’s princelings — or “Revolutionary Successors,” as they prefer to be known. President Xi has stressed the need for “red genes” in China’s rulers. The problem is that all the princelings are all already very wealthy, so marrying into the Xi family wealth would be of no consequence. China’s princesses do well, too. The Huawei executive arrested in Canada, Meng Wanzhou, has a stepsister, Annabel Yeo, who had her debut into high society at Le Bal des Débutantes in Paris in November 2018.

    For a princeling, if you married Xi’s daughter, you would become consort to the empress, but there would be a downside: you would be killed in any palace coup.

    If Xi Mingze is at Harvard, that suggests that the project to get her married off has had pushback and that President Xi isn’t having things going all his way. Another problem with Xi establishing a dynasty is that all the other families living in the gated community in Beijing for China’s elite, Zhongnanhai, would become less than equal, something that would stick in their craw more than the president-for-life thing.

    The communist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe lasted about 70 years before they burned out, and it has been wondered if the 70-year rule will also apply to China. The communist party in China recently celebrated 70 years since its founding, and it looks as if burnout is happening on cue. The princelings are jealous of the fortunes made by China’s entrepreneurial class and have started to take their fortunes from them, starting with the likes of Jack Ma, who had founded Alibaba. Another Chinese billionaire, Miles Kwok, has predicted that Jack Ma will be either in prison or dead within a year. Once started, expropriation will work its way down through the economy, and it will be a profound productivity-killer.

    A lot of China’s managerial class now has at least part of its fortune offshore and has sent its children, often only one child, to foreign universities. Some of those children have been told, “Never come back to China.”

    Xi Mingze at Harvard means that a coup is possible in China.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Failure analysis for SanFrancisco’s new $2.2 billion transit station:

    Built at a cost of $2.2 billion, the Salesforce Transit Center and Park formed the cornerstone of the Bay Area’s ambitious regional transportation plan: a vast, clean, efficient web of trains, buses, and streetcars, running through a hub acclaimed as the Grand Central Station of the West.

    Snip.

    Earlier that day, workers installing panels in the STC’s ceiling beneath the rooftop park un­covered a jagged crack in a steel beam supporting the park and bus deck. “Out of an abundance of caution,” officials said, they closed the transit center, rerouting buses to a temporary terminal. Inspectors were summoned. They found a similar fracture in a second beam.

    Structural steel is exceptionally strong, but given certain conditions—low temperatures, defects incurred during fabrication, heavy-load stress—it remains vulnerable to cracking. Two types of cracks occur in steel: ductile fractures, which occur after the steel has yielded and deformed, and brittle fractures, which generally happen before the steel yields. Ductile fractures develop over time, as the steel stretches during use, explains Michael Engelhardt, Ph.D., a professor of civil engineering at the University of Texas at Austin and chair of the peer-​review committee overseeing the STC’s response to the cracked-beam crisis.

    Engineers can predict ductile fracture and make adjustments during design, such as redistributing the load among various parts of the structure,” Engelhardt says. “Brittle fractures, by contrast, happen suddenly and release a great deal of energy. They’re concerning. They aren’t supposed to happen.”

  • 350,000 protest for Catalonian independence from Spain in Barcelona. This follows nine separatist activists being sentenced for sedition.
  • And the Spanish government got GitHub (now owned by Microsoft) to block access to an app protestors were using to organize. This is yet another reason you should always have an on-premise repository backup…
  • Recently retired top UK climate scientists says that NASA has monkied with historical weather data. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • Is the F-35 actually a success story? I’m a little less rah-rah than Dunn, because I believe the age of the manned fighter is drawing to a close.
  • Violence is the answer. Doesn’t matter what the question is…
  • Deadspin/Kotaku staffers told to stick to sports/gaming. Result: they quit. Giving me a chance to use this for the second time in a week:

    Also this:

  • President Trump sings “God Bless America” with wounded vet. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Should have included this in yesterday’s roundup:

  • The 50th anniversary of the first information transmitted across the nascent Internet.
  • Austin ISD “Rolls Out Transgender Education for 8-Year-Olds.” (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • “Texas luring jobs away from California with promises of electricity.”
  • East Austin bar transforms into Moe’s Tavern for Halloween. (Hat tip: IowaHawk.)
  • Heh:

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    Posted in Austin, Communism, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Jihad, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | No Comments »

    Ted Cruz/Deadspin Follow-Up

    Thursday, January 26th, 2017

    After Ted Cruz pwned Deadspin, the rag’s previously quiescent editor Tim Marchman inexplicably started talking smack.

    Keep in mind that Marchman had not exactly been an active tweeter before:

    But this did not deter him:

    This was odd for a number of reason, not least of which is that after you’ve been brutally pwned, it’s best to not draw attention to how badly you’ve been pwned. If you’re Marvis Frazier, and Mike Tyson has just put you down for the count 30 seconds after the opening bell, the last thing you should do is start bragging about what a badass you are.

    But that’s precisely what Marchman did:

    Like his minion’s original Cruz tweets, it appears that Marchman did not think his cunning scheme all the way through:

    Tim Kennedy is a retired professional MMA fighter out of Austin whose record was 24-18.

    Strangely, since then Marchman’s Twitter feed has gone silent again…

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    Posted in Media Watch, Republicans | 3 Comments »

    Ted Cruz Makes Deadspin His Bitch

    Tuesday, January 24th, 2017

    Upon finding out that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz started a regular senate basketball game, Deadspin asked for pictures of Cruz playing. Cruz himself posted a reply:

    Heh. I’m pretty sure that’s Duke freshman Grayson Allen, who does indeed look a little bit like Cruz.

    Instead of laughing it off (“Nice try!” would have been a good response), Deadspin decided on a response that was…disproportionate.

    That just goes to show: You can take Deadspin out of Gawker, but you can’t take the Gawker out of Deadspin.

    (As for those who object to this post’s title: I thought it was important to pitch it at an intellectual and emotional maturity level that Deadspin staffers were sure to understand…)

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    Posted in Media Watch, Republicans, Texas | 5 Comments »