lulz: Vox Lays Off 72 "People"

Or whatever they are.

Vox Media laid off about 6% of its staff on Thursday, citing the pandemic's impact on revenue across the media industry.

The digital media company, which owns a namesake news site as well as The Verge, Eater and the popular biweekly New York Magazine, employs about 1,200 people. This means the layoffs amount to 72 employees. The majority of these employees were already furloughed in April at the height of the US' coronavirus pandemic. Vox Media implemented three-month furloughs for about 100 people to cut costs as advertising revenue across the media industry took a nosedive.
But it turns out the furloughs were not enough, Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff said in a staff memo, obtained by CNN Business.

Among those leaving Vox -- specifically, leaving New York Magazine -- is Andrew Sullivan, who says his departure is part of a political purge.

What has happened, I think, is relatively simple: A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me, and, in a time of ever tightening budgets, I'm a luxury item they don't want to afford. And that's entirely their prerogative. They seem to believe, and this is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same virtual space. Actually attacking, and even mocking, critical theory's ideas and methods, as I have done continually in this space, is therefore out of sync with the values of Vox Media. That, to the best of my understanding, is why I'm out of here.

Two years ago, I wrote that we all live on campus now. That is an understatement. In academia, a tiny fraction of professors and administrators have not yet bent the knee to the woke program -- and those few left are being purged. The latest study of Harvard University faculty, for example, finds that only 1.46 percent call themselves conservative. But that'; probably higher than the proportion of journalists who call themselves conservative at the New York Times or CNN or New York Magazine. And maybe it's worth pointing out that "conservative" in my case means that I have passionately opposed Donald J. Trump and pioneered marriage equality, that I support legalized drugs, criminal-justice reform, more redistribution of wealth, aggressive action against climate change, police reform, a realist foreign policy, and laws to protect transgender people from discrimination. I was one of the first journalists in established media to come out. I was a major and early supporter of Barack Obama. I intend to vote for Biden in November.

It seems to me that if this conservatism is so foul that many of my peers are embarrassed to be working at the same magazine, then I have no idea what version of conservatism could ever be tolerated. And that's fine. We have freedom of association in this country, and if the mainstream media want to cut ties with even moderate anti-Trump conservatives, because they won't bend the knee to critical theory's version of reality, that's their prerogative. It may even win them more readers, at least temporarily. But this is less of a systemic problem than in the past, because the web has massively eroded the power of gatekeepers to suppress and control speech.

I don't understand this claim by neoliberals such as Andrew Sullivan and various Corporate Kept Women at National Review that it's only fair that corporations should have the right to free association because "we" all have the right to free association.

Do we? Am I permitted to not associate with homosexuals, if that's my choice?

Or do I only have this "right" in a very limited way, and only if I spend hundreds of thousands of dollars vindicating this "right" in court, and only to the extent my desire to not associate with some people is based on some pre-existing religious belief?

It seems to me the latter -- Masterpiece bakery is still being forced to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to not serve a Satanist cake to a transexual Satanist.

Is that really "freedom of association"? Is it a "freedom" when you are periodically forced to pay millions of dollars to keep your "freedom"?

How many other people out there are willing to pay millions of dollars for a supposed "right" to free expression and free association?

Meanwhile, corporations really are permitted to discriminate against conservatives -- even "conservatives" like Milky Loads over here -- without having to pay a nickel.

I'm just curious -- maybe the National Review types who always claim "Corporations have rights of free expression and association, the same as citizens have" can point out to me where I actually do have anything like the actual rights that corporations have?

Or -- if they admit that conservative (human being) citizens do not have the same untrammeled rights to discriminate that corporations do, can they show me where these Paid Whore Media Shills are fighting to give such rights back to the citizens?

Or would it be more accurate to say that the Corporate Shills such as National Review fight against citizens' right to actual freedoms of expression and association, while fighting tooth-and-nail for their corporate patrons' right to discriminate against conservatives?

I literally never see articles in National Review arguing in favor of a broad citizen right to discriminate in his free associations. I only see that with respect to corporations. What I do see from National Review and various other Conservative, Inc. corporate grifter outfits is bullying from the left against any conservative who also wants to assert rights to free expression and free association, even where that results in discrimination.

Why is that corporations, including monopoly corporations, are permitted to discriminate and effectively deny all public participation to citizens, while citizens are not permitted the same right on even a micro level, affecting a handful of people at most?

I'm pretty sure this mostly comes down to money-- National Review writers have their salaries paid by corporatists, and National Review writers feel the biases and bigotries of the Monied Classes are, well, classier than the biases and bigotries of the less tony conservatives who are merely reading their plutocrat propaganda.

More:

36 It's not just money, it's also the old One Way Ratchet. Discriminating AGAINST people with even nominally conservative views is always allowed; discriminating against even the most radical far left views is NEVER allowed.

Posted by: Tom Servo

The "One Way Ratchet" theory is a leftwing, Marxist notion that the Constitution only permits discrimination to go in a single direction, that is, in favor of the leftist coalition and against the right-leaning coalition.

I agree the One Way Ratchet theory is in play.

But I need it explained why allegedly "conservative" media are so eager to push the leftist, Marxist One-Way Ratchet theory, wherein conservatives must accept that they can never negatively discriminate against anyone, but must simultaneously support everyone's negative discrimination against themselves.

That's an awfully strange position for "conservative" media to take, isn't it?

Unless, of course, they're just being paid to take this anti-conservative position. Then it makes perfect sense.

I understand why the Left would push the idea of a New Jim Crow that makes conservatives the only group in America it's socially acceptable -- socially virtuous, in fact -- to discriminate against.

Why are our "conservative" media c*cks pushing the exact same agenda?

posted by Ace at 03:43 PM

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