The New York Times Falls For 50-Year-Old Soviet Virtue Signaling

The old Soviet Union was big on public virtue signaling, being as they had a lot of real crimes to ignore or whitewash. A few days ago, the aptly-named Sophie Pinkham reminded us why Walter Duranty was so easily able to hoodwink the New York Times, and get a Pulitzer besides, with a profoundly dumb piece about Soviet women in space. Aside from @hollymathnerd wrecking this agitprop with actual facts, now comes Karol Markowicz rebutting this nonsense:

As the USSR retreats into the rearview mirror of history, there is a growing tendency to romanticize its disastrous reign through the lens of contemporary wokeness.

Sure, Communists tortured and executed dissidents, starved their own people by the millions and operated gulags — but have you heard about their amazing space feminism and space intersectionality?

The NYT in 2017 ran an editorial series in part rehabilitating the Soviets as part of a May Day commemoration, to which The Federalist published a blistering response by Robert Tracinski; you may find the links there. The commie apologists stuck around at the Gray Lady long after the Berlin Wall fell, and it shows.

Aziz Ansari And The Wild Ride Down At Babe.net

You will read few weirder things this week than this story at TheCut.com about the self-immolation of Babe.net in the wake of their Aziz Ansari story that went explosively viral. Excerpt (emboldening mine):

Every internet era gets the insurgent women’s site it deserves. Jezebel broke new ground with an article about a tampon stuck up a writer’s vagina; xoJane, a microgeneration later, outdid that with a cat hairball found in the same cavity. The Betches defended their right, as feminists (or not, who cares), to Brazilian-wax their vaginas, via sorority-girl screeds. Like the Betches, babe.net certainly wasn’t built to be feminist in any kind of traditional sense (after all, Murdoch was a funder and anarchic page-view-getting was the ethos). And yet babe.net was created during an era when to be a woman saying just about anything online was now, theoretically, classified as feminist. When I asked them about it, the site’s writers described theirs as “not the brand of feminism where we have to unconditionally support every woman no matter what she does. Because women can be problematic too.”

Unusually, the final quote in that graf shows a surprising amount of self-awareness in an era when the brand is, shall we say, a bit tarnished. Of course, no salacious story like this, one in which “28-year-olds managed 24-year-olds who managed 20-year-olds” and sloppy after-work drinks led to hookups led to professional and sexual jealousy, would have any ending other than

And so, a group of five staffers — including three writers who produced much of the site’s content — decided to organize their rage, which had boiled over, at last and all at once. They weren’t just mad about the after-work drunken sloppiness that had seeped into the professional groundwater. They were mad about a lot. They were mad about the whole power imbalance inherent to working for a website that translated their most intimate experiences and identities and beliefs into clicks. They were mad that their female managers didn’t better protect them. When Aburto was asked to star in a video series called Fight Me, she told her managers that the content they wanted her to produce forced her to perform as a caricature of a black woman. Her managers apologized and told her she didn’t have to, but the damage was done. Even now, some former Babe staffers talk about their grievances in the language of raw betrayal; they can’t quite express what was different about the site or the office environment, but the workplace had become, they all make clear, a catastrophe; $30,000-odd a year just wasn’t worth it.

This latter sum is really head-scratching: who signs up to live in famously expensive New York, even Brooklyn, at such a sum? Are these daughters of privilege churning out article after article of drunken sexual liaisons? But no, in the next sentence, we learn that one writer, the pseudonymous Chloe, “would have quit, but financially ... couldn’t”. The stillborn strike amounted to naught, and eventually the grand Facebook ad retooling claimed them. Somewhere, a screenplay beckons.

Women's Soccer Players Make Less Money Because They Draw Smaller Audiences

With the US Women’s soccer team doing well at their World Cup bid (and a fracas involving whether or not they want to meet Donald Trump, yick), comes now the accusation that because the women's team has better TV ratings than the lackluster men's team, they should (at least) get paid as much as the men. Eric Boehm has a good explainer on Reason about why this is as it is. For some things (such as per diem and other related travel expenses), there's little justification for gender imbalance:

The Wall Street Journal reports that the U.S. men's and women's teams have generated about the same amount of revenue from games played since 2015, although those totals account for only about half of U.S. Soccer's annual income. Yet, as Rosen again points out, the women's team continues to get shortchanged when it comes to the percentage of the federation's budget spent on "advertising and P.R., travel and training budgets, and…per diems for food."

Okay, but those aren't the big ticket item of salary (something Bill DeBlasio recently demanded be leveled):

Major League Soccer teams drew an average of 21,000 fans last year, while NWSL games drew about 6,000. The TV contract MLS has with ESPN and other broadcasters generates $90 million a year. While neither league discloses revenue figures, it's a safe bet MLS earns considerably more—and, thus, its players do too.

Sensibly, Megan Rapinoe has some advice for how to close that gap:

"Fans can come to games," Rapinoe said. "Obviously, the national team games will be a hot ticket, but we have nine teams in the NWSL. You can go to your league games, you can support that way. You can buy players' jerseys, you can lend support in that way, you can tell your friends about it, you can become season ticket-holders."

Given the terrible, bitter fans (at least that one!), and greater male interest in sports generally, this seems a tall order.

More Internet Troll Ad Campaigns

I’ve written previously about Paul Feig’s stupid marketing campaign for the Ghostbusters reboot, merging social justice nonsense with intentional efforts to annoy potential moviegoers. That effort bombed so badly that the film earned a $70 million loss, and resulted in Sony handing the keys to the franchise back to originator Ivan Reitman. (Subsequent coverage shows that there will be a new Ghostbusters franchise sequel made, with Jason Reitman at the helm, but with no ties to the Feig 2016 cast or plot lines.) The “get woke, go broke” mantra may be overdone, but it’s not entirely without some basis in fact.

This failure does not seem to have dissuaded would-be marketeers from following in Feig’s dubious footsteps, and so we have a couple new examples in late weeks:

• Disney has planned a live-action Little Mermaid reboot starring black actress Halle Bailey. The Washington Post ran a piece by Brooke Newman claiming there was some sort of backlash, based on the thinnest speculation. The only cite she gives is the hashtag #NotMyAriel, but the mentions there are exclusively virtue-signalers in favor of the casting.
• The latest Terminator franchise (they’re still making those?) has its own baffling anti-Internet-troll marketing blitz, because, wasn’t Sarah Connor supposed to be proof that a Kickass Female Character™️ can make box office bank without resorting to slagging on half their potential audience?

 Usually when an auteur starts a marketing campaign, it's for the widest possible audience. These seem aimed at only social justice warriors. Is this a recipe for success? It seems unlikely.

The Biological Girls Sue

Not that it is likely to find much of a friendly reception, but three Connecticut girls are filing suit against the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference. The complaint itself is a wonder, explaining in detail things that should not need explaining to any athletics body — but these days, the insane and the politically correct have overrun virtually every field. I wish the girls every bit of success, but fear they won’t get it.

The Bureaucracy Explosion In Medicine And Higher Education Is Killing Both

You can safely ignore virtually all of this New York Times editorial about medicine, save for one paragraph:

The health care system needs to be restructured to reflect the realities of patient care. From 1975 to 2010, the number of health care administrators increased 3,200 percent. There are now roughly 10 administrators for every doctor. If we converted even half of those salary lines to additional nurses and doctors, we might have enough clinical staff members to handle the work. Health care is about taking care of patients, not paperwork.

 This is the same problem besetting academia, with administrative staff growing at twice the rate of student populations. It is responsible for the staggering cost of both. And in both places, such bureaucrats must be laid off.

But who will do it?

CeCe Telfer The Latest M2F Transsexual To Whup College Women

Is there a dumber argument in favor of trans women competing against biological women than “doesn’t win every time”? Outsports seems determined to die on that hill, which is getting harder and harder for the heavily politicized trans lobby to justify to the broader public. Let’s Run has a good summary of the situation pre-transition:

Prior to joining the women’s team this season, Telfer was a mediocre DII athlete who never came close to making it to nationals in the men’s category. In 2016 and 2017, Telfer ranked 200th and 390th, respectively, among DII men in the 400 hurdles (Telfer didn’t run outdoor track in 2018 as either a man or woman). Now she’s the national champion in the event simply because she switched her gender (Telfer’s coach told us that even though she competed on the men’s team her first three years, her gender fluidity was present from her freshman year).

The fact that Telfer can change her gender and immediately become a national champion is proof positive as to why women’s sports needs protection. Telfer ran slightly faster in the 400 hurdles competing as a man (57.34) than as a woman (57.53), even though the men’s hurdles are six inches taller than the women’s hurdles. Yet when Telfer ran 57.34 as a man, she didn’t even score at her conference meet — she was just 10th at the Northeast-10 Outdoor Track and Field Championships in 2016. Now she’s the national champion.

The shabby, data-free arguments used to justify M2F trans inclusion in sports are unraveling before our eyes, in a sort of open-air experiment being performed before the whole public.