In 1979, the Dead Kennedys released their first single, the satirical “California Über Alles,” a pointed jab at then-California-governor Jerry Brown, whom the song depicted as a “Zen Fascist” who would soon be sending the “the suede/denim secret police” to arrest “your uncool niece.”
Then Ronald Reagan was elected president and the Dead Kennedys released a new version of the song, this time with Reagan, not Brown, as the focus. The new title: “We’ve Got a Bigger Problem Now.”
Today is the start of the fourth quarter 2016 We Hunted the Mammoth pledge drive. It might as well be called the We’ve Got a Bigger Problem Now pledge drive, with our particular Bigger Problem even bigger than the one the most vulnerable citizens in the US faced in 1980.
I will do all I can to fight back against Trump and Trumpism, tracking and mocking his supporters on the racist right, providing useful resource packs for anti-Trump activists and more weird propaganda posters for these weird times. And I will continue to write about the oddball misogynists that have been the central focus of this blog since I started it six years ago. In these dire times, this blog needs to do more than it ever has before.
But I can’t do it without your help.
Your support has never been more important to We Hunted the Mammoth as it is today. Please give what you can by clicking the “donate” button below!
Donating, as always. is easy. You don’t need a PayPal account; credit cards are accepted, and there are other options as well. If you’re outside the US, PayPal will automatically convert your non-American money into American bucks.You can also set up recurring payments through PayPal if that’s more convenient to you.
If you have a Trump-supporting relative you’d like to send a message to, consider donating to WHTM in their honor. It’s the perfect stocking stuffer!
Donald Trump’s electoral college victory was not just a victory for him: it was a victory for the right-wing media outlets (Breitbart being the most important one) that encouraged and energized his most fervent (and most hateful) fans. It was a symbiotic relationship — Breitbart helped Trump as much as Trump helped Breitbart.
But it wasn’t Trump that made Breitbart what it is.
It was money. More specifically, it was the $10 million cash infusion, from two unnamed investors, that the wannabe new-media powerhouse took in in 2011. As Matthew Phelan notes in Jacobin,
These investments kept Breitbart News above water for years, operating like an even more opaque version of the dark-money patronage system that propped up its nonprofit allies.
It’s damn near impossible for political publications — of any political persuasion, online or off — to support themselves through subscriptions or ad revenue alone; most rely heavily on donations for their survival. We Hunted the Mammoth is no exception.
Unlike Andrew Breitbart and his successors at the website that bears his name, I don’t know any tech billionaires with five or ten million dollars to spare.
So every penny you donate is crucial.
I don’t need millions for fancy offices or publicity campaigns. I do my work on a temperamental laptop sitting on my living room couch, relying on Facebook and Twitter to publicize my posts. My staff consists of two decidedly unhelpful cats. I’m just hoping to scrape together a living wage from ads and donations so that I can keep this blog going at this crucial time.
Small donations are welcome, as are big ones. I appreciate them all!
Thanks to those who donate during pledge drives. Thanks to those who donate between pledge drives. And thanks to those who donate every month!
If you can’t afford to donate and would like to help this blog in other ways — or if you’re a donor looking to help more — there are many other ways to help that won’t cost you a cent.
Many of you already contribute to this blog in non-monetary ways, from posting smart and funny comments, designing graphics, alerting me to trolls in the comments, and many other things that help make the WHTM community vibrant (and my posts more interesting). I appreciate all the help you all give!
Here are a few other things that will help this blog a lot without costing you anything.
Publicizing the blog, by sharing posts on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and other social media sites. When a post of mine goes viral, traffic here explodes, and many of the new readers stick around.
If we want to counter the effects of media outlets like Breitbart and the assorted “fake news” outlets that swayed the election in Trump’s favor, we need to reach a much bigger audience. Your Facebook shares and Twitter retweets (and Reddit posts, and so on and so on) can help WHTM reach many more people.
Sending me tips. I would like to increase the number of posts I put up every day. But tracking down stories takes time. If you see something — a blog post, a Tweet, a weird Reddit thread — that looks like possible WHTM material, send me an email at dfutrelle at gmail.com.
Turning off Ad Block! The ads, as annoying as they can sometimes be, are necessary to keep the blog going. Other media sites have been turning to annoying popups urging readers to turn off ad blockers; I don’t want to have to resort to that.
If you really can’t stand the ads and must use a blocker, please donate to make up for the loss in ad revenue. (And hey, if you’re donating money to WHTM on a regular basis, consider that a subscription to the blog and go ahead and turn off the ads if you want.)
Also, if you see a sketchy ad here, send me an email about it, including some of the text from the ad (as that makes it possible for me to block it in the future).
Buying stuff on Amazon using my affiliate link, which gives me a little kickback without adding a cent to what you’re paying. (If you don’t see the Amazon affiliate links in the sidebar, that’s because you’ve got an adblocker turned on!)
Thanks again, big thanks, to everyone who supports this blog — in whatever way you support it.
@David
Something I’ve wondered about for a while – does it make any difference to your ad revenue if I click on one?
I’m also a bit skint right now, but would happily do a Patreon arrangement and, once my pay check comes in next week, I’ll send a few dollars your way.
Thank you for your hard work!
I don’t have much to add to what Scild already said. With laptops, installing an SSD in place of your HDD is going to be your biggest performance bang for your buck. If you have available slots and can afford it, adding some RAM might help, but it’s less likely to make a big difference, especially since you’re just loading web pages. I assume you’ve got a good browser like Chrome or Firefox, but in the off chance you’re using IE, dropping that for another browser will likely increase your performance significantly. IE is terrible at handling a lot of the new Javascript frameworks out there. And everything else, really.
Oh! Spin speed! That’s a huge thing for hard drives. Standard desktop drives are 7200 RPM and top out at 10,000 RPM. Laptop drives usually ship at 5400 RPM. There’s an enormous access speed difference. That’s also one of the first things that the manufacturer will cheap out on – few people look for spin speed on the drive, so they’ll usually default back to the old 5400. Frankly, if you can get a HDD that’s exactly the same as yours, but at 7200 RPM, you’d probably see a huge boost in performance.
Everything Kupo said is right too!
@Scildfreja and @kupo: thank you for your knowledge! Something I will look at, next time I’m looking to buy a laptop.
David:
No, but you can sign up for an Amazon.co.uk Associates account here: https://affiliate-program.amazon.co.uk/
It works the same as the .com side, but the payment methods will be different, and it will be a separate store ID, so you’d have to offer up two versions of whatever Amazon link you have now.
Also, Amazon.com Associates have CPM Ads that you may be able to use. If you want to participate in that program then reach out to customer service at the following link:
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/home/contact
You can passback to one of your other ad networks if Amazon can’t deliver an ad.
What a coincidence, I get paid tomorrow. Once I do all the necessary (and not necessary) shopping, I’ll see about kicking a few bucks your way. It won’t be much, but it’ll be something.
And if and when you get that Patreon up, I’ll be sure to be one of its supporters!
(Srsly, get that shit up yo.)
I will donate right now. 😀
I’ve just donated 😀
(sorry about the extra bracket at the end of my name in my last comment. I’ve only just noticed it. ^^; )
Thanks to everyone who has donated since I posted last!
And thanks Scildfreja and kupo!
From what you’re saying, it sounds like my problem is with the hard drive. I got a big one (1 TB) not realizing that I would pay for this in quality/performance. I’m a bit wary about making changes to this machine, but on the next go-around I will definitely opt for a smaller/better drive or a solid state one. I hate giving up the storage space but I can always offload stuff onto external hard drives, which I do already.
Any suggestions for good places to buy custom laptops with good-quality hardware? (I’ll be sticking to windows; a lot of the apps I’m interested in don’t have linux versions or good alternatives.)
I’ll also check out Baidu Antivirus and ccleaner.
throwaway, I didn’t realize I could do the amazon affiliate thing on the uk site too; I’ll look into it. Thanks!
Lucrece, yes, it does make a difference if you click on the ads! (In moderation; if you click on too many the ad networks consider that cheating.)
Got it! In that case, although I usually wouldn’t, I’ll check out the odd one or two that sound interesting – you never know!
Before you click an ad, consider that then your browser will be stuffed with that particular ad for some time.
@David
A custom laptop is usually way more high end than what I’m looking for since I have a desktop PC I use for any CPU-intensive tasks (like gaming) and my laptop is mainly for travelling and was my primary school computer while I was still in college.
If I can, I usually wait until the after Christmas sales to buy a laptop. I’ve found those to be the best deal of the year when it comes to electronics. I usually price around at Fry’s, Best Buy, Office Max, and Office Depot. I’ll also check some websites like newegg or tiger direct (never get an open box deal from either of them). I usually end up finding the best deal at Office Depot.
@David: Also consider the .ca amazon site? Shipping from the states is always a looot, and i stress over the custom charges at the border.
Here is (I think?) the link.
Just clicked an ad, and I’ll see about sending a few bucks down the line. Good job and good luck 🙂
Heh! You know the shit has hit the fan when those tracks make you nostalgic!.
Hard drive is almost certainly a bottleneck, if not the bottleneck. I understand not wanting to tinker with your HDD for fear of losing it all, but if you do want to do the swap at some point, take it to your local computermart along with all the disks and stuff and ask them to do it for you. Should only take a half hour if the place you go is reasonable.
When you upgrade, you’re gonna have a difficult time getting a good drive – Laptops are notorious for using in the lowest quality hardware they can get away with. It’s likely that you’ll either have to spend over a thousand, or will have to get them to swap the drive out same-day. My suggestions:
Scildfreja’s Big List of Things
– Buy a business-grade Lenovo. They aren’t super pricey and a no-frills, but they tend to use higher quality stuff in their machines. Alternatively, some of the Asus stuff is good. I buy Asus for most of my hardware. If you have the money, the MSI gaming laptops are great.
– Mid-tier gaming laptops are actually a great choice for a work computer. Good sized screen and excellent cooling systems are the norm. Don’t buy an i5, go for an i7 – if you have a bunch of browser tabs open at once you’re actually using the processor a lot, and the laptop tier i5’s are sort of meh. (frankly, laptop processors in general are meh.) My work laptop’s an MSI. It can choke if I’m building a great big neural network with my twenty tabs of Chrome in the background, but otherwise it’s rock solid.
– Don’t buy a slim laptop. They basically can’t have their hardware changed at all, and have major heat issues that will cause slowdowns, faulting, and shorten the life of the machine.
– Avoid the big box stores if you can, their staff generally don’t know more than what’s on the labels of the stuff they’re selling. Smaller computer stores will get you a lot more knowledge, and to be honest you will be paying around the same anyways.
– Sales are for suckers – they use them to offload the cheap parts you’re trying to avoid. Be prepared to pay normal price. I used to work at a computer store for a little while, and honestly, the computer store probably isn’t making much of a margin at all on that laptop.
– Custom laptops aren’t really a thing unless you’re spending a bunch of money. If you’re at one of the smaller computer shops, or computer repair shops, though? Ask them if they’d swap out the HDD for something with a faster spin speed or larger cache. It means you have to buy a second hard drive, but then you ask them to get an external case for the HDD in the machine currently, and voila, you now have a 1TB external drive for less than it’d cost you to buy one whole. At the same time you could ask for more memory, but to be honest, if you have 8TB in there, that’s plenty.
– If you have to go to a box store, be sure to specifically ask for a 7200 RPM drive in the machine, or higher (next step up is 10k, which is the data-centre grade). Also ask what the cache size of the drive is – 32 is your bare minimum on that. If they don’t know, ask them to look it up for you.
– If they offer an SSD, or if you want one, you’re going to want a 256GB drive, and you’ll want the old HDD in an external case for storage. The Kingston brand drives have had quality issues in the past, but are okay now. Samsung is probably the fastest and most reliable. Corsair is good too. Do not set your SSDs up in RAID.
– This said, you don’t need an SSD. Your laptop’s motherboard is likely gonna choke on the amount of data a SSD can feed it anyways, so don’t feel like you’re missing out on magic if you get a regular HDD instead. A good HDD with a large cache is practically a solid state drive with a disc storage medium riding behind it. (That’s actually a good way to look at a HDD these days. If you have a 64GB cache on your 1TB drive, then you have a 64GB solid state drive which feeds off of a terabyte worth of disc.)
– Buy a laptop cooling pad if you don’t have one already. Your machine will thank you. Absolutely vital, and should come with every machine.
I own a mid-tier MSI gaming laptop which lives permanently on a big cooling pad; it came with a terrible 5400 RPM drive and I upgraded it to a 256GB Samsung SSD. Started with 8TB of RAM, upgraded to 16. It happily runs multiple virtual machines on Windows 10. Including the upgrades, I’ve spent around $1500 Canadian on it. You don’t need anything so beefy, but if you aim for $1000 you’ll get a good machine that should last you several years.
Happy laptoping!
Hi. I just donated. Thanks for all the work you do David.
I always keep the ads unblocked, and would be interested in a patreon as well 🙂
Thanks to everyone else who’s donated since I last stopped by this thread!
And thanks kupo and Scildfreja for the laptop advice.
I’ll look into the canadian amazon affiliate stuff as well.
Speaking of Canada, are any of you Canadians having trouble donating through paypal? One would-be donor tells me the site won’t let her select her province. Any of you run into this?