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.
Unfortunately, I might not be able to contribute this time around. I’m dealing with a nexus of minor paramedical bills, and a credit crunch as I re-finance myself to get out of debt.
If I can spare a few, I’ll send it your way.
Merry Christmas, David. Go buy yourself a pizza or something 😀
Also – how is your laptop? Do we need to get together and get you a new one?
Sweet Jesus it seems like you were asking for money the other week. Do you have a full time job? Or are you using this blog and donations to support yourself?
@Jim: Uh, this is his full time job…? I don’t understand your question? Also, did you read the post where he explained why he needed the money, and what it would be used for?
Dear Jim
Do you intend to donate?
If not, why this thread?
@Jim
There are 4 pledge drives/year. That’s why the blog post says “fourth quarter 2016 We Hunted the Mammoth pledge drive”.
Sweet Jesus, at least read the post before commenting.
@David
David, please please please please please let’s Patreon? I would definitely become a Patreon, but I can’t justify single sum donations at this point. I’m broke, but being a few dollars more broke/month won’t make much of a difference. Parting with a sum of money all at once hurts my imaginary wallet right now. :/
I still think it’s important once in a while to do threads on bigger topics once in a while as well in order to provide education as well as just updates.
Previously when I’ve witnessed discussions about IQ or institutional discrimination or the wage gap or how statistics work in general it’s been very insightful and I feel like the deeper topic shit adds a lot to just the coverage.
Jerry Brown is more properly Once-Again-California-Governor.
Can you put up a link for Amazon UK? I’ll happily use it.
Y’know, the first time I said that MRAs must live in black holes, it was a joke
that I stole from HBomberguy… And yet…Also:
http://i.imgur.com/SwUDPx4.jpg
David
I’m so sorry I can’t afford to give at the minute.
If I use the Amazon affiliate link on WHTM, then link through to the UK version, does that still generate revenue for you, or is it only sales on .com? I currently use an affiliate link with Easy Fundraising to generate donations for the Red Cross, but am happy to switch to you if you’ll feel the benefit. Not that I’m spending much at the mo (see above), but every little helps!
Thanks for all the crappy reading you do, so we don’t have to!
ETA I see requin has beaten me to the Brit-specific query!
😀
http://media.giphy.com/media/3oriOcKVNgWTilLhuw/giphy.gif
I made a small donation. But I still want that Patreon page!
I wish I could donate; it’s been a while. Unfortunately, no income + school + Christmas shopping + saving for future big events…
I am going to make a point of spreading WHTM more widely, and, in the exceedingly rare event that I run into something interesting elsewhere, to share that with you.
As a note for the Patreon-desiring, there’s an option on the Paypal payment screen for “make this a monthly payment”. So you can in fact donate a small monthly amount that way, if you like.
@Scildfreja
True! Good idea. But Patreon would be even better. 🙂
Big thanks to everyone who’s donated so far!
And if you can’t swing it at the moment, I more than understand.
On Amazon UK, etc, I’m pretty sure I can’t make any $$ from Amazon sales that don’t go through the American store.
Scildfreja is right about the monthly donation option, but I do plan to also do a Patreon. I just keep putting it off.
And speaking of Scildfreja, who also asked about my laptop: It’s still functional; it just has a few weird issues that slow it down sometimes. At this point I think waiting a bit more before replacing it makes more sense than doing it now. But thanks!
Jim, as has been pointed out, I do 4 of these a year. The last one was delayed a bit, so there’s less of a gap between that pledge drive and this one than there usually is.
Done. Once my dad’s estate is out of probate, I will set up a monthly.
This blog and the Mammothers are a precious resource for information, fun and fellowship!
Okay David, done & done. I’ve donated in the past (not a lot) but I’ve gone for a monthly donation this time so I hope that helps.
If there’s a special fund just for a new laptop/computer/monitor please post it and I’ll donate to that as well.
Your blog AND the comments here are invaluable to me. I’m sorry I can’t give more but I hope this might at least keep you in cat food.
Jim, STFU thank you!
@David
Try running the free version of CCleaner and see if it helps with the slowness. https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner
Thanks and thanks again!
Actually, I might as well ask about one of the issues that slows me down. I’m on a dell laptop running windows 8.1, which is a terrible OS, but for weird reasons I don’t want to upgrade to 10.
The slowdown problem happens when the disc utilization suddenly jumps to 99% or 100%. This happens more often when I’m using a lot of memory (which is a lot of the time mostly due to my penchant for keeping a lot of tabs open on chrome) or doing something CPU-intensive. But it sometimes happens when my memory and cpu usage is low. What this means in practice is that the machine will sometimes hangs for 30 seconds or longer when I try to open a web page.
I have a lot of problems with apps being non-responsive, which seems to be tied to this as well.
And it doesn’t get any better when I defrag the disk.
Any thoughts?
@David
Better yet, install Baidu Antivirus. It has lots of aditional features, including a system repair. Best of all, you can get the full version for free. That’s what i’m using.
@David,
I don’t blame you for not wanting Windows 10, but 8.1 is a hellbeast that you should abandon with all due haste. Back to 7 if possible, but if not, 10 isn’t horrid. (I’d suggest Mint or Ubuntu, but can understand if you don’t want to take that plunge either).
Your disk problem is very common on laptops. The HDDs that ship on laptops are typically bottom-of-the-barrel. All that most customers are aware of is the size, generally, so they make the drives large, with teeny-tiny front end caches and horrible bandwidth back to the bus. So you may have plenty of space, but your access speed will be terrible.
Replacing the HDD isn’t the worst thing in the world. A decent drive will cost you between 70 and 120 dollars, probably, and you have some options.
1) You can get a decent HDD of up to 500GB (don’t bother with anything higher). Ask for a drive with as large a cache as possible. Also, ask the store to clone your current drive into the new one. They’ll often do this for free, though you may pay a bit of money to get them to actually replace the drive. Often it’s a while-you-wait service. It should be tolerably fast from then on.
2) You can get a solid state HDD of whatever size you’d like to pay for. Much faster, and if you’re okay with a 120GB drive they’re pretty cheap these days. You won’t have to worry as much about the cache, and again, the shop will probably be okay with cloning your current drive over, if it fits into the new drive.
3) You can probably get an MSATA Solid State drive – it’s a little chip that drops into an MSATA slot, if your machine has one. Yours may have one if you have bluetooth, or may otherwise. You can load your OS on that drive and then use it as the boot drive. That way you don’t have to do any drive cloning, but you’d need to have a copy of your OS to put on there.
Note that the problem may or may not be the drive – it could be the motherboard with an inadequate SATA bus. But given that we’re talking about Laptop HDDs, it’s pretty likely that the drive’s not very good.
If you have a model number or something, I’m sure we could do more digging for you!
EDIT: Ohhhh, it’s a DELL. I see. Yeah, they focus their hardware on specific metrics – not actual performance, just the things that go on the advertising stickers. I’m almost certain you’ve hit a hardware limitation, but it’s hard to say.
Expanding on the above; if you mean “Apps” as in “browser apps” or “apps which have a browser in”, or “browser plugins”, then that makes a lot of sense. Applications these days are horribly inefficient messes of code. Programmers write scripts, which collect together and use script libraries, which are all loaded into virtual machines, which then use just-in-time compilation to call to heavyweight applications (browsers, etc), which invoke system calls. It’s a huge chain of events, and even the simplest actions in these apps require the orchestration of massive memory blocks. Much of this stuff is cached in the hard drive and called as needed, meaning that you’re gonna be calling the drive all ding-dang-day as you go through your workflow. If there’s any delay in getting those script libraries into memory (and some of which are incredibly large), you’ll notice it as delays in performance. This is only compounded by the many browser threads chugging along simultaneously, paging back and forth.
That’s my ramble, anyways! Laptops are a weird corner of the computerverse.