Patterico's Pontifications

10/13/2015

Playboy Magazine: No More Nudes

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 8:54 pm



Playboy: you read it for the articles. No, really:

Last month, Cory Jones, a top editor at Playboy, went to see its founder Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion.

In a wood-paneled dining room, with Picasso and de Kooning prints on the walls, Mr. Jones nervously presented a radical suggestion: the magazine, a leader of the revolution that helped take sex in America from furtive to ubiquitous, should stop publishing images of naked women.

Mr. Hefner, now 89, but still listed as editor in chief, agreed. As part of a redesign that will be unveiled next March, the print edition of Playboy will still feature women in provocative poses. But they will no longer be fully nude.

Its executives admit that Playboy has been overtaken by the changes it pioneered. “That battle has been fought and won,” said Scott Flanders, the company’s chief executive. “You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it’s just passé at this juncture.”

So one of the guys who helped decide this is named “Flanders”? Coinkidink?

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The Democrats Debate – Open Thread

Filed under: General — JVW @ 3:45 pm



[guest post by JVW]

The Democrat candidates for President meet in Las Vegas for the first of the party’s six scheduled debates, a DNC-imposed limit that has stirred up some controversy among party members who believe the limit is designed to help Hillary! Rodham Clinton easily sail through the primary season. Unlike the GOP with its two-tiered debates, the Dems have five candidates (all of them white, heterosexual, and born before the Beatles came to the U.S., with only two of them registering as Democrats in the early years of the GW Bush Administration) who will spend 150 minutes telling us why each of them believes that he or she is the logical successor to the dreary reign of Barack Obama.

Naturally the media is awash with horrible puns on “what happens in Vegas stays (or doesn’t stay) in Vegas” and “rolling the dice” on the candidates and all the other clichés that they can’t seem to leave well-enough alone. Time Magazine (yeah, I too had forgotten it was still around) put together a pretty lame drinking-game which isn’t snarky enough to be mildly interesting. Anderson Cooper of CNN, the moderator for tonight’s free-for-all, may or may not stir up direct confrontation among the candidates, but promises to challenge any statements made by a candidate which conflicts with his or her record.

One of the traditions of the pre-debate ritual is that every submits a list of questions that they would like to see the candidates answer. These questions are oftentimes little more than party talking points recycled as softball questions by lazy and sympathetic journalists to allow the candidates to preen and strut, or pointed and belligerent questions from the other camp which the candidates would never in a million years deign to answer. Still, one of the fun part of these debates is to ask yourself what questions you might have if you were on the panel. Feel free to add these in the comments, but do try to make an effort to include serious submissions that are direct and uncomfortable without being shrill and partisan.

ADDENDUM: And, of course, after the debate begins you are welcome to add your observations on what is said here, unless someone else opens a new post.

ADDENDUM 2: Did Facebook do something similar for the GOP debates?

Facebook

– JVW

Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers™: Comparing the Treatment of Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz by “Fact-Checkers”

Filed under: Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers™,General — Patterico @ 7:47 am



I have decided to launch a new occasional Patterico series titled Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers.™ Here’s the problem: so-called “fact-checkers” gain an artificial credibility in political discourse, simply by invoking “fact-checking” as the name of their enterprise. But, as any sentient conservative knows, Big Media “fact-checking” is nothing more than leftist opinionating disguised in faux factual garb. We’re seeing more and more Democrats use these phony “fact checks” in their campaigns, and with 2016 just around the corner, I sense an urgent need for a fairly regular series of posts fact-checking the fact-checkers. Patterico to the rescue!

As most of you know, Ted Cruz recently slammed the head of the Sierra Club in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. If you missed the video, here it is again:

Cruz’s principal point was that there has been a “pause” in global warming, according to the satellite data, which has shown no significant warming for 17 years. There’s really no disputing that fact — yet the Sierra Club invoked Politi(cized)Fact to assert that Cruz’s claims had been “debunked.” This is how lefty organizations defuse effective attacks by conservatives: they cite an analysis by a “fact-checker” that says the conservative is lying — and the public gets the idea that the conservative must indeed be dishonest, because, after all, a “neutral” fact-checker said so!

Today, we’re going to look at the Politi(cized)Fact analysis of Cruz’s statement, and reveal how fact-checkers take true facts uttered by conservatives, and deem them “mostly false” because the conservatives didn’t give the lefty argument, but only their own. Then we’ll analyze a Politi(cized)Fact analysis of a Hillary Clinton claim, and show how the very same defects are present in Clinton’s statement — yet that one is deemed “mostly true.”

As we will see in detail below, Ted Cruz’s statement is found “mostly false.” He stands accused of “cherry-picking” because his data encompasses the years and measurements that best suit his argument, while he omits the arguments of his leftist opposition that the lefties think undercut his main point.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton’s statement is found “mostly true.” She bases it on a study done by two economists, at least one of whom is a rank partisan Democrat who has been an advisor to her husband and other Democrat presidential candidates, and who has donated thousands to Democrats. That study cherry-picks certain data that best suit the pro-Democrat argument, and Hillary omits the parts of the study that undercut her main point.

That, my friends, is how the “fact-checkers” do their work. The lefties can assert misleading facts and get a clean bill of health as long as the “facts” are true. Meanwhile, conservatives can state true facts, but still get accused of lying because the other side has arguments too.

Full details in the extended entry. Ready? Let’s do this!

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