Friday, April 10, 2015

Oh, come on!

Do they seriously need to have their own version of everything?

They thought Wikipedia had a "liberal bias" so they came up with "Conservapedia" so they could have their own definitions of words and whatnot.

Then they had some sort of problem with Facebook allowing people to post things that didn't match their wordlview, so they trotted out "ReaganBook."

There's a "Conservative alternative" to the AARP (AMAC).

There were at least plans to come out with a conservative version of the Bible. I don't know if that ever came out, you can look it up on Conservapedia if you're curious.

Hell, there's even a "Conservative alternative" to the NRA! I forget what it's called, something like Gun Owners of America, or Gun Lovers against Sanity, or the North American Man-Gun Love Association, I don't know, but it's for people who think the N.R. fucking A is too liberal.

So, I guess this should come as no surprise:

Media

Alternative 'bestseller list' launched for conservative books


The Conservative Book Club recently editor Christopher Malgisi say the weekly top ten list provides readers an option to the liberal bias of most mainstream media coverage.
Maglisi says CCB is using "hard data" to rank the books compared to the "fuzzy math "formula" used by The New York Times.
"We don't know exactly how they come up with it," he says of the Times, "but we do know that there have been repeated times where there are certain books that we know are outselling books that on their on their list - political non-fiction list in particular - that are doing better that are not being ranked appropriately."


Yes, now apparently even numbers have a liberal bias.

The New York Times tallied up the total number of sales of each book, but we just know that some right-wing screed is actually selling more than whatever it is they say is the top seller.

This is the same sort of logic that led to the "unskewed polls" debacle of 2012. The polls weren't giving them the answer they wanted, so they must somehow be wrong. Or biased in some way. Of course, it turned out the polls weren't wrong or biased, and the only thing the "unskewing" led to was the fun of watching right-wingers jaws drop when Romney lost, because they had convinced themselves that the polls were bs and in the real world, Romney had a commanding lead.


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So now they want to apply that logic to the best-seller list. It's especially ironic given the way the right-wing tends to game the best-seller list anyway, buying up huge quantities of books by hacks like Coulter and Hannity to give away as gifts to anyone who subscribes to Buy Gold Weekly or Modern Survival Bunker or whatever. But sure, I guess I see their point. I mean, just look at the obvious bias in this recent political non-fiction top ten list:



1
AMERICAN SNIPER, by Chris Kyle with Scott McEwen and Jim DeFelice. (Morrow/HarperCollins.) A member of the Navy Seals who has the most career sniper kills in United States military history discusses his childhood, his marriage and his battlefield experiences during the Iraq war.


2
UNBROKEN, by Laura Hillenbrand. (Random House.) An Olympic runner's story of survival as a prisoner of the Japanese in World War II.


3
KILLING PATTON, by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard. (Holt.) The host of “The O’Reilly Factor” recounts the strange death of Gen. George S. Patton in December 1945.


4
BELIEVER, by David Axelrod. (Penguin Press.) A memoir by the political consultant who became Barack Obama’s campaign
 strategist and White House adviser.


5
LONE SURVIVOR, by Marcus Luttrell with Patrick Robinson. (Back Bay/Little, Brown.) A harrowing Navy SEALs operation.


6
RED NOTICE, by Bill Browder. (Simon & Schuster.) An American hedge fund manager in Russia who became the largest foreign 
investor in the Russian stock market and was eventually expelled
 by kleptocrats who then seized his property.


7
GHETTOSIDE, by Jill Leovy. (Spiegel & Grau.) The investigation of a young black man’s murder in 2007 raises questions about race
 and the criminal justice system.


8
THE REAPER, by Nicholas Irving with Gary Brozek. (St. Martin's.) A memoir by a deadly special operations sniper deployed to Afghanistan.


9
ISIS, by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan. (Regan Arts.) An American journalist and a Syrian analyst examine the origins and methods of the terrorist group.


10
I AM MALALA, by Malala Yousafzai with Christina Lamb. (Little, Brown.) The experience of the Pakistani girl who advocated for women’s education and was shot by the Taliban.

I mean, seriously only ONE book by Bill O'Reilly?  And 7 of the ten books on the list were not written by special forces veterans. Plus there are three books written by women, leaving only 7 for the men! And Malala isn't even American! 
Plus, there's no way that a memoir from a member of the Obama Administration could possibly ever really be in the top five, obviously that's a biased count, like they probably count everyone who saw Axelrod's interview on the Daily Show as having bought his book, it's the only logical explanation.

So, I guess I've pretty much answered my own question. Yes, they really do need their own version of everything.


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