http://mattwelch.com/archives/week_2005_11_06.html#003369

Luke Ford Un-Hired by Pajamas Media: On Monday, the about-to-be-launched Pajamas Media published one of its little contributor profiles, this time of none other than our very own beloved weirdo Luke Ford. Luke first came to prominence seven-plus years ago as the "Matt Drudge of Porn," but is also a genuinely unique interviewer who has done interesting work profiling journalists, scientists, non-porn producers and others; all while exuding his bizarre mix of Orthodox Judaism, conservative moral hectoring, obsession with porn, unnatural fascination with media events, cheerful yet poignant narcissism, and so on. He's not everyone's cup of tea, and mistakes have been made, but he's an original. I gladly wrote an intro to his book on Jewish journalism.

Anyway, his PJ Media profile went up on Monday; on Tuesday, former Pajama partner-turned biggest Pajama critic Dennis the Peasant mocked PJM's selection of Ford, saying:

Bummer. It's accepted that being a pornstar ruins your shot at the mainstream. Now writing about it ruins it, too.

Total bummer. I already had you penciled in around January 2007 for a few hours of legal consultations when Pajamas Media goes up in smoke. It's the JKP of blog companies and will collapse in a flurry of recriminations, financial fiascos that look more seedy than they really are and a scramble by opinionated stay-at-home dads to find their uberblog post about Ted Kennedy's dandruff that the National Review Online linked to before the servers get ripped out of the wall and locked in judge's chambers.

Luke (and I notice you're going by "Luke" on lukeisback.com these days), I wish you'd get it already. I know you're desperate for a community, hence your desire to penetrate one of the most sterile, insular and ritualized subcultures in the world through Judaic conversion. It's not you. You are temperamentally a pariah and an outlaw and it's absurd to bother trying to fit in with these navel-gazing dorks.

Think of anyone worth anything who has ever praised your writing. Have they ever said "You do an outstanding service for the community?" You don't. When you're playing the moralist, it's as an ethicist that only deals with other peoples' ethics. Maybe you misread something: Hell is other people, not a place where only other people live.

What I'm saying is you don't need to be Dennis Prager, Dennis Hastert or even the man that beat Dennis Conner. You're not speaking for anyone but yourself, and people find that interesting enough to read through, daily. Screw these geeks leaching off one public dole or another for the funds to organize their precious thoughts on why the Saracen needs the redemptive power of an American toothbrush. That's not you, and it's ridiculous to still aspire for that kind of social redemption and validation.

huh? i've never heard of these people, kinda the same as prager-at some level you have to actually DO something to be listened to by people who wouldn't recognize any of the sites your blog links to or any of the sites they link to.

i don't see that they've created or solved anything, made more money selling truckloads of manure than anyone else, or been at the top of anything that actually keeps score. they get to argue in front of an audience like the tenured academics or well-compensated writers they never had the talent or ideas to be. but the internet comes along and you don't need to be good enough to publish something to tell the world what you think or even know how to interpret the data from the smart person you just sourced.



no, you just have to speak to the lost souls looking for "commentary" or "criticism". just never admit you're wrong-ever. and you won't have to be either! because you'll stick to analyzing stuff like the implications of 50 cent's movie or anything to do with britney because people love the idea that they can talk about the whims of dumb people like it's a "science". mention something an exotic culture does differently than we do and say there's a lesson in it's simple warmpth without questioning that it could just be useless and inferior because their babies get eaten by dingos and the warmpth you felt was fever. bash bush, mention someone old and inspiring locally, drop some names i don't know or need to know and say something cute about a kid misunderstanding how something worked was adorable.

you've covered every kind of blog out there, if you're someone who'd fit in on luke's other site mention extra names i'm almost certain would be meaningless and foreign to the more-importnant people i clean pools for. they do fine without knowing a story about your lunch with a stranger and will choose to live in ignorance. me? i just can't think of one person who blogs who i'd want to hear opine informally about shit.

these people are parasites, maybe better than spammers but serving the same purpose of floodgates of garbage being opened on humanity as soon as you removed paper and the need to worry about what you're sending out there being worth the 40 cents it took to print and mail it.

and if most bloggers weren't bitches afraid to be be removed from the moderator-like position of "i'll write, while you read and if i like the comment you write i'll let it stay up".

if people have something to say, they can say it on message boards where they don't get to sit there unchallemged, they'd actually think about writing stupid stuff about their dry cleaning place and your relative indifference to it. if someone tells you they don't care and you're talking to yourself you'll adjust and stop the self-important garbage.

wankus is the perfect example of blogging being for people who like to talk about themselves but are too stupid and annoying to handle the possibility of being interrupted or dealing with the reality of people not liking him. he blogs, it's boring, he's locked the comments. this is the unholiness of the format.

Blogs suck

**SIDENOTE** James, clever and 100% accurate observation regarding today's junk mail and paper...is there even any kind of coherent packaging or paper industry left here in the Northeast that doesn't involve making stuff to hold sweet sugary snacks that contribute to child obesity? When I worked/exisited in Cali, I had a paper & packaging client that went from 150 Million in Sales in 1996 to 90 Million in Sales by 2002 and NO ONE on their Board seemed to know why until one day they noticed every sample CD they received from Software companies came in a Glad Sandwich Bag instead of a corrugated or plastic shipper. Does Bob Kraft Still Own all those paper distributorships, and if so are they still selling paper products or merely Life size point of purchase displays of Tom Brady and Adam Viniateri?