"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." ~ H.L. Mencken
Forget It Jake, It's The Guardian
“Alan Skinner, one of the Guardian's literary commies in residence, thinks that self-publishing is "reactionary". Which means, basically, he doesn't like it.” Skinner complains “With authorship and entrepreneurship now equal partners, the new authorpreneurs have thrown off the dictatorship of the editor to replace it with the tyranny of the market.” I agree with the Ace of Spades writer's assessment. “I get the sneaking suspicion,” he wrote, “that what this boils down to is that self-publishing has opened the doors for a lot of conservative writers, and this annoys commie Skinner to no end. If the situation was reversed, and the self-published authors were fellow commies like Howard Zinn or Noam Chomsky, I'd bet Skinner's attitude would be more like "by Jove, this self-publishing phenomenon is really the best thing ever!"I think of Thomas Paine and similar writers and understand exactly why Skinner just despises, and probably fears, the free flow of ideas outside of elite left-leaning gatekeepers' control.
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