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Scandalous Ranking on ‘Top 50’ Website List
One of the most exhausting features of the political Internet is the “Outrage of the Day” culture it perpetuates. In order to generate traffic, blogs hype even the most minor of scandals to SHOCK and APPALL their readers into leaving furious comments and angrily sharing the post with friends and family.
The Outrage Industrial Complex on the Right will launch a half-researched story on a little blog which gets fed to the larger sites, appears on talk radio the next day, and (fingers crossed) Fox News by week’s end. Then the Left reacts to it with mockery and contempt, which gets fed to MSNBC, and (fingers crossed) “The Daily Show” the next day they tape. That’s when the original blog insults Jon Stewart for getting all the details wrong and the cycle starts again.
It’s a pretty good content-generation system if your heart can take the stress and your brain can stand the dumb. Now that all the bloggers are on Twitter and Yik Yak (and whatever the crap Meerkat is), the firehose of outrage is blasting 24/7.
For all these reasons, as well as my delicate constitution, I’m not a fan of outrage culture and only allow my passions to roil over real, life-or-death outrages. Such as our recent website ranking.
A so-called conservative outlet released a so-called list of the so-called Top 50 Conservative Blogs. They listed Ricochet at… um… well, at a ranking considerably below the logical choice of Number One. If memory serves, we were ranked somewhere below “Teenage Republicans for Spiro Agnew” and “Anarcho-syndicalist Horticulture Fortnightly.” Seriously, check out this outrage.
What say you, Ricochetti? Were we robbed? Because I think we were robbed.
I’ll check back in a few hours. I’m heading to Whole Foods so I can flip over a Volvo or two.
Published in General
Beer cans are stronger!
After the first 10 or so, I started to wonder how much Newsmax charged for a good rating.
You’re a headband!
Let us overachieve our 5-year plan, Stakhanovites!
Um… not sure what this means.
More ‘infamous’!
Yer Mama.
Seriosuly, what’s wrong with Priuses? Yeah I get the smug factor, but that’s a problem with Prius drivers, not with the cars themselves.
Spin Doctors. Thirteenth Floor Elevators.
Classic head bands. *runs*
They’re deliberately ugly. There is no technical reason for them to be so unattractive. For example, the Chevy Volt; it’s got every bit the smug factor, but it looks good too. The entire design aesthetic of the Prius is “Look! You can drive around in this hideous thing so that you can save the planet.” It’s all about being able to tell from a distance that “You’re more moral than those other people, and you have the hairshirt to prove it.”
Not every car will be as beautiful as an Aston Martin DB9, but very, very few are outright ugly. You have to really try for that.