Enough of the 'liberal elite' meme already

Elitism is the belief that wealth and power are evidence of virtue. The 'liberal elite' meme is Orwellian in the sense of 'ignorance is strength,' 'freedom is slavery,' etc. As with all memes, the strategy of choice is assertive, relentless repetition.

The people who parrot the 'liberal elite' meme would like us to believe that academia and the media are dominated by liberals, or leftists, or at any rate people they disagree with. This may be true of academia (though I have my doubts--economics department faculties tend to be well to the right of center) but is so obviously untrue of the media (who rather aggressively frame issues in right vs. center terms) that 'liberal media' used as if it were one word is a patent falsehood. Even if media and academia were liberal dominated, the implication that they are the power centers of society is laughable. The amount of real power in media and academia is trivial compared to the power in big business, and in the military and intelligence services, as well as of course government in general.

It all follows the usual pattern of propaganda. The assumption seems to be that if you repeat something enough times, many will believe it to be true.

The Yahoo! Courriel disimprovement

Message options used to be both above and below the message. This was logical. If something was spam, you'd want to click the top "Pourriel" (formerly "Publipostage") button before reading. Otherwise, you'd read the message, and when you're done reading, where are you? At the bottom of the page. Under the old Yahoo! Courriel, you'd have a repeat of the buttons for delete, reply, déplacer (stick in a 'dossier' or folder), etc. Now one has to do a ctrl-home to go back to the top of the page.

"Marquer comme non lu" (mark as unread) no longer works on the currently open message. For a while I thought they had also gotten rid of 'précédent' (previous) and 'suivant' (next), but eventually figured out that that was what the ꜛ and ꜜ represent. One has to go to the inbox view for this feature to work. Oh well, it does say 'beta.' I'm waiting with baited breath to see if the 'alpha' version re-incorporates certain features subtracted from the 'classique' version.