Richard Metzger at Dangerous Minds: "As a connoisseur of Republican schadenfreude, it was pretty obvious that Fox was the place to be on this election night."

  • Cowicide

    I watched FOX “News” last night and throughly enjoyed their panic setting in as reality encroached upon them.  Thing of beauty, it was.  Almost as good as seeing the look in Ann Romney’s eyes (and her disheveled hair she’d been pulling on backstage) as she realized she wasn’t getting what she wanted even after it was paid for fair and square by her hubby’s buddies.  Life is so unfair….  haha…

    • SomeGuyNamedMark

       They even got yelled at by right-wing godfather Karl Rove

  • http://twitter.com/fractos Adam Christie

    Some kind of 404 going on there.

  • soylent_plaid

    The real gold for schadenfreude was freerepublic.com.  Most people dismissed these guys as crazies, and they’re right.  I checked in with them after 2008′s election and did again this year.  Oh, wow, the butthurt was strong

    • jandrese

      I’ve never been to Free Republic before, and holy crap is that site ugly.  There is a strange dichotomy between the minimalist HTML and the clutter everywhere.  The comment threads are especially bad, with the comments seemingly less prominent than the UI clutter.  I guess if you go there a lot you learn the mental tricks to filter out the actual content, but for a new reader it is just awful. 

      It wouldn’t even take much work to massively improve their design.  Is there a big underground greasemonkey scene there?  Is the default known terrible but alright because everybody just uses their own view anyway?  How can so many people use the site without going insane? 

      • Finnagain

         To be fair and balanced, most of their regulars are already insane.

      • L_Mariachi

        It’s a sign of Real American authenticity. Drudge Report is similar.  Good design is something liberal homos do in New York and San Francisco at those “startups” where everyone sits around playing ping pong instead of doing honest work. When you see a site cluttered with animated American flag gifs, it’s that way because the owners have had their minds on more serious business than monkeying around with a perfectly good GeoCities template from 1995.

        • http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby

          Spot on!  I bet they also make their employees work longer hours, ’cause, ya know, that’ll get more out of them.

        • http://www.gyrofrog.com/ Gyrofrog

          Another in the Real American design school:
          http://unskewedpolls.com/
          (speaking of butthurt)

    • acerplatanoides

       you’re braver than I. I have too strong a gag reflex to bear the freepers since about ’06

    • Petzl

      I notice that they prominently feature many, many stories about small businesses laying off 50-100 employees; I guess this is to foster their conceit that obama is bad for america, america is not recovering, etc.  (Since there is a net increase in overall employment, they must necessarily be ignoring all reports of businesses hiring employees.) Typical case of trying to bury the signal with the noise.

      • L_Mariachi

        Actually those are cases of “making up total bullshit stories that did not really happen.”

  • technogeekagain

    We watched the returns on Fox, for amusement value… Can anyone explain what their technical director thought he/she was doing with the continuously moving cameras? Was the entire tech crew drunk, was this an attempt to manufacture excitement, was it an attempt to provoke sea-sickness, or was it a desperate attempt to “prove” that their virtual sets were actually real sets?

  • Ito Kagehisa

    Schadenfreude is icky.  It’s better to look for mudita.

    • Tynam

      As always, Ito, you remind me of grace when my more savage instincts seek mere triumph.  Thank you.

      • Ito Kagehisa

         I don’t know if I can live up to that!  But you’re more than welcome.

    • allium

       Everyone’s assignment – develop the polar opposite of schadenfreude pie. Presumably it would be some sort of appetizer.

      • Ito Kagehisa

        Thanks for the link – I especially enjoyed the pictures!

    • niktemadur

      Understood and acknowledged.
      The delightful part for me is witnessing a despicable paradigm, as well as its’ cynical propaganda system, being demolished by the sledgehammer of reality.  This is where I derive my pleasure, although I can’t say I feel any pity for the Roves and O’Reillys and Coulters of the world, just paid actors, secondary elements in this stage;  the more irrelevant they become, the better for society as a whole, so there is also a sense of relief, which is pleasurable. This is NOT how I felt about politics twenty years ago. THEY turned this into a zero-sum game.

      EDIT: I guess what I am saying is that there is plenty of mudita here, for society as a whole, for all those who will not be negatively affected by the greedy indifference or outright hostility of yet another corporate/neocon-powered USA presidency and the legacy it would have left in its’ wake. That would be a very large number, indeed.

      • Ito Kagehisa

        I understand.  You wish to take joy in success, without necessarily celebrating anothers’ loss, but without false pity either.

        Personally, I am still hoping for change – I’m hoping that Obama will change back into the person he was the year before he was elected President.

        • niktemadur

          You wish to take joy in success,

          Another potentially catastrophic laissez-faire method of governance has been averted.
          Another foreign policy of unnecessary, large-scale military aggressiveness has been averted.
          Meanwhile, the new, younger electorate is growing every year, and policies are shifting with it, towards more socially-conscientious lines.
          Yes, a sense of joy, for steps taken forward, at the very least not taken back.  Good for everybody, whether some know it, feel it or not.

          without false pity either

          Romney’s concession speech was his and his alone, finally we get to glimpse him uninfluenced by campaign advisers, and there he was – gracious and truly heartfelt in tone.  Right there I saw a decent man and I wish him a happy life, far away from manipulative neocon creeps that came with the package of his candidacy, who salivated for the toxic and destructive power they wielded during the Bush years.

          I’m hoping that Obama will change back into the person he was the year before he was elected President

          Absolutely!  I still see Obama as a man who does NOT use the world as a canvas to project dogma or personal traumas.
          On the one hand, he still has to contend with uncooperative, adamant Republicans in Congress, as well as the very same propaganda machine that spews lies and vitriol that is the topic of this discussion.
          But on the other hand, he does not have to concern himself with reelection anymore.  Here’s hoping…!

          平和と祝福

  • bcsizemo

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3_DjiLLDfo

    I just love scooten fruity…

  • IronEdithKidd

    Brit Hume seemed at least partially cogent in the quote Metzger put in his piece.  What Brit isn’t getting, though, is that the US isn’t a center-right country, it’s closer to a center-center country.

  • http://burntheflag.ca Jardine

    I watched some of the election on Sun News. They’re kind of Fox News wannabes. They like to advocate for Mitt Romney even though only about 10% of Canadians prefer Mitt. Which kind of explains their shitty ratings. Sometimes it’s fun to watch a gibbering idiot spout stupid bullshit though.

  • TheMudshark

    It´s pedantic but since the Schadenfreude emanates from Democrats and is directed towards Republicans, in this case it would sound more appropriate to me to call it Democrat Schadenfreude.

    He would be a connoisseur of Republican misery, making the Schadenfreude his, not the Republicans´.