Salon.com

An average Salon reader incensed by the flood of businessmen, Jews and white heterosexual Christian males flooding America

“In old days men had the rack. Now they have Salon.”

~ Oscar Wilde

Salon.com is an award-winning (as they like to remind you) American news and lifestyle website. It is written by a strange mixture of people who earn over 50k a year and own more Apple products than most poor people have ever seen, fat, ultra-feminist lesbian goths and skinny, sensitive, nerdy, bespectacled, unwashed men who look like they have never bathed or been laid in their lives and who probably never will be. This disparate constituency is united by a loathing of "the Right Wing", historically the GOP and the Catholic Church; now their own country, the 1%, the wealthy, the Koch Brothers, Pamela Geller, Israel and Ayn Rand of course. Salon readers and editors are generally stereotyped as thinking they should rule the world, as opposed to Fox News watchers and reporters who think they do rule the world, Capitalism Magazine readers, who know they should rule the world and readers of The New York Times who actually do. The idea of Salon ruling the world is similar to the idea of Miley Cyrus running NASA.

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for a long enough time will eventually type Hamlet. The good news is that in next to no time at all, that same monkey can write for Salon. (Even quicker if the monkey has done porn.) Statistics indicate that Salon readers and editors like to sit in Starbucks sipping Frappucinos and texting on their I-Phones whilst criticising Steve Jobs for paying children to work in sweatshops and complaining about how big businesses are crushing the working classes. They usually drive Priuses.

Why Salon contains and covers what it does

Salon readers and writers generally convince themselves that they’re intrepid outsiders battling a system controlled by the far right, libertarian, Islamophobic, capitalist, Randist, sexist, homophobic, gun-toting, global warming denialist, imperialist 1% defending Jew lobby who seek to destroy the world through not allowing children younger than ten to be taught about sex and refusing to recycle, even though they themselves live in relative comfort and luxury and have probably never even set foot on a farm or in a factory where the supposed oppressed proletariats work. This known as “Marxist-Leninist” syndrome.

Stop Advancing the Exploitative Racist Agenda of Advertising

In order to attract internet hits, Salon display a column of top searches along the right hand side of their page, most of them linking back to the right-wing entertainment website, AskMen.

Salonese: What White, Male Hetero-Patriarchal Capitalist Shitlord George Orwell Got Wrong About Newspeak

Analysis of a Salon writer's brain

Hint: It's not a bad thing.

• The USA/America - New York, specifically the Upper East Side.
• Islamophobia – Opposing Sharia Law, clitorectomies, child-marriage, polygamy and wife beating, not jerking off to a copy of the Qu'ran.
• Atheism: Opposing Christianity and Judaism but never daring to criticise Islam.
• Sexism – Telling women they’re beautiful or showing an interest in them.
• Homophobia – Heterosexuality.
• Imperialism - Anything the United States does overseas. Being Israeli.
• Progressive – A term coined by Upton Sinclair for closeted socialists to describe themselves with so as to get people to trust them.
• Socialism – Wanting the government to do everything and own everything, waving a Palestinian flag around and opposing the war with Iraq. This is all good by the way.
• Tea Party - Formerly what Salon readers enjoyed on a Sunday back when they were Whigs in London, now a far-right, homophobic, Islamophobic, fascist, authoritarian fringe-party, er, what were we talking about again?
• Libertarian - Initially referring to a person who believes in individual rights, free-speech and free-market capitalism, now used to describe anyone in the English-speaking world who believes in less government regulation.
• Liberalism - Originally an ideology formulated by John Locke promoting social fairness and individual freedom, now used to mean anything vaguely left-wing. Hence confused Maoists and Marxists referring to themselves as "liberals" and being referred to as the same by equally-confused right-wingers.
• Fascism – Not wanting the government to own your life and property.
• Capitalism – Fascism.

Why Our Editors and Columnists Are the Most Charming and Intelligent People

Once they've woken up early at one PM and eaten their Vegan Muesli seasoned with ground Viagra, these diligent individuals sit down at their computers for their long, two-hour work-day.

• Current Editor-In-Chief: Paul Krugman.

Editors

• David Talbot (founder)
• Gail Wynand (co-founder)
• Vyacheslav Molotov
• Joseph Goebbels
• Ellsworth M. Toohey

Famous columnists

• Bertram Scudder
• Stefane August
• Professor P. Pot, Geography and History expert whose columns on environmental concerns and population growth are greatly respected.

Typical Salon topics

NOTE: Some of these are actual Salon headlines. See if you can figure out which ones. Good luck.

How they get most of their ideas

• Why This Recession Is America's Perfect Opportunity To Apologise For Even Existing
• Republicans/Koch Brothers to blame for __________
• 50 Reasons Why The Democrats Are Too Right-Wing
• Is Mad Men The Best Thing On Television?
• Great Prices on Vaginal Lubricants
• America poised to fall to fascist horde any day now. More tomorrow.
• Bring Back Occupy Wallstreet!
• Jewish Bankers Crash Economy! Kill Them Now!
• "We're sorry and we are ashamed of ourselves" - What white American males should be saying to the world
• I apologise for using the discriminatory terms “she” and “he”
• Why Don’t We Use Condoms For Oral Sex?
• North Korea’s Master Breweries! You’ll Be The Envy of Your Commune With These Great Recipes for Beer (but not decadent, capitalist, elitist wine)
• Uncyclopedia’s Shameful Plagiarism Of Our Article Headlines
• Property Rights? What Property Rights?
• What is the average penis size? (Hint: longer than that of the average Salon journalist or writer)
• Why Don't the Rich Pay Taxes for Oxygen?
• Critics of Obama Should Be Sent to Guantanamo!
• Why Miley Cyrus Twerking is the Philosophical Issue of Our Age
• Eat road-kill! It's ethical meat!
• If you are not poor, you are a BAD person! By the way, why haven't they invented a vibrator that you can text with so that I can multitask?
• Welcome to the world's largest penis collection! And no, it's not our writing staff!
• Are Knock-Knock Jokes Non-Inclusive to the Homeless?
• "The Man From Nantucket": Anti-Transgender Subtexts in Classical Limericks
• "Jolene, Please Don't Take Mah Man": Opposition to Polygamy in Southern Songs
• "The Mr. Show": Patriarchal Hegemony in Sketch-Show Titles
• Expansion of ice caps shows reality's right-wing bias.
• Libertarians to blame for extinction of the dinosaurs
• The 1%'s devious new plan to hide under your children's beds, wait until they've gone to sleep and then eat their brains whilst producing carbon emission
• Ageing White Republicans Block Bill To Ban Any Food Other Than Salad
• I hated government, even though it was the only one trying to save me. But I won victory over myself. I love Big Brother.
• The Progressive Case for Beating Your Children if They Read Ayn Rand
• Amy Schumer Is The Funniest Person Who Has Ever Lived And If You Disagree, You Are A Misogynist
• "How Many Roads Must A Man Walk Down Before You Call Him A Man?": Is folk music exclusive to the transgendered and disabled?
• Did Donald Trump use time travel to kill JFK?

What To/You Will Read/Think

From 1996 to 2011, the imaginatively named Salon Book Awards were an annual literary award given by the editors of Salon.com to fiction and nonfiction books published the previous year. The editors' criteria for winning books are:

"the books we'd wholeheartedly recommend to our friends (and the public), books we'd clear our social calendar to finish, books we returned to eagerly even when we could barely focus our eyes on a page. They remind us of why we fell in love with reading and why we keep at it in a world that's simultaneously cluttered with mediocre books and increasingly indifferent to the written word."

In 2012, a new award was established called the What To Read Awards, named ingeniously after the Salon column "What To Read", although Laura Miller continued to maintain a separate Best Books of the Year top-10 list which is quite hypocritical as this implies that Salon believe that some books are better than others. The What To Read Awards were chosen as follows:

"we surveyed the most popular book critics, both print and online, from high-profile publications to the hottest literary blogs. We asked for their top-10 books of 2012, and then tabulated the winners by assigning 10 points for a No. 1 selection, 9 for No. 2, all the way to 1 point for No. 10 and then we burned all the ones we didn't agree with in front of the Reichstag."

What To/You Will Read/Think Award Winners

• Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James
• Against Autonomy: Justifying Coerceive Paternalism by Sarah Conly
• The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama
• The Audacity of Those Who Dare To Question My Ingenious Policies by Barack Obama
• Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama
• Money Actually Does Grow On Trees and Why Thomas Sowell Can Suck It by Paul Krugman
• The Little Red Book by Chairman Mao
• The Little Green Book by Muammar Gaddafi
• Das Kapital by Karl Marx
• The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
• The Protocols of the Elders of Zion by Anon
• The Qu'ran by Allah
• I'm A Nihilistic Hack Who's Popular With Hippy Stoners But Whom You Won't Have Heard of Unless You Took A Course in English Literature by David Foster Wallace
• Fifty Shades of Grey (again) by E. L. James
• The Day I Wanked And Had An Aneurysm by Ashok Rajamani
• The Day I Picked My A-Hole And Went Into A Coma by Afrite Ramadani