Otherness and Power: Michael Jackson and His Media Critics is a rather short book by Susan Woodword but it does a lot to expose "progressive" hypocrisy in the media and academia.

It analyzes three works:
- A 1985 book by Dave Marsh called "Trapped: Michael Jackson and the Crossover Dream"
- Maureen Orth's MJ articles in Vanity Fair
- And a 2009 book entitled The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson, edited by British music critic Mark Fisher
I went back to the latter part today because I heard Fisher's name again in a completely different context (he was also a philosopher) and it kind of ringed a bell, so I checked back if he was really the dude who wrote some horrible book about MJ?
Well, he didn't write it alone (he personally wrote only one chapter), but he edited it. As per Woodward the book is short on actual facts and research on MJ's life, but high on opinionated and dehumanizing hatred based on tabloid information and their perception of him.
What Woodward does is making lists of the adjectives the books' authors use of Jackson. That in itself shows the out of control, irrational hatred.
I guess anyone has the right to hate a celebrity (even if it is irrational), but I find enlightening in these lists is how it exposes these supposed "progressive" journalists, critics and academists as straight up racist, sexist and homophobic.
Here are some of those lists to illustrate that.
I guess the reason why MJ is such a litmus test in exposing "progressive" hypocrisy is because when it comes to him people suddenly don't have the same boundaries and caution as the mask of decency they would put on with anyone else.
Because he is not considered black by these people (I guess because it is up to privileged white upper middle class males to determine that) they can be racist towards him. Because they can't figure out his gender and sexuality, they can be sexist and homophobic.
They couldn't get away with describing any other person in terms like "inhuman", "weirdo girl-man", "drag queen puppet droog", "hermaphroditic James Brown", "auto-castrate asexual", "a never-man",
a "grotesque parody of whiteness" (that about a black man who never claimed to be anything else but a black man), "white woman pork face", "white lady", "slave master's wife", "never quite human", "monster", "abomination", "trash" and so on and so forth.
I am sure they critique white artists as well, but I doubt any white artist or anyone who fits their definition of what is "normal" ever gets this same dehumanizing pure hatred from them.

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Legacy site *downloads* ~630 KB CSS per theme and writing direction.

6,769 rules
9,252 selectors
16.7k declarations
3,370 unique declarations
44 media queries
36 unique colors
50 unique background colors
46 unique font sizes
39 unique z-indices

https://t.co/qyl4Bt1i5x


PWA *incrementally generates* ~30 KB CSS that handles all themes and writing directions.

735 rules
740 selectors
757 declarations
730 unique declarations
0 media queries
11 unique colors
32 unique background colors
15 unique font sizes
7 unique z-indices

https://t.co/w7oNG5KUkJ


The legacy site's CSS is what happens when hundreds of people directly write CSS over many years. Specificity wars, redundancy, a house of cards that can't be fixed. The result is extremely inefficient and error-prone styling that punishes users and developers.

The PWA's CSS is generated on-demand by a JS framework that manages styles and outputs "atomic CSS". The framework can enforce strict constraints and perform optimisations, which is why the CSS is so much smaller and safer. Style conflicts and unbounded CSS growth are avoided.