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NYT: Who’s The Internettiest? Obama, Edwards or Clinton?

Published on January 23, 20071 Comment

Eugene Robinson writing in the NYT gives it to Edwards by a blog-length:

[…]

So what do the Web sites HillaryClinton.com, BarackObama.com and JohnEdwards.com tell us about their namesakes? At first glance, they seem to confirm what we think we already know. Clinton’s site evokes a super-competent juggernaut, with every base covered and every hair in place. Obama’s is very much a work in progress. And Edwards’s Web site suggests the patience, attention to detail and willingness to take risks that you would expect from a trial lawyer who rose from nothing to become a self-made millionaire.

Clinton and Obama are first-name candidates on their sites — “Hillary” says this, “Barack” says that. Edwards is more formal — he’s “John Edwards” or “Senator Edwards,” if you please. Perhaps that’s a necessary reminder, since he’s not, technically speaking, a senator anymore.

As for overall tone and scope, it’s hard to evaluate Obama’s campaign cyber-HQ because it’s so clearly a provisional, placeholding site with not much but a couple of videos (the announcement; a biography) and a big button you can click to become a contributor. There’s a link to his Senate reelection Web site— he would have to run in 2010 — and if you find the link and click through, you get a fuller picture of the man.

The Clinton and Edwards sites, as one might expect, are largely about the business of getting elected. Clinton’s home page tells you how to “Join Team Hillary” or become a “HillRaiser” of campaign funds. Edwards likewise prominently advises how to join his team, but his home page also focuses on some issues — he’s against global warming, we learn, and opposes an escalation of the war in Iraq.

The real difference is depth and ambition. Both Clinton and Obama (he on his Senate campaign Web site) say they want to have a dialogue with the American people about how best to solve the nation’s problems. But Edwards has already started his conversation with the nation. His Web site is an exercise in social networking that includes not only a blog, where surfers can post their thoughts, but also cyber-diaries written by Edwards’s family members.

“The soft rain of last night has left the field behind the house dewy with a low fog. Maybe the gossamer meadow is the reason I feel contemplative this morning,” begins a recent entry by Elizabeth Edwards. Her diary posts generally draw more comments than her husband’s.

Somehow, it’s hard to imagine Hillary Clinton waxing about any gossamer meadow.

Edwards’s Web site is less YouTube than MySpace. It tries to take advantage of the Internet’s great paradox — that a technology so devoid of human contact can nevertheless create a sense of intimacy and connection.

So, Mama’s playing it safe, Obama’s not quite ready and Edwards is up to something interesting. In the “Second Life” sense, at least. We’ll see about the real world.

I’m hoping (though it’s a hope based on not much actual foundation) that Obama and Clinton are being encouraged to stand as stalking horses for Clark/Edwards, on the principle that they’ll keep the likes of Fox and the Right’s other swiftboating squads busy while the real candidates do an end run round the opposition. Let’s face it , Clinton or Obama won’t get through the primaries, because the voters just don’t trust them.

This is the most deliberately, wilfully and blindly incompetent administration ever: they’re almost proud of it, incompetence is a strategy for them – remember Grover Norquist‘s famous axiom about ‘drowning the government in a bathtub’? The Republicans refined that concept slightly and now they’ve almost but not quite waterboarded the government to death. The American public seems desperate for some saviour to rush in, free the captive and arrest the torturers, someone who knows the difference between right and wrong and knows what do do about it . Even more imporatant, that someone has to be someone the public trusts.

I can’t see how the DLC can hope Hillary will be the candidate even though her adverts are all over the blogs like a rash: no-one trusts her, everybody hates her, even her own side. If she’s depending on the loyalty of the sisterhood and female votes to carry her through, well she’s shit out of luck. Republican women hate her (and paradoxically enough, the whole ‘stand by your man’ schtick post-Lewinsky made them hate her all the more) and Democratic women don’t seem to be much moire enamoured, what with her support for the war and carefully triangulated non-positions on choice and reproductive freedoms.

As for Obama – other than oodles of charisma and photegeneity, what has he got? If elected he’d be another Tony Blair : a one term politician with little experience in national or international politics and with bugger-all managerial experience. And we all know how that turned out. Obama talks a good fight, he looks good, but can you see him running the country yet? 2 elections down the road when he has some solid experience under his belt, yes. Now, no – and I’ve yet to mention the regrettably ever-present possibility of a far-right assassin, something that goes for Hillary too.

Damn it. I hate it that the most viable ‘liberal’ candidates (and I use the scare quotes deliberately, because neither Edwards nor Clark fit my definition of liberal) candidates will be, yet again, white, wealthy middle class men.

But unless some deus ex machina in the shape of the perfect Dem candidate comes along, that’s what’ll happen.

Could He BE Any More Up Himself?

Published on January 22, 2007

I worked on a Tesco’s checkout when I was a law student, to make money for my children’s Christmas presents and to pay off pressing bills, so this condescending blogpost really got my goat.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Blogging Comes of Age …

There is a golden thermometer that I and others use for technology known generally as the Tesco Checkout Girl Test (TCGT). This is the test of what happens when someone, with often limited ability, has to use technology in order to carry out their job tasks, such as credit card checkers, changing till rolls, rebooting an electric till etc. It comes as a shock to me then to have been standing in a queue in my local Tesco tonight and hear two checkout girls discussing the optimal ways to ensure comment moderation in their blogs and discussing the merits of Blogger versus MySpace, Facebook or TagWorld. In fact when it came to my turn to be served I went and stood in another queue and left them to it so I could listen some more.

I don’t know when Julian was at university but grants no longer exist. The person serving you in Asda or KFC may well be putting themselves through a course in nursing or astrophysics.

He should be a little more careful – for all he knows the heart surgeon doing his triple bypass in 15 year’s time could be the same girl he’s taking the piss out of on his blog this week.

Aside from that, who the hell is he to assume that even fulltime non-student supermarket staff have no intelligence or aptitude for technology?

But ah, yes, I forgot. They’re checkout girls. Naturally their grouindstate is brainless and they have no life other than when they’re pushing his lasagna-for-one over the scanner.

Julian, you may be a fellow Pratchett and Guido Fawkes fan and Blears-hater, but you’re still a condescending sexist prick.

Where Are All The Kids At?

Published on January 20, 20072 Comments

The kids are all right

Today’s Comment of The Day is at Hullabaloo and is a somewhat testy response to a post by Poputanian and subsequent commenters’ wondering what it will take to get today’s youth to rebel:

what kind of youth movement would satisfy you sanctimonious boomers? how would you like us to express our outrage? we live with a terrible future hanging over our heads, where we will be paying for YOUR social security, YOUR healthcare, and THIS FUCKING WAR! adults have spent nearly three decades consolidating their own wealth and now kids are supposed to feel guilty for not being able to stop an illegal war that the entire world couldn’t stand in the way of???

in 2004, voters below 30 were the ONLY age group in the nation that voted for Kerry. i firmly believe that before you can start telling us about political activism, you should straighten out your own fucking generation.
Utica | 01.20.07 – 12:18 am | #

Go Utica! God, how I loathe boomers and I’m not even a kid.

I was born in 1959 which makes me an in-betweenie; neither Boomer nor Gen X. We’re not hippies: we’re the generation of disco and punk, the generation that were left no crumbs to scrabble for once the entitled generation their greedy mitts on the money and the levers of power. Once elected, for the boomers it was ‘get all you can and after that pull up the ladder’.

They had free schools and universities, the NHS, riches through property and the welfare state: we got unemployment, a housing shortage, double-digit inflation, insane rightwing government, death squads, drugs and the threat of nuclear war. And now Iraq, Tony Blair and George Bush. And for our own children it looks to be even worse.

Cheers, boomers.

The Watergate and Vietnam scandals that they harp on about so much happened when we were in our early teens; mostly, to us it was all so much background noise – and it’s not as though they got the rightwing out, anyhow. The movement was a failure.

No, the defining political events of our times were Iran-Contra, mutually assured destruction and the death squads and the cynicism of those times has informed our politics for ever. As a result, we’ve never trusted anyone in politics and we’ve taught our kids to do the same – so is it any wonder they don’t want to be politically involved in the formal channels provided, when it’s plain for anyone to see that the existing political institutions are so irredeemably corrupt?

There is an assumption made (t’s common wisdom now, it’s been repeated so often) – that leftists are dirty hippies. No, no and again no.

Our rebellion started in the eighties, against Thatcher, Reagan and Pinochet, to whose rightist legacy Bush et al are the heirs. We created our own political space by being early adopers of technology – we were posting to listservs, bulletin boards and usenet and chatting via IRC before the web was even a glint in anyone’s eye.

I feel so sorry for my children’s generation – not only are they expected to be well-rounded individuals, successful in their careers and in their personal lives, but they’re expected to also somehow sort out the mess their grandparents have made of the world – to clean up Washington, solve global warming, rescue the environment – as though there’s some sort of generational magic wand that would wipe the slate clean, if only those damned kids would take their attention away from MySpace and show some gumption for once.

For one thing, why the hell should they? They didn’t break it, why should they be expected to fix it? They’ve got enough to do just surviving.No, fuck that, let the boomers clean up their own messes.

Secondly, it’s all very well for bloggers of a certain age to pontificate to the young for their inaction – but who is it on the barricades at G8 protests, blocking the gates at Faslane nuclear base, pie-ing politicians or putting their lives on the line by lying in front of bulldozers in Palestine? Who is it that’s the mainstay of the antiwar movement? It’s not middle-aged bloggers continually harking back to the sixties.

My sons’ generation, those in their teens and twenties now, are taking the use of technology for political purposes much further than we could ever have concieved of. Just because young people don’t choose the political channels the boomers choose and the boomers can’t see them doing it, doesn’t mean they’re not political, or active.

Perhaps those complaining about political inactivity and apathy on the part of the young should stop reading the likes of ageing fake-liberal HuffPo and Salon and take a look at the Social Forum movement or Globalise Resistance or Schnews, or Indymedia. That’s where the kids are: they want to change the system, not just become more vote-fodder for the existing parties.

Get over yourselves, boomers. You are not the sine qua non of political activism to whom all later activists must genuflect – those days are long gone and so have those outdated modes of protest.

What the younger generation is looking for from you is active leadership and support, not envious blog-criticism.

Linky, Linky

Published on January 18, 20071 Comment

Mineralia:

Why carbon offsetting is just as another money making scheme exploiting liberal guilt.

How does Bush define victory? It’s the oil, stupid:

Under the new American-drafted law, the Iraqi government will offer contractual concessions up to 30 years’ long to foreign companies, using a system known as a PSA (Production Sharing Agreement). In other words, American and other Western oil companies are being allowed to exploit Iraq’s current predicament and negotiate self-serving, one-sided oil PSA’s that will legally commit the entire country of Iraq for the next 30 years.

Animalia:

3 cat videos –

Hot cat on turtle action!

The cat that likes to floss

Just Say No! Cats and the demon weed

Vegetalia:

Professional chav Jade Goody’s racism gives a fading reality show a popularity injection and the nation something to talk about. (Pssst, don’t mention the war!)

These white women, behaving like bitchy schoolgirls in the playground, have reduced Ms Shetty to tears on several occasions, accusing her of wanting to be white, having facial stubble, being “a dog”, making their skin crawl, touching their food (“you don’t know where those hands have been”), and have signally failed to get her name right, calling her “the Indian” at one point.

They might not have been quite as motivated by group tyranny as Orwell described – that “hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture . . . that seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current” – but there seems no doubt that their pack behaviour was offensive to Ms Shetty and damaging to our desire to be seen as a tolerant nation. Remember the message: without intellect we are lost. Clips of those lumpen women are being broadcast round the world as typically British, voicing British sentiments; by default we are all cast in the same mould of molten ignorance; all reduced to the racist drone of a thousand pub conversations.

Marginalia:

Madison Guy has links to some of the best street fashion photoblogs on the web, courtesy Avedon’s comments section.

James Wolcott asks why are are British sex scandals so much more interesting than American ones? Short answer, for our politicians the illicitness is 75% of the fun and the danger of being caught adds more spice. American politicians do it from a feeling of entitlement rather than in the spirit of titillating adventure, so it’s more about the greedy consumption of a ‘luxury’ sexual product like high-class call-girls (or rough trade or kids as the case may be) than the eroticism and thrill of the chase. Though the erotic aspect falls down somewhat in light of the four-year liaison between former PM John Major and ex-health Minister Edwina Currie – “By the way, Edwina, that was a not inconsiderably satisfying orgasm”. Ewww.

Resolution? What New Year’s resolution? For your sweet tooth, here’s Fanny, a French patisserie chef who blogs in English at Foodbeam.

Read the recipes and patisserie reviews, drool over the pictures, and get baking. I made her Petits carrés au caramel et au chocolat, known to us commoners asmillionaires shortbread, last weekend using white chocolate ( because that’s what we had) and it was very, very rich and absolutely delicious.

Did we time travel back to 2002 or what?

Published on January 17, 2007

Atrios calls out that stupid fucker Kevin “I thought Kenneth Pollack was smart” Drum on Drum’s amnesia about the war debate and asks:

..adding, as I meant to say in the original post, there are also numerous obvious bad consequences to killing a bunch of people for no good reason. So, yes, there were numerous reasons to oppose this war and no good reasons to support it. Why are we still arguing about this?

Because the idiots and criminals who conspired to get the War on Iraq going, have not had to pay for their crimes yet. Worse they’ ve been rewarded for it. As long as that is the case, as long as having been wrong about the War on Iraq carries no cost, people will be able to argue that having been a supporter of the war was the right thing to do.

In this case, Kevin Drum is just self aware enough and still possesses a rudimentary sense of shame, so he’s unable to argue with a straight face that he made the right choice at the time, but what he can do is rubbish his then opponents.

For this to stop, people need to start losing their cushy thinktank jobs and pundit gigs. People like Peter Beinart or Kenneth Pollack should at the very least be laughed of television when they open their big fat mouths.

Read more about:
Kevin Drum, War on Iraq, chickenhawks