Blogs

Forward, Not Backward, Upward, Not Forward, And Always Twirling, Twirling, Twirling Towards Freedom!

Blogs, Kittens!
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Blogs are starting to rev up again in fits and starts as people surface blinking from the safety of their duvets, stumble bleary-eyedly back to work and go “Wha’?” over their keyboards.

The desertification of the lefty blogosphere over the holiday period might’ve led one to think that not every employee uses their work pc for the purpose for which it was intended… or maybe bloggers just have better social lives and that stopped them blogging. Yes, that’s it. It must be.

Anyway, now we’re all done with our rich and fulfilling, glitter-filled social whirls, let’s take a look at what some of our favourite bloggers’re up to:

The News Blog: Steve Gilliard on Bush and sacrifice, exploding myths about young Black men, and middle-class American children’s pole-dancing and running wild in libraries. I don’t always agree with him and that’s putting it mildly, but he’s always provocative and the commenters make good reading too. (I do wish the blog’d switch back to a commenting system that remembers commenter ID though. Haloscan is indeed a pain, but at least you don’t have to keep retyping info to post a comment.)

Lest we forget, Martini Republic is pointing to the newly-beatified former president Gerald Ford’s shady role in the crime of East Timor and also is showing why even online versions of US newspapers are failing. It’s the journalists, duh.

At Pandagon, Pam on the folly of putting the civil rights of a minority to the popular vote, and Amanda asks: is creationism the supreme form of separation anxiety?

For those who’ve overindulged somwhat in the past couple of weeks, Lifehacker takes its considerable nous to New Year Weight Loss Hacks

Dependable Renegade has moved to her own domain here, and is still retitling pics with great aplomb:

“I didn’t do it, I swear.”

REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

Bouphonia: “…the conclusions one can draw about Womanhood from the matrimonial hazards of 19th-century Mormonism are limited at best. ” Quite.

Reading wingnuts so we don’t have to, Athenae at First Draft gives us the shorter Townhall: “New Orleanians too stoned to evacuate”

I almost hesitate to look at Sadly, No these days for fear of what those strangely lovable little scamps have been up to now but it seems to be safe at the moment after Atrios’ valiant bombardment of their lair with the bunker-busting Rick Wakeman On Ice. However, they are not dead, they are merely sleeping. Beware. But…. hmmm, I wonder if now, while their powers are weak, might not be a good time to taunt them with two-faced kittens ?

Hilzoy is a bit fed-up and apparently a antiamerican satanist to boot, but is cheered (and who wouldn’t be?) by the existence of Poetry Tulip.

And finally, get next year’s Christmas shop done early from the comfort of your sofa, via The AK-47 Shopping Channel:

Link

Read more: Internet, Blogs, Blogging, Kittens, Video, Guns, Drink! Women, Arse, Feck.

How To Handle Trolls

Blogs
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They always come swarming out of the metaphorical internet woodwork (do tubes have skirting boards?) when the post topic’s on Israel and Palestine. Ho to combat them? Take a lesson from good old Uncle Vlad, who doesn’t mince his words :

What a mindless set of talking points, Rysk. I assume you picked this up from some pathetic snot-rag from the Israeli or yank press.

So what if you have some miserable Qassams being fired into your cities? You choose war, you butcher and murder Palestinians daily, you steal their land, you ethnically cleanse them, you blockade them, you kill their children as they sleep: you choose war. You get war. Don’t whine about it.

So the Palestinians didn’t build high rise flats in their open air prison. You destroy their economy, you uproot their olive trees, you bulldoze their houses, you blockade them, you checkpoint them, you build Jewish Only roads all around you, you siphon off the water. You choose their misery and poverty for them. Don’t sneer about it.

So, some greenhouses were damaged by the settlers on their way out and by some celebrating Palestinian kids. You bulldoze their greenhouses. You destroy their land and everything they try to grow. The Palestinians had utilised those greenhouses and had a harvest within months – you couldn’t have that. So you invaded, and bombed and raked unarmed crowds with bullets, and used human shields and kidnapped the government. Don’t even try to be sanctimonious about it.

You creep. You moron. You odious racist fool.

lenin Homepage 19 Dec, 11:28 #

And may I add he’s a crayon-botherer too.

Read more: Internet, Blogs, Blogging, Trolls, Putdowns

Blog Title Of The Day

Blogs
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WER IN UR MEDDOS Plottin UR DoWNFAll

I’m bored with Comment Of The Day and I’m thinking of instituting a new feature: Blog Title Of The Day. There’s so many witty ones out there that get no recognition and so much effort goes into naming blogs it’s about time. I’m going on titles alone: this has nothing to do with blog ethos or content, just if I like the title or it tickles me in some way.

Subjective, yes, but screw it, it’s our blog and it’s nice to indulge the tyrannical impulse now and then. Stops you getting acne too. Do you see the Chimperor or Pooty-poot Putin with zits? No. I rest my case.

So to start the ball rolling, blog titles of the day today are:

God of Biscuits

If only there really were a god of biscuits ( if there is it’s Ralf Little) , maybe she or he could explain the atrocity that is the Oreo.

Jesus Reporting

What would Jesus report if he had a blog? I dunno. Sandal reviews? Beard-grooming tips?

Great Dairy State Conspiracy

I have this mental picture of vast herds of Holsteins, looking placid but plotting furiously… be scared, America.

Any other BTOTD suggestions are very welcome.

Read more: Blog Title of The Day

Hours of festive fun for all the family

Blogs, Funny, Wingnuts
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Heh. Indeed.

What happened when the otherly-ethicked (I won’t say corrupt, he wouldn’t know what the word meant) Republican ex-bigwig Tom Delay began a blog, suggested readers ‘speak to truth to power’, and left the comments open and umoderated?

Pretty much what you’d expect. Here’s one of the milder, more thoughtful comments:

You left Congress disgracefully and you want people to take you seriously? You should be in prison you assclown, piss off Tom.

December 10, 2006 Unregistered Commenter Tom you suck

It’s a free for all at the roach motel! The comments have been removed now but are saved for posterity at the above link.

Hours of festive fun for all the family.

Read more: US politics, Tom Delay, Blogs.

Stating The Utterly Bleeding Obvious Or Necessary Truths ?

Anti-war, Blogs, US politics, War on Afghanistan, War on Iraq, War on Terror
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I’m Spartacus, you’re Spartacus, we’re all bloody Spartacus, blah blah blah. Nonagenarian former actor Kirk Douglas, of all people, is attempting to rally world youth to sort out the mess his generation created:

Kirk Douglas calls on youth to stand up and be counted

Dan Glaister in Los Angeles
Monday December 11, 2006
The Guardian

The cleft chin may be familiar to some. But others may have difficulty placing the ageing Hollywood star.

“You may know me,” he writes in an open letter published last Saturday. “If you don’t … Google me. I was a movie star and I’m Michael Douglas’s dad, Catherine Zeta-Jones’s father-in-law, and the grandparents of their two children. Today I celebrate my 90th birthday.”

But Kirk Douglas has loftier things on his mind than summoning up the wind to blow out 90 candles. The man who led the slaves to revolt as Spartacus, the man who embodied the suffering of Van Gogh’s art in Lust For Life is turning his attention to the fate of the planet.

“Let’s face it,” he writes to “America’s young people”, “THE WORLD IS IN A MESS and you are inheriting it.

“Generation Y, you are on the cusp. You are the group facing many problems: abject poverty, global warming, genocide, Aids, and suicide bombers to name a few. These problems exist, and the world is silent. We have done very little to solve these problems. Now, we leave it to you. You have to fix it because the situation is intolerable.”

[..]

Cheers for pointing that out Grandad, we’d never have noticed if you hadn’t said.

I had similar feelings at first on reading recent Digby and Hilzoy posts. Shorter Digby: “America has a class system that’s wrecking the country.” Wow, I thought, who knew? So that’s what all those ads and movies and tv shows are about. Shorter Hilzoy: “The methods used to produce chocolate, gold, diamonds and many other commodities produce human misery and ecological disaster.” Do they really? Well, fancy. Oh, OK, that’s why all those Africans are running away from that misery as fast as they can and making new lives in Europe…

Now I was quite peeved. None of these issues are new or unknown or hidden – anyone outside the US with half a brain and a smidgen of conscience who’s followed current events knows these things, even if not in detail. They’ve been out in the open for a long time in the rest of the world, but Americans are acting as though it’s something newly-dicovered! What do you think all the European and S. American leftists have been telling you all this time? Argh, why are you all so stupid?

I was getting a good head of outraged steam up at this point.

But then I thought, am I just being horribly snotty here? It’s that ‘outside the US’ that makes all the difference in perception. To so many US readers who are just switching on to the liberating idea of online dissenting and blogs the idea that by eating a candy bar they are supporting slavery, for example, must be deeply shocking new information which must challenge their view of themselves and their nation’s way of living in some pretty basic ways.

Similarly the truth about their government’s complicity in the torture and murder of thousands in Chile is shocking the US public following Augusto Pinochet‘s death. The information about how the coup was engineered by Kissinger and other neocons and how Pinochet’s murderous regime was supported by the US is something which has, again, been common knowledge for a long time elsewhere, even in the most remote of places. For example the woman doctor who ran the hospice in Devon where my mother died was raped and tortured by Pinochet’s thugs while working in Chile in the seventies. As a result the US’ role in Chile had massive coverage locally.

But at a national and international level coverage of even the most egregious excesses of the Pinochet regime was constantly downplayed, excused and finessed by the US and UK government/media complex particularly so in the US. American Journalists who didn’t sing the right tune were even disappeared themselves, so it’s not surprising that this is all coming as a bit of a shock to many in Leftpondia.

There are many more such shocks to come too, as the citizenry realises the facts are out there, if you only care to look – take Guatemala, Afghanistan, The Marianas, Diego Garcia or East Timor to name just a few- it’s all there for the knowing. There is a whole other mass of people apart from the liberal left blogerati who can only now, because of the wonders of the internet, find out what has been kept from them for so long. Viewed from this standpoint Digby’s and Hilzoy’s posts are objective, trustworthy and essential guides for people to know where to find what’s been hidden in plain sight, rather than just restatements of received wisdom.

So from my initial irritation and snark I’ve changed my position. Rather than being such a horribly European elitist leftist snot I really should be jubilant to find that after all the chipping away at the tunnel face that others have been chipping away on the other side and we’re about to meet in the middle.

In that light even Kirk Douglas’ slightly bizarre call to arms is actually quite laudable – rarely does someone of his generation actually say ‘Sorry, we were wrong’ and make an attempt, however lame, to put it right.

As my son constantly tells me, it’s all good.

Read more: US media, US politics, Blogs, Kirk Douglas, Augusto Pinochet, Chile, Guatemala, Afghanistan, The Marianas, Diego Garcia, East Timor