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Martin’s first rule of blogging

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Nothing good can come from a post that starts like this:

Andrew Sullivan links to a Ross Douthat-Julian Sanchez exchange (that started as a Douthat-Saletan exchange, and concerning which Karl Smith and Noah Millman get words in edgewise, if you care to follow up the links.)

In a related question, a) who still reads Sullivan and b) what have you done in a previous life that you’d voluntarily read Douthat or Sanchez? Also, why take any of them seriously enough to blog about them? They’re all hacks who I wouldn’t trust me to tell the sky is blue if I weren’t in a position to check it. Why give people who basically act like polite trolls the intellectual credit by responding to their latest inane “discussions”?

So, Martin’s first rule of blogging: don’t take proven trolls seriously, never respond to hacks.

Sandra

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Sandra

You may have noticed nothing much has happened at this blog in the last year or so. Yhose of you who also read my other blog may have guessed why this is: Sandra’s longterm illness and sadly, her death earlier this month. What you may not know is that Sandra was not just my wife, but also my blogging partner Palau, pretty much the person who kept this blog going for the last four-five years or so, as it evolved away from being a repository of the best of leftwing blogs to something more personal yet still political. Though she was always modest about her talents, when she was on she was incredible, with a nose for interesting but under reported news, a knack for writing naturally and wittily and a keen interest in, well, everything. She loved writing about politics, could incredibly outraged, but was interested in more than just politics. One of her strengths was her lawyer background, she had a respect for the law and the British constitution that is sometimes lacking in socialist bloggers, who do tend to view the law as just another instrument for the rich to oppress the working classes, which is true as far as it goes, but she knew it was more than this and it annoyed the hell out of her to see the cavalier attitude with which New Labour especially treated it.

But it wasn’t all serious with her. She was tickled pink finding that Pimp My Crab kit a few years back for example. And she was into gardening and nature and kittens and squid. Especially squid, but other cephalopods as well. She was incredibly productive posting when she could, but her illness did rob her of a lot of energy and time to post and in the end she had to give it up long before she had to give up on life itself. She had hoped to come back to the blog, but unfortunately she couldn’t.

Link Of The Day: This Post Brought To You By Opiates

IT is not magic pixie dust, Meta, UK elections
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UPDATE Sunday noon

This morning’s X- ray shows it’s pleurisy, probably fungal and migrated from the yeast infection in my kidney. That’s the trouble with being immunosuppressed, any stray infective organism sees me and goes “come on guys -FREE FOOD!

Damn it, I haven’t been through all this just to fall to a fungus at the last hurdle. And I suppose better a pleural infection than a heart infection. I do try to be resilient, but still, the bright side is a little hard to find sometimes.

UPDATE Sunday a.m: Just call me Job. The shoulder pain got much worse during the night – it seems I may well have dry pleurisy and/or pericarditis.

Happy, happy, joy, joy.

But never mind, there’s always an upside to everything, and if I hadn’t had to look up pericarditis I’d’ve never come across the amusingly named coxsackie virus..
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Light posting from me today: the reason is that, when I was intensive care post kidney transplant, the medics tried numerous times to put in an arterial line (Considering the damage, they must’ve used a hammer and chisel.)

Doing this caused several massive haematomae – and subsequently scar tissue – to form up my right arm and damaged both my radial and median nerves. The damage appears to be permanent. (More than you ever wanted to know about needles and nerve damage here)

The practical upshot is that my right hand and arm are numb yet paradoxically incredibly painful at the same time and my shoulder hurts like a very, very hurty thing, and as I have a high tolerance for painkillers, it takes morphine to shut it up.

Yes, I know I should be grateful to still be here and I know too that yet again, they were trying to stop me from dying, but bloody hell, don’t they know I have blogposts to write?

Not that anyone reads them, but I have rage to offload. Especially about the election.

Anyhow, if you don’t read anything else today, read Ben Goldacre’s latest Bad Science piece, “The real political nerds”, on just how crappy the data management of election information by UK gov has been and how intelligent bystanders have taken up the slack. It’s packed with interesting links if you, like me, are a political nerd too.

“Want to look back at how people voted in your local council elections over the past 10 years?” asks Chris: “Tough. Want to compare turnout between different areas, and different periods? No can do. Want an easy way to see how close the election was last time, and how much your vote might make a difference? Forget it.”

Like so many data problems, all that’s needed is a tiny tweak: all this information is known to someone, somewhere, and it’s all been typed in, several times over, in several places, local websites, newspapers, and so on.

So what the hell have we been paying for all this time?

Oh yeah.

Don’t Talk To Me About Technology

Health, Internet, IT is not magic pixie dust, Life under Capitalism, Media, Meta, TV, UK elections
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Can you believe this shit?

Here I am, a politics and news junkie stuck here in a Dutch hospital for the past 5 months and on the night before the UK election. my overpriced crap hospital tv,(3 euro a day, run by a private company called PatientLine) and hence my access to BBC’s 1 and 2, is fubared.

The greedy, incompetent bastards. The only thing I got nthe tv on for was the election coverage. No wonder I threw the remote at the wall.

Luckily I’ve found a live video link to the BBC’s Campaign Show that doesn’t rely on the execrable iPlayer – now if only I could get a reliable WiFi connection.

But to cap it all the hospital’s free KPN WiFi really is the shittiest on the planet. It’s been kicking me off every 5 minutes all day, which requires a reboot every single time or it locks you out from logging on.

13 years I’ve been waiting to see Labour get it in the neck. I want to kill someone.

What Tory blogs do better

Blogs, Meta, Wingnuts
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Or, how we must learn to stop worrying and start loving our fellow lefty bloggers:

Which is not to say that the left can’t learn from the right. Some of the bigger left-of-Labour blogs have much higher traffic than specifically Labour-identified ones, but there are still bad old leftist habits. One thing that’s impressive about the Tory bloggers is that, though they have disagreements, they don’t escalate into nuclear polemic – they do recognise each other as being on basically the same side – and also, they link to each other assiduously. Compare that with the far-left blogs, where in some particular cases, a mixture of sectarian dogmatism and personality clashes leads to long-running feuds, and in one or two cases putatively socialist blogs that do little except run furious denunciations of other socialists.

I’m not that familiar with the toffosphere, but I wonder how much of that supposed unity isn’t an optical illusion. From what I’ve seen of the American wingnut sphere there as a high degree of lockstep as well as long as their “movement” was on the ascent — once the Repubs started to lose the rats started to bite each other. Furthermore, much of their unity was also centrally directed, with much of the traffic being vertical, top to bottom rather than horizontal between equal(ish) partners/blogs. If you get your talking points from the RNC, disseminated via the bigger blogs & mainstream media, then reinforced by the smaller blogs linking back (and being linked to as examples of “grassroots outrage”), it’s no wonder there’s a greater degree of communality amongst rightwing blogs.

But even before the lost presidential and congressional elections there were schisms. There has always been the paleoconservative, libertarian and isolationist right (Pat Robinson, antiwar.com, Jim Henley, etc), subjected to almost as much wingnut hatred as the socalled liberal left for their anti Iraq war stance. Then there were the high profile apostates like Balloon Juice or Andrew Sullivan, once part of the wingnut right until they sobered up (latest example: Little Green Footballs). And currently we have the Teabagger/Palin fanatics trying to purge the unbelievers and vice versa. So much of what makes the rightwing blogs look so united is a ruthless attack of anybody on their side who doesn’t adhere to orthodoxy. So I’m skeptical about how nice the Tories really are towards each other and how much of it is –at least for the moment– enforced from above.

All of which doesn’t take away from some of the more self destructive tendencies of the non-Labour left, it’s true…