Blogging politics, culture, sociology and life from Brisvegas
I had written him a letter,
Or email, to be precise.
The tone was less than friendly,
And the premise not-so-nice.
Still I knew no harm could come to me –
‘Twere a trifle, in the end;
The distribution list was small,
Mostly just my friends.
But as I hit send — alas! over
The day was cast a pall,
The ominous realisation:
I had sent it — “Reply All”.
Continue reading ‘Dear Everyone,’
There was an interesting discussion on this post on the whole “what is different about blogs and MSM “blogs” theme” with George Megalogenis recently. I generally agree with those who argued that whatever takes place on the bulletin boards of the News Limited and Fairfax online empires, it ain’t blogging. Even the reference to commenters as “bloggers” is jarring to anyone who was actually around the blogosphere before the media tried to appropriate it. It’s the lingo, dude! That’s just a small sign of something different going on, but a significant one. Another is evident from Megalogenis’ blog today.
My concern is not what you argue but how you go about it.
My mind is open on pretty much every issue. It’s what journalists do for a living: keep their minds open in the hope that they catch the next new idea out there.
Sadly, what a significant minority of my bloggers do is begin their posts with an assumption that everyone who disagrees with them is a “moron”.
Here’s why those posts grate: My job as a journalist is to assume that the person who disagrees with me doesn’t know what I know. To increase the sum of their knowledge, I can only tell them what I know on their terms, in their language. Which must begin with an assumption that I am not better than my reader.
Continue reading ‘The mote in your own eye: civility, community and the MSM online’
It doesn’t seem like all that long ago, but it’s been half a month since we had a good condemn. Although there’s been a bit of condemnation about the Lympics. So it must be time again to condemn. Here’s a twenty fourth open condemnation thread. What’s getting up your goat this month so far? Which evil political, cultural, social, musical, religious and other phenomena need condemnation? (Or loud denunciation?)
You can condemn anything you like except La Femme Nikita. Well, you can condemn Michael. But not Nikita, Edward Woodward or Coldplay tracks.
[Via The Global Sociology Blog] Here’s something fun for a Sunday evening. This website enables you to select any day of any year going back to 1892 and find out what the top song on the (American) charts was. It’s suggested that you find out what the hit of the moment on your birthday was. Mine’s “Love is Blue” by Paul Mauriat and his orchestra. I don’t know if there are any quasi-astrological influences on your future destiny, but anyway…
It’s well known that grammar stoushes can get a tad heated.
A very curious article in the Boston Globe reflecting on punctuation wars surrounding the semicolon, with the tag line “the punctuation mark that makes men tremble”, shows something rather interesting about language in use aside from its ostensible casus belli: how quickly heated arguments lead to the invocation of gendered abuse.
Consider this:
Real men, goes the unwritten rule of American punctuation, don’t use semi-colons.
And Kilpatrick, in a 2006 column, restated those sentiments at a higher pitch, calling the semicolon “girly,” “odious,” and “the most pusillanimous, sissified, utterly useless mark of punctuation ever invented.”
Nevertheless, the semicolon has been suffering. Paul Collins, in a recent Slate article, cited a study showing “a stunning drop in semicolon usage between the 18th and 19th centuries, from 68.1 semicolons per thousand words to just 17.7.”
You’d think a victory like that would satisfy the anti-semicolon crowd. But no, they keep worrying that those girly, prissy, hermaphroditic punctuation marks will somehow infect their sturdy prose. If semicolons are masculine enough for Melville and Irving, why should they unsettle Barthelme and Vonnegut? Are today’s male writers just more insecure than yesterday’s about the manliness of their vocation?
The typical order of business for most people when Google Street View came to Australia seemed to be:
But given the extraordinarily comprehensive coverage, another possibility came to mind. Can Street View replace the need to take one’s camera to show off a place you’ve visited?
The Evolution of Dance. Amazing routine.
Find more memes you missed back in the ancient days of Internets yore at the Internet Memes Timeline. There’s explanations for the ones you see around all the time, and even use, but may not know their origins.
Well it’s August so it must be time again to condemn. Here’s a twenty third open condemnation thread. What’s getting up your goat this month so far? Which evil political, cultural, social, musical, religious and other phenomena need condemnation? (Or loud denunciation?)
You can condemn anything you like except feminism and feminists.
Continue reading ‘I won’t add my condemn to your condemn XXIII’
Extra marks if you can work in any Irate Queen, postmodern time stream, Pirate Queen and/or peg leg motifs:
The prize? Your chance to clearly articulate the Liberal Party’s position on climate change.
This (long) post is inspired by the tapes of self-styled seduction guru Dimitri The Lover (AKA James Sears) that are being discussed on blogs all over at the moment (or at least linked to with a LOLOLOL!!1!), and the arguments as to whether they are genuine recordings of a creep or performance art from a guy engaging in viral marketing for a movie. I’ll get to them later, but first a little about the background of the “seduction community”, because Sears claims to be a different kind of seduction guru.
There’s been a lot written about the seduction community (AKA players/PUAs (Pick Up Artists)) in the last few years, and it’s worth emphasising here that most men join these (largely online) communities because they are simply looking to gain more confidence when interacting with women, that there’s nothing wrong in principle with seeking sex without commitment for either men or women as long as everybody’s being emotionally honest and physically safe/sane, and that most of these men probably do ultimately want a committed relationship one day. These points are usually clouded by the best-known Community gurus emphasising cynical bedpost-notching above all (and making a lot of money talking about the ways that their special techniques allegedly make women powerless to resist them).
One of the aims of the Community is to correct a common problem for inexperienced men - an overly romantic view of women as sweet, pure and sexually demure that makes these men overly hesitant and overly eager to please. The Community doesn’t tend to mention that this package usually includes a belief that sex is inherently dirty, resulting in a side-serve of self-loathing for their desire to defile women, which is the part of their attitude that is most offputting, rather than the common plaint that the men are just “being too nice”.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with correcting the pernicious stereotype that sex sullies women and that men must supplicate and compensate women for their dirty male desires. Done properly it can lead to a more realistic, relaxed and confident style of social interaction that both sexes can appreciate. Unfortunately, instead of moving away from gender-stereotypes to view women as people with highly individual wants and needs (that often do actually include sex for fun with the right person at the right time), what tends to happen in the Community is that one gender-stereotype is replaced with another: women as fickle, emotional, selfish and easily manipulated. The idea that sex demeans women remains, but is recast as sluts deserve to be demeaned. Then the Community wonders why folks (not just feminists) find fault with their collective wisdom. Continue reading ‘Cognitive dissonance in the Seduction Community’
Warning: snark ahead
According to last night’s Lateline, “A growing number of bloggers are now using the internet to attack the science of global warming. Written by climate change sceptics, the blogs are hosting a new scientific debate over whether the world has become hotter or colder during the past ten years.”
The reporter’s evidence for this “new scientific debate”? Andrew Bolt and Jennifer Marohasy. You know, Bolt. The long-serving columnist with a regular gig in the Herald-Sun and Insiders. And Marohasy, the IPA employee whose glass-half-full schtick on the environment has been making its way into the mainstream media for many years. Both do run blogs (in Bolt’s case, to give him credit, he does genuinely blog in a way that most journalists haven’t tried), but the idea that they are in any way new voices on the scene is complete rot. And their “new scientific debate”? A rehashed version of the “world is cooling” nonsense - based on a high-schooler’s level of data analysis - that they’ve been running for years, which as Paul noted has been debunked in detail by any number of experts.
Note to John Stewart (the Lateline reporter, not the Daily Show host): just because somebody says it on the Internet doesn’t make it new, scientific, or interesting. And if you really want to report on climate change blogging, might I suggest there’s a whole other world of it out there that’s been doing a whole lot better covering not only the problem, but the merits of the various solutions, than your program has managed?
My attention has been drawn to a blog piece by Andrew Bolt which purports to show graphical evidence to support the central dogma of the Stupid Cult of Cooling.
The centrepiece of Bolt’s article is a monthly series graph of global average temperatures from the Hadley Centre for Climate Change. On the basis of this graph Bolt claims that:
As you see, since 1998—an unusually warm year thanks to the “El Nino” pool of warmer water in the Pacific—the world’s temperature dropped back to a steady plateau, followed by a few years of cooling.
What Bolt either does not understand, or is not telling his readers, is that monthly series graphs register very short-term (i.e. monthly) fluctuations in global average temperatures. Short-term fluctuations tell us little about long-term trends, which is what the global warming debate is about. I explained this in the LP post linked to above, with reference to year to year trends which are subject to the influence of short-run trends such as movements in the El Nino/La Nina cycle (hereafter referred to as ENSO). What is true with respect to yearly fluctuations holds a fortiori for monthly fluctuations.
Continue reading ‘Rip Van Bolt’s missing months’
I could have used many harsher terms, but I was exhausted from outrage and despair after reading his latest, and couldn’t really give him my best invective.
Apparently, despite decades of study from medical and childhood health professions, Michael Savage knows better than all of them when it comes to autism. (Like so many of his fellow cultural warrior pundits, an awful lot of it boils down to WIMMIN R DOIN IT RONG (AS USUAL (COZ WIMMIN R LOOSRS)), but there’s a nasty side-dish of JUST SNAP OUT OF IT)
That’s what autism is. What do you mean they scream and they’re silent? They don’t have a father around to tell them, ‘Don’t act like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don’t sit there crying and screaming, idiot.’” Savage concluded, “[I]f I behaved like a fool, my father called me a fool. And he said to me, ‘Don’t behave like a fool.’ The worst thing he said — ‘Don’t behave like a fool. Don’t be anybody’s dummy. Don’t sound like an idiot. Don’t act like a girl. Don’t cry.’ That’s what I was raised with. That’s what you should raise your children with. Stop with the sensitivity training. You’re turning your son into a girl, and you’re turning your nation into a nation of losers and beaten men. That’s why we have the politicians we have.
Basically? F*ck you and that ablist, misogynist high horse you’re riding, Savage. Continue reading ‘Michael Savage is a drongo’
Elliott Bledsoe reminds us not to take men wearing robes all that seriously. Make sure you look at this photo very carefully indeed.
Note: If you don’t like what you see - tough - it’s now legal to be annoyed.
Continue reading ‘World Youth Day: The dark side of the force?’
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Happy Birthday to Mindy!
And she’s all alone at the office today! I would have left a comment on that post, but the Haloscan commenting system won’t let me. Seeing as I would hate for her to think that no comments means that no-one cares, I’m saying it here instead, via the Fab Four.