 by Flemming Funch
Marc Strassman wants to be Mayor of the San Fernando Valley, where I live. He runs his campaign online and he wants to be an E-mayor, really, promising universal broadband access, online voting, and open source software. But The Valley hasn't actually seceeded from Los Angeles yet. Might happen next year.
Hm, looks like some of the NCN NewsLogs have caught the attention of the WarBloggers. That's a very active faction of right-wing webloggers on the net who for one thing just LOVE The War, and who generally have a strangely homogenous ideology. I'm not sure if it is Rush Limbaugh's listeners or what. The above article describers them like this: "They also tend to have certain ideological characteristics: to a man (and woman) they are as scathingly intolerant of any and all dissent on the War question as they are vehement in their contempt for Arabs – all Arabs, as such – and blind support for the state of Israel. It's frightening, really, with so many sites – there must be hundreds of these little war-bots spawned in cyberspace, springing out of the psychic ether like Myrmidons and lunging at anyone who doesn't toe the Party Line." Indeed that's pretty much how it looks. They're out prowling for people they call "idiotarians", and a typical site of theirs is "The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler". "Idiotarians" seems to be the derogatory term for people with a different ideology, like peace activist, or people with a more balanced view of the middle east than George Bush has. And they do spend some time out looking for such people so they can sort of virtually lynch them. In different times it would be like "Let's go kill ourselves some niggers", or "..beat up some commies", or "hippies" or "faggots" or fill in your own slur. OK, this is the Internet, so all they can really do is to ridicule you in their own weblog, or leave nasty comments in yours, if you allow them to. Nothing much to worry about really.
I was talking the other day with a friend who moved to the U.S. from the Czech Republic just a few years ago. And he mentioned that one of the first surprised reactions he had when he got here was "Hey, this is just like Communism!" You know, lots of unfeeling bureaucracies, a government run by rich party bosses, a corrupt system where power is for sale, and lots of little people who can't really do much about it. The propaganda is just different here, and you have to work harder to survive.
Seems like Google comes and looks at my page here every single day. That's quite an honor. Obviously because it has noticed that I update it every day. I can't figure out, however, why it only goes one level deep. It indexes what is linked directly from right here, but it doesn't get the second level. Which means it hasn't yet picked up all articles in my NewsLog. I wonder if it is a question of time, or a question of how well other people link to the front page.
"Tardigrades are among the hardiest of multicelled animals, maybe the toughest little critters of all. Dry them out and they go into a state of suspended animation in which they can live for - well, no one knows. The can be frozen at temperatures near absolute zero, heated to 150 degrees, subjected to a high vacuum or to pressure greater than that of the deepest ocean, and zapped with deadly radiation." --Chet Raymo. A Little Reminder of Reality's Scale
|
|