Embarrassing or Otherwise?

Your decision. The Poor Man, however, cannot be upstaged. Thanks to The Editors for the chance to be hoist by my own petard. Again.

Scandal!

Need to print something out. To avoid wasting ink I reset the colours:



Then after I'm done, I go to Sadly, No! What do I see?



A fucking piece-of-shit logo, that's what I see.

Goddamn you all to hell!

Man is She Dense.

Come on.

One of the main things that draws me to writing about something is the desire to make fun of people who are taking themselves too seriously, like those bloggers who were so dorkily proud to be lunching with Clinton.

This right after a pretty-please vote-beg.

Vote The Moderate Voice, for the sake of mockery everywhere.

Accountability

I've been thinking a little bit - a very little bit, so apologies in advance for saying something everybody has said better - about accountability. With all the pooh-poohing about the inherent deceptiveness and badness of blogging, it seems a little weird that there exist two mechanisms for accountability in blogging that the media haven't had, for the most part:

Comments
Links

This is changing of course, as people abandon or embrace static content for discourse, but a decent blog will have comments and people who link to posts on it if the posts are decent.

Neither of these things is an arbiter of truthiness, but comments in particular are really valuable, as people will call you on your bullshit or correct you on your errors if you're trying to shovel it past them. This is still not real accountability, as idiots can post, comment, link, and censor with impunity but I think dishonesty is ordinarily pretty easy to recognize.

In any case, this is a far greater accountability than pundits generally have to deal with, so suck on it, finger-wagglers, until you have the decency to exchange ideas with your readers instead of deliver them. Comments also necessarily deal in the dreaded incivility. You'd think that saying "this idea is stupid" (as long as reasons are laid out) would be a welcome thing, given the recent misadventures undertaken as a result of everybody important being too chicken to confront a dangerous idiot. There's always a little heat with the light.

So welcome the bloggers. Only the ones with comments though. And give the incivil a big wet kiss. We hate that.

A Poem By My Four-Year-Old

People on the news
Make snafus.

God's a Shit

Found a copy of "To a Baby Born Without Limbs" from The Anti-Death League by my favourite cranky Tory Kingsley Amis:

This is just to show you who's boss around here.
It'll keep you on your toes, so to speak,

Make you put your best foot forward, so to speak,

And give you something to turn your hand to, so to speak.

You can face up to it like a man,

Or snivel and blubber like a baby.

That's up to you. Nothing to do with Me.

If you take it in the right spirit,

You can have a bloody marvelous life,

With the great rewards courage brings,

And the beauty of accepting your LOT.

And think how much good it'll do your Mum and Dad,

And your Grans and Gramps and the rest of the shower,

To be stopped being complacent.

Make sure they baptize you, though,

In case some murdering bastard

Decides to put you away quick,

Which would send you straight to LIMB-O, ha ha ha.

But just a word in your ear, if you've got one.

Mind you DO take this in the right spirit,

And keep a civil tongue in your head about Me.

Because if you DON'T,

I've got plenty of other stuff up My sleeve,

Such as leukemia and polio,

(Which incidentally you're welcome to any time,

Whatever spirit you take this in.)

I've given you one love-pat, right?

You don't want another.

So watch it, Jack.

Extra Althousian Denseness

Rarely has a thread been so thoroughly demolished. Excellent work.