Online Blogintegrity

70 years ago today

70 years ago today German and Italian planes bombed the town of Guernica, een the Basque region of Spain.

The planes belonged to the allies of the fascist dictator Francisco Franco, who placed blame for the bombings squarely on the communists.

The bombing went on for more than three hours, the planes targeting not the factories, bridges and railroads,  but highly populated civilian areas such as marketplaces, churches, town-squares and tightly clustered village houses.

The idea was to terrify the populace eento a state of compliance. The reverberations of the act were felt world wide as the tactic was repeated over the remaining years of the war een Dresden, London and Tokyo.

The ripples of these first cataclysmic waves are yet having an effect today, een places like Iraq, from the first employment of "Shock and Awe' bombings to the shocking and awful acts such as were visited upon Haditha.

Picasso's famous painting of the event became a world renown anti-war icon. However, een España,  the painting has been even more significant as an historic touchstone, keeping the atrocity fresh een the minds of generations of Spanish pipples until the dictator Franco was gone, and the nation of Spain could turn back to the past, and finally seek out the truth.

Picasso's piece was no just an outraged cry at the atrocity committed by the Spanish state on eet's own pipples. Guernica could also be seen as a warning of the theengs to come eef such an act were allowed to stand, and to be repeated.

Unfortunamente, the ones who should have heeded the warning had been bred and raised to disregard such theengs as naive, and frivolous.

On the plus side, the painting ees even yet weeth us, and her message remains undiluted by time.

so.

Nasty Assed Blogs

Apparently 80% of blogs contain "offensive content," including the f-word.

Shocking. Absolutely fucking shocking.

Blogs should be banned. Totally fucking banned.

--Thers

Dowd Attempts Coquetry, Achieves Coultery.

The New York Times' personal Chatty-Cathy Doll goes all "Mean-girls" for the third election een a row...

"Celebrity distorts democracy by giving the rich, beautiful, and famous more authority than they deserve." ~ Maureen Dowd, U.S. journalist. The New York Times, “Giant Puppet Show,” (September 10, 1995)

Wanker Of The Day

No, it's not Frank, but Markos...

ntodd

A Tale Of Two Shitties

Molly Ivors has an excellent post about Rich, Cox, Imus, Sierra and [whichever the hell last name Marko's really is].

ntodd

KSFO's Eliminationist Tendencies, caught on tape.

These are the WMA mp3 files of on-air personalities on KSFO spewing the eliminationist and wingnutty-bar invective.

Listen to them for jourself, then, por favor, post them far and wide.

Theenk of eet as an easy way to give Mickey Mouse the feenger.

so.

Brian Sussman tells caller to say 'Allah is a whore'

KSFO caller suggests bombing Syrian mosques

Brian Sussman wants military weapons in his home

Brian Sussman says he doesn't have to tolerate Islam

Brian Sussman says we should cut off detainee fingers and penises

Melanie Morgan and Ann Coulter say liberals should be executed

Coulter and Morgan say Bill Keller should be executed - sound effects by Officer Vic

Brian Sussman says Islam is a false religion

Czar Wars

Amigos, I am supposing that joo have all heard of thees story:

3 Generals Spurn the Position of War 'Czar' Bush Seeks Overseer For Iraq, Afghanistan

By Peter Baker and Thomas E. Ricks Washington Post Staff Writers Wednesday, April 11, 2007; Page A01

The White House wants to appoint a high-powered czar to oversee the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with authority to issue directions to the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies, but it has had trouble finding anyone able and willing to take the job, according to people close to the situation. At least three retired four-star generals approached by the White House in recent weeks have declined to be considered for the position, the sources said, underscoring the administration's difficulty in enlisting its top recruits to join the team after five years of warfare that have taxed the United States and its military.

Hmmmmmmmm...

¿Now, why would someone no want to run two wars for el Chimperador's administracíon?

I know, let's ask "retired Marine Gen. John J. "Jack" Sheehan, a former top NATO commander who was among those rejecting the job".

¿Jack?

"The very fundamental issue is, they don't know where the hell they're going,"... Sheehan said he believes that Vice President Cheney and his hawkish allies remain more powerful within the administration than pragmatists looking for a way out of Iraq. "So rather than go over there, develop an ulcer and eventually leave, I said, 'No, thanks,' " he said.

Wow, thees sounds rough, no?

Let me see, thees person weel have no power relative to hees boss, and be blamed for everytheeng.

¿¡Dios Gatos del Paradiso! who would want to deal weeth such painful humiliation?

Aahhh, ummm, well... si, I guess he could work.

To fill such a role, the White House is searching for someone with enough stature and confidence to deal directly with heavyweight administration figures such as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.

Stature, huh?  Sheet, then I guess Lieberman ees out.

Hmmmmmmm,  theenk, theenk, theenk...

Kurt Campbell, a Clinton administration Pentagon official who heads the Center for a New American Security, said the difficulty in finding someone to take the job shows that Bush has exhausted his ability to sign up top people to help salvage a disastrous war. "Who's sitting on the bench?" he asked. "Who is there to turn to? And who would want to take the job?"

¡Yo la tengo!

¡No! ¡No! Yo la tengo ees Español for ¡Eureka!

As een: ¡Eureka! ¡I have eet!

Above:John McCain, keeping our wars from getting soggy

¡Crunchatize me, War Czar!

Take The Pledge By Not Taking The Pledge: A Meta Exercise In Three Bowel Movements

First off, let me observe that [my friend] Bill is stupid and his mom wears combat boots in bed.  Now I will address his alleged "points" in a fisting, er...fisking manner.

First of all, NTodd has decided to ally himself with the "uncivil" set that the Code seeks to address. He writes, "Look, civility is great and shit, and nice people are nice and assholes like me are assholes."

WRONG! I haven't decided to ally myself with anybody.  I merely observe that I am, in fact, incivil.  That's merely my state of blogging, not some conscious choice to join other assholes in Asshole Solidarity.  I don't give a shit if somebody else is civil or incivil--well, now maybe I do, but more on that in a bit,

Let's remember how this current round of "wow, the blogosphere is a shrill place" got started -- with threats of sexual assault and death on a prominent technology blogger. NTodd may be a fucking potty mouth, but I don't think any reasonable person (so this excludes Althouse and her ilk) would consider him part of the problem.

Indeed, I am not part of the problem.  But golly, if I don't take The Pledge of Holy Blogging Goodness, how could any reasonable person tell?  Oh yeah, because they're reasonable people. 

For the comments threatening sexual assault and death, well...a Civility Code isn't going to stop the insane dorkwads who do that shit from doing it.  What's more, there are legal remedies in place for that, whether it be on a blog, via phone or with the person scrawling threats on your walls with your dog's blood.

There is a misconception, hinted at in the Times piece yesterday, that the freest speech is that which is completely unmoderated -- anything goes.

Watch out when playing with fire, Strawman!  You could get hurt.

I know of nobody who actually believes this--at the very least, I do not.  I never suggested that unfettered speech in any and all fora is the freest.  That's why in my previous post I recommended that people who want civility in their threads do stuff like post their house rules and moderate the goddamned comments.

"[T]hat shit" is fucking rampant out there in the woolly blogosphere and it sucks -- just as much as comment-spam -- more if you're the one getting the death threats. So what's wrong with saying "that shit won't fly on my blog?"

Uh...nothing.  Which is a large part of my point: bloggers can go ahead and say that.  Right now, without Timmy or Jimmy to help them.

I have a "support EFF" button on my blog. That button declares my support not only for the Electronic Frontier Foundation itself, but also for my general concern with copyright, privacy and free speech issues online. It's a badge that states my alignment with a certain set of guiding principles. Visitors to Candleblog can see that, and know that I'm hip to the work being done on warrantless wiretapping and frivolous DMCA takedown notices. Those buttons are common in the blogosphere and they have helped to shape its culture. That's the hope here.

Do you often make apple pie with oranges?  EFF is an activist organization that is protecting civil liberties online and fighting corporatist overreach.  Here we're talking about people promising to be excellent to each other in online communities.

Yes, that's exactly what this code is about Todd, bloggers stating their commenting policies. It's just a little bit organized in an effort to show some solidarity. Nobody is forcing anybody to do, say or think anything. There is no Blogger's Code Board set up to punish those who don't toe the line. Please get off your high horse -- you might fall and hurt something.

Projection, thy name is Bill.  The whole point of the Civility Code is to give birth to the Civility High Horse.  What organization is needed for bloggers to say, "hey, I'm civil"?  Absolutely NONE.

What you're failing to see is the larger context of such codes and pledges and shitbrained "solutions".  As I said before, I've seen this kind of thing crop up and all it really ends up being is some bullshit to let people claim moral superiority when underneath their civil language are wholly incivil concepts. 

"Don't use the word faggot...and by the way, that's icky and they shouldn't have civil rights."

"Don't say 'fuck'...but if somebody disagrees with you, out them and their family."

Dig?

Anyway, another strawman rears its ugly head here: I've not suggested that there is a Blogger's Code Board or anything.  The point here is that even such voluntary things, which have no real pragmatic purpose, are fucking stupid and I damn well always will criticize them in the loudest, most obnoxious manner NToddly possible.

And Todd is the second blogger I've seen compare the "Infamous Scribblers" Hamilton and Burr to "uncivil" blog commenters. It's a weak comparison. Hamilton and his ilk were nothing, if not substantive. The same cannot be said for the commenters who called for the rape and murder of Kathy Sierra.

Uh...Hamilton was killed.  One might say that was not just having a comment call for his murder, but rather murdering him in actual fact.

Further, you're now conflating threats with civility.  When BDG, the troll from Toronto, pretended to be my dead mother, my dead SIL, and my ex-wife whilst making disgusting comments, that was incivil.  Making threats is another thing entirely and, as I noted above, has remedies that necessarily go beyond pledges and codes.  Law enforcement needs to be engaged in that situation.

As for the rest, I dare say that the incivil bloggers who give the blogosphere the rep as being incivil and shrill and nasty and whatever do, in fact, provide substance in addition.  Being naughty and being logical are not mutually exclusive characteristics of most bloggers and commenters.

And now I offer the wide world of blogging my own pledge.  To show solidarity, I demand that all incivil bloggers unite under my banner. Don't take this Holy Fucking Pledge and you can earn The Seal:

We fucking celebrate the blogosphere because it embraces words like 'fuck' and open conversation. But frankness does not have to mean we can't have fun and swear like sailors. We present this Holy Fucking Pledge in hopes that it helps create a culture that encourages both personal expression and constructive conversation. One can say naughty words and insult one's mom without losing points in the discussion.

1. We take responsibility for our own words and reserve the right to call stupid people names when they fucking annoy us.

2. We won't tell anybody to fuck off if we wouldn't tell them to fuck off in person.

3. If tensions escalate, we will start a metablogpissingmatch, if only to generate traffic.

4. When we believe someone is unfairly attacking another, we escalate and get more personal and nasty.

5. We allow anonymous comments because who the fuck really cares?  It's a goddamned blog.

6. We troll other sites for shits and giggles.

7. We encourage parody sites because if you can't take a fucking joke, you're a goddamned moran and shouldn't be blogging.

I left all the long-winded explanatory stuff under each point as an exercise for the individual blogger.  Fuck you, you lazy-assed pieces of shit--I ain't doing all the work.

ntodd

[X-posted at Dohiyi Mir]

[Update: Bill has responded again.  Well, uh, that's just your opinion, man.]

We're too civil for our pants

Maple Syrup Boy points us to a story from the Judith Miller Wayward Journalists Review New York Times, which tells us that, in addition to our already heavy burden of Blogging Integrity-wiseally, we must now all blog with such grace and civility that one might expect the Queen to stop by for a scone and tea.  (God save her if she stops by here - we like the knickers, we do!)

The conversational free-for-all on the Internet known as the blogosphere can be a prickly and unpleasant place. Now, a few high-profile figures in high-tech are proposing a blogger code of conduct to clean up the quality of online discourse.

Last week, Tim O’Reilly, a conference promoter and book publisher who is credited with coining the term Web 2.0, began working with Jimmy Wales, creator of the communal online encyclopedia Wikipedia, to create a set of guidelines to shape online discussion and debate.

We don't get it.  Just look at the banner, Tim.  We're all about the civil discourse, motherfu... ohhhhh, wait a minute!  Man, do I feel silly!

Here's a nickel's worth of free advice from the Blog Integrity Kids for all you consultants, naysayers, politicians, marketers and generally ill-informed folks who think that your opinion of the Blogosphere should be writ in the Heavens:

We Don't Care

We will read and think and buy and vote and blog however the fuck we feel like.  And if you don't like it, there's always a donut rolling by, Mr. Vonnegut willing.  Knock yourselves out.  We will.

Rip -

The Great Integritous Blogroll Purge Of 2007

You'll notice the blogroll is considerably shorter than Atrios', as well as the original OBI site's.  That's not because we're lazy.  O NO!  It's because integritude must be reverified and repledged in order to maintain integritocity in the intertubes.

So if you support our goals, whatever the hell they are, comment here and if you pass muster we might deign to add you to the list of people who care about...stuff.  Please include the words 'motherfucker' and 'civility' in your post.

ntodd