Perry in particular will be delighted to know of the existence of Moonbat Media – it is new to me anyway. Though they do not seem to be taking the definition very literally.
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Must go, got a government to destabilise. – Guido Fawkes explains the brevity of his comment on this posting at my blog July 6th, 2006 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Just a quick plug for a good friend of mine. Steve Edwards, author of the now-defunct Daily Slander, is back with his new blog, The Raving Wingnut. Steve’s posts are still as lucid and pleasingly inflammatory as ever – true to form. Welcome back, Stevie. Do drop by, and whilst there, take a closer look at Steve’s “Charlie don’t surf” photo. That shot was taken in Yun’nan province of south-western China – not Vietnam! – at a spartan guesthouse along the Tiger Leaping Gorge trek Steve and I embarked upon last year (my second time through that glorious part of the world). And note Steve’s Cherie Blair-esque grin is clasping a particularly cheap and nasty Chinese cigar. He’s all class, that fella. June 30th, 2006 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
I just discovered that O.G. blogger Acidman passed away last Monday, which is really too bad as he was a splendidly cantankerous and hugely entertaining SOB. I always thought of him as the Ted Nugent of the blogosphere.
Rock on, Rob. June 28th, 2006 | Comments are closed
There is a rather groovy bit of videoblogging on HopperVideo showing samizdata.net’s Adriana discussing the issue of Net Neutrality in San Francisco. What I really like is how the vlogger uses floating text over the video to emphasise the points Adriana is making. June 22nd, 2006 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
It has been a while since my last visit to the excellent India Uncut blog – too long. First laugh – Amit’s latest post links to a chef dispensing advice concerning prawns. As an Aussie, I was rather amused to discover some poor Seppo writing in, wondering what to do with that whole ‘vein thing’ running down the back of a prawn. Kiss it goodbye or let it lie? Basically, if you bought your prawns to impress – as a stand-out ingredient in some culinary masterpiece you’ve had up your sleeve for months – then you should clean them. Even if the prawns are merely a somewhat important ingredient amongst a few others, you should clean them. If you are using those bland tiddlers from Thailand – to add an interesting texture to your gruel or something along those lines – then don’t bother cleaning them. I swear, I was born with that innate knowledge. Bewdy, mate. Throw another… oh, never mind. Now, if you bought your prawns to impress, and in doing so you selected those aforementioned bland Thai tiddlers – then you should clean them, because that’s your punishment for being a tightarse. Apologies, the one minute I spent looking through idiotic online Strine dictionaries did not yield the definition of “tightarse”. Note to the confused; if you are a tightarse, you are cheap. And you know who you are. Second laugh – some politically incorrect Indian astrologer has decided that “Mumbai” is somewhat unlucky, and “Bombay” is rather more auspicious. Whatever. All the terribly clever weathermen on Australia’s two publicly-funded television broadcasters take great pride in saying “Moom-Bye”, like it is a signifier of one’s magnificent cultural adjustment. A decisive strike in your valiant quest to bash down those imperialist Anglosized verbal imposts, comrade! When I was in Bombay, I did not meet a single Indian who termed their fair city ‘Mumbai’ – although a lot of Western tourists did. Having said that, perhaps the Indians did too, because I believe the correct pronounciation is “Mum (like your non-American, Pommy/Aussie mother) – Bay”, and – if you say it quickly (which is invariably the case, because Indians are the greatest communicators in the world) – that sounds rather similar to “Bombay”. Then again, I do not know, because I do not speak Hindi, and am basically a stupid Westerner. June 21st, 2006 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
Hrm. Sorry to plunge you all into the bizarre depths of DailyKos twice in the space of a week, but some of the goings on there are quite amusing. If I was a psychologist, I would say professionally intriguing. Take DailyKos commenter “CheChe” and the – erm – unusual relationship he appears to have with his daughter. Here’s an excerpt from his post, which is so tragi-comic it is hard not to laugh out loud when reading it:
Er…right. How old is this child? Does she even know what $100 is worth? Of course, the policy itself is utterly ridiculous, but that’s hardly the point. Now, there is something really odd about this CheChe character’s comments. He takes the exact same wordage from a previous comment he wrote relaying his daughter’s earlier misery, and then superimposes another Kos talking point as the source of his little girl’s current terror and sadness to create a new saga:
They have a lot of these kinds of chats; here’s another. Same scenario, different bogeyman:
And so on. By now, most would have twigged to the fact that this CheChe fellow might be playing a little jape on the Kos kids. But no. Check out the number of people who “recommended” one of his posts (26), versus those who pointed him out as a troll (2). It is amazing that these plainly fictional tales of crocodile-tear woe hold currency with parts of the American left. To be fair, some people on the thread pointed out CheChe as a rather obvious fraud. His subsequent denial was true to form and hilarious:
Classic. (Hat tip: Zoe Brain) June 18th, 2006 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
One of my all-time favourite bloggers – who also happens to be the funniest man in the blogosphere – is under attack from DailyKos contributor ‘dday’, who does not think Harry Hutton is particularly funny at all. This post raised the ire of ‘dday’ and provoked this response from the little pet. ‘dday’ starts off by qualifying his monumental whinge with a “some of my best friends are black, but…” type defence of his sense of humour :
For one so allegedly adept at the art of piss-taking, he does not seem to understand that whole irreverence thing. Later, ‘dday’ flashes his humour credentials again – just so everyone is sure it is not him with the problem :
You can imagine the sort of emasculated, PC jokes this guy would crack. I bet he’s about as funny as a gender feminist. Anyway, if the plight of those living in intellectual poverty concerns you, take a look at the “debate” via the links provided above. The related comments thread on DailyKos and that attached to the offending post at Hutton’s are also worth a read if you enjoy the spectacle of uncomprehending, outraged mewling from humourless dolts. June 15th, 2006 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Sometime Samizdatista and now Texan, Alice Bachini, has some thoughts on advertising on blogs.
I will have to leap into the defense of advertisers here, on openness grounds. I think that if there’s a big flashy banner involved on someone’s blog, you can be sure that money traded hands. And like Dr. Johnson, I have faith in the innocence of those who are out to make money. Mind you, I think you have to be a fairly large blog to make advertising worth your while. I had ‘google ad-sense’ on my old sport blog, and that did not make any money for me even though I was getting 400 or so readers a day. Not a lot, but it is no easy task to start a blog from scratch and get 400 readers a day. But I will agree with Alice Bachini that the aesthetics are just awful on many blogs. Those huge ‘pajamas media™’ ads one sees around the place look dreadful. It is not for the likes of a humble mortal such as I to guess at the complex and elevated deliberations of the mighty. However, if the Editorial Pantheon ever do decide to go down the advertising road, I do hope they will not disfigure the stylish nature of this page in the process. May 25th, 2006 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am fairly used to intermittently getting peeved e-mails from people who get their comments deleted wailing about how they cannot understand how a ‘libertarian’ blog can ‘censor’ free speech (never mind that Samizdata is a blog that has many libertarian writers, rather than a libertarian blog per se). But today I got two such e-mails within minutes of each other, one from a racist troll whom I have long banned and one from a Muslim troll who keeps posting passages from the Koran in random articles. As a result I thought I would revisit the issue yet again, even though Samizdata has several articles on this subject, such as this one. It is really simple: this is private property and as a result anything published here is at the sufferance of Samizdata’s editors. We invite comments but that does not mean we relinquish control over our property, just as when you invite people into your house, you do not relinquish the right to subsequently un-invite them if they act inappropriately or if you just want them out for whatever reason. Apart from spam comments, the main reason we axe people’s remarks are that they are gratuitously insulting, grossly and uninterestingly off-topic (interesting but off-topic is sometimes tolerated) or they are endlessly repetitive. Racists and Muslim extremists, who between them make up 85% of the non-spam deletions, almost always fall into the last category. It does not matter that their arguments are shredded and rebutted, neither group are psychologically capable of accepting their questions have been asked and answered unless they have been agreed with. Even more annoying, the racists are capable of hijacking a discussion about cricket or Beethoven into yet another absurd phrenological rant about racial IQs. The Muslim extremists tend to just reply to reasonable questions with great long quotes from the Koran as if that will magically end all arguments. Well life is just too short to tolerate such people flogging their dead horses on our turf and preventing rational discourse and reasonable progression of a discussion. And when certain commenters wear out their welcome, sometimes they do not just get their comments deleted, they get banned completely. This is often a shame because a couple of the banned commenters had some interesting things to say when on the rare occasion they can bring themselves to stop obsessing about the issue that dements them. Yet there are only so many hours in the day we can spend moderating Samizdata (we do have off-line lives, believe it or not) and when the majority of a person’s comments have proven to be obsessive rants, they get banned. And who gets to make that call? We do. Our house, our rules. End of story.  May 4th, 2006 | 48 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here is an interesting story. A friend of Jackie D (to whom thanks for the link) called Amy Alkon has discovered an artist. He is now homeless, but something tells me he is not going to be homeless for long. His name is Gary Musselman, and here is one of his drawings:  Amy put that at the top of her posting, surely knowing that this would appeal to the blogosphere, although I rather prefer “Wichita” myself. Scroll down to see that. These are the kind of drawings now sufficiently out of date in artistic style to appeal to large numbers of the general public, especially the sort who are internet-connected, but to be disapproved of by the regular art critics, who will not, I predict, approve. “Derivative”, “emotionally empty”, etc. Their real objection will be that their verdicts aren’t going to count. Not this time. Jackie D has already equipped Gary Musselman with his own blog, and the story is now gathering pace. May 1st, 2006 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
David Miliband, Minister of Communities and Local Government, is happy for (undisclosed) government employees to post comments full of praise for him on the taxpayer-owned blog he uses to promote himself and his department. When a taxpayer – in this case, journalist David Tebbutt – asks if the fawning comment is indeed from a government employee, Miliband will not even publish the query, let alone answer it. This, in a blog discussion about how MPs and ministers can prove to us through blogging that they do listen to taxpayers and are not as out of touch as we silly people imagine. The state is not your friend and politicians certainly do not work for you, no matter whose propaganda (theirs or the taxpayers’ rights’ groups) you have bought into. Taking your money under threat of violence and actually working for you are not the same thing. David Miliband is one of many who take your money and work on their own agendas, on which self-promotion is paramount. This is an obvious fact, and David Miliband’s abuse of his taxpayer-owned blog is just one more piece of evidence which proves it. I submitted the following comment to the David Miliband promotional blog:
April 29th, 2006 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
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