Guilty pleasure? How 'bout, "if you need motivation to take a shower...."

I confess to liking Michael Totten in this mood. Was one of the links, as advertised, "an emotional punch in the stomach"? It was. Can his characterization be proven wrong with statistics and reporting? It can't - it's a purely personal reaction, and that kind of thing has its place. (And earlier: does Michael Totten want to call himself a neoconservative? It sounds like he's quite right to prefer other categories and ideological affiliations. One could dismiss this as trying to split hairs, when hairs are made of fog, but that's not how I reacted to it.)

That said, I'm retiring from posting reader comments, to what must be the relief of a great many of you. On certain issues, I've seen a cycle: someone (often initially, Michael Totten) will take some information or some quote out of context, spin it simplistically (e.g. dos Passos' plea for some greater compassion on the part of Americans for the plight of Occupied Europe, or the rush to judgement on some supposed massacre in Kirkuk's Citadel quarter); then he and others will take quotes from a more nuanced analysis in reader comments out of context (or worse: not even quote, just assume an interpretation), and spin that, simplistically. I hear "civility" preached, but then people who disagree are called "assholes" and "looters" (and in my case "treasonous fucking bastard") without much complaint. In retrospect, I wonder what ever made me think that spending time trying to discern truth in a forum like this could ever bear fruit.

I've spent very little time in the blogiverse; I had read about how wonderfully and naturally it filters truth out of raw information. At one point, when it was a new phenomenon, populated by technological cognoscenti excited by its potential, there might have been some validity to these claims, which I dismissed as hype at the time. But whatever it was then, blogdom does now seems to be festering with crosslinking only to other blogs, rather than to more direct sources of information. And it seems just as prone as any style of forum, if not more so, to confirmation bias. It favors those who agree en masse over those who want to work at the truth.

I've since fallen into conversations with professional journalists, editors, publishers and web programmers who have arrived at the same conclusions: on the issues of the day, blogging isn't much better than yellow journalism and 19th century pampheteering -- it's "Letters to the Editor" with cancer. And yet it's a vibrant phenomenon. Is the cancer inoperable? Is there no treatment for the disease? If there is some way to fix its faults by leveraging some hybrid of new technology and older tradions of journalistic integrity (as much in danger now from the likes of Rupert Murdoch as they were in the days of William Randolph Hearst), then the attempt should be made. I've begun discussions with a few friends about how this might be done. In the meantime, simply writing about what's broken about blogdom is unlikely to have an effect, by the very nature of the brokenness. So I'll stop.

Have a good vacation in Central America, Michael.

Michael, what's up with that character? He should go hang out at Indymedia or WRH he'd fit in well with them perhaps?

Anyway, from your link I just read a few entires by Sean Lefreniere and now I'm hooked. The guy is intelligent and provides some great summaries, like the one on the past and present sayings of Mathir. "Moonbat Mathir, THIS IS YOUR LIFE" oh....... the wittisisms that could follow :-))

Also, I recently took a liking to HeadHeeb and AzizPoonawala. Both provide differing perspectives and intellectual commentary and research. Headheeb's got some excellent historical and relevant international information you won't find anywhere else. At least not that I can see.

Regards,
Mike