Because, well, it’s probably a bad idea to let the proles decide for themselves who to trust without first having in place some elite Blogging Council (Kofi Annan, co-Chair?) to provide a “corrective filter” to all those unregulated personal opinions. To, you know— protect the online lumpenproletariat from their own ignorance and such. After all, an unfiltered blogosphere is how we ended up with a Democratic House and Senate, is it not?
Wait, that can’t be right —
****
h/t Althouse, who—though she makes some excellent points in her post—weakens her argument’s credibility by intimating that Alterman engaged in potentially homophobic comments when all he really did, in my opinion, was follow up his thinly-veiled call for control over content with a thinly-veiled call for control over style.
What was “thinly veiled” about it? Seemed fairly outright to me
Do think this “Council” would be a successor-in-interest to the Townhouse Group?
With that lot, it would be the HomeSTARrunner Chamber.
Four legs good! Two legs bad!
I’m so happy that Alterman is willing to let us continue blogging even if his council finds us untrustworthy.
Frankly, if I were branded untrustworthy by Alterman’s blogging council, it would enhance my marketability beyond my wildest dreams.
– Owing to the fact that I do not share all this free range angst, concerning feckless lies, hyperbolic propoganda, and political polemic in generaal, nor any fprm of “thought police”, or its twin sister comment/post censurship, I simply consider this entire area, specious nonsense, and a non-starter. I think we have far less to fear from a widespread belief that the US, for instance, has methodically killed 600,000+ Iraqui’a in that war, than say Anna Nicole will suddenly show up at a Florida WaLMart opening. The Left needs to believe that the NYT’s campaign of Bush-Bashing is effective, because the alternative is dismal.
What, I wonder, would such a condemnation gig pay? I’ve been thinking about working at the UN, but they’ll only pay for America and Israel bashing.
This could be an option.
One wonders whether Alterman and his ilk have, perhaps, heard of Joe McCarthy? He had a list of folks he condemned for inappropriate activities, too.
Frankly, wouldn’t inclusion on an Alterman-approved blacklist increase your marketability? I mean, outside of the Bay Area, New York, and Boston, anyway. Or so says this Rethuglican Christofascist GODBAG.
Once again the mask slips. Alterman, for all of his assertions to the contrary, does not seek dialogue in the marketplace of ideas, he seeks authority and control.
People are still learning how blogging, without the ‘benefit’ of editors, reconsideration, and re-writes can reveal truths, agendas, and attitudes many would prefer remain hidden.
Video blogging even more so.
“Frankly, wouldn’t inclusion on an Alterman-approved blacklist increase your marketability? I mean, outside of the Bay Area, New York, and Boston, anyway. Or so says this Rethuglican Christofascist GODBAG. “
Of course not. Those areas are the only bastions of culture and thought remaining in this benighted country, where plastic turkeys stalk the countryside.
I nominate Amanda Marcotte and Bill Donohue to lead the first council meeting. The ticket sales would be great. I call dibs on the disposable poncho concession. When the blood and cat fur fly, they’ll be a hot item.
Tempest, meet teapot.
Didn’t someone already try this? It was called Online Integrity or something similarly pretentious.
I think I’ve heard of her. Isn’t she the one with a…vagina?
Oh, those leftists! Always ready to set up a troika to encourage us into correct consciousness.
Kelly, I swear that I wouldn’t know. Though I think that it may have seen that written somewhere.
You know, that Groucho Marx quote about any club that would have him as a member keeps coming to mind.
I really wish I had spared myself the video link… I fell asleep twice before getting through the whole thing.
Alterman and personality are not well acquainted … heck, I don’t think they even reside in the same county.
Holy shit that’s weak.
I though “online integrity” was voluntary and non-binding.
Which, I should think a lot of the lefties sites would have LOVED that non-binding part…
I for one WELCOME our new blogging overlords.
God, that’s a stale joke.
OK, really, how about we just start typing H**L NO WE WON’T STOP BLOGGING (or commenting!) at the top of our voices every time somebody brings up this stupid stupid stupid idea (that’s three times I typed it, so you know it is true!).
Okay. What do we call our council?
TW: simple34
It might work.
So is this thing that Alterman’s proposing:
To whom do I send my request for pre-denunciation?
Because that is one badge I want for my blog.
No, Moops. Alterman is proposing a BLOG COUNCIL. That can, in its function as BLOG COUNCIL, “condemn people.”
Now, granted, Alterman allows that “you could still blog if you want” after such a denunciation. But ”everybody is going to know you’re not to be trusted.”
I envision smoke signals sent up during Eschaton III: This Time it’s Personal.
BLOGGERS WHO HATE OTHER PEOPLE, UNITE!!
wait, where’s everyone going?
damn, we almost had a MEETING….
(yes, I stole that from Bill Hicks, soo what.)
Sorry, Tman, but that’s kind of like trying to organize a “Misanthropes’ Society” – not a bad idea, but not going to work in the execution, is it?
Yes, he’s proposing a group of people who will comprise a BLOG COUNCIL and, if they see behavior they don’t like, will condemn it. I don’t think that self-applying the label BLOG COUNCIL, however scary it may sound, will endow this proposed body with quasi-judicial authority.
It could be like a Pulitzer Prize panel, or a Nobel selection committee. They do a wonderful job.
Why is it these lefties drone on endlessly about how Bush is taking our freedom,horrors, nazis, lynchings, the whole nine yards, but in reality:
Fairness Doctrine
Hate Speech laws
Banish dissenters from Global Warming orthodoxy
I could go on and on, but you probably could tell even more. Obviously it goes beyond mere comprehension, it has a spiteful, resentful flavor.
I say fuckem!
Well … we can add The Grammys, and the Oscars (you know Al Gore is gonna win … the only debate is whether or not he’ll announce his Presidential bid during his acceptance rant..and will the orchestra play him off the stage when he goes over a couple of minutes…)
Jim Butcher fans know better than to trust the Council…
The only significant impression I come away with here is: videobloggers need to liberate themselves from the disheveled rumpus rooms where they sit and pontificate. Do I really want to see your family photos, breakfast nooks, crumpled linen, haphazard bookshelves, sunken living rooms, dirty dishes and ceramic frog collections in the background? No. These videobloggers need to adopt a staging mindset, where the message is not subsumed by the backdrop. Please consider clean rooms, outhouses, or meatlockers for a set. That is my contribution to the mindhive.
The only clean room I know is available is the one at the Sixpenny up on the Northwest side. Was used for IRA fundraising, so I hear…
Now vlogging from a meat locker…hmmm.
Ladies and gentlemen (and I use those terms loosely), who could possibly not want the instant street cred you’d get from posting something like this on your blog?
I wonder if the BLOG COUNCIL (how will they choose who gets a seat?) will require its members to wear special hats. With, like, wi-fi antennas instead of antlers.
‘Cos I’d be down for that.
You’re on a roll these days, Darleen. Honestly, I giggled at that one.
The traditional term for a people’s workers’ council is Soviet.
Truly, I think the reconfiguration is coming. Aren’t there already external attempts to regulate the internet? This internal regulation flies in the face of free speech. I see the creation of a whole new pirate generation, dedicated to attacking and gutting the old stuttering classes. And that means us, I’m afraid to say. Because they can.
Did you take a blow to the head? Did I accidentally take some of Jeff’s red pills? WTF?
Yes, actually it means us. Unless you are virtually plugged into the the latest viral craze, and can appropriately translate it; unless you can accurately manage an onslaught of video and audio downloads, and determine instantly which ones are relevant or not; unless you can simultaneously parse the waves of vidoe, audio, and neuro (yes, they use that term now) that bomard you daily, then yes, you are a dinosaur. Unless you are a soldier, then I suppose that’s all part of the skillset. But I predict our kids will be a very different sort of warrior, when called upon.
NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH BLOG COUNCIL!!!!!
Sven, that’s almost exactly what I was thinking of.
I DEMAND DENUNCIATION NOW!!!
Ooooo
Oooooo
Maybe they could call it “The Watcher’s Council”.
Some sort of free-lance socialists, huh?
They used to be called muggers.
Got it. No accident in waiting here.
Major John,
I’m starting to favor the “red pill theory”.
No, moron these are called children of the digital age. They are smarter, faster, and more adaptible where it counts. Can you outdo them?
I am talking to N.O., who seems to live on the Grease set.
cynn cynn cynn……
I’m probably about three steps ahead of them.
I’m a systems analyst, working in Windows Vista desktop deployment right now, with ohhhh, 15 or 20 years of computer experience.
To cap it all?
I beat Call of Duty.
So take your world weary cynicism, Grease it up, and shove it up your ass.
I, on the other hand, have a driver’s license and no curfew. So I’ll know where they are and have the means to go get the little bastards.
O. Brain, hook it to a winch and haul it outcha nose.
The rest, thanks for honest exchange
hnnn,,, the last post made no sense, sorry.
Oh, quit yammering, people!
WHERE’S MY DENUNCIATION???
My father was a delegate to the ‘84 Republican national convention – does that move me up in the queue at all?
Oui, oui! We could call it “Mon. Alterman’s Comité de Salut Public Blogging”!
Does Alterman understnad anything he reads?
Perhaps he just wants someone to tell his whats good and whats bad. Plus it would be helpful if that someone, you know, leaned a little left.
Little Red Stars for our report cards:
“Disapproved!” “Shunned!” and “Condemned!”
Collect all three!!
(Thanks Robin Roberts!)
So how do you train for that?
Take MacOS X, cripple some features so they won’t work so well, induce some bugs, add in code to make your computer slow, throw in some snooping software so Gates can see your personal stuff and stir?
Damn, you’re good.
Heh, indeed SGT.
cynn…I am still quite puzzled by what you posted. Maybe as a soldier I am more “adaptable” to technology.
Of course, I could just point out that I grew up right as PCs took the stage. Or that I enlisted when the Army was moving from Analog to Digital (I learned to polar plot artillery coordinates with a modified slide rule/wheel. Now I use a GPS.)
If I felt snarky I could point out that these modern day e-pirates would have to put down the bag of chips, and pry themselves away from the PS III to hoist the virtual Jolly Roger and seize the Elctronic Main….
A bloggers council?
With power to condemn, and possibly purge?
Sounds like fun.
Who wants to play Dzerzhinsky to my Stalin?
Right up until the methamphetamines start to wear off.
cynn
You don’t envolve yourself with actual children regularly, do you?
They are not “smarter, more adaptable, etc” then any other children at any other age. Growing up with the newest technology and accepting it as a given is not a measure of “smarts” today any more than the Boomer generation growing up with television rather than their parents’ radio made them “more adaptable” to different information streams.
“Smarts” isn’t a value without effort and it certainly isn’t a value without wisdom. One of the worst things Boomer parents ever bought into was the whole “make your kids feel good with unconditional praise” schtick from the California-inspired “self-esteem” movement. Tell a kid they are “smart” all the time and you produce two things in a kid … a kid that thinks being “smart” (which they translate as ‘success’ at every task) is all you value them for, and a kid that will reject trying anything they may think they won’t master perfectly the first time tried (failure or mistakes = “dumb”)
Digital “kids” will rule their elders?
Only if such “kids” are being used by other elders like some Kucinich “Fairness means no dissent from my views” imposed Council.
Think Cambodian 12 y/os with AK 47s.
Ayep. I had a TI/99-4A, then an Apple IIe. Then a cheap-ass PC on a college campus that had networked dorms and an Internet connection—in 1989.
My first job involved writing PL/1 on a Big Blue mainframe. My second project there had an estimated disk space requirement of a terabyte—in 1994. I’ve written software for a Palm (the Tide Stain Detective for Palm—hopefully now long abandoned by Tide), for PCs, and for really big-ass servers. I had a Unix-based PC in 1993, a Linux box in ‘94, and had MySQL running on a production project in ‘96.
I can still do math in my head—even base conversions—can write in complete sentences, and can even spell.
I don’t think today’s “digital kids” are really that capable with technology. Being able to use doesn’t mean the same as being able to understand. And it certainly doesn’t mean the same as being able to think.
You got that one right, Robert. Witness some of the trolls here; they’re the cuneiform of the internet.
I once caught a virus with my anti-virus software.
All it took was the click of an icon, too. Mad skillz, I tell you.
BRING ON THE CYBER JIHADISTS!
I agree that the “homophobe” accusation was out of place and silly, and it was repeated by several commenters at Althouse’s site. As it so happens I agree that unless your site is about your life or has bizarre, humorous episodes like this one, stay away from the personal details. I don’t care about your dog or your boyfriend or how mean your mom is.
For some, any complaint or disagreement with someone who happens to be gay is automatically “homophobic” to use one of the stupidest labels extant. That reaction is “Homophilic” in my book: an unnatural, unreasonable defensiveness for and affection toward gays.
Blogging in cuneiform – that must be a bitch to upload.