As everyone kinda, sorta knows, from the late "True/Slant" to "The New York Times" to "Crain's Chicago" to "The Des Moines Register" to this little sliver of digital real state...virtually every blog in creation has a comment section.
It is one of those constituent elements that makes a blog a blog.
And yet blogger Andrew Sullivan -- one of my fellow 2008 Weblog Award winners -- does not allow comments on his site, under any circumstance, for any reason.
Now of course any blogger is free to do with his/her site whatever the Hell he/she wants and this very, um, Tory approach to dealing with the problem of loud groundlings with dirty feet who may want to scribble mean things on Mr. Sullivan's drawing-room walls has certainly worked out well for him.
Mr. Sullivan explained this decision via one of his readers' emails here:
The site [HuffPo] handled all comment moderation on my posts - a task I find about as appealing as panning for fool's gold in an open sewer.Which is why the Dish doesn't have a comments section.
And that may well be true, but offhand I can think of at least 40 other reasons why Mr. Sullivan would not want to open his site up to the unfiltered observations of others.
1 ,One of the constants (or obsessions, depending on your POV) at Mr. Sullivan's blog is a steadfast and often lonely vigil on matter of Trig Palin's matrilineage (specifically) and the strange lies of Sarah Palin (generally).
2 ,
3 ,
4 ,
5 ,
6 ,
7 ,
8 ,
9 ,
10 ,
11 ,
12 ,
13 ,
14 ,
15 ,
16 ,
17 ,
18 ,
19 ,
20 ,
21 ,
22 ,
23 ,
24 ,
25 ,
26 ,
27 ,
28 ,
29 ,
30 ,
31 ,
32 ,
33 ,
34 ,
35 ,
36 ,
37 ,
38 ,
39 ,
40
As a for-profit political/media enterprise, Palinism rests on a foundation of overt dishonesty and a highly mythologized past, which is constantly refreshed and extended by the hilariously dodgy assertions being made by its Queen Bee. This massive scam is abetted by a compliant press which is simply too cowardly to take up these matters, and Palin herself, who makes absolutely sure she never gets cornered in a venue where there is the slightest chance some goof will stand up and confront her over the many, many inconvenient truths that are always threatening to blow the Conservative consensual hallucination of Palinism to atoms.
So good for him, and my critique is simply this; what's good for the goose is great for the gander.
Or to put it a little more clearly...
Sullivan-style Conservatism rests on a foundation of overt dishonesty and a highly mythologized past, which is constantly refreshed and extended by the hilariously dodgy assertions being made by people like Mr. Sullivan.
This scam is abetted by a compliant press which is simply too cowardly to turn an honest and critical eye to the real record of Conservatism for the last 30 years, and its spokesmodels -- people like Mr. Sullivan and Davis Brooks -- who make absolutely sure they never get cornered in a venue where there is the slightest chance some goof will stand up and confront them over the many, many inconvenient truths that are always threatening to blow their own Conservative consensual hallucination apart.
Both Palin and Sullivan (and Brooks, and all the rest) rode to financial success and cultural prominence on the back of Fake Reagan and Fantasy Conservatism doing battle with Imaginary Liberals, and now neither Palin nor Sullivan (nor Brooks, nor all the rest) can afford to have people tugging at the bright, clear, awkward loose ends of the fictions on which they have built a living.
Or have I missed something?
10 comments:
"Sullivan-style Conservatism"
All conservatism includes tax cuts for the rich. It's embedded into its deepest bedrock. Yet nowadays Sullivan attacks the Laffer curve.
So how is it that Sullivan still thinks any part of Reagan was admirable?
steeve,
If Reagan was a failure, then Sullivan is suddenly and publicly faced with the task of explaining why anyone who has been wrong about Conservatism his adult life should continue to be treated as a Serious Conservative Public Intellectual.
In other words, career suicide.
You ask if you've missed anything.
Only that Sully is also a pussy.
His cravenness, combined with his refusal to be engaged by readers who may take exception to his depraved idiocy is all the explanation one needs for the lack of comments at his blog.
Which, come to think of it, also sort of makes it not a blog, if you know what I mean?
Color-blind people (there are a lot of us) cannot read the last word of your graphic (which is the punchline.) Clue us in, please.
-----
Two Tips for graphic artists on ways to make graphics legible to the vast majority of 'colorblind'* people:
The most common form, so-called 'red-green colorblindness' (bad name), is actually just a significantly-attenuated perception of red light.
The easy, perceptual, no-math way to make sure foreground and background colors contrast well (if you can find this) is to use cyan-colored sunglasses (or a cyan-colored lighting gel). This attenuates red light and allows you to literally 'see as we do'.
The 'numeric' way is to look at (or imagine - this can be very approximate) the RGB (red, green and blue) light component values of the colors. Make sure the colors differ significantly something other than the R values, i.e. in the G and/or B values.
This can be eyeball-approximate; you don't need to know any exact values. Just remember you're combining light (RGB, monitors), rather than pigments (CMY[K], printers).
But say you do have the RGB values, as when on a computer (say r1, g1 and b1 for the foreground color, r2, g2, b2 for the background, each number in the standard range [0-255]) a simple computer test would be something like:
if abs(g1-g2) + abs(b1-b2) > 75 or so
then contrast is ok
Note that pure red (255,0,0) vs anything really dark (small,small,small) doesn't pass this test.
This is why we also have trouble distinguishing (RGB values approximate):
dark blue (0,0,80) from purple (80,0,80)
pure bright green (0,255,0) from yellow (255,255,0)
medium green (0,110,0) from orange (100,100,0)
dark green (0,70,0) from brown (50,50,0)
green traffic lights (cyan: 0,255,255) from streetlights (255,255,255)
----------
*But: There are loads of combinations that do work for all of us. We 'red-green colorblind' people (bad name) do see lots of color - we're not 'blind' to color. Essentially we perceive two dimensions of color, whereas most people see three.
A scientist would point out that everyone is 'colorblind', if anyone can be said to be. Humans' color range is about 1 octave; scientists routinely measure light within a 50-octave frequency (color) range. Further, even within the very-limited 'optical' range, there are infinitely many 'dimensions' (spectral lines), not just three. Pure red light blended with pure green light is very different from pure yellow light, but all human eyes are blind to the difference. This is why we can get away with 3 color guns or 3 colors of ink. But the color balance of our prints and monitors would no doubt look completely messed up to a Martian.
Maybe Andrew will realize his mistake...
http://www.theonion.com/articles/embarrassed-republicans-admit-theyve-been-thinking,19248/
Picking apart the discrepancies and errors in the Palin mythology is fun, kind of like doing the same for the Sherlock Holmes Universe, or the Star Trek Universe. Only with SH or ST the errors were the result of the Author's indifference to consistency, or the ST multiple authors/writers often unfamiliar with the rules of that Universe.
Palin seems to do peculiar things (traveling thousands of miles to a sub-standard hospital to have her Down's baby delivered) and tell pointless lies. I'm not sure there's any rhyme or reason to it, but it's fun trying to make things "work".
scorching
Sullivan doesn't have comments because he's lazy. I'm sure it's also because he can't be bothered with trolls, dissention or mockery, but mostly it's because he's lazy.
For awhile, he was even too lazy to proof read his work. It's occasionally atrocious. Now I think he has young beareded proofreaders most of the time.
Sullivan has also seen what comments have done to his Atlantic partner in crime, MeMeMeMeMeMeMeMeMegan McGargle, i.e., pretty much pulverized the tiny shards of credibility that came with her to her present position.
Ol' Andy ain't havin' none o' that....
For Sullivan, comments = potential links to inconvenient facts = either spend half your posts correcting/rationalizing the other half or get ready to be on a "where are they now?" segment in a few years.
It seems like quite a tell that after more than two years, the PalinGates people have yet to receive so much as a restraining order (or an angry Tweet) from a woman infamous for her prompt & ruthless response to her & her family's detractors. The dog that didn't bark in the night isn't a pitbull wearing lipstick.
Post a Comment