Recently in Blog Nation Category
In the past week, two friends and readers have informed me that GitM is acting somewhat squirrelly in the latest version of Firefox for Mac. Now, I'm a PC guy (by usage and by temperament), so I can't troubleshoot the problem on my computers here. But, is anyone else out there having issues recently? My guess it probably has something to do with embedded videos, since that's the only "new" thing around here lately, and most likely I'm betting the problem is either this St. Patrick's Day post from last week or the Tracey Morgan SNL one right before it. Does anyone know if Firefox (on a Mac) hiccups with certain types of embedded videos, or am I barking up the wrong tree? Any help is greatly appreciated.
Update: Raza at High Industrial informed me that the offending party was likely the Tracy Morgan post. I've now removed the embedded video...Mac Firefoxers, is everything back to normal?
"Despite the attention blogs can get, the poll said 56 percent of Americans say they never read blogs that discuss politics. Another 23 percent read them several times a year, the survey showed. While blogs are largely considered the realm of young people who are most Internet-savvy, only 19 percent of people ages 18 to 31, and 17 percent of those ages 32 to 43, regularly read a political blog, the poll said." A new Harris Interactive poll finds that most people don't read political blogs. Believe me, I've noticed. :s
"With a week to go before climactic tests in Texas and Ohio, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign team has slipped into full recriminations mode. Looking backward, interviews with a cross-section of campaign aides and sympathetic outsiders suggest a team consumed with frustration and finger-pointing about the apparent failure of several recent tactical moves against Barack Obama. Looking forward, it is clear Clinton’s team has only a faint and highly improvisational strategy about what to do over the next seven days. Simply put, there is no secret weapon." Politico's Mike Allen and John F. Harris offer another dismal window into what looks to be the final days in Camp Clinton.
In related news, Atlantic blogger Marc Ambinder -- who, along with Politico's Ben Smith and Salon's Joan Walsh, has been one of the more obviously Clinton-leaning pundits in the paid blogosphere (nice work if you can get it) -- pretty much gives up hope: "The 'HRC can come back' bandwagon is rolling through town, and I spent a long time yesterday contemplating whether to jump on board. But the platform on which her supporters stand right now seems more tenuous by the day...Advisers figure that a loss in Texas is as likely as a win in Ohio; a large number of staffers appear to be willing to quit en masse next Wednesday if there’s a split decision and Clinton gives notice that she intends to fight for another month."
Update: Former Chief of Staff and long-time Clinton loyalist Leon Panetta gives his own post-mortem for the campaign, and puts the blame squarely on Mark Penn: "'[Penn] is a political pollster from the past. I never considered him someone who would run a national campaign for the presidency,' he said. He asserted that Mr. Penn 'comes from an old school, like Karl Rove -- it’s all about dividing people into smaller groups rather than taking the broader approach that was needed.'"
Hello, all. So...can you guess who I'm supporting in Tuesday's NH primary?
In any case, now seems as good a time as any to plug some GitM spinoffs I've recently put together, if anyone is interested. First up, if you usually come here just for the movie reviews, I've created GitM Reviews as a separate review site (although -- don't worry -- they'll always be posted here first.) Second, if your interest was piqued by any of the entries on civic progressivism of late, I've also created Small-R Republic as a central clearinghouse for that information. (Again, everything will be either posted here first or linked to as written.)
Both of these are projects I'm only starting to develop online, but they're enough off the ground that they can bear page views and/or advice from the regulars. (Also, while I've refrained from putting advertising here and plan to continue to, I may decide to put up ads on GitMreviews...so if anyone has had a particularly good or terrible experience with an ad provider, please let me know.)
Way to shield the hated heat. Way to put myself to sleep. Ghost in the Machine is 8 years old today. [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.] Time to take a break? Nah...I can still reach my destination (tho' it's still a ways away.) Until then, as always, whether you're a long-time reader, a first-time visitor, or (most likely) just a lost Googler, thanks for coming by.
"For those who attempt it, the doctoral dissertation can loom on the horizon like Everest, gleaming invitingly as a challenge but often turning into a masochistic exercise once the ascent is begun. The average student takes 8.2 years to get a Ph.D.; in education, that figure surpasses 13 years. Fifty percent of students drop out along the way, with dissertations the major stumbling block. At commencement, the typical doctoral holder is 33, an age when peers are well along in their professions, and 12 percent of graduates are saddled with more than $50,000 in debt." By way of Little Bit Left, a new site by a Columbia colleague that's well worth adding to the blogroll, the NYT surveys the sad plight of the modern ABD. (I'll be 33 at my current expected finish date, seven years after starting, and my cohort's attrition rate has been significant, so it seems the stats bear out in my case.) "Those who insist on dissertations are aware that they must reduce the loneliness that defeats so many scholars...'It’s easy, especially in our field, to feel isolated, and that tends to slow people down...There’s no sense of belonging to an academic community.'" Oh, I dunno...Berk and I often have very scintillating conversations...progressive citizenship, New Era consumerism, socks, squirrels, you name it.
A hearty congrats to former Columbia colleague Ted (of The Late Adopter) and his wife Reshima on the birth of their daughter last Thursday. I expect she will be well-versed in both American history and movie lore from a very young age.
With the aid of an eagle-eyed reader, whom I met at my friend Steve's wedding in Louisville last August and who saw it on sale, I went ahead yesterday and procured ghostinthemachine.com. The blog's been here at .net for five and half of its almost eight years, and is pretty well-established here. (Put another way, it seems like GitM already has all the readership it's ever going to get.) Still, I figured it couldn't hurt to finally pick up the .com addy I'd been eyeing since '99, and which now bounces to this site. At any rate, if you've been using ghostinthemachine.net to get here, go ahead and keep doing so. But, if .com strikes your fancy more...well, now that works too.
Movable 4.D'oh! update: Ok, with my limited knowledge of css and a lot of trial and error testing of MT 4's template system, this is the new look I've managed to piece together for the front page. Let me know if it's a strain on the eyes or otherwise unpleasant to peruse. Now, time to fix the archives...
Hmm. Ok, as you can see, things look slightly different at the moment. I've been trying to update to Movable Type 4.0, and, while trying to get the individual entry pages to update, it seems I've gone ahead and switched back to the default style. That's recommended anyway, but things might look funky around here for a few days while I get everything working again (and try to figure out how to get my individual entry pages to appear.) Bear with me...and hope I don't permanently break anything.
Update: Well, shoot. I think I broke it. Individual entry pages used to be listed by number. Now they're listed by name. So that means every entry that links to another entry is now riddled with "Page Not Found" errors. This is not good.
Update 2: Ok, that problem is fixed. I had to read up on archive mapping and then navigate my way around this bug, but that seemed to do the trick. Now, to start playing with the look around here. Sigh...MT 4.0 better be something else, 'cause right now I'm feeling like Gob Bluth...I've made a huge mistake.
Update 3: Ok, MT 4.0, autosave be damned, just ate the In the Valley of Elah review I'd been working on for the past hour. And, when it comes to fixing the templates, cutting and pasting is absolutely afflicted. I'm really starting to hate this "upgrade."
Also, since I came back to find over 10,000 spam comments plastered all over the Ghost, I've decided to take drastic action and installed a Captcha system, in the form of Jay Allen's comment challenge. So, if any of y'all want to leave a comment from now herein, you'll need to answer the not-very-tricky "challenge question." (The answer, as the hint basically tells you, is Berkeley.) As a result, the spam ratio around here has gone from 10-15 a minute to none, zip, zero over the past 24 hours. Can the war on spam finally be over? I'm not rolling out the Mission Accomplished banner just yet, but I'm cautiously optimistic.
"The man in me will hide sometimes to keep from bein' seen, but that's just because he doesn't want to turn into some machine." Or something like that. Obviously, I've been taking a break from the Ghost for a few weeks (although, as per the norm, that didn't much upset the thousands of comment spammers -- they still love the site, want to borrow my templates, have their own sites about infinitis, pr0n, prescription drugs, etc. etc.) And, since I'm off to my ten-year college reunion this weekend, I won't be posting much for the next few days yet. But, I figured I should pop my head in and say hello. So, hello. Hope everyone else is having a grand summer thus far. For what it's worth, I do hope to return to a normal schedule around here at some point...we'll see.
"What was once seen as a liability for Democrats and progressives in the past -- they couldn't get 20 people to agree to the same thing, they could never finish anything, they couldn't stay on message -- is now an asset,' Leyden said. 'All this talking and discussing and fighting energizes everyone, involves everyone, and gets people totally into it.'" The WP's Jose Antonio Vargas examines why the Dems are winning the Web War. "'For Republicans, the Internet is where bad things happen. Take [former U.S. senator] George Allen and his 'macaca' moment...You can kind of understand why Republicans have this almost instinctive fear of the Internet, where the mob rules."
In the deadliest act of school violence in American history, at least 33 people lie dead at Virginia Tech after what was presumably a jilted student's bloody shooting rampage."'It is difficult to comprehend senseless violence on this scale,' said Virginia's Governor Timothy M. Kaine in a statement."
And, as details from this story emerge, I've been catching up over at Medley on the recent nightmare befalling blogger Kathy Sierra, who's been the recipient of sexually repugnant death threats as a result of her posting on, of all things, tech issues. (Not to say that posting on anything else would justify the depraved sexist bile thrown her way, but I've sadly come to half-expect that sort of vileness from Freepers, the uglier elements of dKos, and the like.) I guess I shouldn't be all that surprised by the disgusting misogyny pervading this latter incident -- it's sorta like people acting surprised that we've found a racist in our midst in Don Imus, as if bigoted old white guys in positions of power were a dwindling species or something. And, true, these two events have little or nothing to do with each other, except that I'm finding out about them at the same time. Still, I have to say, sometimes all the rage, ugliness, and despair that seems to lurk just under the brittle crust of our society is overwhelmingly disheartening. Let's get it together, people. To go back to Auden again, we must love one another or die.
Update: Exhibit C in today's litany of horrors, this ghastly assault on a Columbia Journalism grad student, which occurred not more than twenty blocks from here over the weekend. Sweet merciful Jesus, this is a sick, sick world sometimes. Update 2: They got him.
By way of Quiddity, Matthew Perpetua of the always enticing (and mp3-stacked) Fluxblog has dedicated himself to writing on every R.E.M. song over at Pop Songs '07. I'll definitely be checking it out, even if I think he's way off on "Saturn Return"...(it made #15 on my own list awhile back, and is still up there in my esteem.)
As you no doubt know, the Oscars were held last night, with The Departed, Martin Scorsese (finally), Forest Whitaker in The Last King of Scotland, and Helen Mirren for The Queen the big winners of the evening. [Full list.] (Letters from Iwo Jima was to my mind a better film than Departed, but Scorsese's Aviator was better than the egregious Million Dollar Baby two years ago, so it's a wash.) Alas, once again I was a very close also-ran in the Webgoddess Oscar pool, placing in the top-four [I got 10 out of 12 of the major awards right, missing only on Best Foreign Film (I picked Pan, but was glad to see it lose, in a way -- it had already taken too many of Children of Men's awards) and Best Song. (Melissa Etheridge over Dreamgirls? Really? That's just bizarre.)] Ah well, wait 'till next year...
Cineastes and sock monkey enthusiasts take note: Kris's annual Oscar contest at WebGoddess is now officially open, and the prize this year is as cool in its own way as last year's Brokesock pair. I came really close last year (grrr, stupid Crash) so I think I'm going to hold off until the buzz solidifies before making this year's picks.
Grand news for discriminating readers of the blog nation: GitM's consistently excellent blog-twin, Follow Me Here, has returned from hiatus. (Both FmH and GitM date to 11/15/99.)
Yep, it's that time again: Ghost in the Machine is seven years old today. It's been an up-and-down year, to be sure, but I've got no plans to give up the Ghost just yet, seven-year-itch be damned. (Particularly given that this blog has never seen a Democratic Congress -- that should make things interesting for awhile.) At any rate, once again, and as always, thanks for stopping by. [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
By way of Dumbmonkey, one of the old-school progressive blogs returns to the Big Game. Welcome back, Ethel the Blog!
Via LMG, two bizarrer-than-most comic book creators get in the blog game: Dave Sim and Bill Sienkiewicz.
Some amusing links via other blogs: Pureboredom offers an appreciation of John Hughes soundtracks, with a number of worthy mp3s available for download (via Freakgirl), and Webgoddess points the way to this slew of decently funny motivational posters. We're going to need more monkeys.
"Colbert stepped farther through the looking glass by editing Wikipedia's 'Stephen Colbert' entry during his show. He railed against the Encyclopedia Britannica's assertion that George Washington owned slaves. 'If I want to say he didn't, that's my right,' Colbert said. On Wikipedia's "George Washington" entry, the following phrase appeared at the end: 'In conclusion, George Washington did not own slaves.'" The inimitable Stephen Colbert sends his legions against Wikipedia. (Via Now This.)
I've upgraded the site to Movable Type 3.31. Please let me know if y'all have any issues with functionality and the like.
"I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially." Via my sis-in-law Lotta, GOP Senator Ted "Bridge to Nowhere" Stevens (R-AK) seems more than slightly confused about the functioning of the Internets, to use Dubya's parlance.
"Where is the analyst at a firm called Forrester Research who used to be quoted everywhere calling us, witlessly, 'the Slatanic'? Haven't heard much from him lately." A happy 10th anniversary to Michael Kinsley's Slate, home to Dahlia Lithwick, Fred Kaplan, Seth Stevenson, and several other writers and journalists invariably worth checking out.
Hey y'all...if you tried to leave a comment recently, but couldn't, sorry about that -- it's fixed now. Spambots overwhelmed the server while I was busy elsewhere.
"History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it." A personal note: At the kind invitation of Ralph Luker at Cliopatria, I've joined up as one of the founding bloggers of Revise and Dissent, a recently launched group effort by younger historians and historians-to-be over at the History News Network. I haven't gotten around to posting there yet (and I expect I'll be cross-posting quite often with GitM), but it's now up-and-running and my new blog-colleagues are already posting, so check it out!
My apologies if you've tried to come by here lately and found the site derelict. There've been issues on the server side (perhaps akin to this) that look to have resolved themselves.
As you may have noticed, I've tweaked the formatting of blog-entries here at GitM (mainly to resolve strange spacing issues in Mozilla/Netscape.) Let me know if you find the new layout (or the old layout, for that matter) unreadable.
A very happy sixth blogday to Quiddity, Neilalien (belated -- Feb. 25), and LinkMachineGo (preemptive -- Mar. 4), all must-reads on the fanboy/fangirl blog circuit. And, also turning older than one hand can count is Le Blogeur, perhaps the original who-blogs-the-bloggers site. Congrats to all!
Another Murphy enters the blogosphere -- My sister-in-law Lotta has just begun her own blogg for Allehanda, a Swedish newspaper. Check it out! (particularly if you speak or understand Swedish.)
Sorry for the lack of updates around here of late -- I've been using the blog-time to redesign the old headers above, as well as add quite a few more to the rotation. (It was something vaguely productive that I could accomplish while TV-binging to get up to date on Battlestar Galactica -- the thinking man's gritty post-9/11-traumatic stress disorder sci-fi shoot-em-up -- for a few nights.) At any rate, keep an eye out for new faces.
A very happy 5th blogday to one of Sydney's finest blogs, Kris at Web-Goddess (In case you haven't been reading her, she's compiled a very thorough set of Year 5 stats.) Also, a belated sixth blogday to Boycaught of Caught in Between, who, like this site, also got into the blog-game in late '99. Here's to many more! Update: And, in other excellent blog news, Raza at HighIndustrial is back for the '06...booyah.
A very happy 6th blogday to Hal at Blivet, and here's to many more.
As a nightcap to Kong (who, as it turns out, was sitting outside the venue) yesterday evening, I caught Goldfrapp for their only US performance (although they're rumored to be touring here in 2006) at the surprisingly spacious new Nokia Theatre in Times Square (it used to be a mega-sized theater...I saw Titanic there back in the day.) All in all, an excellent show -- Allison's voice sounded studio-perfect and their sultry electrobeat bounce really filled the room:
The (Supernature-heavy) Setlist: Train / Tiptoe / Koko / Slide In / Number 1 / U Never Know / Lovely Head / Fly Me Away / Satin Chic / Beautiful / Ride A White Horse (a particular highlight) / Ooh La La
Encore: Strict Machine / Black Cherry
The stage show (if you don't count the Jesus lookalike playing synth-violin) basically involved two dancers writhing in various costumes: as bikini-clad werewolves in "Train" ("Wolflady sucks my brain"), glittering horses in "Ride the White Horse," spidery green winged-things for "Strict Machine," and so on. Meanwhile, the comparatively demure Ms. Goldfrapp, looking a bit like Debbie Harry in a dark pantsuit, held court at center stage, and she sounded amazing. (Damiella/Dream Out Loud has posted some pics. If you invert the angle and add a few more heads, you basically get the show from my perspective on the right side of the room, where I'd fallen in with fellow bloggers Chris/Do You Feel Loved and Matt/Fluxblog.) At any rate, if they come to your town, check 'em out (and preferably in a spacious venue like the Nokia Theatre -- you'll want room to bop and dance.)
A very happy 5th blogday to Listen Missy, a fellow DC-to-NYC transplant with consistently great links and comment on film, dance, photography, and music. Encore!
Do You Feel Loved? turns five today. Happy blogday, Chris, and here's to many more.
Better late than never...
If you've tried to post a comment here in the past two days or so and were denied for "questionable content," sorry about that. I inadvertently added "http://" to my MT-Blacklist, causing basically all comments to bounce. The problem is fixed now.
A very happy (and belated) 5th blogday to All About George, a frequent source for absorbing links and occasional Dylania.
In keeping with the design and functionality around here being a good two or three years behind the curve, I've gone ahead and enabled Trackback and tried to fix up the RSS feeds (RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0). Please let me know if I broke anything. (Also, if there's a quick way to allow trackbacks on all the old posts without going through and doing it manually, that'd be helpful to know too.)
"How can we fix us? The fights, the silence . . . I know! Let's get a puppy!" A hearty congrats to Joel Derfner, who's both a friend from college and the brother/roommate of a good friend here at Columbia, on the publication of his recent book, Gay Haiku (a project which originated on his blog...assuredly a better way to make this hobby pay than the Kottke route.)
B.K. DeLong of Brainstream reports that The Leaky Cauldron, the Harry Potter-themed blog I started at the old Geocities site years and years ago, has not only been deemed J.K. Rowling's favorite fan site, but is also on the short list of press invites to Rowling's home once the Half-Blood Prince arrives. A hearty congrats to the Cauldron team!
What did I have to do with this? Less than nothing, really -- the site just kinda sat there until B.K. took it over and turned it into the flagship Potter fan site. But I did find this news another interesting reflection of just how much Internet-time's passed since GitM first got off the ground (the second in two days.) I'm old, Gandalf. I may not look it, but I feel it...
If you've arrived from Ralph Luker's kind article in this month's AHA Perspectives, welcome to GitM. If you click and/or scroll around enough, you should be able to find something that catches your fancy around here. And, if you're looking for more quality weblogs by historians (and aspiring historians), check out Cliopatria's comprehensive History Blogroll.
The Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington's answer to Matt Drudge, went live today, with a handful of celebrity postings (for example, John Cusack on Hunter) and a blogroll of the usual suspects. Seems ok, I guess, although I think Huffington would do well to make the site layout look less like the print version of The Onion.
A very happy 5th Blogday to the consistently well-written, entertaining, and informative Booknotes. Here's to many more.
He's seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser gate...and he's always made sure to post about it soon afterwards at LinkMachineGo, another excellent blog joining the ranks of recent five-year veterans. Congrats! (Somewhere, Grant Morrison is rejoicing.)
By way of Uncorked/Medley, a Federal Election Commissioner warns that political blogging may have to be regulated under the McCain-Feingold bill. Hmm. Well, obviously that wouldn't work. But, I get the sense that Bradley Smith, a GOP anti-campaign-finance ringer, knows this, and is raising the black flag of Internet Regulation just to get the blogosphere up in arms over McCain-Feingold in particular and campaign finance regulation in general. Well, I'm not biting. Sure, the FEC needs a new direction when it comes to addressing the Internet, but I highly doubt Agent Smith here is the guy to provide it. Better someone who at least recognizes the utility of and need for comprehensive campaign finance reform.
Happy recent 5th blogdays to Quiddity, one of the web's best-kept secrets for quality fangirl linkage, to Neilalien, bane of Dormammu and otherworldly portal to all things Strange in this realm, and to Le Blogeur, who's been eyeing the blog nation since before it was hip....we've come a long way, Sally/Renton.
Sorry, Ted - You may be The Late Adopter, but now we have an even later adopter in the Columbia History Department -- On Friday, ancient historian Jason Governale set sail with his new blog Corsairs United. Happy hunting.
Found while perusing the Metafilter dust-up (via LinkMachineGo) that ensued after Kottke's recent decision to quit his job and blog for food (I stopped reading Kottke years ago, but power to him) -- Dan Hartung, one of the earliest old-school bloggers and former proprietor of Lake Effect, has returned to the game with Stilicho. Welcome back!
With spring just around the corner, old blog stalwarts Lots of Co. and Do You Feel Loved? (and, for that matter, even the ghastly-retro AICN) get spiffy new redesigns. And, if you stop by GitM mainly for the politics, I have two newly-born blogs of note for you. My Columbia colleague Ted Wilkinson (currently working on a dissertation on Pat Brown) has set up shop over at The Late Adopter, and Ben Kirby, an old friend and political hand from DC, is now posting at The Spencerian. All of the above are well worth checking out.
Hmmm...I tried to update this morning and was locked out of MT..."Got an error: Bad ObjectDriver config: Connection error: Too many connections." It seems fixed now -- still, it's random snafus like these that make me think I really need to get wiser about how to troubleshoot such issues.
A hearty congrats to Chris at Do You Feel Loved?, who procured one of his dream jobs yesterday, and will be working for none other than DC Comics starting next week. With this and Batman Begins, is Detective Comics back for the '05?
After the general post-election gloominess began to wear off near the end of last year (of course, it hasn't completely subsided -- at times, I think you can still see the cynicism emanating off me like little cartoon lines), I made it a resolution of sorts to start getting more involved in Dem organizing for this upcoming political cycle. So when some friends of mine (and founders of Concerts for Change) alerted me to their forum this evening on "Net Roots and the DNC," which included A-list lefty bloggers Atrios and Afro-Netizen, former Dean director Zephyr Teachout, Personal Democracy Forum editor Micah Sifry, and NY Dem Party higher-ups Judith Hope and Mark Green, I very quickly decided to go check it out.
All in all, it made for a partial yet intriguing glimpse into the State of the Party 2005, and one I found at turns dispiriting and encouraging (and far more often the latter.) The panel itself was decently engaging, with most of the discussion centered around the imminent battle for DNC chair. (While there were a number of Simon Rosenberg buttons among the attendees, the panel seemed to split between Dean enthusiasts and DNC agnostics, who felt the upcoming election wasn't of much import regardless of who wins.) There was also some discussion of the role left-leaning bloggers might play in helping to keep the media more attuned to right-wing spin jobs, but, alas, no one figured out how to square that circle just yet.
Former mayoral candidate and Nader Raider Mark Green, charismatic enough in that politico way, closed out the forum part of the evening with some clever but clearly canned remarks for the Young People into that Newfangled Technology stuff. (For example, he advised the crowd to "choose your mentors well," which, c'mon now, is the same hoary advice Strom Thurmond gave 1000 of us at Boys' State when I was 17 years old.) He also regaled us with a short US history lesson, which I'll give him a B+ on -- he was spot-on with George Washington plying his constituents-to-be with rum and George McGovern and direct mail, less so with the Lincoln the "real Log Cabin Republican" quip.)
As I said, I found some elements of the evening somewhat discouraging (and not just because I soon realized that my limited socializing skills at these sorts of things had further atrophied since entering academia.) For one, at times I felt the discussion seemed on the verge of degenerating into the worst kind of New Left-era identity politics, whereby the gender and ethnicity of the new DNC chair was somehow more important than his or her vision for the party. [This was driven home by a (white) fellow in the back hijacking the conversation at one point (does this sort of thing happen at GOP events? I always wonder) and loudly enumerating the few minorities in the room (By which he meant black people -- Latinos and South Asians went under the radar), all to suggest that the event was somehow a charade and a farce for its lack of proportional representation.]
This is not to say that issues of gender and ethnicity aren't absolutely central to our party's core principles, or that the all-white-male slate for DNC chair isn't a disappointment -- to suggest otherwise would be both neanderthal and imbecilic to the extreme...even, dare I say it, Summers-esque. But, to my mind, it's a question of focus. White, Black, Asian, Hispanic, male, female, straight, gay, or bisexual...we Dems just got our asses handed to us by the predominantly white male GOP. At a certain point -- hopefully soon -- we're going to have to learn to deemphasize these differences among us and reemphasize our commonality as left-leaning citizens of the republic, rising up together against the corporate-sponsored avarice, imperial ambitions, and narrow-minded bigotry of today's Republican Party. In other words and IMHO, rhetorically we need to start thinking 1933, and at times I heard way too much 1972 tonight.
(Also, and I know this is a goofy history-geek semantic distinction that I'll just have to get over, but people kept throwing around 'progressive' when they meant 'liberal.' Not the same, y'all.)
All that being said, however, my general impression of the evening was quite favorable, mostly because of the energy, exuberance, and organizational acumen on display from the attendees. We may have lost the recent battle in 2004, but much of the online community-building infrastructure seems intact...and, indeed, seems to be here for the duration. I was reminded of the recent scholarship on the rise of the New Right (by Lisa McGirr, Rick Perlstein, and Matthew Dallek, among others), which ably demonstrates how conservatives, soundly defeated in 1964, managed to capture the California governorship only two years later, once Reagan had replaced Goldwater at the top of the movement. For now, the wheels are definitely churning at the grass-roots level...if we can just get the party machinery in order, find a standard-bearer willing to abandon the protective camouflage, and, most importantly, work on a way to articulate our democratic values against the corporate ministrations of the GOP, we might actually get somewhere.
If nothing else, it speaks volumes that conservative direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie is worried about what he sees from the online left -- he's a guy who knows a thing or two about political organizing, and how quickly the worm can turn. Matt Drudge and GWB, we're coming for you.
"Did you think to try to warn them, or were you working on something new?" This may not come as a surprise to many folks, but apparently U2 recently made the business decision to screw over their biggest fans, from forcing fan sites to remove lyric postings to misorganizing a botched online ticket presale that turned into a seriously Dirty Day. I've never been much more than a casual U2 fan, really -- I have all their studio albums, love the A-side of The Joshua Tree like the rest of the Western World, and was most intrigued by them during their more experimental Achtung-Zooropa-Pop phase (To be honest, I haven't had much use for their "Instant Classic Rock" incarnation since.) Still, while Bono's continuing work for Third World debt relief is obviously a very worthy cause, it's sad to see the band turn their backs on their hardcore following like this...and in such patently dumb ways.
As you may have noticed, I've added a Flickr window to the GitM sidebar, making good on my earlier threat to regale y'all with more pictures in 2005. Not much new quite yet, but there'll be more to come soon, hopefully - I'll try to go heavy on photogenic Berkeley pics and keep yours truly safely ensconsed behind the keyboard where I belong.