Tag: Open Thread

Because I just can’t get enough statistics.

It being the 6 month anniversary and all and having just passed our 5,000th essay and 100,000th comment I thought I’d take a look at the stats for our Admin board.  

Just as an aside Front Pagers, and you know who you are, you really should register and check out Scheduling Dharma before you post or promote to the Front Page.

4093 entries.

budhy surprisingly enough is in the lead with 784 posts followed closely by me at 773.  Others in the triple digits are Turkana at 411, pfiore8 with 399, On The Bus at 278, Nightprowlkitty with 205, and Robyn at 118.

And this amazingly slight essay will be my 229th, 4.5%.

Well, since sex sells.

Here’s why I don’t go to nudie bars.

One night my Republican friend and another friend of ours (don’t know his political affiliation) decided that we (that’s all of us including me) should go out to a local bar where a girl we all knew from having attended several parties with her was “performing”.

It was a horrible place, barely bigger than a walk-in closet and dead empty.

The 400 pound owner was crammed behind the bar his fat factually filling the space between the counter and the bottles.  He was screaming obscenities at our mutual acquaintance, calling her a lazy slut who couldn’t make money.

So when we sat down next to the stage with our $5 Budweisers, I took what I had in my wallet and just dumped it out.

I didn’t even drink my beer, just kind of clutched it in both hands and stared at it.

An eternity later, after my “friends” decided I was sufficiently embarrassed we finally left and as we did my non-affiliated bud said to me-

“You know, she makes more in one night than you do in a week.”

Somehow that did not console me.

Feeling guilty about blogging yet?

Second Life avatars and Brazilians: the same carbon footprint

by Aurelia End, AFP

Thu Mar 6, 2:23 PM ET

HANOVER, Germany (AFP) – What do an avatar on Second Life and the average inhabitant of Brazil in the real world have in common? Incredibly, they both use the same amount of electricity.

It is perhaps not a fair example as the average virtual being in the online community is not active all the time, but the statistic does show that all that time the rich world spends online has an impact on the environment.

And how. Providing energy to work the Internet needs the equivalent of 14 power stations, which in turn cough out the same amount of harmful carbon dioxide emissions as the airline industry, research has estimated.

Sonic the Hedgehog, climate killer?

by Simon Sturdee, AFP

Fri Mar 7, 12:15 PM ET

HANOVER, Germany (AFP) – “I don’t care, we’re all going to die anyway,” says 17-year-old Christian, to laughs from his friends as they play video games at the CeBIT IT fair in Germany.

What he does not care about is the environmental impact of the games console he and his mates are playing in a giant exhibition hall crammed full of other teenagers playing the latest shoot-em-ups, driving games and the like.

Whereas many of the 5,500 exhibitors at CeBIT in Hanover, Germany like IBM and Deutsche Telekom have been at pains to trumpet their green credentials, in Hall 22 there is not a tree-hugger in sight.

Well, the Charlotte Allen piece does not quite die.  Laura Rozen got a link on Atrios’ Wankers of the Day–

The Post Hides Behind Allen’s Knickers

In all honesty, I’m torn. Partly I’m tired of this jihad, and was tired of it two days ago. Partly, I feel a smidgen of compassion for Pomfret not knowing what to do, who did express regrets if the piece offended (in an email), and for whom I never had anything but respect until I deduced he was responsible for the Allen piece Sunday. But mostly, I am still fuming that the Post as an institution is now hiding behind Charlotte Allen’s knickers, and stubbornly continues to refuse to answer tremendous reader demand (more than a thousand comments, several hundred blog posts) for an explanation and an apology for running the piece. It’s cowardly. It makes their and my profession look bad. It’s unnecessary.

Instead, comically, truly, they’re hauling out Charlotte Allen (who can be faulted for writing the tripe — but not for publishing it!) to take the first bullets during a chat today which I honestly don’t see why anyone should dignify, except possibly to interrogate her about how the interactions with the Post went down exactly as her essay thesis got clarified.

And consider that these fully moderated comments were the only ones Charlotte deigned to answer (read the moderation policy)-

Editor’s Note: washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions. washingtonpost.com is not responsible for any content posted by third parties.

Alex Leo at HuffPo says-

Charlotte Allen Is a Bigot

So I’m watching the Washington Post live chat with Charlotte Allen unfurl and the “writer” is defending what is arguably the worst OpEd piece published in this century. I am not here to dissect the details or ramifications.

… they lost me because they gave a bigot a platform, defended her, tried to make it seem like she was kidding (she’s not, by the way and makes that clear in this forum), and then gave her another THREE HOURS on their website to purport her hatred and inanity. They do not realize that if she had said these things about African Americans or Hispanics or any other group, they would never have published it.

I remember a picnic, on a beach in a cove in Maine.  It was the kind of place you write kids books about, and as a matter of fact someone had and I read it as a child.

You know the thing about people who rail against “political correctness” is what they really desire is the ability to be as sexist, racist, and bigoted in public as they want without having to suffer your scorn and derision making them feel like the small shabby mean spirited twits that they are.

How else do you explain this?

Why Is Obama’s Middle Name Taboo?

By NATHAN THORNBURGH, Time Magazine

Fri Feb 29, 1:50 PM ET

…

So who gets to say Hussein? At the Oscars, host Jon Stewart took innuendo about as far as it can go, saying that Barack Hussein Obama running today is like a 1940’s candidate named Gaydolph Titler. But that reference, served up to a crowd that presumably swoons for Obama, got laughs. So maybe the H-word is more like the N-word: you can say it, but only if you are an initiate. Blacks can use the N-word; Obama supporters can use the H-word.

We Scream, We Swoon.  How Dumb Can We Get?

By Charlotte Allen, The Washington Post

Sunday, March 2, 2008; Page B01

…

I can’t help it, but reading about such episodes of screaming, gushing and swooning makes me wonder whether women — I should say, “we women,” of course — aren’t the weaker sex after all. Or even the stupid sex, our brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and distraction by the superficial. Women “are only children of a larger growth,” wrote the 18th-century Earl of Chesterfield. Could he have been right?

For Hillary’s Campaign, It’s Been a Class Struggle

By Linda Hirshman, The Washington Post

Sunday, March 2, 2008; Page B01

…

For the Clinton campaign, this is devastating. A year ago, chief strategist Mark Penn proclaimed that the double-X factor was going to catapult his candidate all the way to the White House. Instead, the women’s vote has fragmented. The only conclusion: American women still aren’t strategic enough to form a meaningful political movement directed at taking power. Will they ever be?

Penn was right about the importance of the women’s vote. About 57 percent of the voters in the Democratic primaries so far have been women. As of Feb. 12, Clinton had a lead of about seven percentage points over Obama among them (24 points among white women). But the Obama campaign reached out to the fair sex, following Clinton’s announcement of women-oriented programs with similar ones within a matter of weeks. I can imagine the strategists for the senator from Illinois thinking, “What’s that song in Verdi’s ‘Rigoletto’?” Women are fickle.

Turns out it’s true.

…

Ominously for Clinton, the feminist movement split, generating a large number of “scribbling women” all over the blogosphere describing the gender-trumping call of the Obama candidacy. …

…

Or maybe it has to do with what Pollitt expressed in a recent blog posting: “On foreign policy Obama seems more enlightened, as in less bellicose.” Educated women focusing more on foreign policy fits with what we know about women and politics. Although at every class level, women know less than men do about politics in general, they know more as their education level goes up. So it may be that foreign policy issues are more salient to women with a college degree.