Category: Blogosphere

Thanks for the feedback

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

I’m glad some of you are enjoying the new music, I do try to find stuff that builds on the historical feel of the oldies we love. I’m thrilled to hear that I’ve turned you on to new artists. I can’t ask for more than that!

Glad to be here in the sanity zone. The comments section at work has been blowing up — apparently I’m supposed to be fine with being called a bitch, a fascist and (worst of all) a DLC Dem-in-name only! I’ve already had a migraine this morning, and I’m sipping passion flower tea (aka “herbal Prozac”) because of the stress.

It’s really easy for me to ignore comments until I see errors of fact. That’s my Achilles heel.

On a big blog like my employer’s, it seems almost like blogger malpractice to let people pass on erroneous information to so many other readers. (And of course, these days, most of the erroneous information involves Hillary Clinton — which only makes things worse.) Last week, I saw a bunch of old white guys, Sanders supporters, piling on two black commenters who supported Black Lives Matter, and it was pretty ugly. It’s always weird to see white “progressives” explain to black people the right way to protest — let alone label them as “racist” because they haven’t accepted Bernie as their savior.

It’s not a war, guys. Don’t take it personally if I don’t agree with you. It’s primary madness, we’ve seen it before. Hopefully we’ll make it to the convention without killing each other.

Black Lives Matter takes the stage at NN

~ susie

The netroots were all a-twitter over this Saturday:

Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley arrived at the annual Netroots Nation convention hoping to impress some of the party’s most influential liberal activists. Things didn’t exactly go as planned.

Demonstrators protesting cases of police brutality and the treatment of black Americans by law enforcement disrupted a presidential forum Saturday as O’Malley, a former Maryland governor, was interviewed on stage. The group later heckled Sanders.

The raucous scene unfolded when a large group of protesters streamed into the convention hall chanting, “Black lives matter!” As O’Malley and interviewer Jose Antonio Vargas looked on, one of the group’s leaders took over the stage and addressed the audience as the largely female group of demonstrators railed against police-involved shootings, the treatment of immigrants and Arizona’s racial history.

Over at David Horowitz’s wacky right-wing site:
NETROOTS SHOWS EVEN BERNIE SANDERS IS TOO RIGHT-WING FOR THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

God, I love politics!

Oh boy, was he wrong

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Vision of the Future

May 9th, 2008 at 6:39 am by Susie

I’d love to have some of whatever Matt Stoller is drinking. Go read the whole thing, it’s a comprehensive look at how Obama is consolidating money/power:

All I’ll add is that it’s time to think through the consequences of a party where there is a new chief with massive amounts of power. I’ve been in the wilderness all my political life, as have most of us. The Clintonistas haven’t, and they know what it’s like to be part of the inside crew. We have a leader, and he’s not a partisan and he can now end fractious intraparty fights with a word and/or a nod. His opinion really matters in a way that even Nancy Pelosi’s just did not. He has control of the party apparatus, the grassroots, the money, and the messaging environment. He is also, and this is fundamental, someone that millions of people believe in as a moral force. When you disagree with Obama, you are saying to these people ‘your favorite band sucks’.

Like many of us, I endorsed Obama, gave him money, and I intend to work to get him elected. He is attempting to completely rewrite the rules of politics, and we should try to figure out what that means for where we take our meager work. Obama is now the party leader. And he has ensured and we have given him the mandate that when he speaks, he speaks for all of us. I hope he’s a vibrant progressive when he gets into office, and we should begin figuring out how to put ourselves in a position to help him take the country in a progressive direction.

The only reason anyone has paid attention to the blogosphere is because of our fundraising, period. Obama’s now vacuumed up the majority of the grassroots donors, is discouraging his donors from giving to anyone else, and there’s no point whatsoever to placating the netroots.
I can’t believe Stoller doesn’t get that. They don’t need us, and we will have no influence whatsoever in an Obama administration. Those of you who dream of a new progressive netroots Utopia will have a rather rude awakening, I think. (Not that this makes some huge difference in my own life – I’ve never thought bloggers were anywhere near as influential as they like to think.)

I can believe that Obama, or Daschle, or whoever designed his movement, has relatively benign intent – for now. But the nature of unchecked power is such thatthe power inevitably becomes an end in itself – and, of course, corrupts.

Oh well.

Andrew Sullivan: Blogging ‘was killing me’

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

andrew-sullivan

People think I’m kidding when I say blogging is killing me, but I’m not. Man, do I relate to this:

I hear you, Andrew. Churning out material every few minutes can eat you up. You have your life back now. But you, arguably, are the one who helped create the medium. Revealing that he wrote 40 posts a day – “every 20 minutes, seven days a week” – Sullivan said that the pace he set for… Continue reading “Andrew Sullivan: Blogging ‘was killing me’” →

New rules

~ susie ~ 8 Comments

Hillary Clinton hará públicos sus correos electrónicos - www.remolacha.net

Look, I know some of you hate Hillary Clinton. I don’t. And I’m not going to spend the next two years reading Hillary Hate in my comments section. Whether men acknowledge it or not, there is a strong gendered subtext to most of the violent attacks made on her. (A friend told me the other night that of course I wasn’t imagining it, and said the only reason he could come up with were mother issues — which is what female bloggers decided back then, because there was no other obvious explanation for why white male progressives adored one corporatist centrist candidate, and despised the other.)

But whatever. I went through this in 2007-08, and I’m not going to go through it again in my own living room.

I don’t want to stifle debate. But at least here, it will be respectful and fact-based. If you need to bash Hillary Clinton, go do it at Democratic Underground or Daily Kos, where you will find many kindred spirits.

This is your brain on Facebook

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

I know people who spend much of their waking hours on Facebook, which I don’t understand. I read it for the jokes!

The 2014 social media update from the Pew Research Center showed Facebook continues to be the most popular of the social media sites. Though platform growth has slowed, the level of user engagement has increased, researchers said. Seventy percent of Facebook users engage with the site daily while 45 percent do so several times a day… Continue reading “This is your brain on Facebook” →

Bye bye Andrew

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Blogger Andrew Sullivan

There was a lot (most) we didn’t agree on, but he was basically a decent sort (except when he got caught up in 9/11 hysteria and called anti-war bloggers “the fifth column”) and he did his best for his readers, I think.

And I know exactly what he means. Blogging takes a lot out of you, both physically and mentally — at least, blogging on a daily basis for more than ten years does. So I wish him the best.

How do I say goodbye? How do I walk away from the best daily, hourly, readership a writer could ever have? It’s tough. In fact, it’s brutal. But I know you will understand. Because after all these years, I feel I have come to know you, even as you have come to see me, flaws and all. Some things are worth cherishing precisely because they are finite. Things cannot go on for ever. I learned this in my younger days: it isn’t how long you live that matters. What matters is what you do when you’re alive. And, man, is this place alive.

When I write again, it will be for you, I hope – just in a different form. I need to decompress and get healthy for a while; but I won’t disappear as a writer.

But this much I know: nothing will ever be like this again, which is why it has been so precious; and why it will always be a part of me, wherever I go; and why it is so hard to finish this sentence and publish this post.

Oh dear, the Republicans are upset

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

PRESIDENT OBAMA ALL SET FOR HIS STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS

I guess this SOTU stuff must have more impact than I thought, because why would they be so upset about proposals that can’t happen without Congress?

The White House previewed its tax messaging coming in the State of the Union on Tuesday — heavy on tax breaks for children and middle-class families, paid for by steeper taxes on investments, cutting a loophole benefiting the uber-wealthy, and a new fee on big banks.

Republicans did not see it as an olive branch.

“Slapping American small businesses, savers and investors with more tax hikes only negates the benefits of the tax policies that have been successful in helping to expand the economy, promote savings, and create jobs,” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), the new chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said in a statement.
Absent in the highlights provided by White House officials is one big area the parties agree on — a cut in the corporate tax rate.

President Barack Obama could still announce a detailed tax reform proposal, plans for negotiations with Congress and a deadline to get it done. But tax watchers are prepared to be disappointed.

We’re all screwed

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

I picked up my work laptop yesterday because it was so slow, it was impossible to use with any reasonable speed. My computer repairman told me it was clogged up with viruses. He said Norton sucks, and said the free anti-virus program I use is the one he prefers (AVG). He warned that it was basically impossible to avoid them if you spent much time online — he compared them to potholes. He advised me to be vigilant about updating Java, Flash, and Adobe, because their vulnerabilities were the most popular point of entry for malware and viruses. That’s why I have a backup service — you never know when you’ll need it.

Oh, and by the way, did I mention tomorrow is the beginning of the Mercury retrograde?

Via Wired:

Karsten Nohl demonstrated an attack he called BadUSB to a standing-room-only crowd at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, showing that it’s possible to corrupt any USB device with insidious, undetectable malware. Given the severity of that security problem—and the lack of any easy patch—Nohl has held back on releasing the code he used to pull off the attack. But at least two of Nohl’s fellow researchers aren’t waiting any longer.

Caudill and Wilson reverse engineered the firmware of USB microcontrollers sold by the Taiwanese firm Phison, one of the world’s top USB makers. Then they reprogrammed that firmware to perform disturbing attacks: In one case, they showed that the infected USB can impersonate a keyboard to type any keystrokes the attacker chooses on the victim’s machine. Because it affects the firmware of the USB’s microcontroller, that attack program would be stored in the rewritable code that controls the USB’s basic functions, not in its flash memory—even deleting the entire contents of its storage wouldn’t catch the malware.

But he (Karsten Nohl) warned that even if that code-signing measure were put in place today, it could take 10 years or more to iron out the USB standard’s bugs and pull existing vulnerable devices out of circulation. “It’s unfixable for the most part,” Nohl said at the time. “But before even starting this arms race, USB sticks have to attempt security.”