The main point for me in all the hooha over Armando, who always treated me decently by the way, even when I was acting my own insane clown posse over there, is that you cannot very easily extract todays “left wing” from the corporate culture. Coopted is a word that comes to mind.
I will freely admit my own culpability. I am a business person. Sure, I practice a style of business that differs tremendously from that of say, Scrooge, but there are certain elements of business life that would make any good sixties style progressive, especially those employed in the “helping” professions, aghast.
An objective presence, say a deity from on high, might not notice much difference between Americans from roughly the middle to the top of the economic ladder when it comes to guilt by association with the Beast. Regardless of professed political progressivism.
A side point, in Suskinds diary, he mentions something about a journalists rights? Is Armando a journalist? Are any bloggers performing journalism in these blogs?
While I too am protective of my real identity, mainly because it makes me freer to use my friends, family and acquaintances as characters in my little autobio comedies, anyone who really knows me can determine from a close reading of my always cogent and excellent posts exactly who I am.
Lucky for me, nobody really cares.
Besides, now that he has been outed Armando will no doubt get a book contract and maybe even a TV gig if he is good looking enough.
The blogosphere is so badly overrated in just about every possible way (and mainly by the blooging proprietors themselves)that these little melodramas are increasingly the most interesting part of the entire phenomenon.
And what will happen to the lefty blogoshere IF and WHEN the Democrats regain control of the federal government?
Its bound to happen sooner or later. Even a blind horse wins a race by accident once in a while, especially when the opponent is a chimpanzee in an oversized dunce cap who cant do anything right.
I say we keep trashing the Temple…
Just to give a few examples: Pamela Jones over at Groklaw has been covering a court action, SCO vs. IBM, that has serious implications in the world of computer programming and programmer culture. She and her merry band of investigators have dug up some real nuggets of information and Groklaw has been cited in court documents in the case. Just recently a diary here by SluggoJD unmasked a Diebold employee as a troll who was spreading lies and disinformation about Black Box Voting (a site dedicated to voter education on the topic of voting machines and their problems and implications) and its founded, Bev Harris. And don’t forget the Jeff Gannon and Howard Kaloogian stories.
I would even say that Armando would qualify as a journalist, at least in some of his writings. He was a prominent critic of the Alito nomination, and his writings on that subject in my mind at least are the equivalent of a newspaper’s editorials.
By the way, is there any way you could change the title of the diary?
When has a journalist ever been granted the inherent right to anonymity? The answer: Never.
Journalists put it on the line with their actual name, and if they do use a pseudonym, there is still no crying foul when their real name gets revealed.
My contention is that this is a non-issue.
click here for my full dissertation on this subject
And as I am banned at dKos, but wish to follow rules here, I am asking anyone with posting privileges over there to please cross-post this for me at dKos
sure. what do you suggest?
I almost deleted the diary because of the title. I thought the Recent Unpleasantness was spilling over here to DK. (Then I read it and I thought it was a worthwhile point.)
I also think the title is misleading. It makes it sound like Armando was an employee of Wal-Mart, when in fact he was only a lawyer from a large firm representing Wal-Mart in a lawsuit. Not the same thing, but I don’t know how to represent the difference succinctly, and I realize that it’s convenient shorthand to sometimes refer to outside counsel as “Megacorp’s lawyer” when the lawyer in question actually works for the law firm of Engulf & Devour, LLC and is only representing Megacorp in court.
You almost deleted DonkeyTale’s diary? You can do that Omir? If so, how and why would you have that authority?
I said almost. It is not well known, but I am a superuser. I have only used my super-powers once, when I broke up SluggoJD’s diary about Black Box Voting’s Diebold-employed troll so the diaries page wouldn’t take a week and a half to load because he posted everything into the Intro Text section.
Wait, I take that back. I have been known to repair errant italic tags and the like that screwed up formatting when I notice them.
Had this diary been posted by a relatively new user with the same sort of modus operandi used over on Daily Kos, you bet I would have deleted it. If I was wrong about it BooMan would have called me on it, I would have apologized, and had he seen fit to take away my superuser status for doing so I would have accepted my punishment. But so far this site has been relatively free of the disruption that was caused by Armando’s being outed, and in the absence of any other superuser at three in the morning when I noticed the diary I would have acted to keep the peace.
Once I got past the title of the diary and realized it was by donkeytale, who is in my opinion a valued member of this site (whose views I don’t always agree with, but then I don’t always agree with anybody’s views, including my own) there was no question that the diary would stay.
Wow another “outing”!
Superuser!
I love it.
supersoling you mean you are not a superuser too?
I am shocked and appalled! (not really)
It was the cape, wasn’t it? My mother always told me to tuck my cape into my pants when I changed back into a normal user, but did I listen? Nooooooooo.
Ahhhh, BT; learn somethin’ every day…Ommmmmmmmmmir…:{)
Peace
Hey screw this stuff. why not put this diary on the reco list?
Not because it was so great–like most of my crap it was ‘first take’ with little to no thinking involved, non edited stream of semiconsciousness–
but because this is an Important Blogging Topic Which Demands More Discussion.
Plus, we need to find someone who hasnt been banned at Dkos to crosspost Mr. Nowhere’s gratuitous but excellent slamming of Armando. Otherwise he will be technically a troll without proper recourse to follow the blooger rules….and I, donkeytale, will not stand for such injustice in one of my own threads especially!
I don’t think I can just unilaterally put stuff on the rec list. I suppose I could create about ten accounts to recommend your diary, and in fact once upon I time I considered it before I decided that getting onto the recommended list at Big Orange wasn’t that important. Not that I ever got to find out, grumble mumble mumble.
Besides, when I do stuff like that I always get caught. I would have made a rotten crook.
just recommend it!
Youre welcome “Omir the Superuser.” 🙂
That term cracks me up. You better delete this diary before your cover gets blown to the higher ups in Vegas….
BooMan knows. Basically it’s so I can look at technical problems with the site once in a while and see if I can suggest fixes. Yeah, I know, I could have have invisibility or X-ray vision or something useful like that, but instead I got Can See HTML Breaks. Geez, how am I going to get a lucrative comic book deal with something wimpy like that?
are you trying to say you are comic books? Why dont you run a serial? Show off your stuff. I have been thinking of running a serial picaresque here, but it seems like awfully hard work for so little reward….so I’ll just blow off steam here instead.
meant to say you create comic books? its self evident that is not a comic book!
To me it isnt real journalism until it has been fact checked, sourced more than once, edited and proofed by professionals.
I know I know. Dont even go there about the SCLM’s lack of professionalism or more to the point, “courage.”
But Brian Nowhere is right. It cant be journalism unless you can be held accountable.
Can an anonymous blogger truly be held accountable?
Is Nowhere truly his last name?
Anyone who knows how to access whois on the internet can check out who owns the domain nowhereweb.com and wala, ther it is: Brian Browder, Chicago, IL
It even has my phone #. Luckily that’s an old number
I like Nowhere a lot better than Browder….:)
Actually, me too. Luckily with pseudonyms, you get to pick the one you like. 😉
Earl Browder? Wasnt he the communist party USA president? No relation Im sure…
Earl Browder, the son of William Browder, a schoolteacher, was born in Wichita, Kansas, on 20th May, 1891. After an elementary schooling he worked as a cash boy for the Wallenstein & Cohen Dry Goods Company. When he was 15 he joined the Socialist Party of America. Later he attended business college he found employment as a bookkeeper for the Potts Drug Company.
Browder, like most members of the Socialist Party, believed that the First World War had been caused by the imperialist competitive system. Between 1914 and 1917 Browder made several speeches explaining why he believed the United States should not join the war.
——————————————————
Now I guess I know where my own socialist leanings come from (FTR:I believe in a hybrid, socio-capitalism), as well as my fondness for drugs ( Potts Drug Company) 🙂
Who needs Google when you have a well-worn-but-still- half-serviceable-forgotten-all-the-bad-stuff-I-did-but-remember-every-perceived-slight-against-me mind like mine?
Of course, Mr. Nowhere, you are talking about prescription drugs and always following the advice of your physician, correct?
Choice of physician is very important.
I think the line between physician/drug dealer has gotten about as blurry as the line between blogger/journalist.
how’s that for coming full circle, back on topic?
thats the problem with this world. So much information that everything is blurry.
is that technology promised to cut our work in half when in actuality it only allows the great grinder to demand from double the output.
It also allowed many jobs to be outsourced from under our asses.
I blame two people. Steven Jobs for inventing the hardware and Bill Gates for providing the shitty software from which he has become the richest nerd in the rich history of nerds.
To me it isnt real journalism until it has been fact checked, sourced more than once, edited and proofed by professionals.
I agree with you, actually. It’s why I think that blogging is related to journalism, but isn’t quite the same thing — or not always. We’re always having this debate over whether it is or isn’t “journalism” — and there’s no answer. “Is this journalism?”, like many questions, is a muddy thing that can’t always be answered with a yes or a no.
I do give more weight to fact checked, sourced, edited stuff. But that doesn’t mean I don’t also read the other stuff, and so forth. It all gets complicated.
I think it’s quite possible that an anonymous blogger can be held accountable, but of course it depends on whether they will be.
It is not journalism I assure you. I do recall going to journalism school a long time ago and rejecting it as a career—mainly because of the “others’ who also wanted to be journalists, and the profs, who were a bunch of ego blinded clodhoppers.
And yes even then the hot chicks got promoted to the top faster than the ugly dudes like me.
And this was SF State, the iconic bastion of the left in the late 60s early 70s.
What really get s me is when one blogger links to another blogger who is making his own opinion known about something and the first blogger reprts the second bloggers opinion as “fact.”
My favorite thing is when a blogger cuts-and-pastes a link from Google news and posts it at an (orange colored) blog faster than some other cut-and-paster did and then the first cut-and-paster claims he “scooped” the second cut-and-paster.
It’s fucking pathetic. Journalists my ass.
A bunch of whiny Op-Ed columnists?…maybe.
Yeah but its alright. Gets better quality all the time. Even more relaxed.
Is it because of us or Bush poll numbers?
Who holds them accountable? We do. We all have tools at our disposal that journalists even 20 years ago would have sold their grandmothers to the gypsies for, and it shouldn’t take more than fifteen seconds on Google to verify whether a quote is accurate or taken out of context, for instance.
And in the end, on the Internet all anyone has is their credibility. Someone like you-know-who can fail time and time again because of who his daddy is and his hail-fellow-well-met demeanor. But on the Internet, in the absence of any outside evidence you are the words you use. Your background, your connections, your socioeconomic status are irrelevant. Your credibility is your asset, and if you lose that you are effectively done. You can still post if you like, I guess, but anyone who does a bit of research is going to find out that your stories have to be carefully scrutinized or completely discarded, depending on how badly you screwed up (or whether you blatantly lied). In my opinion this is true whether you are using your own name or an alias.
is whether you have some sort of legal or ethical right to that anonymity.
In the case of Armando, the phrases that keeps coming to minds is “Chickens coming home to roost”, and “mess With The Bull Get The Horns” and “If ya can’t take the heat get out of the kitchen”.
Does this qualify as real journalism? Crossposted here, where it was mostly ignored.
No, it contains far too many facts to be considered journalism, and not enough pictures of goodlooking newsbabes.
I changed it to “WalMart Contractor.”
Thats as close as I could come to retaining the sleaze factor inherent in the term “WalMart Lawyer” and still fulfilling your requirements for accuracy.
Which I appreciate very much by the way…..a little accuracy goes along way with me.
I think I had a brain seizure and kept hitting send.
IMO, part of the problem with this issue is the conflation of journalism:
n 1: newspapers and magazines collectively [syn: news media,
fourth estate] 2: the profession of reporting or photographing
or editing news stories for one of the media
with activism:
n : a policy of taking direct and militant action to achieve a
political or social goal
While blogs may be, in some instance, written by persons educated and/or employed as “journalists” (not required) the configuration of most of the blogs that I visit is essentially that of an electronic, reality (fact) based op-ed page with the opportunity for dialog and correction/refutation, in “real time”.
As such, those who contribute and wish to remain anonymous should have that right. Where the lines blur is when the position/stature that an individual feels they have achieved enables/compels that same individual to increase/take advantage of/leverage their presence/influence in the “real world”. Inherent in that decision is the distinct possibility that their anonymity will be comprised. Such actions once knowingly undertaken, relinquish any claim to a de facto right to anonymity.
Most bloggers who aspire to reach a wider audience are aware of this, and have voluntarily made their personal personas openly available…re: MSOC, Booman, Kos, Christy Hardin Smith (FDL) et al. To move in that direction and take advantage of the opportunities to reach a wider audience presupposes an acknowledgement of the consequence. To cry fou for l”professional” reasons when it happens is patently dishonest and hypocritical.
My 2¢.
Peace
Succinctly and Well Put!!
bravo!
anyone who really knows me can determine from a close reading of my always cogent and excellent posts exactly who I am.
Hilarious, considering this is (at least) your third username here. If you have such a low opinion of the blogosphere, why do you spend your time on the blogs?
Good one, altho I didnt say I had a low opinion of blogs did I?
More careful reading of other peoples writing would help us all a lot dont you think?
And yes it is only three. And yes I outed myself, and no, I have never used the other two to recommend my diaries, altho I have noticed a lot of the celebrated bloggers routinely use shills (real or imagined as they may be) to pump up their diaries to the top of the charts.
It wouldnt be that hard. I noticed yesterday it took as few as two recommeds to make the list. hmmmm….
You can look it up.
In fact “iom” and “pete” dead and gone. I promised both supersoling (who is my guardian angel) and BooMan and I never, ever tell a lie (unless I mean to).
BTW, I tried to sell all three classic diarist personas to Gilroy yesterday for only $6.66, shipping and handling, but he turned me down…smart fellow that he is…
You can look it up.
It’s in this very diary
The blogosphere is so badly overrated in just about every possible way
Regarding the “shills” comment, I’m afraid that’s a little too vague for me to have a clue as to what you’re talking about.
and FWIW, I agree with you about careful reading.
I know. Thats what I meant. Read the sentence again.
Stating that the blogosphere is badly overrated, especially by the proprietors themselves, is not the same as saying I have a low opinion of blogs.
I know that you are intelligent and can follow a logical word and thought construct.
I would call my opinion of the blogoshere “centered” not low. I try to avoid all highs and lows (well except there is one high I still shoot for–and am going there now–another reason for keeping anonymity)
Ciao
pete or iom would have taken your bait and started naming names but my probatio–I mean guardian angel–I mean my reformed soul wont allow me to start “outing” shills.
It doesnt matter anyway. I just referenced it because it is there.
I like the current crop of recommendeds just fine. I even get there once in a while, which shows you how upside down things really are in Bloogerville.
I do think those “Froggy Bottom Cafe” threads shouldnt be eligible for the top of the pops….lets open a spot for some deserving (or even undeserving)soul who has poured his/her heart into a diary…..
How about coming on over and giving a BrotherFromAnotherMother a recommend.
God, I feel so used.
Done.
anyone crossposted it at DKos yet? I’m all for discussing anonymity and how it relates to the blogosphere, but that diary is still out of bounds regarding the rules mentioned in a comment on your thread.
as you already know, I am out over there. You too?
I visit both places regularly and will post a diary every once in a while to see how it flies with a larger crowd.
If you cross post it for me. I would if I could.
I’ve even made it easy by uploading the formatting code
HERE
It’s always nice to have someone out there who owes you.
I’m not interested in losing my eyebrows again anytime soon.
With that, I am signing off. Meta makes me hungry and its lunch time.
you, in fact we’ve been lobbying for a completely different setup for those threads (sort of like the regional links) but time/programming manpower slows down the process.
I’m not trying to bait you into anything, was asking for clarification so as to only respond to points that I’m clear with.
The denizens of the Cafe have wanted that, too, from the beginning, and BooMan would like to make it happen, but as ManE says, it ain’t easy. The Cafe has experimented with other ideas, like asking us to Hotlist it instead of Recommending it. Currently we’re not doing that (I think), but then neither is the Cafe making it to the Rec list all the time, either. In fact, lately, I think it’s more often NOT on the list than on the list. I could be wrong. This once.
IMO, any popular diary has a right to be on the rec list, including the Cafe. It contributes a lot to the popularity and user stats of this site and is probably important to the health of this place.
Personally, I don’t think that’s even a problem. What I do think is a problem is that the Cafe overwhelms the Recent Comments feature, making everybody wade through all of our chat to get to comments from other diaries. I think that’s unfortunate. Also probably difficult and/or expensive to fix.
Sorry for going so off-topic, but I wanted to join ManE in addressing this question as it arose. Anybody who wants to discuss it more, how about moving the discussion to the Cafe? (My, aren’t I just the Little Miss Hall Monitor Today.)
I don’t think it’s a problem so long as the users who recommend the current Cafe unrecommend the previous one. For instance, as I write this the Cafe isn’t on the recommended list. Maybe it would be worth it to expand the Recommended diaries section to nine diaries instead of eight.
Actually, what I would like to see is a “Community” box on the right hand side of the page, similar to the “Recommend Diaries” and “Recommended World Diaries” boxes. That would be a good spot for popular non-political diaries like the Cafe, the Jazz Jams, Thursday Dog Blogging and the like. I’m not sure how you would differentiate them from other diaries, though. It would probably require some database work (adding a new field that would mark “community” diaries) and being able to keep track of which one was the latest in any given series. I would have to give serious thought to that, and my mind is otherwise occupied at the moment (mostly with thoughts of “the heck with this, I’m going home early today”).
My god you have your shit together! I hear they need a female presence on the front page. I know you are a mystery writer and so must spend a lot of time on the road solving msyteries so you can then write about them for an adoring audience, but I dont know you have an aura that calms me down with every word you write.
I am hungry for something from this sight which is “centered.” Not centrist if you get the subtle difference.
I say that is you. Centered from kansas. YES!
I’m a back page kinda gal, but thanks.
By the way it or may not interest you to know that over the last two years I have been:
frontpaged on Dkos, Banned at Dkos (both as donkeytale), but never made the recommended list on dkos…
stayed on the recommended list for about a week at Redstate with something like 40 comments for a Christmas poem which went virtually unread and unnoticed by anyone here (except again the saintly super)where it was first posted by “pete”
and
banned at Redstate (a very quick trigger finger there)
as donkeytale for another piece orignally posted here which again went uncommented upon here
plus all the suffering and abuse endured by iom and pete for simply speaking the unpleasant truth.
All in all I like it here best. Never post anywhere else under any names these days…
Some of us require three or four lifetimes to get it right….too bad christians only allow you one…
It will be breaking news with wall to wall continuous live coverage on all three crusadenets, as well as your local stations.
disagree slightly. In order for their to be a right, there by the laws of physics must be a left as well.
Its just that our left has been pulled (paid) so far right that its hard to tell just where the right stops and the left starts.
Its like the words some 1st century hack put in the mouth of the savior:
“The left shall be right when the right moves even farther right. You will know by the camel’s eye when it has a needle sticking from it. Brood of vipers!”
It will be more like “Walmart to Walmartcontinuous live coverage”, I fear.
And just LIKE Walmart, if that ever happens they will simply move the main entrance (Entrancing idea, ain’t it?) and left will magically become right again.
Much like what is happening out west in Old New Las Vader, NevaDarth as we speak.
“And the new will become old. the light will become dark, and southpaws will once AGAIN rule the earth. Pitching right into the outfield.”
Cleva little bastids, ain’t they?
AG
On MSNBC a few minutes ago, Armando & Cole were discussed.
Armando as a lawyer for Walmart being outed for [hypocrisy?]
Cole for his opinions on his blog differing from his teachings.
It seems that the “journalist” speaking about Armando is of a different caliber than the discussion here on “is a blogger a journalist?”