Category: Media

This review of Startrek Resurrection is priceless:

But MIM rejects the universal moralizing of Insurrection. Forced relocations can be to the benefit of the people being moved, as when Stalin internally deported Jews in the Soviet Union to move them away from the advancing German troops. MIM would rather see Jews moved to undesirable locations within the USSR than worked into disease in concentration camps and then gassed or shot. We also generally oppose the fiction that liberation will come from a segment of the conquering army.

While it is true that occupying troops are often won over by the strength and correctness of an Indigenous liberation struggle, the officers of an occupying force tend not to be the leaders of any liberation struggle. In truth, the strength of the people’s will can win over segments of the opposition, but this will must originate with the people who liberate themselves.

From Gary Farber via Dr. Frank.

Right Wing News conducted a poll of conservative opinion makers to see what blogs they read:

One of the things many bloggers have long believed is that weblogs are able to influence public opinion, despite not receiving massive amounts of traffic, because large numbers of influential people read blogs. In other words, blogger influence comes mostly from “the who”, not the “how many”. So, in order to test that hypothesis, I decided to poll more than a 100 prominent conservatives to see if they read blogs.

Among the findings is that one anonymous conservative reads this blog under its new name and URL. So here’s a big hello to our anonymous reader.

See Good News from Iraq. I know, you thought there wasn’t any.

Via Third Hand.

On The Third Hand has a new look – with WordPress and some new authors. Check it out.

Michelle Malkin on Wonkette, Washingtonienne, and their fifteen minutes:

…give The Washington Post two vain, young, trash-mouthed skanks who couldn’t care less about what their parents think of their sex-drenched infamy, and the newspaper can’t wait to help make them full-fledged members of the media elite.

Sounds about right. And behind this wonderful story, we have Wonkette’s sponsor, Nick Denton.

Aren’t blogs great?

via Ben Domenich.

Business 2.0 is no more impressed with Kinja than we were:

After only a few months in the lab, the Kinja team scrapped the marketing-tool angle. The project persisted as a kind of Google for blogs, and at launch, to no one’s surprise, the New York Times ran a piece about it. But so far, the thing has turned out to be an overhyped bust on par with “push technology.” Hourihan quit the day of its launch. Power bloggers eschew it as a weaker version of the programs they already use, the blog-gathering RSS applications, which keep tabs on hundreds of blogs at once. People new to the blogging world, of course, don’t look at it at all.

Denton’s genius is his uncanny ability to exploit bright but emotionally-disturbed young women, a formula from which he departed in the case of Kinja. Perhaps he’s learned something.

Bendomenech.com: The Rundown

Safire has the best take on the coverage of the Sarin gas shell. Or non-coverage: Only at the NYTimes is a gallon equivalent to “small traces.” The find is significant, as Joe Carter points out effectively.

I’m experimenting with WordPress, a GPL blogware that’s a lot faster and more solid than Movable Type. There’s a lot of controversy over the new Movable Type licensing terms, and I don’t want to weigh into all of that because I don’t care. I’m looking at other packages because MT is way too buggy and way too poorly designed for my purposes. The WordPress conversion was extremely easy – you just export your MT blog and import it, and the only problems I’ve encountered so far are with the hosting server, Hosting Matters, because they set default permissions too strictly.

WordPress accommodates zFeeder, the Robopundit software, extremely well. I’m still using the default template, and learning the tricks. Check out the experimental blog here: Mossback on WordPress.

I found an odd little tidbit from Doc Searls today: KPOJ, the Portland station that carries Frankenradio, is owned by Clear Channel Communications. Please excuse me while alert Lessig about this encroachment on his civil rights.