The Sufferable Ass

This is a real shocker. Steve Irwin, TV’s Crocodile Hunter, has died in a freak accident, while filming an underwater documentary off the coast of Cairns, Queensland, Australia. He was struck through the chest by the barb of a sting-ray and killed instantly. Our deepest sympathies to his wife Terry, and the couple’s children Bindi and Bob.

This is a very wise and important point that Atrios makes, and it’s a very hard truth to embrace. I absolutely believe that all of us have our blind spots, but it’s always hardest to understand your own. Yet it’s vital that we make an effort to understand it in order to win others to our point of view. Too many of us on the left side of the blogosphere suffer from this particular malady.

I wish that the rest of the media had Keith Olbermann’s understanding of history. Tonight he delivered a powerful rebuke of the Secretary of Defense’s recent remarks to the American Legion, hitting all the right notes. Click here and take just a few minutes to watch the video.

I’ve discovered a weird glitch in NetNewsWire, where some linked text simply doesn’t display in the newsreader layout, though links do display on the original site and in other RSS readers. I’m posting example pictures here in case anyone has any insight into why this might be.

I use the Ollicle Flex theme, though NNW exhibits the same behavior regardless of the theme selected.

Here’s a screenshot from NNW, from a post on The Year of Coffee blog:

Notice the pairs of double quotes? There should be linked text between those quotes, as you can see in the following screenshot from the live version of the page:

Here’s another example from Media Matters:

The NNW view panel drops all the links in these two paragraphs, as you can clearly see from the following screenshot of the live site:

Now, it’s fun to kind of play MadLibs and make up my own words to fill in the blanks, but I’d really like to know why my favorite Mac newsreader is dropping links.

Any thoughts?

I’m actively looking for liberal blogs that take a different tone than the ones I currently read. Anger and frustration, justified though it may be, still is of limited usefulness. Emotional writing may spur me to action, but I rarely feel more than riled up after reading a dozen posts on the outrages du jour. I’m convinced, okay? Now I’m ready to take action. But if I am to carry any arguments from the blogosphere to the real world, how exactly should I construct a cogent conversation with only emotion? Who gives me the building blocks of rational argument that I need if I want to change hearts and minds? Among the blogs I’ve chosen to read until now, I have found damn few who can do that.

That said, I find nothing I read on these blogs as divisive or cartoonishly over-the-top as continually emanates from the conservative noise machine. Jamison Foser’s post today on Media Matters is right on:

Media Matters – “Media Matters”; by Jamison Foser:
Media pounce on “screeching,” “frothing [liberal] bloggers”—while waving on conservatives who advocate … murder

As recently as July 12, Ann Coulter suggested that staff members of the New York Times be prosecuted for treason. And on July 14, she repeated her criticism of the 9/11 widows, whom she has accused of “enjoying their husbands’ deaths”. How is it that Coulter is not shunned from the public forum. How is it that she is not rebuked by conservative and liberal alike? And she’s only one example. Other conservative pundits are allowed to spew hateful, outrageous speech without question or criticism.

I don’t think I want to hear anything else about “crazy liberal bloggers.”