Fellowship of Punditry

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

Cul Heath

Mick Arran

Jeffrey Barbose

Inspector Lohmann

Eric M. Fink

Michael Lane

Rep. Mark B. Cohen

The Fellowship is accepting new members. Inquire within.

The Sages

  • David Weinberger
  • Jon Lebkowsky
  • Jay Rosen
  • Rebecca MacKinnon
  • Nova Spivack
  • Dan Gillmor
  • Jim Moore
  • Lawerence Lessig
  • Ed Cone
  • Jeff Jarvis
  • Joi Ito
  • The Titans

  • Talking Points Memo
  • Oliver Willis
  • Burnt Orange Report
  • Jim Hightower
  • Wonkette
  • Political Animal
  • The-Hamster
  • Matthew Yglesias
  • Pandagon
  • Altercation
  • Informed Comment
  • Donkey Rising
  • The Decembrist
  • Buzz Machine
  • Orcinus
  • Brad Delong
  • Eschaton
  • The Left Coaster
  • Pacific Views

    Distinguished Colleagues

  • Tom Burka
  • The American Street
  • wood s lot
  • Rox Populi
  • Scratchings
  • Blond Sense
  • Cut To The Chase
  • Bad Attitudes
  • Rook's Rant
  • Dohiyi Mir
  • Stout Dem Blog
  • A Violently Executed Blog
  • American Leftist
  • Easy Bake Coven
  • Southerly Buster
  • Abuddhas Memes
  • ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES
  • Post-Atomic
  • Van Ramblings
  • Friends of the Fellowship

  • Texas Native
  • Chuck Currie
  • To The Teeth
  • Radically Inept
  • In Dark Times
  • Serial Blogonomy
  • The Bone
  • Public Domain Progress
  • Alien Intelligencer
  • Research Associates

  • Blogged In the Desert
  • One Fine Jay
  • Jessica's Universe
  • Selective Amnesia
  • In Grown Brain Stem
  • Immolation.org
  • Somewhere over the rainbough
  • Politikult
  • Political Puzzle
  • Dear Free World
  • Twenty Something
  • Thom:WebLog
  • Random Act of Kindness
  • A Skeptical Blog
  • The Common Man
  • Progressive News

  • The American Prospect
  • World Press Review
  • Alternet
  • In These Times
  • Common Dreams
  • Media Channel
  • History News Network
  • MOJO.COM
  • Tom Paine
  • Z-Magazine
  • Breaking News

  • Associated Press
  • Reuters
  • BBC Newswire
  • World NEws

  • The Guardian (UK)
  • The Independent (UK)
  • The Financial Times (UK)
  • Pravda (Russia)
  • La Monde Diplomatique (France)
  • Arab News (Saudi Arabia)
  • The Age (Australia)
  • China Daily
  • The People's Daily (China)
  • The Korea Herald
  • Think Tanks

  • RAND CORPORATION
  • CEIP
  • The CATO Institute
  • Center for America Progress
  • Federation of American Scientists
  • Progressive Policy Institute
  • Council on Foreign Relations
  • The Brookings Institution
  • The Foreign Policy Association
  • Blogging Resources

  • Principia Cybernetica
  • The Fallacy Files
  • Fact Check
  • 50 Ways To Improve Your Blog
  • Poynter Online's Writers ToolBox
  • News Thinking
  • The Scout Archives
  • WebReference.com
  • Into the Blogosphere
  • George Orwell

    Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

    Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

    In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

    If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

    But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

    Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.

    Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

    In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.

    All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

    At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

    Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

    John Stuart Mill

    Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.

    The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.

    The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.

    Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.

    A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

    Mark Twain

    Don't let schooling interfere with your education.

    All generalizations are false, including this one.

    A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

    Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.

    Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

    The Public is merely a multiplied "me."

    Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial "we."

    Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

    Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.

    Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

    Winston Churchill

    The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

    I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.

    Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash.

    Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room.

    Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.

    However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.

    In war as in life, it is often necessary when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might.

    Otto Von Bismarck

    When you want to fool the world, tell the truth.

    I have seen three emperors in their nakedness, and the sight was not inspiring.

    Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.

    Be polite; write diplomatically ;even in a declaration of war one observes the rules of politeness.

    Voltaire

    A witty saying proves nothing.

    If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.

    When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.

    I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it.

    To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered.

    Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

    It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

    The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out.

    Karl Marx

    Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.

    All I know is I'm not a Marxist.

    The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.

    Sunday, June 27, 2004

    The Korean government censors the entire blogosphere, but the Koreans are still blogging.

    By Nick


    "Westsiiiiide. Represent. I taught them that. Byung Min in the house. Yes, I teach my kids gang signs. I never though it would be possible to laugh myself to death until I saw this picture. Don't be sad. That's how I want to go. It really, really is.
    " -An American English teacher on leaving his Korean students.

    For those of you who haven't visited Korea's blogosphere, treat yourself to their free voices. I can't stand the thought of them being silenced by a government which throws shoes at eachother in parliment. Anyhow, this is how the blogosphere has reacted to the complete censorship. Lets help our blogging friends Korea be heard. Apparently, they can't hear us, they are blogging out of pure virtue.

    Korea Life reported the the lowering of an iron curtain over the Korean blogosphere on the 26th:

    Though I can log into Blogger and update, Blogspot websites are currently inaccessible in Korea. According to this thread, Korea blogs using Blogger and other services such as Typepad have been blocked. Apparently someone posted on their blog the beheading footage of Kim Sun Il in Iraq. That's a shame and it shows very poor taste on the part of whoever posted the footage, but I don't see why my website has to be blocked too. I guess they can't seperate the blog ISPs, so when they block a site from Blogger, all Blogger blogs are then blocked. (at least that's a great sentence)


    Big Hominid reminds Westerners:

    Just so you're aware: Korean's aren't of one mind about all this, despite the prevalence of the han-ma-eum (one mind) idea in Korean culture. Remember the same is true of the myth of Muslim brotherhood: Muslims are actually pretty fractious, not nearly as monolithic as they consider themselves (or as we stereotype them).


    In another post he takes a not-so-suttle jab at the Korean nationalism fueling the censorship:

    In other words: "We like being stupid and we'll do whatever it takes to remain stupid. We are the Korean Borg. Existence is feudal."



    DDA's reaction to the censorship was rather witty. However, take note of why DDA claims his country is backwards. I heard the ghost of Voltaire in this post.

    ...(the censorship) is not surprising at all. After all, this country has still a long road to go until they grow up into a civilised and developped country. Let's not forget that snazzy Samsung mobile phones and broadband Internet notwithstanding, this is still the Third World (and Middle Age) here. A country where parents call their sons "possessions", where they marry the girl/boy they're told to, and where mopeds drive on the pavements (a ethonologist, specialist of Africa, told me during her stay here that a good sign to pick out Third World countries is the number and behavior of mopeds. Whatever!).


    JeffinKorea took a much less satiral stance. He sounds American...
    The fascist government has justified their campaign of censorship, oppression, and repression by claiming that they must protect the people of South Korea from viewing the corrupting influence of the video of Kim Sun Il's beheading at the hands of Iraqi terrorists. This protection has extended to seeking out and blocking any and all access to blogs, bulliten boards, commercial, and private domains that reference, post, or link to the Kim Sun Il beheading video. Orgrish.com, blogs.com, typepad.com, blogspot.com, blog-city.com, and others have already been blocked. The list continues to grow as informers report sites to the Korean Ministry of Information and Communication.


    Incestuous Amplification made a sharp point that we should all take note of:
    Is your burial considered dignified if your parents are surrounded by scores of camera crews and reporters asking if George Bush was personally responsible for your death? Just wondering.

    Dignity. Interesting word, that. Certain members of the media in certain unnamed countries may want to look it up sometime. Been here 6 years and still yet to find a scant trace of it anywhere.

    Seen plenty of uncontrollable outbursts of childlike raw emotion. Seen a hell of a lot of fist-pumping, chest-thumping, riot police-smacking and protester-whacking. Seen a shitload of screaming, yelling, shouting, bawling, roaring, wailing, shrieking, clamoring, snarling and howling. Seen infinte amounts of pain, suffering, agonizing, sadness, hurt, heartache, torment, grief, distress, woe, bitterness, anguish, and exasperation. But dignity? Nada.

    Wait, that's not entirely true. I did witness a highly dignified display in the National Assembly earlier this year. That of this nation's esteemed leaders hurling shoes at each other, biting, scratching, slapping and rolling around on the floor crying in front of the cameras.

    With that last sentence, I think we've come full circle.

    ---------------------------------------------------
    I feel powerless, I'm against the Korean protester's rash response to the tragety, and the totalitarian measures of the Korean government. If there is a beautiful thing about blogs, its that it gives everyone who is caught in the middle of the sensationalist news coverage a voice. Visit a Korean blog, Korean isn't defined by an insane government or insane protesters.










    posted by Nick at 6/27/2004 06:54:00 PM |

    Comments: Post a Comment

    About US

    Image Hosted by ImageShack.usImage Hosted by ImageShack.usImage Hosted by ImageShack.usImage Hosted by ImageShack.us

    "Netpolitik is a new style of diplomacy that seeks to exploit the powerful capabilities of the Internet to shape politics, culture, values, and personal identity. But unlike Realpolitik — which seeks to advance a nation’s political interests through amoral coercion — Netpolitik traffics in “softer” issues such as moral legitimacy, culturalidentity, societal values, and public perception." - The Rise of Netpolitik

    PUN-DIT (n) : A learned man; a teacher; a source of opinion; a critic: a political pundit.

    Recent Posts

    Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

    Nick: The Korean government censors the entire blogosphere, but the Koreans are still blogging. |

    archives

    Birthplace of The Progressive Blog Alliance

    Image Hosted by ImageShack.us
    Leave a comment here to join.

    The Bots