Slashdot Mirror

Yeah, but as far as the people in power are concerned, the blogs are huge machines for reaching out to their core audience. Atrios and DailyKos are two prime examples of this. In fact, politicians are already trying to appeal to DailyKos's readership in order to get campaign dollars.

Yeah, but as far as the people in power are concerned, the blogs are huge machines for reaching out to their core audience. Atrios and DailyKos are two prime examples of this. In fact, politicians are already trying to appeal to DailyKos's readership in order to get campaign dollars.

Daily Kos
Atrios
Pandagon
Whisky Bar

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WTF? DO NOT USE EITHER OF THOSE SITES AS INDICATING ANYTHING ABOUT EITHER PARTY. They're both a bunch of jackass extremists. For left/democrat stuff try atrios or Daily KOS or if you're in to economics Brad DeLong. For righties/repub you can check out Instapundit or the Volokh Conspiracy and I'm sure there are more sane rightish folks out there as well (although Instapundit is on the edges of what I call sane but I'm generally a lefty). As with all Blogs they're all worth checking out but take everything you see with a big grain of salt and get involved in the comments.

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...and NO PLACE ELSE!

+1, Patriotic

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All 4 are kind of the same thing. It's the /., you have karma and ratings and all that.

But in NO way do I think of any of these as weblogs. They're discussion boards. Actually I think of them as slash-sites, but whatever.

If they wanted to review something that is influential AND innovative, they should take a peek at DailyKOS. A more traditional weblog, but mixed with more promiment community collaboration features and slash-style ratings.

It works really well for serious discussion of topical matters.

I'm a little surprised that Scoop and Slashcode aren't being considered for blogging software. They're a little complex maybe, but they've been used for blogging pretty successfully. For example: DailyKos is a pretty successful 'blog, and it does very well on Scoop (which runs Kuro5hin). Beastbay used to run Slashcode.

DailyKos, one of the more popular political blogs (mentioned on Air America quite a bit), is using a slightly modified form of Scoop. If you haven't heard of Scoop, it runs Kuro5hin.

LOL whats nice about these is that we are living it RIGHT NOW thanks to W. want more of the same dipshit?

Today, NPR covered the situation in Lousiana. In that state, public defenders are paid for by parishes. The money comes from (a portion of) fees collected from traffic violations. That's it. Though there is a minimal amount of state money sent to the parishes, it's done without regard to caseload or need. The sparse funds are then paid out to private firms, mostly through flat-fee contracts, where the firms agree to take on any and all cases for one fixed price.

The result would be hilarious, were it not so deadly serious. The average public defender there is saddled with over 600 felony cases a year. This includes capital murder cases. In the examples cited today, they covered an attorney who was given 11 minutes to prepare for a murder trial -- on a day when she had to deal with over twenty other cases. When the attorney complained, the judge gave her another hour to prepare, but refused to give her time to find or call experts for her client. Less than eight hours later, her client was sentenced to life behind bars. And that's not an extraordinary case. The attorney went on to the next of her 400+ active cases.

Louisiana is far from the only state in this kind of situation. In fact, flat-fee justice is spreading as state after state looks for a way to trim costs. After all, people don't call the state up and complain that defendants aren't get a fair trial. Heck no, people want blood. Louisiana, which can't find the funds to pay public defenders, finds more than 300% more to pay district attorneys -- this despite the fact that more than 80% of cases use a court appointed defense attorney. So, on average, each defense lawyer is carrying three times the case load, and facing a district attorney with three times as long to prepare.

Virginia, a state that pays all defense funds from the state, might look better on the surface, but Virginia uses flat fees in another way. Attorneys are paid for the type of case. For example, $395 for a class "B" felony. That rate doesn't change whether the client pleads guilty or innocent, and it's no different whether there's a plea agreement on the first day, or months of work leading up to a trial. So, where is the incentive for the lawyers? Plead everything. Fast.

A new, low-cost internet version of the 4 AM robocalling of New Hampshire voters supposedly by the Dean campaign?

That'll put an end to DailyKos and the rest.

You think he was elected?

Why is this modded flamebait? It's a reasonable, non-vitriolic reply to a scathing, error-ridden post (which itself was closer to flamebait, but is instead at +5).

The best tactic for partisan moderation is to use 'overrated', that way your chance of being meta-moderated negatively is not great. They probably are modding flamebait because they forget this when they get mad.

The fact is that nothing hurts as much or as hard as the truth. What the republicans are reacting to in this thread is the fact that so many people don't believe Bush is a competent leader. Ever since 9/11 they have been looking at polls that say 75% plus of the population believe that Bush is a 'strong leader', 'tough on terror' etc. Its not just those particular views that are part of their core belief system, the fact that these views are near universal is also part of their core belief system

This is why they react so strongly when these ideas are questioned. That is why the mere questioning of Bush's competence results in inflated charges of 'treason' or as they are currently throwing at Clarke 'perjury'. They can't handle the fact that amongst people between the ages of 20 and 40 the idea 'Bush = Liar = Incompetent = Fool = Coward' is not merely a fringe view, it is now the overwhelming consensus.

I don't like ideology, I don't like religions where you are told what to believe. I have not even joined the Quakers because that is too organized for me. What I dislike about what the Republican party has become is the total subservience to dogma. When they accuse us of being blinkered for merely criticizing Bush they are merely projecting their own ideological blinkers that blind them totally.

The reason we are going to win and the right is going to lose can be seen on the Web. Go to any of the right wing blogs and you find a fan site which simply promotes whatever today's line from GOP headquartes might be. The left wing blog sites are very different, the typical story for a widely read left wing blog like atrios or Kos or Josh Micah Marshall consists of a immanent critique of the right. So say Drudge and cronies will put out a statement by Condi Rice attacking Clarke, the left wing blogs will then show that the statement is in direct contradiction with a previous statement by Cheney, or better yet by Rice herself. Right wing blogs often try to do this, but in order to create the 'contradiction' they usually have to end up doing some malicious editing to present words out of context, and that leads to the second typical story for a left wing blog, the post showing the manufacture of a specious quotation.

"Another shortcoming of the Internet is that it lends itself to individual rather than communal activities."

Obviously the author has never visited dailykos.com or atrios.blogspot.com which have developed their own communities nad are motivating people to act locally, vote locally, and gather funds in the range of tens of thousands a week to democractic politicians.

They also criticize media and bring to light stories buried or neglected by the corporate press. And these are just two examples of thousands of political sites making a real difference everyday.

Also, the internet is not just for geeks anymore. That argument might have made sense in 1995.

"Another shortcoming of the Internet is that it lends itself to individual rather than communal activities. It "is about people sitting in front of a terminal, barely interacting," says one Laotian researcher. The Web is less well-suited to fostering political discussion and debate because, unlike radio or even television, it does not generally bring people together in one house or one room."

That's a big Whisky Tango Foxtrot. A huge one.

Where has this guy been? The reason why the internet is so useful is EXACTLY that reason. It doesn't need people in one house, or one room. People can be comparing ideas and improving them from across the street, across the state or across the world.

The world is run by ideas, and only by improving and refining those ideas can any progress be made.

It's open source politics, that's really what it is. And to think that it's not changing things, well..you might as well think that linux isn't changing things.

Check out Eschatron or Daily Kos to get some of the best examples of this principle at work.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is adamant that he will not ask Congress to authorize a draft, and officials at the Selective Service System, the independent federal agency that would organize any conscription, stress that the possibility of a so-called "special skills draft" is remote.

He would never ever ever mislead people. Look how honest he was during the run-up to the War on Iraq!

If Rumsfeld says there's no draft, then that settles the issue. Yes sir, this administration means what it says and never ever flip flops.

"My opinion is subject to change without warning."

Sen. Kerry? Is that you??

No, it's George Bush.

It wasn't you, but micheal "sensationalism sells" who gave the story that ridiculous title. When I read it (the headline) I assumed it was just another bunch of wack-jobs like the Ralians again, but in fact this really has nothing to do with actual human cloning except in the eyes of crazy fundies like Bush.

Which brings me to a central complaint I have about Slashdot. /. Has so many intelligent posters, and the site does nothing but ignore them. Checkout the diary section on a site like dailykos (warning, hard-core leftism) and you'll see one way that posters can really help make a site work.

There are lots of things Slashdot could do, like allowing people to fact-check a submission (like kuro5hin's edit queue before vote queue), and so many others that could really make this site something special.

But for whatever reason (either out of shear laziness or some kind of desire to maintain power for themselves) the people who run Slashdot have no interest in using the community as anything other then tools to filter comments. Which really sucks, since it seems that those people mostly fall into about the bottom 1/3rd intelligence/knowlageablility bracket of posters on here.

Here's a great quote from someone over on Kos:

To the moon and Mars! We can use the Orient Express Hypersonic Space plane that President Ronny Raygun help build. Oh wait, Reagan never got that program off the ground.

But we still have the fully funded Space Station Freedom that Reagan and Bush 1 advocated. Oh, that was never really finished either.

We could always use the budget surplus that Bush 2 inherited to build the moon base. Oh gee, that's gone too.

Right wingers: good at press releases, bad at engineering.

I think this is a great idea. In fact it is one that has been put into practice by several blogs. Both Atrios and Daily Kos have taken up collections which have gotten them meetings with the head of the Democratic National Committee. Slashdot could easily raise enough money to get Cowboy Neal an audience with Committee Chairmen or even Dick Cheney in his undisclosed location.

Google is the same way and they are expanding the breadth of their content like Amazon. If you want to find something on the web, newsgroups or news, you go to Google first.

I don't see how anyone else can easily overcome the economies of scale that Google has already attained.

Is Howard Dean's candidacy doomed?

The NY Times has serious flaws (as well as serious virtues). Conservatives usually scream about Jayson Blair; liberals on the other hand are appalled at Judith Miller, who seemed to be some kind of mole working for Ahmed Chalabi, the convicted embezzler who wants to run Iraq.

But as every other newspaper and television station in the US basically just reprints and rewrites what the the Times writes, you're pretty much stuck with them. Small newspapers and local TV stations don't have the staff to find non-local news on their own, so they just read the Times and the Washington Post and print what they print.

I am much more liberal than Dean, but his aggressive adherance to the facts and his penchant for standing up to the current administration have made me a solid supporter. I've been blogging for Dean (various sites) and have volunteered for his campaign for various activities including the New Hampshire Democratic Convention. For more information on Dean, check out Blogforamerica (Dean's official blog, Unofficial Dean Blog, The DailyKOS (Great left leaning blog that covers the primaries).

I only know what I read in people's blogs, but from what I know the "mobile chemical weapons labs" story is unconfirmed and in all likelihood bogus. Link to informative blog coverage.

Seriously, if I got my news only from bbc, npr, pbs, or even the many traditional online news publications (and not just the mainstream ones that crowd google news, I would have little factual basis for my cynical attitudes regarding USA's government's claims. That's because the professional media rarely make corrections to lies that they've carried or spun, and when they do correct themselves, they tend to do so in small print away from the headlines and front page stories.

Blogs, and I might say particularily the (anti)warblogs, have been performing a great service to info-seekers. They cull stories from back pages and disparate sources, and present alternative takes on world events. Think of it this way. There are tens of thousands of journalists filing stories electronically at any given time. With such a superabundance of information, what sense does it make to rely on a small handful of people to make editorial decisions about which events are truly significant or what significance they should carry?

(Paranthetically, I agree with you that backtoiraq analogy was really dorky. Hardly the best example of edifying blogging.)

> those curtains were bought to hide the breasts
> simply to stop the press from acting like 5th
> graders trying to get politicians into a shot
> with the breast. if you see the actual setting,
> the statue would hardly be seen from a normal
> point of view, but photographers would go out of
> their way to include them in a shot.

I've seen this written a couple of times on Slashdot. Do you have any proof of this?

It doesn't make sense to me, because I can't imagine an editor of a major newsagency allowing hundreds of photos to be shown with the same pair of statue's breasts in them. So why would professional photographers go out of their way to immaturely compose their pictures that won't get printed anyway. I mean, it's not like the breasts improve the photo's newsworthyness.

I guess you could use the same justification to censor the war photos: "We got rid of this whole free speech thing because people started acting like a bunch of fifth graders, you know showing pictures of injured civilians and stuff."

This was marked "troll". Speaking against the illegal invasion is not a troll. Hence, I will repost it.

You mean those 300 hundred or so people visible on television today? Wow. Out of a country how large?

Here is the result of our war.

Quoting the only NYT article that supports this view, written no less by the most hawkish rightwing journalist there, whose key points rest on 'the most reluctant warrior' Colin Powell's conversion and the author's report of what some Kurds said to him isn't a very convincing argument. One back at you.

Note that Kurds are desperate for their own state and would have lots of motivation to cook up stories to meet what the Americans want to hear. "You say you'll invade if Iraq has links to Al-Qaeda? Gee... now that you mention it..."

I'm not even going to go near your last paragraph. Shall I mention Hitler now so we can end this thread?