PhotoDude.com

Sat. Nov 02, 2002

Blogs Not Bombs

Blogs Not Bombs – Needless to say, I’ve been hopelessly out of touch with the news, and won’t have much to say about current events until I get back up to speed (maybe next week…). However, I’ve made a mostly futile attempt to catch up on various people in their weblogs, and perhaps it’s just the perspective of returning from a honeymoon, but, geez, some of you people need a nap … bad … and maybe a second pasttime to occupy your hands. Certainly, some perspective is in order.

In a cursory skim of a dozen sites, I’ve found that in the six days I was gone, the world of weblogs has been inventing new means of … expression. No, I’m not going to link one bit of it, in hopes of avoiding the sucking undertow.

We have Bloody Hawk contests started in jest that quickly snowball into a screaming pro-war-no-war scrum, complete with blatant vote buying, fractured alliances, exposed cleavage, and pop up ads. It’s enough to make me miss simple home pages written in HTML 3.2 with nice pictures of kitty cats.

We also now have public delinking ceremonies, for those times when someone with whom you’ve become belinked strays from your personal political sphere, and therefore must be publicly shamed and flayed bloody with the stripped strand of HTML that once formed a connection. Personally, I find a One Flavor link list to be boring, but then I thought the point of weblogs was to experience the diversity of people, thoughts, and philosophies around the world, not delink them when you disagree. If I only link people like me, or who think like me, that’s going to be one short list. What’s the point?

There’s a high level of inflated self importance in such a delinking. Myself, I’m certain that my little link to anyone is but a snowflake in a blizzard, of no impact at all, added or removed. It’s a shame others think their links are such precious pearls.

We seem to have the development of some sort of blog-jihad against another non-word, the ”warblogger,” a loathsome group of identical Neaderthals with keyboards who do nothing but pray for war. They are all alike, all evil, and must never be spoken of or linked again. Their output is shameful, horrific and a stain on us all, a disaster for the development of personal publishing, and a crippling blow to the individual integrity and worth of weblogs and weblogging, the worst kind of soapbox punditry, witch-hunting, and a platform for violent warmongers and nationalists.

I think I may have channelled that last part. It’s too over the top for me to have made it up. But there’s more: ”At the moment one very specific site is in my mind. This site, which I will not link to, links to a considerable number of intelligent and interesting people. Many of whom don’t share the politics or attitude of the man in question [...] What I’m suggesting is that there is a power that comes with being linked to – and it’s a power that one should not only be aware of, but should feel the responsibility to employ – whether by sending a simple e-mail askind the link to be removed (’I do not wish to be associated with the bile-ridden drivel on your site’), or more proactively and campaigningly by using an .htaccess file or something similar to serve up a page which declares that you refuse to be associated with the views of the person whose site you’ve just left.”

I doubt this is the case, but the above could very well have been written about me, as this person has linked me in the past. I link to quite a few creative liberal types … being one myself. They might disagree with my politics at times, and I’m certain I disagree with some of theirs. But I never dreamed of delinking them. In fact, to me that’s all the more reason to read them.

Perhaps I’m just open minded that way. It’s a shame that seems to be going out of style in some quarters of the web, as we descend into high schoolish blog cliques.

Of course, I blame Matt Welch for all of this. He created a word that has become an ugly cubbyhole in which dissimilar people with varying opinions are all stuffed. And demeaned.

I’m going to delink him. He’s the origin of this evil, and everyone who wears a straw hat like him is evil, too. I think I should probably also delink his cohort, Ken Layne, just on general principles. If he associates with him, he must be evil too. Evil twins, they are.

My advice for the rest of you? Stop looking so hard for differences that you fail to see the similarities. Realize that the diversity of humanity isn’t going to be affected at all by your little link list, nor will the parts you dislike dissappear because you removed a link to it. Go take a nap, and start writing about something other than weblogs. It’s getting horribly redundant. It’s like watching two good but different artists argue incessantly about the merits of their brushes rather than paint something. It is ultimately counterproductive. And ugly to watch, given the alternative of a beautiful painting.