Good Morning Planet,

I want to thank everyone for their warm welcome. I was over at the Huffpo under the cover of my new moniker. Apparently the IP address banning department isn’t being paid enough to do their job. So I decided to have some fun with a new identity and poke at the caged animals with my intellectual stick. Intellectual: now there’s a subjective term. Okay, I’m busted – you caught me. Yes – I admit it: I am going for blood and it’s purely a personal and emotional crusade that has nothing to do with intellect. Well, the Huffpo has nothing to do with intellect either; so it’s a good match I think.

My recipe for fun includes writing little post of pure random gibberish. I learned back in 2008 when I was antagonizing posters at our local newspaper, that I could write a few random words and get the Kool aid crowd worked up pretty good. You’d be surprised at how condescending and insulting people can be – wait – I forgot my audience here – sorry – I guess I ought to rephrase that. You know how condescending and insulting people can be (better) but when you exceed their threshold of rudimentary English skills and insult their pathetically minimal understanding of syntax and grammar, you can get a very fiery response. I demonstrated my most basic technique to a co-worker during the presidential elections. My method was quick and simple:

1. go to the web-page that has the infamous gibberish generator
2. cut and paste a trolls very own words into the generator
3. generate the gibberish
4. cut and paste the result into a comment box
5. post
6. check back later and enjoy

What I am doing over at the Huffpo isn’t so lowbrow as that. I am doing what is more like poetry – random yet fluid word association in rhythmic patterns. I guess it takes some effort to do it that way but I reviewed the results of last nights guerrilla posting and discovered that some mawd there didn’t appreciate my sense of humor. One of my carefully constructed post had been deleted. This only goes to prove one thing and that would be that Huffpo mawds are capricious and vain. Further proof that the site has been overrun by right wing Christian extremists. Seriously, gibberish is apolitical and -  – - -it’s gibberish. Are these people offended by nonsense? God, now there’s a double standard! Again more proof that the Huffpo is being run by right wing Christian extremists. Hey, not that I have anything against right wing Christian extremists. (insert tasteless humor about lions).

Cheers – and I’ll be baaaaaaack

Hi Folks,

Quwhellyicquid here. Some of you may have met me over at the Huffpo. Apparently some mawd didn’t like my snark so I got canned.

Hell, I had a great fan to comment ratio going too: 700 comments and 103 fans. Ef it anyway. It seemed obvious that the Huffpo had sold out

to the right wing MSM right? Like how stupid is it to put up an article about Dickhead Cheney being in the hospital and not let anyone post even a passive comment about how happy that made them feel.

Seriously, the sooner that war criminal goes to hell the better. However, all of the sappy posts that the mawds let through were “I’m praying for a speedy recovery” or some other bullocks like that.

Like this was the Huffpo, and I thought it was against the insanity of the right wing – and here they are having a little Cheney love fest going on. Purely nauseating.

Anyway, I’ll just my news from the BBC unless someone can suggest a better source. Until then, I’ll just have to deposit my snark here unless otherwise told to do otherwise.

Cheers

All ye who failed to believe my last blog concerning the REAL political leanings of Arianna Huffington, please take a look at the picture she recently tweeted below.

She’s on holiday in Italy, and whilst in Amalfi, just “happened” to run into an old friend and his wife. Guess who?

Unexpected encounters: in Amalfi, running into Newt Gingrich and his wife (even invited him to blog about his new book)

What’s the old Rod Stewart song say – every picture tells a story? She’s even asked him to blog. Huffington Post takes a sharp turn to the Right, with the man who likens Muslims to Nazis.

I feel vindicated.

Arianna Huffington is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post. She fancies herself a powerful voice in the world of American Progressive politics, and I suppose she is, although I’ve always doubted the liberal credentials of someone who was closely-knit, literally and figuratively, into the framework of Newt Gingrich’s political philosophy throughout the 1990s. People change, yes, but lasting, believeable and genuine change is often of the calibre which occurs slowly, almost imperceptibly, throughout a number of years – much in the way the conservative former Supreme Court Justice, John Paul Stevens, evolved from a conservative jurist into the liberal conscience of the Court.

So pardon me, a natural secularist, if I found Huffington’s Damascene conversion from hardcore neocon and Gingrich neophyte into a fully paid-up member of the Progressive Populist club, practically overnight, more than a bit difficult to swallow.

Even harder to accept was the ease with which the liberal media readily accepted her within their fold. More than Mitch McConnell “taking the President’s word” that he’s a Christian, the media elite embraced this woman as one of their own.

She certainly has been making the rounds – from Morning Joe to various appearances on CNN, with stops in between on Ed Schultz’s and Keith Olbermann’s echo chambers, as well as a quasi-regular stint on ABC’s This Week – especially when there’s an opportunity to criticize whatever the President has said or hasn’t said, has done or hasn’t done, which hasn’t met her personal standard of excellence. And then, there’s always the opportunity for her particular brand of argumentum ad hominem. I believe her favourite reference to the President is “Nowhere Man.”

Don’t get me wrong. Politicians were made to be criticized, their feet being fashioned to be held to the fire by the people who elect them; but – Lordy! – according to Arianna Huffington’s political perspective, it’s amazing that the President is able to walk down the street and chew gum without tripping up. There’s criticism, there’s nitpicking … and there’s cherry-picking.

However, I’ve noticed, during yet another summer of discontent, that Madame’s been curiously quiet of late, starting right about the time of the Shirley Sherrod/Andrew Breibart incident.

In an interview printed earlier in the year in Wired magazine, Breitbart amply credited Huffington as being  his mentor, saying she’d taught him everything he knew about his particular type of journalism – which is, at best, described as “press hackery” and, at worst, as a variety of ratfucking: shady, oblique quotes from anonymous sources, phrases and sentences taken out of context and spun with a view to imparting a message completely different from the original, and loads of nuanced criticism, which never offers any alternative suggestions, but always ends with a sneer and more than a dollop of condescension.

Needless to say, the interview went viral in the age of the internet, and more than a few of the many people who comment regularly on Huffington Post were quick to point out, not only the association between Huffington and Breitbart, but also the fact that Breitbart was the co-founder of HuffPo, himself.

This guilt by association was just enough to jog some memories of Huffington the virulent neocon of the Nineties – neophyte of Newt and the founder of a website dedicated entirely to securing the impeachment of one President William Jefferson Clinton, Democrat. It was also enough, for awhile, for several commentators to slam accusations of “Breitbart journalism” against certain of her regular reporters, each time their “reporting” proved to be shoddy and inaccurate – which was quite a lot.

The dots were connected.

Huffington never referenced Breitbart, and, although her site offered many and varied articles concerning Shirley Sherrod, Fox News and the Obama Administration, with most of the blame being heaped heavily onto the President’s shoulders, she never offered up a word, distancing herself from this man and his shady practices, never reassured her adoring gaggle of fans that she totally condemned what he’d tried to do. She simply ignored the name Breitbart altogether, as if he didn’t exist in her fragrant world of expensive facials, debutant balls and speaking up for the “small people.”

It seemed as though Arianna, for once, had lost her mighty voice.

And now, with all the kerfuffle surrounding the Park51 incident in New York, all the not-too-cleverly disguised innuendo insinuating that Muslims, as a whole, are to be feared, vilified and persecuted, we’ve yet to hear Mrs Huffington expound upon this. The verbal attack on a construction worker, trying  to thread his way through the New York mob, who appeared to “look Muslim” didn’t raise a whimper of protest from Arianna’s throat.  Nor did the fact that recent polls reveal an increasing number of people seem to suspect our President is a Muslim. These are ordinary people who believe this, the sort of people for whom Arianna claims to speak, especially in her recent book, which has yet to climb onto the New York Times best-seller list.

Arianna, who always speaks the truth (according to her dittoes), should be guiding and enlightening these people to the contrary.

Instead, she’s uncharacteristically silent.

Sometimes silence reverberates more astoundingly than a plethora of loud and gratuitous criticism, and sometimes silence can be interpreted as tacit assent.

In days of yore, in the Nineties when the budget was balanced and everyone believed they had money in their pockets, Arianna was the First Disciple in the Church of Newt Gingrich. Now that Newt’s likening the Muslims to Nazis, one wonders if the sheets Arianna might be thinking of donning are made of designer-labelled white linen.

The Huffington Post has gone Vegas.

It has instituted a clever way to have commenters engage in what can only be seen as a form of slot machine gambling.  I noticed this  after learning HP had started some kind of  “badges” system.  I visited the site and saw a curious form of differentiation occurring amongst the commenters.  Now there were  symbols next to the individual members which served as an additional set of descriptors.  It gave the promise  of  a member becoming  something of a  Huffington Eagle Scout skilled in all sorts of communications Huffington.  As far as I could tell, if you tweeted Huffington, Face Booked Huffington, networked Huffington by smoke signal and semaphore, you could obtain a badge of some sort.  As Questinia, I saw I had a badge.  A level 1 badge of some sort.  It meant something. Although I found out what it meant in the badge identifying page, I  forgot what it means.

BUT! As I was observing the merry calvacade of HP all-stars, trolls,  data plodders, the marginalized and the up and coming, I saw my badge had been taken away! What had I done?  I reviewed my comments as tried and true Questinia and saw nothing that merited the  demerit of  badge removal.   I promptly inquired HP as to why my badge had been taken away with a modicum of feeling pathetic.   But,  as a “good girl” with my reinforcements of yore including a brief stint in Catholic school,  I responded to this virtual punishment with pique;  without explanation, I was duly given back my badge.  It was odd, but I realized they had gotten me to modify my  behavior (caring to ask what happened) by tapping into my school-girl’s deeper parochial brain. Now, I was intrigued.

A parallel phenomenon appeared to be taking hold at HP:  That of whirlwind fanning.  Members were now fanning one another in declaratives “I Fan You!”.  “Faved and Fanned!”, etc…  giving the site an air of part boy’s High School locker room high fiving after a big team win and a ceremony of title bequeathing.  It seemed partially gratuitous, as genuine appreciation, as a new form of LMAO, at times as a form of barter, as a way to give a message, as a way to get back at someone.  Even as sex.   I saw one fanner write “I am fanning you SO HARD right now!!”.  My only hope was that the person getting fanned wasn’t getting fanned in the fanny.

I thought HP was engaging in some sort of blog site social experiment while possibly driving up it’s membership and number of comments made.  Some moderator in the backroom must be earning a PhD.  So I thought of conducting a simple experiment of my own.  I began to play with socks to see how people would respond to various personae.  What came out of it was somewhat interesting.  All the socks attracted different people.  Although I tried to keep the tone of my posts similar, it was clear  that different personae attracted different people and they were duly fanned and faved.   Then, for some reason, I found myself wanting more fans.  I wanted to hit a payload of fan accolades.  I wanted to see if I could increase my odds of getting repeatedly fanned, good and proper.  I wanted an all out gang-fan. I wondered why I was feeling this way.  What became clear to me was the site is now set up as a smoky Vegas slot hall with intermittent reinforcement keeping posters more or less compulsively commenting.  Now, HP was always that way to an extent, but one couldn’t overlook the muted mid-brow frenzy of fanning, and faving and flagging.  All in the presence of croupier moderators.  But, in the olden days a fan was hard earned and was more or less disconnected from the comment timewise.

You remember intermittent reinforcement.  It’s what gets people searching for that high, it’s what keeps gamblers hoping for that big win, it’s what certain unscrupulous men use on women as “fractionation”:  That deadly and effective psycho-strategy of paying incredibly focused  attention to the objects of their desire then suddenly and without warning withdrawing.  It’s the push-pull.  It gets women into bed in a heartbeat.  It’s all based on that form of learned responses called operant conditioning.  An operant is a modifying condition which changes a behavior.  With positive reinforcement, the desired behavior is always matched with a reward, say a rat always gets the pellet.  It is an easy behavior to extinguish since the rat begins to always expect the reward and therefore becomes a bit blasé to begin with.  When the reward ceases to be forthcoming the rat goes “meh”.  The negative reinforcement schedule is essentially one where the desired behavior is reinforced and learned by averting a punishment, say an electric shock to a rat’s front privates.  These types of paradigms are continuous.  That is to say, a behavior is always met with a reward, either a positive one or a negative/averting unpleasantness one.  Each of these forms of learning are fairly easy to extinguish.  Simply uncouple the behavior and the reward and the behavior decays over time.

However, with intermittent reinforcement, there is discontinuous rewarding.  It is intermittent.  It can occur after every fifth attempt at obtaining a reward, or tenth , under certain light conditions, after different amounts of lapsed time.  The most important feature of intermittent reinforcement is that it is very difficult to extinguish.  It provides the foundation for obsession and compulsive behaviors.  Under continuous reinforced learning, the behavior to be extinguished is never given the reward. Therefore it is easy to stop.   However in intermittent reinforcement, the subject has become used to going for periods of time without a reward so they will continue to engage in it.

My goal was to make the intermittent reinforcement a more positive continuous one by making me more irresistibly fannable. One in which I would  nearly always get a fan.  For that, I had to strategize what name, avatar and type of comment I should use.  I chose a furry, cute, dysmorphically dwarfed,  creamy orange kitten with  parted red Clara Bow, blowing-kisses-lips on a baby blue blanket.  It’s name was to be a shamelessly manipulative play on pity-fuck.  I named it Pity-Fan Me.  As to type of comment,  I chose humorous, punny or sarcastic.  Sometimes abstruse and esoterically knowing.  Occasionally precious.  The name and moniker alone gave me a shower of fans.  Nearly everything I wrote was faved.  Mostly,  people commented on how cute my avi was.  I increased my odds by leaving overly serious main threads and  by repairing to posts like “Tokio Hotel Band member OD’s on Viagra”.  It worked.

I decided then to have a goal which would make the entire fanning system appear absurd all the while earning me more and more fans.  I declared to the bloggers that I wanted to accumulate more fans than Hume Skeptic.  That I wanted to initiate a “Fan Drive”.  At least I wanted to outdo Rich Misty or Thunderclap Newman.  I even went up to Hume and taunted him  by saying I was on his heels  ( I SHOULD have said fanny!)  and I had only 2, 243 more fans to go.  So…he fanned me.  To make things fair, I fanned him back.  I got a few fans from people who evidently had some hidden animosity toward  Mr. Skeptic.  Even though I obtained many fans that way, my trifecta winning moment came when I composed a poem about oil fuck-up Oynes called “Oynty Doynty”.  I got about five fans in a single swoop.  I was batting .500.  I had roughly 50 fans at 100 comments, but then lost a few for some reason when I got cocky and wrote “Hello my name is Pity-Fan Me and I am a fanaholic”.  Maybe I was hitting too close to home.  In keeping with my shamelessness,  I then shored my fan number with a reinforcement of my old socks just to pad the numbers.  So what?  I cheated.  I don’t run any NIH studies so don’t worry.  The point is, I found myself commenting more and more. When the magic seemed to be  wearing thin,  I commented more foolishly and desperately.  Saying things that Pity-fan wouldn’t write.  After eight un-fanned comments, I noticed I was on a losing streak.  Since I am by nature not an addictive person I quit while I was ahead and didn’t waste any more of my time.

And because I am also very familiar with the power of  intermittent fanning, I got bored.

Pity-Fan Me.

Hey Kids! Did you get your Super User badge yet? You can redeem your Networker tickets for cheap plastic toys at the Redemption Booth!!! And you can earn more tickets playing Whack A Troll!!! Weeeeeeeeee!!!! Blogging time is fun time!!!

Have you checked out HuffPo’s new comment system upgrade? If you haven’t, just imagine the arcade at a miniature golf course and you’ll get the idea.

That’s not to say that they didn’t make some improvements. As many of us suggested a long time ago, they are providing a structure of community moderating which is a good thing.  Still,  HuffPo has been morphing into a neon-flashing, distraction littered,  Chuck E. Cheese-styled “playground” for some time and it has all now come to fruition.

Badges and colors and categories are applied to users. The fanning led to a class system and cliques over there but this latest application of a variety classes, IMO, turns HuffPo into even more of a  High School  campus than before. IMO, it trivializes so much about blogging and sets up fertile ground for a greater degree of cliques and egos.

BTW, if you link to their Facebook page, you get your comments highlighted in purple! So, if you are a troll with only hate to offer, as long as you help HuffPo’s bottom line by linking to their Facebook page, your comment is highlighted and a reasoned comment from a good blogger isn’t.

What a circus HP has become, a parody of itself. Instead of the site encouraging discussion on issues, it continues to make the focus on the social standing and relations of its bloggers.

I think HP learned very well that many people there are addicted to the Chuck E. Cheese aspect of getting “tickets” and “points”, they love accumulating “fans”.  Some people over there are more interested in getting more fans than any issue that could be discussed. So this latest cornucopia of badges will be, IMO, a goldmine for HP in addicting many of the same people and more to competing on who can get the coolest badges. And if that’s not what blogging’s about, my name isn’t Dave or Buster.

As for me, I think blogging should be about substantive conversations on issues that matter. I don’t think that elevating some bloggers above others is Progressive, constructive or mature. I don’t think that turning blogging into a game of Skee-Ball where you can win badges is a step forward.

For me, when it comes to blogging, I don’t need no stinkin’ badges.

Yes this ad trying to destroy the democratic process was actually linked on a so called progressive website. I could be wrong but I doubt even people who want to kill the bill out of principle on the left don’t want to block the democratic process. I really don’t know what to say but this is way too over the top.

Please keep this in Speakers Corner.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/state-of-the-union-is-oba_b_436045.html

It seems Whoreanna has become the self-appointed spokesperson on the plight of the middle class in our country. As if. She’s an ueber-right idealogue, who married a fortune and sucked up a mega divorce deal (along with a lot of other things along the way) and suddenly converted from slightly Right of the Teabag Party to saintly Progressive overnight in November 2004 … for a price. (No surprise there).

She’s second-guessing and threatening this President again. No doubt tomorrow she’ll be all over MSNBC, causing Ed’s blood pressure to rise, eliciting more syllable-strangling mixed metaphors from Keith, or else she’ll be over on The Situation Room, causing Wolf Blitzer to cream his knickers.

She is a corporate whore doing the job of the corporations and people are stupid enough to drink her toxic koolaid. And for someone who’s championing freedom of speech, she sure as hell doesn’t practice it.

I would love to issue her the challenge of living for a MONTH on an average middle class salary and living in an average middle class home, juggling bills, mortgage payments, car expenses etc. She simply couldn’t do it. She’d be out of that house so fast, the front door wouldn’t hit her feta-cheesed ass. I don’t know what makes me angrier – idiots like Huffington getting kudos and credits for being clever or the dumbasses who follow her religiously.

Right … I’m going to the dark room now.

Huffy is doing it again.  Any good news that does not fit their narrative must be instantly spun to the negative.

Case in point a recent poll by ABC News, the BBC and ARD German TV that attitudes are improving towards the West in Afghanistan.  Rachel Maddow even touted this poll as good news on her show.  Huffy now has “experts” (their spin machine) refuting the results of the poll.  Polls have errors and I am not defending the results of the poll specifically because I do not have enough info but I do ask,

Why challenge this poll Huffy when there are hundreds of polls?

The answer is simple on any subject where Huffy is trying to create a narrative all contrary evidence must be refuted.  There is no reason to question the news services that conducted the poll.   They have no reason to push poll to skew the results.  Spinning news to fit memes is exactly what Republicans do when results are contrary to their intentions.

Today I stumbled upon a website called scienceblogs.com. I found a post called “What to do about the Huffington Post’s support for anti-vaccine nonsense and quackery?” written by a surgeon/scientist called Orac.

The gist of the article (from May 1, 2009) was the tone and quality of the science articles on the Huffington Post and AH’s apparent anti-vaccine vendetta (and other issues). Since many of us have a lot of problems with how political issues are presented on HP, I found it extremely interesting that scientists on this site (read the comments) are taking issue with the quality of science there.

Here is a link to the post I describe:

What to do about the Huffington Post’s support for anti-vaccine nonsense and quackery?

More links to articles by Orac about the science at HP:

Antivaccination rhetoric running rampant on the Huffington Post

Woo-meister Supreme Kim Evans takes on rationality and the swine flu at The Huffington Post

More quackery at–where else?–The Huffington Post

Who is Patricia Fitzgerald (and why should you care)?

Needless to say, I entered a comment inviting Orac to planetpov.

BEWARE OF GREEKS CAUSING RIFTS IN YOUR POLITICAL PARTY/MOVEMENT …

I’m on a mission. I’m utterly angered and repulsed that so many people on the Left are bamboozled by a phoney shill, who purports to be a Progressive.

People need to learn to think critically and investigate the background and modus operandi of every media talking head who puts forth an idea as fact. If you don’t, you just aren’t thinking. The saddest thing that can happen to a person is for his intellect to stultify.

There’s a particular media person who’s really getting up my tits at the moment. Just like I had George Bush pegged as the ineffectual frat boy that he turned out to be, I’ve had this one pegged for the last 28 years, ever since her rather ignominious departure from the United Kingdom after brazenly trying to appropriate a place amongst the serious British media intelligensia. (Don’t be fooled: the fact that Kirsty Wark – the most dipshitbrained political commentator and ‘pet Scot’ fo the BBC – interviewed her recently only served one purpose – Huffington’s stupidity made the equally vapid Wark look good).

I suppose our fathers and grandfathers, the so-called Greatest Generation, had to deal with Tokyo Rose and Axis Annie. Now we have to deal with the Greek Whoracle. I always thought, being the grandchild of three, that naturalised Americans came to this country to savour freedom. Instead the Whoracle came to enhance her brand and further her own interests, all the while criticising any and all Administrations which got in her way. I suppose Michael Huffington’s loss to Barbara Boxer in the Senate campaign and his subsequent ‘outing’ (and thus ending of the business arrangement that was her marriage) put paid to her ultimate ambition of becoming a First Lady with an ‘intellectual political salon.’

She’s weighing in on everything with no experience or expertise, shouting down people whose knowledge is better, and criticising everything our President does with no basis whatsoever. In her past two television appearances, she’s managed to shout down both Jane Mayer and John Podesta, both of whom have infinitely more experience in matters Afghan than she can ever hope to have. As she’s adamantly demanding President Obama reveal all his strategy behind his escalation of troops in Afghanistan, I’m absolutely gobsmacked at this assertion.

Lady, this is war. And in war, sometimes you have to keep your cards close to your chest – mostly, so assholes like you can hazard second-guessing. You show everyone your hand and your enemy has you by the short and curlies … or maybe that’s what you want? Maybe you’re the obvious spy, the dog in the manger, whose demands are so ridiculously silly that no one would ever think that you’re working for ‘the other side.’

Ah, but who is the other side? Well, we haven’t heard much from the teabaggers and the birthers lately, have we? But we’ve been hearing a lot of the Left’s base who’ve obviously been breathing in the toxic fumes of the Whoracle’s Koolaid. These are so-called rational people – well, I’m rational too; and I never believed the Damascene conversion the first time around when it happened to St Paul, and I’m sure as hell skeptical about someone who promoted Newt Gingrich as the saviour of America in the 1990s, blatantly and openly campaigned for Bill Clinton’s impeachment at the same time, supported John McCain in 2000, hurrah’d George Bush’s surge and voted him in a second time, enabled Ahhnold in his bid for governor after her own laughable ‘campaign’ tanked, and suddenly woke up the morning after the 2004 Election to ‘realise’ she’s a Progressive?

As the Brits would say, ‘Pull the other one. It’s got bleeding bells on.’

Like Rupert Murdoch, she runs with the hares and hunts with the hounds; and at the end of the day, it’s all about herself and her ego. That someone of the calibre of George Stephanopolous keeps giving her the kudos by allowing her to appear on his roundtable and spew her toxic venom and ignorance is a disappointment. Perhaps it’s something to do with the Greek connection. Well, Major Hasan’s a Virginian too, but I’m not about to land on the side of someone who opens fire on and kills 13 people.

Nope, the reason we haven’t heard from out teabagging friends on the Right is because their seemingly more intelligent counterparts on the Left, having drunk the Koolaid-flavoured retsina offered up by the Whoracle, are doing the job of debunking and discrediting President Obama for them.

Perhaps when President Palin ascends the Oval Office throne, there’ll be a place at her side for the Media Whoracle too. Two good ones together, and all enabled by the totally puerile and immature base of the left, throwing a massive hissy fit and not voting for a reasonable, rational, sensitive and intelligent man. We thought we’d done something right, only to be told by a media shill that we haven’t, and she’s telling us what to do about it.

Hello?

One great Progressive voice recently said, ‘Faith is the absence of critical thinking.’
But I wonder how long he will continue to be a ‘progressive voice?’

Just remember this: In the end, you get the government you deserve. Maybe y’all deserve Palin.

And in the meantime, read the bloggings of one Greek who’s not afraid to call out a Media Whoracle out for the phoney she is.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/12/13/17647/726

Since the orbit of The Planet periodically brings it close to the wormhole that is The Huffington Post (mainly after full moons), I think it is high time that I made an oath here and now to stop talking about the trolls and personal conflicts at Huffington Post.

After all, the whole point of being at The Planet instead of HuffPo is so that I don’t have to be bothered with and distracted by all that petty, unnecessary stress and soap opera over there. I can get back to what I set out to do by joining HuffPo originally, blog about issues and events that really matter to me.

And by continuing to talk about all that HuffPoop  here, it’s like I’m working against my own desire to escape it. So, I vow not to talk about the inter-member bullshit at HuffPo ever again after the period at the end of this sentence.

There! That feels good! Very freeing!

No more will I talk about you know who and that other guy and “her”, not to mention “she” and the other one, you know who I mean.

In fact, I think talking about not talking about HuffPo is worth talking about often and in great detail.

And, I think anyone not talking about not talking about HuffPo is not talking about what shouldn’t be not talked about.

If we’re going to try to shrug off the HuffPo insanity, we need to start talking seriously about not talking about HuffPo.

And what better way to do that than talking about how we should be talking about not talking about it? And we can’t be all talk about not talking about it!

Know what I’m talking about?

Disclaimer:  I am not an owner or employee of PlanetPOV.  All opinions expressed herein are mine and mine alone.  Only through the wonder of a non-moderated free internet press do these opinions appear.

To Ms. Arianna Huffington, co-founder of the Huffington Post

I would like to communicate to you my sincere concerns over the overall premise and day to day operation of your website, the Huffington Post.  If I did not care on how the image of Huffington Post reflects on all progressives, within and outside of the blogosphere, I would just walk away and say nothing, but it is considered a “representative” source for progressive thought.  This is why I am commenting here.  I have come not to praise Caesar nor to try to bury her.  Instead, it is time to openly and honestly say what is at issue with the Post.

Those who you have entrusted to operate it have turned it into a tabloid.  It no longer resembles a blog for intelligent discourse but instead contains far to many questionable items, as I will list:

1. Stories only fit for the National Inquirer.  Frankly, I don’t care how cute or naïve that the almost son-in-law of the former governor of Alaska looks in his Playgirl photo shoot.  Nor who is or is not wearing panties at some celebrity event.
2. The headlines for the more serious stories are now glaring examples of deceptive advertising.  They are designed to bring you in to see what’s in the circus tent it seems, not what is actually under the big top.
3. The accuracy of a number of your stories is getting diminished all the time.  I will give you the benefit of the doubt and say this is do to quick and lazy writing, not purposeful deceit like I would expect from my hometown Republican newspaper.

The stories are supposedly for a progressive audience, but more and more they have an agenda of their own, and it is not the agenda of the core progressives I know, and certainly not mine.

Those whose duties it is to maintain decorum and equilibrium in the flow of thoughts and ideas on the comments section, otherwise known as the moderators, are an utter failure.  I cannot claim them to be anything but.  Why?  Because:

1. There is absolutely no actual enforcement of the commenting policies.  It is as willy-nilly as it can be.
2. Besides turning the “comments” section into a social gathering place, you have allowed and seemingly approved of the publishing by trolls, and some others, comments that are vile and ugly in a manner that all civilized people should recoil in horror from.  I have seen comments calling the president a “nigger”, holocaust denial comments, comments claiming our government is worse than the operators of the concentration camps, etc.  Even in an open exchange forum those types of comments should be severely limited, but it seems no longer at HP.
3. Good, intelligent comments, backed by unbiased fact sources, are often obliterated for unknown reasons.  It is almost as if real thought and discourse is being discouraged.
4. People are being exiled for extremely dubious reasons, and yet some members are allowed to perpetually exist; promoting vendettas against others, often for reasons only based on opinions.

This is not a healthy environment for anyone.  I don’t know what the management’s motivations are these days, but it does not seem to be for the promotion of progressive ideals and thoughts.  This is sad.  Instead, it has become nearly as virulent as some of the right wing blogs in some ways.  This is unacceptable to clear thinking people.  And it is becoming an agent infecting even good progressives who would have shown more civility in the past than I see them showing today in their posts.

If you sincerely want the Huffington Post to be a beacon of progressive truth, it is time for you to put aside other pursuits and wade back in and take the bull by the horns.  As it stands today, the Post is becoming less and less believable, and although you may be receiving awards for being a highly influential woman, you are losing readers who no longer have any faith in what you are saying or what you are really after.  I became one of those a few months back.  Disillusionment is sad for everyone, including myself.

I am willing to be a “proper” visitor to HP if and when the environment there is cleaned up.  Until then I will come in, say what I got to say in a passable manner, and get out.  If someone wants to see my more intelligent and eloquent postings, they should not look at HP, but instead at PlanetPOV.  This is what a more healthy environment can and should look like.

Sincerely, Felonious Monk

Reprinted from “DocStrangelove’s” message on the HadEnoughington Post…

“For what it’s worth, I just heard from my friend on the west coast known as “MrCreosot­­e” and it seems that he is NOT currently in limbo as originally thought.

He told me that his profile is now gone and it appears that he has been rendered an official “non person” on this site.

He was never warned of this impending action, nor has he had any communication from HP whatsoever. Just, “poof”, as he said to me.

He did tend to P.O. the powers that be here. Heck, I probably would as well if I came here as often, but I only post every once in a long while.

He asked to wish all of his fans here, and, in his own words, “even the dimwits”, a very Happy Thanksgiving!

He told me how disappointed he was and how sorry he was to see what had happened to this once vibrant place and that he probably won’t be back… deciding to go to another “Planet” where one can speak one’s mind without fear of institutionalized retribution.

Although he is a J.ewish Athiest (his words, not an oxymoron), he offered this missive from First Corinthians (13:11) as his swan song;

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

There, I done my duty.

_____

I imagine that we’ll have another contributor here soon.