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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.