Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Oh, by the way

I mentioned 2Truthy in my last post.  2Truthy is the blogger who, at Losing the War on Humor, weighs in on all manner of corporate and government shenanigans in a style that I cannot begin to describe.  It's one of those blogs that consistently offers posts that I wish, just once, I could write, so wry and funny and impassioned.  You should check it out for yourself, as I'm not doing it any justice, and I don't want to start quoting, because I'll get lost in reading and blow my whole day (as it is, I'm behind on some other stuff like replying to an e-mail from my brother...just go read LtWoH and leave me out of it).

My larger point is about how we all are constrained by our tools, a point that has some connection to my post from yesterday.  I rarely mention 2Truthy, despite my admiration, because, for some reason, LtWoH doesn't work as a feed to my Google Reader.  I have it there, but no new posts ever come through.  I know 2Truthy is posting, I go there, Carrie (please come back) mentions posts there, but the site doesn't regularly bubble into my consciousness because there's never a little (1) next to it in GR.

Two lessons here: 1) for me, I need to go out and check sites I like once in a while even if Google Reader doesn't show anything; and 2) we all need to stay aware of the limitations of our tools and work to overcome them.

[Update: OK, a taste, from a recent post about everyone's favorite Pulitzer winner, Tom "Jowls" Friedman:
Rather than Tom taking his puffed up journalistic backside down to North Carolina to interview the fired locals from Wachovia who have lost their jobs because of the legalized, Indian cheap labor lobby that Friedman triumphs, he instead is content to dispense quotes from officials at companies like Infosys who are complicit in this war on America’s white collar middle class.
Friedman goes on to proclaim that we need new banking regulations that reins in the leverage and speculative trading that big banks and insurance companies can undertake. Fair enough. But THEN he displays his salesy, bag-of burning rats in a meth lab, pseudo analysis here:


“And this is ALSO why we need a tax on carbon — so we and our power utilities don't become permanently addicted to cheap coal that makes for lower electricity prices today but spits out toxic greenhouse gases that have to be paid for by future generations tomorrow.”


Huh? Coal is bad. Check. Let’s tax all those American hillbillies who rely on coal to heat their dreadful shanties. Check. Let’s tax Utility companies that don’t do business with businessman Al Gore’s portfolio companies. Check. Let’s tax every effing body in this country, while we’re at it – to subsidize all of that other gre$n stuff that Gore’s VC firm is pushing. Check!
Put that on your Friedman shelf next to Matt Taibbi.]

1 comment:

2Truthy said...

Hi Androcass,

Thanks for this and for reminding me to spiff up my site's reader feeds. I'm also adding your site to my sidebar to replace the dead Carrie's Nation. It's not often one comes across well-reasoned, intelligent writers who happen to care about the particular practice of offshoring/inshoring and its deleterious impact on the lives of people in our communities.

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