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POPSAlone Together - Loneliness myth - very intersting !
"Hampton says he views the Internet as the ultimate city, the last stop on the continuum of human connectedness. I’d argue that New York and the Internet are about the same, in the way that a large bookstore feels like it offers just as many possibilities as Amazon.com—maybe slightly less inventory, but more opportunities to stumble on things you might not have otherwise. Whichever the case, what the Internet and New York have in common is that each environment facilitates interaction between individuals like no other, and both would be positively useless—would literally lose their raison d’être—if solitary individuals didn’t furiously interact in each. They show us, in trillions of invisible ways every day, that people are essentially nothing without one another. We may sometimes want to throttle our fellow travelers on the F train. We may on occasion curse our neighbors for playing music so loud it splits the floor. But living cheek-by-jowl is the necessary price we pay .."
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POPSThink Progress, MSNBC 'Manufacture' a Story With Putative Smoking Gun 'Mob' Memo The blog falsely connected MacGuffie to the national conservative group FreedomWorks through the most tenuous of threads. The Think Progress link that purports to establish MacGuffie as a FreedomWorks "volunteer" leads to his one blog posting on a Tea Party website (on the free social networking site, ning.com). Think Progress calls Tea Party Patriots a "FreedomWorks website." The problem is it's not a FreedomWorks site, according to FreedomWorks spokesman Adam Brandon. "There is no formal structural connection," Brandon told me. "Never has been. Never will be. We're just fellow travelers in the movement." So MacGuffie, a local activist in Connecticut who never volunteered for FreedomWorks wrote a memo and also wrote a blog post on a site not paid for or hosted by FreedomWorks. There's your national conspiracy, folks.
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POPSSo Many Idiots, So Little Time Despite the manifest insanity of their view, they vocally believe that they’re the Phoenix, and it’s up to them to stoke to fire to create the ashes. One wonders were it will end. Manson’s mania-driven murders numbered in the double-digits. If these fellow-travelers have their way, mere millions of deaths may ultimately seem like small numbers.
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POPSVote How We Tell You or Else Easy to close your eyes and hear the same words being spouting by MoveOn.org and their fellow travelers on the lunatic left, eh? Elections are only valid if their candidates win and if not, well, America must me morphing into a fascist regime.
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POPSSarah Palin’s ‘Political Pornography’ is an Updated Version of McCarthyism
As with McCarthyism, Palinism is a product of its times. McCarthy exploited the public’s fear of communism and communists. Not only were they abroad, but they were here in America — spies, fellow travelers, pinkos, apologists, intellectuals and short, bespectacled minorities. It was their very ubiquity and invisibility that made them so dangerous. Health-care reform provides Palin the same opportunity. The klutziness of Obama’s effort — people think they know what they can lose but have no idea of what they can gain — again raises the specter of invisible forces that will take but not give, dictate but not listen, tax but not provide. But as is almost always the case with right-wing populists, the shooter has aimed at her own foot. Palin’s “death panel” remarks either killed or helped kill the proposal to offer end-of-life counseling. The victims will be the poor, the uninformed and the ideologically blind who will find themselves unable to make a graceful exit. The affluent have th
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POPSStatistician Debunks Gore’s Climate Linkage . . . . . . . . . . to the collapse of the Mayan civilisation . . . . . including El Nino events and major decadal shifts in the North Atlantic Oscillation, as well as two or three decade-long variations in rainfall over many centuries.” “Why did the Maya civilisation suddenly come apart? Everyone who studies the Classic Maya collapse agrees that it was brought on by a combination of ecological, political, and sociological factors.” “When the great droughts of the eighth and ninth centuries came, Maya civilisation everywhere was under increasing stress.” “The drought was the final straw.” “The collapse did not come without turmoil and war.” Brian Fagan describes how the ruling class (the kings had divine powers, they were also shamans and there was a vast aristocracy and their fellow-travelers that the tightly regulated workers toiled to maintain) encouraged population growth beyond what the land could carry;
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POPSAnyone on The Left Approve of This? Cont... by mucking up my comments section with posts that said nothing, but all used the same in-joke pseudonym. Next, the tiny little thugs started putting up comments in my name and regular commenters's names, even using the word "nigger" in one of those posts -- as if that commenter had said it. That's straight defamation, and completely disgusting. Finally, after I started deleting comments that were clearly from people sent over here to be part of a mob to punish me for speech unapproved by the liberalocracy, the tiny thugs started posting huge spam posts like the one above -- also in my name -- from proxy servers in Germany, etc. So, in favor of your fellow travelers, or not?
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POPSPostcards From the Frontier: Unmovable American Images More commminstrelon were the scolders and scandalized of Europe’s elite. Shocked at the determination of her fellow travelers to cram more baggage on her coach than it could decently carry, a visiting Frances Trollope protested, “No law, sir, can permit such conduct as this.” She elicited the loud reaction of backwoods laissez-faire: “We makes our own laws, and governs our own selves . . . this is a free country, we have no laws here, and we don’t want no foreign power to tyrannize over us.” Mrs. Trollope thought the association of law with tyranny revealing, even if it came from men who had “evidently been drinking more than an usual portion of whiskey.” It suggested a bias on behalf of convenience as against custom, lawlessness transformed into freedom. And it typified the ways in which Americans drew distinctions between themselves and Europe.
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POPSInsidious Form of Thought Control a la 1984 In Near Future
. . . lines when critics of Barack Obama appeared on radio call in shows. The "authoritarian tactics being employed by the Obama campaign to stifle and intimidate its critics" were on full display. Of course, the specter of the Fairness Doctrine being passed by Congress is also another card in the deck meant to chill criticism of Barack Obama and his fellow travelers. Now comes a more insidious form of thought control a la 1984 Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law professor who has been appointed to a shadowy post that will grant him powers that are merely mind-boggling, explicitly supports using the courts to impose a "chilling effect" on speech that might hurt someone's feelings. He thinks that the bloggers have been rampaging out of control and that new laws need to be written to corral them. Advance copies of Sunstein's new book, "On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done," have gone out to reviewers ahead of its September . . .
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POPSWorld peace hitcher is murdered This is a sad story. I imagine that Giuseppina was a really nice person, someone who would be a really good friend. But I think that this is a cautionary tale for travelers. Be open to new experiences, to new people, but be wise and use caution because as Giuseppina's sister said, "not everyone deserves trust."
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