Why your Movable Type blog must die

Why your Movable Type blog must die
By James A C Joyce in Internet
Tue Feb 03, 2004 at 02:22:25 AM EST

In the past, blogging was an interesting pastime. Now, with the advent of the ridiculously popular weblog packages, the Web is in risk of drowning under a tidal wave of morons who throttle search engines with writing that has no purpose and such PageRank-destroying features as "TrackBack".

You are all pretentious twats

Every last one of you. You're all latte-sipping, iMac-using, suburban-living tertiary-industry-working WASPs or cartoonists who offer absolutely no new insights on anything whatsoever apart from maybe one specialist field if we're lucky. Most of you think that you're writing original content and that you're making a contribution by licensing your spewings under Creative Commons "Some Rights Reserved" licences, just because it's the hip thing to do. You think you know all there is to say about blogging because you understand the concept of HTML and CSS, but the horrible truth is that 40% of you are all using the same shitty default layout. Then you take pictures of yourselves looking pensive or making vague allusions to mythology.

You make up irritating jargon for the sake of it

The word 'weblog' is acceptable. 'Blog' is just about tolerable. The following are simply galling:

• Blogosphere
• Travelblog
• Blogroll
• Moblog
• Blogstream

The puns just make them worse.

You are fucking stupid

The idiocy of bloggers is most evident when they become emotional about a topic. When this occurs, they tend to make all kinds of massive, grating rhetorical faux pas such as false analogies. For instance, one fatuous journaller made the following claim after being crapflooded and having lots of search requests made on her blog:

Even the most asinine of hackers would not be in the least bit surprised to find themselves pressed with charges were they to enter a cement-and-mortar library and begin wantonly destroying books, ripping out their pages, defacing their covers, rendering them unusable by anyone else. Yet that is precisely what they are doing when they attack weblogs and sites containing original, creative content.

Congratulations, you dumb bint. You've just equated the useless babblings of millions of ostentatious retards around the world to a valuable free source of information available to all. Crapflooding is nothing like ripping up most of the books in a library. It's more likely scribbling on several thousands of pieces of paper and then stuffing them all into the "Comments and Suggestions" box hung up on the wall. This will hardly interfere at all with the experience of other library (blog) users. So shut the fuck up before you make a fool of yourself again by making nonsensical comparisons.

You are all sheep

Whenever you discuss a subject about which you all fake your knowledge, such as "metablogging", the lot of you tend to throw out random and completely false opinions and then temperately argue each other down to a single, unified viewpoint. Which is completely wrong.

Your blog is fucking up Google

This is what makes your blogs worse than useless. Previously, they were merely bundles of listless rambling scattered around the Web. Now their effects are positively toxic, choking search engines as they grow continuously and invasively.

If you try to search Google on any kind of nonmainstream topic which has been discussed amongst yourselves, it's entirely possible that all of the top search results are from a few well-connected bloggers who have blabbed about a subject and then been TrackBacked over and over again by hundreds of other people. TrackBack and "other related blog entries" are hypertextual viruses for fucking up Google, I swear. PageRank was not designed for this sort of linking where each in a series of a thousand pages links to all of the other 999 pages.

Full Article:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/2/171117/8823

Cambodian Election...

With special thanks to Hanky

Steve Goodman – attention whore

Follow Up plug for Steve - new links to his websites on the right ---->>

But really it is just an excuse to post the funny picture...

(yes, I am that shallow)

Original Khmer Rouge Trial 1978

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia -- Shortly after Vietnamese tanks rumbled across Cambodia's border in late 1978 the Khmer Rouge elite fled the capital and a new regime first attempted what the United Nations is poised to try again more than a quarter of a century later -- account for the grisly deaths of up to two million people.

Pol Pot and perhaps his closest friend from their university days in France, Ieng Sary, were long ago sentenced to death in absentia for genocide, in a trial widely regarded as a legal farce. It was so badly handled and wrapped-up in Cold War politics that it escaped the attention of the outside world and for only a handful of people it remains a distant and inconvenient memory.

In the wake of the Vietnam War, the West and Washington in particular preferred to recognize Pol Pot as head of state, and despite the atrocities committed by the hard line cadre that surrounded Brother Number One, Hanoi's occupation of Cambodia was deemed illegal and their Soviet-backed effort to deliver justice for the dead was damned as a rigged show trial.

Twenty-seven years later, however, that two-day tribunal is on the verge of re-emerging onto the final stage of the Khmer Rouge era with legal ramifications that prosecutors would like the defense to forget, but with evidence so compelling and gut-wrenching that lawyers and the West can no longer ignore it.

The original trial began on Aug.15, 1979, with testimonies from 54 people.

Hundreds in the audience wept openly as Sim Phia told the court: "Hidden from behind a coconut tree, I saw the soldiers take nine children from 10 to 13 years of age out of trucks.

"The children's arms were tied. The soldiers pulled them up to the bridge over the pool. No matter how much they cried or shouted for help, they were thrown in as prey for the crocodiles."

Vang Pheap, a guard at the notorious S-21 torture and execution camp delivered unfettered insights into how 16,000 people would meet their ultimate fate. Pits were dug ahead of time and the prisoners were struck with an iron bar: "After that, Pol Pot's men cut the victims' throats or ripped their bellies to pluck the liver."

Denise Alfonso, a former secretary at the French embassy, witnessed cannibalism.

"The condemned man was tied to a tree, his chest bare and a blindfold over his eyes. Ta Sok the executioner, using a large knife, made a long cut in the stomach of the poor man."

Ms Alfonoso then testified the man screamed like a wild beast: "His insides were all laid bare, and Ta Sok cut out the liver and cooked it on a little stove. . . . They divided the liver among them and ate it hungrily."

Mass killings were well documented and Bun Sath, a political officer, told the court of the steady precision required to carry out the leadership's commands. Evenings were preferred because the streets were deserted. The prisoners were bound in pairs and bashed on the napes of their necks.

Up to 300 were killed in a session: "We began at 6pm and continued until 9pm or 10pm," the court heard.

Evidence of genocide committed against ethnic Muslim Chams, Vietnamese, Chinese and intellectuals was overwhelming, and on Aug. 19 Pol Pot and Ieng Sary were sentenced to death in absentia while they were holed-up in the jungles of the remote countryside.

While the testimony was honest, the tribunal was not.

Hope Stevens, an African American, landed the job of defending Pol Pot and Ieng Sarry. Because of her own background, she described herself as an expert on "genocide, murder, rape, torture, mutilation, lynching and deprivation of human rights."

She then labeled her own clients as "criminally insane monsters."

Few would take the verdict seriously, including the Khmer Rouge, which would continue to wage its wars for another two decades. But that changed in 1996 when serious efforts were finally made to end the conflict and Ieng Sary, along with the troops he personally commanded, defected.

His defection was assured only after negotiating a pardon of the verdict from then-king Norodom Sihanouk. Thus from a legal standpoint the 1979 tribunal was legitimized, posing serious questions for the current trial, which is expected to get underway in earnest by early next year, and whether or not Ieng Sary can be tried for genocide.

In his own mind, Ieng Sary believed he had immunity from any future prosecution. However, advisors to the trial will argue that while a royal pardon may exempt Ieng Sary from being put in the dock again on charges of genocide, the ageing former foreign minister and Khmer Rouge power broker could still be charged with murder or crimes against humanity.

Pol Pot, like many others in his circle who may have faced justice, has since died. Of those who remain, Ieng Sary's wife Ieng Tirith, Brother Number Two Nuon Chea and former prime minister Khieu Samphan are chief candidates for prosecution at the tribunal.

If justice is to be delivered, a fair trial of Ieng Sary is crucial, but this will only become possible once the legalities of the long forgotten 1979 tribunal have been dealt with.

And this time around it will be those same original detractors -- the United States, Australia, France and Japan -- who as chief backers of the current tribunal will be forced to pay attention.

Luke Hunt is a Hong Kong-based journalist who has covered Cambodia for many years. He was the Phnom Penh bureau chief for Agence France-Presse from 2001 to 2004

Cambodia passes adultery law

PHNOM PENH (Reuters) - Cambodia's parliament passed a law Friday which could send adulterers to jail for up to a year.

The vote prompted a walkout by opposition lawmakers who said the law carried echoes of the Khmer Rouge and the Taliban in a country which should be tackling poverty and corruption instead of legislating about morality.

But the government argued the law would help reduce pervasive corruption by removing the temptation for officials to steal from state coffers to maintain mistresses as well as halting what it called a decline in morality.

"This law is also aimed at reducing corruption, because when government officials have more women, they seek more financial sources to support their girls," National Assembly Chairman Heng Samrin said.

Sam Rainsy, chief of his eponymous opposition party, was not impressed.

"The government wants to distract the public from the important issues of poverty and the culture of impunity," he said of a country where 35 percent of the 14 million population live on less than $1 a day and the powerful rarely face justice.

Many married Cambodian men keep mistresses if they can afford them and the government argued that making adultery a criminal offence would help shore up the family.

Some wives resent the unfaithfulness of their husbands to the point of violence.

In the last 7 years, at least 108 cases were reported of women being attacked by acid, some left horrendously scarred, usually by an outraged wife, the Licadho human rights group says

Few such cases made it to court, most being settled by compensation.

The opposition argued that a law on adultery smacked too much of rigidly authoritarian regimes like the Khmer Rouge and the Taliban for a country still recovering from the Pol Pot years in which 1.7 million people were killed or died of overwork and starvation.

"There are only a couple of countries in the world which prosecuted personal immorality based on their sacred texts such as the ousted Taliban regime," opposition MP Eng Chhay Eang said in the debate.

"They forced people to follow their tradition which cannot be accepted. So did Pol Pot's regime. They murdered people who had love affairs," he added.

© Reuters 2006. All Rights Reserved.

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