Not The Singularity is a group blog, a partnership between authors who will seek to bring you the best commentary they can about range of subjects – literature, music, politics, foreign affairs, art, technology news and more. We promise we won’t dumb things down, but we also promise not to write in such densely academic pseudo-prose that you cripple your thinky-thing trying to understand what we’re driving at. We’ll be informative, stay classy and more than a little snarky, and we won’t pull our punches. Our politics will lean leftward, because “from each according to their means, to each according to their needs” seems to us to be the logical next step from “for the good of the greatest number”. We promise we’ll have fun writing so you have fun reading. There, that’s the mission statement.Give them a look!
So why “Not The Singularity”? Well, for one thing we couldn’t resist the geeky pun – it is a group blog, there’s more than one of us! For a second, we’re a bit skeptical about this whole “singularity” business in any case. The idea is that technological innovation transforms the human race, but fans of the notion never seem to deal with the fact that huge chunks of humanity don’t have drinkable water, never mind somewhere to plug their smartphone in to recharge. As William Gibson says, “the future is already here but it is unevenly distributed”. In other words, the singularity is a notion from rich elites and for rich elites, a have-and-have-not society which would further polarize humanity into a relatively few technology-rich Eloi and a vast underclass of Morlocks. That’s not nice, and it isn’t progressive thinking. As progressives we’d like to help find solutions to the world’s problems that help all of humanity first and foremost, rather than pursue an elitist fantasy, a “Rapture Of The Nerds”. If we can do that while fuelling our own geeky interest in gaming or politics, so much the better.
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| Mom on her 85th Birthday |
I have a new project. In addition to my all picture site, Just Pictures, I have started a new site dedicated to preservation and restoration of old photos and documents, Preserving The Past. I will be showing some images from the past with a little history when available. In addition I will be sharing digital restoration tricks I have learned and developed.
When we started RedState in May of 2004, we used a website program called Scoop — the same program a lot of similar sites on the left used. But, as the number of visitors to our site grew, Scoop kept crashing on us.There is a little problem with this alleged cash crunch as Jane Hamsher explains:
If we’d been a liberal website, we would have been able to fix the problem quickly and relatively cheaply. The online left loves Scoop. Unfortunately, there weren’t really any conservative Scoop developers out there to help us. We kept crashing and were out of money. We had to close down or take drastic action.
Well, we didn’t close down. We ditched Scoop and moved to the best alternative at the time, a program called Drupal. But, in accomplishing the switch, budget constraints forced us to sacrifice some popular site features in order to alleviate the strain on our overused servers.
Needless to say, we always regarded those “downgrades” as temporary, and we hoped to restore the eliminated features – and to add new and even better ones – as soon as we could afford to.
Unfortunately, we still can’t afford to. But we’re convinced that America can afford even less to have us operating at anything less than our absolute peak potential during the coming presidential election season.
RedState is now owned by Eagle Publishing, the parent company of Human Events, Regnery, Evans-Novak Political Report, the Conservative Book Club and other conservative publishing enterprises.Hey, it worked for Pat Robertson and it would seem that the RedState audience isn't much smarter than Pat's.
According to Hoovers, Eagle Publishing had $8.3 million in sales in 2006.
When the sale was announced, Robert Bluey at Human Events wrote:The site’s managing editor, Erick-Woods Erickson, said the new arrangement would provide RedState with the resources it needs to continue playing a leading role in the conservative movement.
You may not agree with what someone has written, but contrary to popular belief, there hasn't been a single documented case of anyone's head exploding from reading a post he or she disagrees with.
Here's wishing the best of holidays to the MEJ crew from Chuck and the Chuck for... site. I'd especially like to thank Ron for providing another venue for me and his readers for taking time with my stuff. A special thanks to you who come over my spot.
There have not been a lot of posts the last few days and I apologize. It was my mothers 85th birthday and my sister and brother came to town to help us celebrate. Between house guests and road trips I have had little time. The last of the house guests will depart in the morning and life should return to normal. I just received my review copy of Pepe Escobar's book Red Zone Blues, a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. It's short and I hope to have a review in the next couple of days.
I am getting tired of spending 20 minutes a day deleting comment and trackback spam from Haloscan. Since Blogger has a decent comment system with verification I have decided to get rid of Haloscan. There will be no trackback but with Technorati effortless trackback it has become irrelevant anyway. Since I really have no idea what Haloscan did to my template I will be using the "nuclear option" - I will be reloading the original template. This means I will lose all of the other tweaks and modifications I have done over the last nine months so there will be several hours of rebuilding to be done. Since hardly anyone will be reading Blogs this weekend this seems like a good time to do it. As a result things may look strange for awhile.The New York Times is poised to stop charging readers for online access to its Op-Ed columnists and other content, The Post has learned.Bootleg copies of Paul Krugman and Frank Rich were usually available on the Web but it was rare for anyone to bother with Dowd, Friedman or Brooks. I imagine they were the ones that were complaining.
After much internal debate, Times executives - including publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. - made the decision to end the subscription-only TimesSelect service but have yet to make an official announcement, according to a source briefed on the matter.
[.....]
While other online publications were abandoning subscriptions, the Times took the opposite approach in 2005 and began charging for access to well-known writers, including Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich and Thomas L. Friedman.
The decision, which also walled off access to archives and other content, was controversial almost from the start, with some of the paper's own columnists complaining that it limited their Web readership.
TimesSelect belongs to a bygone era of gatekeeping that had become obsolete even before Pinch pinched off readership of his star columnists. It practically served as a monument to the Times' sclerotic management. Hiding these columnists behind the Firewall of Sanity may have served a noble purpose in elevating the debate, but irrelevance became the chief consequence of the service. Without access to the opinion columns, no one cared any longer what the Times' writers had to say.I predicted at the time that TS would simply remove the Times columnists out of the discussion - make them irrelevant. Since that time I suspect the internet has made most pundits irrelevant so it may not really matter that much. It will be nice to be able to make fun of Tom Friedman and David Brooks again however.