Entries from July 2007 ↓

On a lark one night, after reading about Chris Wage’s commitment, I signed up to attend the admittedly vague-sounding BarCamp Nashville*, even going whole-hog and signing up to speak. I’m a total follower like that. Plus, I love a good mystery, so vague is exciting for me. Double plus, I’ve spoken before at PR firms and conferences and in front of med school classrooms, so I figured I could put together something insightful that could fill twenty minutes. I’m going to talk about blogging: increasing traffic/tips on getting read, privacy issues, “How to handle trolls: Learn from my mistakes,” and some other awesome, yet to be revealed mind-blowers. All in twenty minutes. Secure your (free! woo!) drink for the ride.

I’m excited to get out and see some of my peeps from ’round the sphere-of-blogs way. The speaker list looks good, and the (barf) networking possibilities plentiful. Sign up if you haven’t yet: It’s free, you’re getting free drinks, maybe free schwag, and it’s Saturday. Not even a football season Saturday, dude.

*It has since been thoroughly explained. I think.

Blake’s take on the Nashville mayoral race coming to a head this Friday: “David Briley has probably never held a gun or a football, and he probably wants to take yours away if you have one.”

Perverting the word “activist.”

I like this tip, and should follow the advice.

Holy crap: A magazine about art blogs. How awesome is that?

So proud.

For the record, I’d rather read whatever lint Lindsay found taking up space in her brain that day than stale, bulleted meta-lists from bloggers who think they can tell others how to blog. Stories like Lindsay’s make me more and more inclined to dismiss better-than-thou meta-bloggers, who are often the driest reads on the net.

Bloggers: Do whatever floats your boat. Think new, think big, bust out of these boring boxes the so-called experts want to force you into. The floating of boats is what eventually made blogging a high-profile hobby that brings about book deals and high traffic and personal success. Want to make a splash with your blog? Listen to people like this less. (And listen to me even less than that.)

(hat tip: Kate)

This morning I was taken back to the first part of 2005 when I first started blogging at WKRN. It was then that I dared to say the following:

Why is it that when right-wing bloggers talk about Gitmo they fail to mention that there is no way to know if those being held there are guilty of anything at all? Many of these detainees have had no charges formally filed against them and even after the Supreme Court ruled that prisoners at Gitmo have the right to legal representation almost two-thirds still have none.

After making such an outlandish claim, I was then piled upon by Bill Hobbs and Lance in Iraq, who is no longer in Iraq but instead works as a Republican lackey. Those two far-right-wing bloggers went so far as to call me a propagandist who “regurgitates insurgent talking points.” [scroll all the way down] They also called for their sycophant readers to call in to the station where I worked to voice their complaint about my al-Jazeera-like website.

Why was I reminded of that painful time caused by the idiocy of a couple of neo-con warmongers? Oh, only this story from NPR confirming the sentiment I took such shit for expressing:

It was among the largest detainee transfers from Guantanamo. Over the past few years, about 420 prisoners have been released — that’s more than half the total number incarcerated at Guantanamo since the opening days of the war on terror.

Joanne Mariner, a counter-terrorism expert with Human Rights Watch, said her organization has been tracking what has happened to those detainees who have been released.

“We found that most detainees have basically returned back to obscurity. They haven’t been involved in any kind of violent acts, and they’ve essentially returned to their lives,” she said.

From the moment the detainees first started arriving at Guantanamo in January 2002, and for a few years thereafter, the Bush administration portrayed the men as ruthless killers, the worst of the worst, sentiments echoed at the time by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers.

“These are people that would gnaw through hydraulic lines in the back of a C-17 to bring it down. So these are very, very dangerous people,” Myers said.

Rumsfeld said Guantanamo contained prisoners “perfectly willing to kill themselves and kill other people.”

Critics, however, say that the release of hundreds of detainees undermines the administration’s assertion that all Guantanamo prisoners are extremely dangerous. They say it is likely there was not enough evidence to hold them in the first place.

The quality of evidence was also called into question recently by a military officer who sharply criticized the process, known as Combatant Status Review Tribunal, or CSRT, used to decide whether a detainee should be held indefinitely. Reserve Army Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham heard some of the evidence against the detainees.

“In reality, the information upon which CSRT decisions were based were vague, generalized, dated, and of little probative value,” he said.

Why do I bring this up now? Because extremely partisan bloggers like Lance Frizzell and Bill Hobbs can accuse others of hating America and aiding the enemy, only to later be proven wrong, then never see any retribution for their short-sighted and moronic overreactions. However, this blog post isn’t retribution. I am not capable of such a thing. But it is a reminder of (and to) all those so-called patriots who abused and accused so many of us who were genuinely trying to carry on a dialog about the horrors of this war and the policies of this administration. They attempted to shut down conversation about human injustices and atrocities at the hands of our great nation. I’m glad to see that they failed. And I’m glad to see that labeling people haters of the country is on the decline. But I am most glad to see that innocent detainees who were never even charged with any wrongdoing are now free to live their lives in whatever peace they might be allowed.

Yes, newspapers probably are that hard up for content.