The Decline and Fall of Blogcritics
Anyone wanting evidence that Blogcritics is still circling the drain only needs to read this posting. It's by someone from the nasty end of the religious right. If you can stomach it, read his other postings on the site; they're all pretty unpleasant stuff.
Blogcritics still advertises itself as "A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, technology, and politics".
It is patently obvious that such a statement is no longer true. Blogcritics, once a fine music and culture site, is now becoming nothing more than soapbox for crude rightwing rants, and any claims about "superior bloggers" are nonsense. Many recent postings would be embarrassing as trolls in the comments. But Eric Olsen has seen fit to recruit these blowhards as actual contributors to the site.
It's not just a one-off incident. Every week there seem to be three or four new posters, and they're nearly all from the brownshirt end of the political spectrum. Many of these postings are little more than badly-written boilerplate rants, and each new member seems to go just a little bit further than the one before, constantly ratcheting up the level of violently intolerant rhetoric.
I know the Blogosphere skews heavily to the right. Unfortunately the line between the mainstream right and what many would call the 'brownshirt right' is getting increasingly blurred. Nowadays too many rightwing bloggers are quite comfortable with the sorts of opinions that used to be unacceptable in polite company. And Blogcritics in increasingly resembing the worst of it,
Put a fork in Blogcritics. It's over. This feels as bad as the time when Compu$erve turned the RPGAMES forum into a porn site. It used to be a great site once, otherwise I wouldn't care.
Posted by TimHall at May 23, 2005 09:49 PM | TrackBackA pity; there was some decent stuff up there in the early days.
Posted by: Scott on May 24, 2005 08:50 PMSometimes I wonder if it's still possible to salvage something. I know at least one category editor is seriously pissed-off with the way things are going, but the site owner doesn't seem to recognise that there's a problem.
It's only the last few months the site has gone really badly downhill.
I looked at the site today, and it seems to be overrun by the hardcore religious right; something like a dozen new posters have popped up within a week, all posting liberals-waging-war-on-Christians or Newsweek-editors-must-be-hung-for-treason freeping.
What would need to happen for me to consider contributing again would either be for a lot of the recent arrivals to be booted, of for the politics section to be spun off into a separate site which anyone to the left of the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler can steer well clear of.
Posted by: Tim Hall on May 24, 2005 11:15 PMPlease help me understand this. I'm not saying that "the Right" doesn't go too far sometimes but I honestly can't find anything wrong with the post you linked. Please explain to me what you think is wrong with it.
Posted by: Lynn S on May 26, 2005 02:19 PMLynn, you do have a point. You probably do need to know a bit about the background of the story to understand why I found that particular posting so offensive. Read the rest of his postings, and you should see a pattern emerge, and realise just where this guy is coming from.
Judge Lefkow was subject to death threats from members of a white supremacist group after she ruled against them in a civil lawsuit. When two of her family were murdered at her home, many of these far right yahoos cheered loudly, believing one of their number had carried out the deed, even though the actual murderer turned out not to be connected with the group. It's all documented by Orcinus - http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/ - which you should read for more background for this story.
When read in conjunction with another post from the same poster, in which he approvingly quotes another unnamed right-wing blogger calling for the editors of Newsweek to be hanged, you should begin to see the pattern. I can only come away with the impression that the poster is more on the side of a bunch of neo-Nazi would-be murderers than those responsibly for upholding the law.
This sort of eliminationist rhetoric may be protected by America's first amendment, but I cannot support any private website who willingly provides a platform for this sort of speech.
Posted by: Tim Hall on May 26, 2005 06:20 PM