I thought I’d seen everything on Boing! Boing!’s discussion forums until I read this thread. Nielsen herself shows up halfway through the conversation and replies to a number of posters, including to a user nicknamed Coldspell who apparently posted that Democrats and Republicans are equally inane. Nielsen writes,

Coldspell @25, I just lost my patience with unthinking assertions of parity. I’ve been running a center-by-center-left sometimes-political weblog for seven years now, and what you’re saying simply isn’t true. I don’t think a day has gone by here at Boing Boing for weeks now when I haven’t seen one or two dozen lazy assertions that things are the same on both sides.

They aren’t.

Did you catch Antinous, some while back, explaining that we’re not enforcing a party line at Boing Boing, and it’s not our fault that worst of the fuggheads almost all come from the same end of the political spectrum? The far right has been cultivating the dumb-and-resentful segments of the population for many years now. I honestly feel sorry for the intelligent, thoughtful conservatives whose political neighborhoods have filled up with yahoos.

Interesting. I wanted to see exactly what Coldspell had written that touched off such a nerve, but I think you can guess what’s coming next . . .

#25 posted by coldspell , October 9, 2008 4:51 PM

T b fr, n cld *sly* crt smlr vd tsd n bm rlly:

“Grg Bsh *prsnlly* crshd *bth* rplns nt th Wrld Trd Cntr! Bt nly ftr rlsng mnd-cntrl chmtrls nd rgn-hrnssng stllts vr NYC!”

Slctv dtng s th prpgndst’s frnd.

That’s right, the post was interesting enough for Nielsen to write a 137-word reply to it, but apparently enough of a threat to the tenor of discourse at Boing! Boing! to warrant being disemvoweled!

And, to go to the heart of Nielsen’s claim in her post, it is easy to live in an echo chamber when you can deface the words of someone you disagree with while then posting your own, unadulterated to said defaced post for all to see.

Nielsen’s the Dave Winer of forum moderation — forever seeing bad acts and malicious intent in anything that deviates from her point of view (and quickly disemvoweling such threats).

Finally, Nielsen and others keep claiming that Boing! Boing! is not biased in its posts for or against Democrats or Republicans. As she puts it, it just happens to be the truth that Republicans are the party of “fuggheads.” However, it is interesting that in September Boing! Boing! featured posts about Cintra Wilson twice, but couldn’t once be bothered to mention Wilson’s bizarre rant in Salon about Sarah Palin.

Again, if all you ever feature are Republican idiots, of course you are going to conclude that it is simply the case that the only idiots are Republicans. It is called selection bias.

This is a post from Brian.Carnell.Com.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden Demonstrates How *Not* To Moderate an Internet Forum

Pope Benedict XVI today said that the global credit crisis shows that the world’s financial systems are “built on sand” and that only the works of God have “solid reality”.

Opening a Synod of Bishops in the Vatican the Pope referred to a passage from St Matthew’s Gospel on false prophets, saying ”He who builds only on visible and tangible things like success, career and money builds the house of his life on sand”.

He added: ”We are now seeing, in the collapse of major banks, that money vanishes, it is nothing. All these things that appear to be real are in fact secondary. Only God’s words are a solid reality”

Hmm . . .  so the problem with world financial markets is that, rather than being grounded in reality, traders just took things on faith?

Yeah, I agree that is a major problem in the world today.

This is a post from Brian.Carnell.Com.

The Pope on the Global Financial Crisis

. . . but take a closer look,

No your eyes do not deceive you — that’s a turkey in a Medieval village!

Are the locals going to use the turkey to feed the Medieval dinosaurs? Is Lego now bringing in Michael Crichton to provide ideas?

Oy.

This is a post from Brian.Carnell.Com.

My Wife’s about to Go Medieval on Lego

Anyway, I got the thing home and hooked it up to a Linksys Wireless N Gaming adapter so I could connect it in with my wireless network.

Setting up the streaming was interesting. I tried to set up the Media Center sharing option with Windows Media on my server, but never could get that to work. The server could see the Xbox but not vice versa.

Fortunately, I was able to navigate to the share directly within the Xbox’s external drive selection menus and everything worked perfectly. Nice. I love it when a plan comes together.

This is a post from Brian.Carnell.Com.

Xbox360 Video Streaming

This is a post from Brian.Carnell.Com.

Xavin’s Review Ratings Plugin for WordPress

Anyway, so you can create an account for XBOX Live, and it keeps tracks of what you’re doing on the XBOX, game achievements, etc. Accept there’s no fricking RSS feeds for any of it. WTF?

Fortunately, InternetDuctTape.Com created a Yahoo! Pipe that scrapes your XBOX Live account and then RSS-ifies it. Just visit the Pipe, put in your Gamertag and then Run the pipe. Then select the “Get as RSS” option from the “More Options” drop down to get the RSS version.

This is a post from Brian.Carnell.Com.

XBOX Gamertag RSS Feed

Just like ComplexLife, after installing SweetCron you start giving it feeds of sites you post/contribute/update to, and then it regularly goes out and pulls down the feeds and aggregates them in a central area. Unlike ComplexLife, however, SweetCron writes each item to a database where you can edit and tag it. It also displays the entire text of the item and any graphics, whereas ComplexLife just provides the subject line and then a link to the item in question.

Overall, I was very impressed with SweetCron — check out my SweetCron lifestream if you’re curious what it looks like. Still in beta, but very stable and capable.

This is a post from Brian.Carnell.Com.

SweetCron - Standalone Lifestream Aggregator

This is a post from Brian.Carnell.Com.

Twittering Again (Publicly This Time)

This is a post from Brian.Carnell.Com.

Approved by the Comics Code Authority T-Shirt

This is a post from Brian.Carnell.Com.

Diamond Select Tribble