Interesting article. The Saudi leaders are not only openly oppressing women in a way that the modern world hasn't seen in at least fifty years, but the government is also actively gagging the court of public opinion. Gotta love those Islamists; what a great group of guys.

You know, I hate to make broad generalizations, but I'd be willing to bet that monkey was asking for it. Seriously, you ever seen a monkey at the zoo that didn't strike you as at least a little annoying? And those bears were locked up with that little bastard day in and day out.

I was thinking the other day that the downfall of the blogosphere is probably going to be one of the things that has made it great in the past - its accessibility. In earlier years, not many people really 'got' this thing that would become the blogosphere. Some people were still unfamiliar with the Internet itself - let alone anything beyond AOL Instant messenger, email, or online shopping. Actually running your own website? Who knew how to do that? Didn't you need to learn one of those wacky programming languages to do that? Soon, however, the days of point and click web editors were upon us; and riding on their coat tails were open source templates.

The simple fact that I am blogging right now is testament to the argument that it's just become to damn easy for any idiot to set up a site.

But seriously, when the blogosphere was still a little inaccesible or at least too 'geeky' for most people it was at it's least polluted stage. There was discourse, courteous dialogue and the kind of reasonable debate that actually added value. These days, easily half of the comments left on political blogs (or even the blogs themselves) are simply verve. The kind of vitriol that amounts to verbal graffiti. Why have things changed? Mob mentality. There's so many people out there in today's blogosphere that it's hard to have open, polite arguments without some band of wingnuts hijacking the comment thread. I'm talking about the kinds of commenters that repeatedly attack the same blog, without ever really addressing the argument. You people fucking blow. You're like spammers; except spam's manufactured, automatic sort of uselessness is attributed to the fact that it's just a program someone is running. Wheras you guys actually choose to be one dimensional.