This Is Today's Open Thread #4; The I Hate Blogs Edition

Awhile back, on July 5th specifically, you may remember that I de-linked Maddox from my list of links because he's got "a bad attitude," he insulted Oasis, and as a result he's just "not the bad-assed pirate I thought he was." Coincidentally, the very next day, Maddox went on this tirade entitled "If These Words Were People, I Would Embrace Their Genocide." Where he takes his best shot at bloggers. I'm not saying I hurt his feelings. But at the same time the evidence is irrefutable. I'll admit he makes some good points, though. For instance:

Then God forbid a blogger gets mentioned on CNN. If you thought it was impossible for a certain blogger to get more pious than he was, wait until you see the shit storm of self-righteous save-the-world bullshit after a network plug. Suddenly the boring, mild-mannered blogger you once knew will turn into Mother Theresa, and will single handedly take it upon himself to end world hunger with his stupid links to band websites and other smug blogger dipshits.

I immediately thought of Andrew Sullivan upon reading that. But otherwise, it's just a silly, if entertaining, attack on an entire medium and one shouldn't bother taking it too seriously. It's the same as making fun of comic books, or people who play video games, or anything else. It's kind of amusing, I guess, but it's still dumb too. As dumb as saying all of anything is dumb. Which is the thing about Maddox that really led me to delinking him. He says a lot of really dumb stuff, and although he says it with entertaining ATTITUDE~! It's hard sometimes to get beyond the blatant dumbness of it.

Needless to say, anyway, I'm a big fan of blogs. Even the really crappy ones. Even the ones where some narcissistic dork fills their pages with lame-assed Quizzila thingies and writes about their life in a way that you can't imagine even their closest friends would bother to keep up with it. But I choose to celebrate self-expression whatever form it takes. At the very least, these are people who have made the decision to express themselves in some way, even if they're not very good at it, rather than watch television all day. And I appreciate that and applaud it. Cause, as much as I enjoy Belushi and Animal House, fat and stupid really is no way to go through life. Besides, I think what's her face who wrote that one book put it best:

"Remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it.
"Your father's right," she said. "Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy . . . but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

Because these bloggers are working pretty hard and they really don't get much out of it. Because really, it's not that hard to not read blogs, anyway. But then, people wouldn't be so impressed with what a bad-assed pirate you are if you just let shit slide and went about your life. People have such a hard time with that: live and let live. I think it's because human beings are pretty much pack animals. And if something upsets the pack, then it's fair game. And if something upsets you, you feel like you have the right to yell and scream about it, and hanker for the horde to suppress it. I don't know, maybe I'm biting off more than I can chew there. But I think people pretty clearly do have a herd mentality. That's why shit like gays, abortion, plastic surgery, tattoos, Pamela Anderson, and drug use provoke the ire of so many.

But I'm getting off topic. The purpose of this post is to highlight a few things that I really hate about blogs at the moment. I made a list.

1. Cat-blogging.
Seriously, man, I don't give a fuck about your cat. If in real life, you started telling me about your pets, I would roll my eyes as conspicuously as possible and laugh in your face. I hate your cats. Seriously. They aren't cute.

2. Friday Random Ten Posts
I could give a fuck what you have in your Ipod right now. I mean, really, what kind of stance are you trying to pull here? Cause it really only comes off like yuppie scum a little too fond of their gadgets and bourgeois musical tastes.

3. Posts about how Democrats can better appeal to the red states.
Self-explanatory really.

4. "I just dug up the craziest fucking dipshit I could find on the opposing political team, and now let's all pat ourselves on the back for either a) not hating america or b) not being stupid."

5. Let's all speculate on what George Bush will do about X and why he'll do it posts. I really don't understand these posts. The most recent spate of them were the "who will Bush appoint to fill O'Connor's seat and what if Rehnquist retires too?" posts. Pretty obviously those posts are all completely obsolete now, and no one can even remember who was right and who wasn't. Plus it wasn't all that interesting anyway unless you're a really tedious person or you've got some conspiracy theories and you need a thin pretext to start pushing them.

But I don't really care, except to the extent that the people who routinely do that shit often have the most well-trafficked blogs, so they can get away with it I guess.

Here's a funny anecdote. I just used the Blogger spell-checker for this post, because I don't know how to spell narcisistic (???) and fucking Blogger's spell-checker does not recognize the following words: blog, blogger, blogging, de-linked, and a bunch of other crazy stuff. Is that Ironic? No, it's not, just funny.