This probably won't satisfy anyone (except RightGirl...)
"They have a right to say anything they want and so do we. I wish she hadn't said it at CPAC, but I also think that being sent to rehab for saying 'faggot' is worse than saying 'faggot' -- and a leftist would think the opposite of course.
"My concern is that Jason the Hall Monitor and Co. on both sides are trying to clean up the blogosphere and make it into something it isn't. It isn't a newspaper or tv show. Swearing and nudity or whatever have their place (a submarine, the walls of an art gallery) but aren't appropriate everywhere (church, the super bowl half time show). Blogging is its own space where certain rules don't apply, in my opinion as one of the pioneers who doesn't like to see blogging being professionalized and sanitized.
"So Robert can say what he wants on his blog, but Coulter should have been more circumspect at CPAC. Then we say so. What I sense is something far more insidious that anything Robert or Coulter can say and that is the stuck up little twerps like Jason and Kinsella and their faux outrage over
other people's opinions and the not-far-off call for censorship."
***
Blogging is not the newspaper. It is not the radio. It is more like karaoke night. Except when I sing "You're So Vain", inevitably some doofus complains that I'm slandering Warren Beatty or something...
Too many people are trying to apply the rules of everything from parliamentary debate to "professional journalism" to Socratic dialogue, to this thing that was never designed to support any of them.
I hope I don't need to say this again (ha ha):
Your boring, made up rules don't apply to me. Your unsolicited advice is unwelcome (especially when I -- a professional who sold her first piece to a major American magazine when she was 20 -- receive admonishments about my writing style from... attorneys! Whose blogs get 1/100th of my readership!) I was here before you were and will still be here after you're gone. I've outlasted a few of you already.
Since I don't share your ambitions to be a paid blogger for the National Post/Macleans/Your Political Party Here, don't rag on me for being more outrageous, candid or just plain entertaining than you dare to be.
Flannery O'Connor used to say she didn't know what she thought until she wrote it down. Sadly, I've been wired such that I only know what I think after I fight about it. It's like "make up sex", except, well, not really at all.
I've come here pretty much every day for seven years, and said a lot of things I'm proud of and some things I regret. I bitch and moan and insult people and see how it feels and even read feedback from non-idiots. What does it say that some folks still obsess over me calling Arabs "violent retards" in a fit when a) that was years ago and b) they are, dammit?
Anyway, this business has helped clarify my thoughts about a lot of things. Now, somebody hand me that mic and crank up "The Love Theme from Poseidon Adventure"...