Truly Stranded

Written By: - Date published: 11:30 am, March 4th, 2011 - 21 comments
Categories: blogs, humour, Satire - Tags: , , ,

One of the names that the self-inflated blogs who consider themselves to be the “taste police“1 give us is the unimaginative juvenile name of “The Stranded”. Typically this is when they are writing a silly post trying to tell us why we should think like them2. Anyway I thought I’d give them some real bad taste to moan about in a Friday Fun post.

The gotcha blogsite has really has become the benchmark site for regarding fiction as being the new reality3. We actually try to check our facts. But there they are regarded as being an inconvenient impediment to the truth, in much the same way that Whaleoil likes to over-rule judges.

Last week a newish and probably very temporary author, The Frontrower, wrote a post that has all of the gotcha hallmarks. It is silly, pretends to display political acumen, and is wildly inaccurate. What The Frontrower said was

Quote of the week goes to Sonny Blount, Labour Party activist, oppo­nent of the reduc­tion in back office pub­lic ser­vants, tax cuts and no sup­porter of the cur­rent Gov­ern­ment. Over on the Stan­dard blog, he com­mented on a post about how the res­cue work­ers need more bureau­crats, not less — politi­cis­ing the earth­quake response.

This thread is the low­est class thing I have seen in NZ in the last 24 hours.

Short of the looters.

This might be the only time I get to say this: I agree with Sonny.

This puzzled me for a while because the “Sonny Blount”4 who comments on our site does so from a distinctly right persuasion and has never claimed to be a Labour Party activist. But one day when I was really really tired I started to think like a gotcha author. This requires a straight line logic that ignores all evidence except the desired outcome. I usually refer to this mental process as the totally obvious way of doing calculations where 1 + 1 = 11.

With the required dumbing down in place, I realized The Frontrower thought that “Sonny Blount” was the labour activist Sonny Thomas. After all they both had the same first name

Duh! Maybe WhaleOil should apoligize to both Sonny’s on behalf of The Frontrower. Ironically the previous post by this author was titled “Hungry for honesty in reporting“. Since gotcha were informed by a comment by La Grande Fromage that they’d cocked up on the 28th and didn’t even update their post, clearly they don’t practice what they preach.

1: Taste police – Kind of bitchy, vindictive, and mildly vicious like the fashion police, but with a lot more Mrs Grundy. Have a self-inflated sense of their own importance. Ineffective except when talking to adherents to their wee cult. Can be safely ignored. It isn’t hard to be one, you just have to never ever look at your own behavior. This post is written in the Cactus Kate style so you can see what I mean. I’m not that good at it *sigh*

2: I guess everyone is entitled to a unrealistic dream. Their dream appears to be that there should be complete personal freedom – provided everyone is like them. Probably explains why they seldom manage to have more than one author on a blog at a time – the cooperation is too much. I was quite surprised to see that WhaleOil had managed to get someone else writing there and that they’d managed to last more than a couple of weeks.

3: Gotcha deserves the name “The Stranded” far more than we do. It expresses their alienation from reality quite well.

4: Is this a real name or a psuedonym? I don’t know and neither do I care. I just read the comments under this handle which are sometimes interesting and sometimes not. Sometimes they have facts and links of interest, and sometimes are clearly just personal opinions.

21 comments on “Truly Stranded ”

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  1. Lanthanide 1
    4 March 2011 at 11:51 am

    Hah, I read this post and when I got to the end of it (before the footnotes) thought it seemed a little out of style for you. But it was also easy and entertaining to read, like a woman’s magazine in the way it hand-holds you along the authors train of thought, but ultimately pretty puffy. For this subject such puffery is appropriate.

    Then I read footnote #1 and it suddenly makes sense why I found it out of place.

    I can’t imagine reading what is supposed to be ‘serious’ or ‘thought-provoking’ opinion written in such a fashion. Give me r0b, MartyG or Eddie any day.

    • lprent 1.1
      4 March 2011 at 11:53 am

      😈 It was kind of amusing to write. Bloat out an entire post based on a single ‘fact’. The key phrase at the start was “self-inflated”

      But I found myself to have difficulties in the name-calling and faux outrage fronts. I’ll have to practice those a bit more…

  2. ianmac 2
    4 March 2011 at 12:43 pm

    Last election it seemed that the internet and the Blogs therein at least raised awareness and probably influenced some/many voters. Now that the Standard is well established it seems to me that it must pose a threat in the eyes of the Right. When threatened they attack. So it is a compliment in a way LPrent. Keep up the good work and have a laugh at gotcha, and Cactus, and David.

  3. TightyRighty 3
    4 March 2011 at 4:33 pm

    Between this and the so called “humour” post, its easy to see why you are described as stranded. Berefit of humour and imagination, I can only marvel at the stunningly boring greyness of your world. You should stick to being serious lprent. People will think you are less of a joke.

    • mickysavage 3.1
      4 March 2011 at 4:38 pm

      Berefit of humour and imagination, I can only marvel …

      I would not be so hard on yourself TightyRighty although with a sense of humour you might have understood …

    • lprent 3.2
      4 March 2011 at 5:17 pm

      😈
      And why should I care about your opinion on humor? I can’t recall you ever attempting it on this site yourself (except inadvertently).

      The fact of the matter is that I find the “taste police” posts to be vastly amusing (although I suspect that is not what was intended). What I find just outright hilarious is Cactus Kate (talking about us)

      I hereby move that they are booted immediately out of the NZ Bloggers Union for being cunts during earthquake week. No more linking. No more referencing. Ignore them.

      then promptly both referring to this site and linking to to a post at the first available opportunity.

      It is all self-aggrandizing bullshit anyway when you look at any real numbers.

      I can see where people enter this site from when they click on links, and I have never seen katies site ever even register. Sure we get a small number of click throughs from gotcha or kiwiblog when they rant about us but it is in the order of 10’s to 30’s on a good day.

      The whole thing is just funny as hell. But I guess that these people simply don’t get how irrelevant they are to the traffic on this site (or don’t bother reading their own exit stats).

      Almost everyone enters this site because they obviously have it bookmarked – the home page is something like 95% of all landings on this site. A very few google “The Standard”, and these days a similar number come from facebook linkages. We get more people look at the site most days after they google “milk bottle” or “minnow”, get sent to some images of them, and load the pages using those images.

      But the reason for almost all of our traffic is because readers find the material our authors write to be of interest regardless if they agree or disagree. A small fraction of readers then write comments. A large fraction of readers read those comments (the average time reading each page has been climbing steadily over the years, end especially amongst the new readers).

      A call to arms by the likes of Katie or Whale (or even DPF if he did it) is just farcical and to me is just indicative of a interesting reality break.

      BTW: And what is this “bloggers union” anyway. I can remember something called that asking for nominations for top posts last year sometime, but I’ve never seen squat about it. Getting ‘expelled’ from it seems like it would be more activity than it has displayed for quite some time.

      • Lanthanide 3.2.1
        4 March 2011 at 6:39 pm

        I just googled for “milk bottle” and although The Standard didn’t show up as a regular link, it’s the 4th entry down as “Images for milk bottle” and the very first image on the left. Of the 6 pictures shown, it’s the most elegant. Ironically enough it goes to this post: http://thestandard.org.nz/trivia-the-milk-bottle-mystery/

        • lprent 3.2.1.1
          4 March 2011 at 8:05 pm

          Sorry, that is what I forgot to put in the first part of the sentence – google images, ie images in the top left of the google page.

          Google in one mode displays the web page a image is on behind the image. This seems to be a cached page. But we can see the page hit if they say to view the page, and we see a different hit if they just pick up the image.

      • Deadly_NZ 3.2.2
        4 March 2011 at 11:12 pm

        I just had a look at the gotcha links. Is it a blog site? or is it Slaters personal narcissistic place, And whats with the photo’s of his pimply mug on every page? Told Adblock they were AD’s and thats better my eyes have stopped bleeding now, now that was scary. But the story of Mita Ririnui leaving parliament. And being a life long labour supporter of over 30 years, even I said “WHO”? I really have not heard of this guy and what has he done???? He has been there 12 years oh dear how many others are like that in the house??? It’s almost like an episode of yes minister entitled the spare ministers.

        • lprent 3.2.2.1
          4 March 2011 at 11:35 pm

          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mita_Ririnui

          He is also Ratana, and had kind words said about him by Turia when announced he was leaving. I don’t know him either, but that is hardly surprising. His constituency was Maori. I suspect he would be well known around rotorua

          It is the whale site. Gotcha was the new site where whaleoil and cactus kate were meant to harmonize with each other. It did for less than a couple of weeks. Since then it has been the whaleoil site with a few other names popping up very occasionally. And it has been slowly turning into a whaleoil shrine with very very few visible comments.

          Based on some google cache traces that have turned up when I have been looking for various things, I suspect that there are some private areas associated with whaleoil as well. This would fit with some of the periodic coordinated troll sweeps we have had in the past.

  4. jcuknz 4
    4 March 2011 at 4:44 pm

    Whatever …. I like your “1+1=11″
    Reminds me of a near forgotten intelligence test around awhile back ” Add 1 make ****” etc 🙂

  5. fizzleplug 5
    4 March 2011 at 6:18 pm

    I always assumed that The Stranded was a reference to your Labour-leaning persuasion, as Labour are well and truly stranded.

    Humour is definitely subjective (I think MartyG writes some hilarious stuff).

  7. William Joyce 7
    4 March 2011 at 11:51 pm

    In comedy the difference between comedy and tragedy is timing. The same tension is true when it comes to politics. Is it too early to discuss certain implications of tragedy?
    While the general public have the luxury to grieve, the frontline rescuers don’t and so do the back room people who have to work out “We have had an earthquake, what does that mean?”.
    So they work away in their vilified back office, calculating what ifs and consequences and then advise the ministers what the implications are.
    Stuck in the middle are the blogs and forums like The Standard. The writers also do the numbers, the policy philosophy, the consequences. But they report directly to the public sphere and not the ministers. Consequently they are one step ahead of the establishment process.
    Opening themselves up to the opportunistic criticisms of the right who would just love to garner the grief of the public in a wave of outrage at the heartless left speaking too early.

    • lprent 7.1
      5 March 2011 at 12:06 am

      The problem is that while the rescue / recovery is going on, we keep hearing of people trying to find a toilet. Historically earthquakes caused many times more deaths afterwards because of fire, poor sanitation, bad water and lack of income than from the quakes themselves. That was the tragedy in Napier in 1931.

      Should we let that happen in Christchurch because ministers can’t multitask? DPF seems to think that there is an orderly list that you go through one phase after another. Sounds like a way to kill people to me.

      Should we take cognizance of people like Cactus Kate who are so busy looking into the past and ‘caring’ about the memory of the dead that she isn’t looking at how to prevent deaths? I don’t think so.

      That idiotic approach to the results of natural disasters doesn’t help the living. Nor does deferring money decisions for sewerage system repairs until a may budget.

  8. Bunnykinz 8
    5 March 2011 at 1:30 am

    Not too sure if it makes any difference to how you interpert his comments, but “Sonny Blount” is the Earth-given name of that most famous of extra-terrestrials, Sun Ra.
    Not too sure what a ground-breaking jazz musician who now resides on Saturn would be doing commenting on NZ politics however.

  9. gnomic 9
    6 March 2011 at 12:11 am

    Erm, spelling police here . . . shurely ‘apologise’ and ‘pseudonym’. OK, we’ll call these typos in the heat of composition, but out of respect for the English language feel obliged to spellcheck.