Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Saturday, May 31, 2008

'Roid Rage R US

By Cernig



In a Reuters item about a new documentary looking at steroid abuse in America, the film's director has this to offer:

"Everything has to be bigger and better and that is part of the American psyche," he said. "It's not steroids that are the problem, they are a side effect of being American. The idea of steroids comes out of the idea of winning."

Certainly, I've never been to a country where the pressures on schoolkids to win, rather than just enjoy the game, are higher . And I've been around a fair bit. But the comment by former bodybuilder and director Chris Bell got me thinking about the intersection between those former jocks and ROTC kids who end up as military types and the pasty geeks from neocon think tanks, who finally found a way to get in with the popular jock kids who ignored them in high school. It seems to me that the hyper-aggressive "win at all costs" ethos that encourages steroid abuse seems to be pretty well represented on the Right. "The Project For The New American 'Roid Rage".



Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)