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.


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Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Have A Happy Retirement, Hilzoy

By Steve Hynd


Hilzoy, one of the best bloggers in Blogtopia (ysydctp), is hanging up her keyboard. She will be sorely missed but I respect her reasons even as I disagree.



The main reason I started blogging, besides the fact that I thought it would be fun, was that starting sometime in 2002, I thought that my country had gone insane. It wasn't just the insane policies, although that was part of it. It was the sheer level of invective: the way that people who held what seemed to me to be perfectly reasonable views, e.g. that invading Iraq might not be such a smart move, were routinely being described as al Qaeda sympathizers who hated America and all it stood for and wanted us all to die. 

 

...That said, it seems to me that the madness is over. There are lots of people I disagree with, and lots of things I really care about, and even some people who seem to me to have misplaced their sanity, but the country as a whole does not seem to me to be crazy any more.

I don't think that last bit is true. There's the lack of progressive engagement in Obama's foolish doubling down in Afghanistan just for starters. The tone of American foreign policy is still that of an interventionist bully carrying a big stick, he just mouths off more about how it's all for the brown people's own good. Then there's the inability to say torturing is criminal, the Goldman Sachs behind the economic curtain, the lobbyists behind the healthcare curtain and the continued descent into madness of the hating far right. The nation hasn't gotten saner - the type of crazy has just changed.


Then again:



Also, it has been nearly five years since I started. And so it seems to me that it's time for me to turn back into a pumpkin and twelve white mice.


Is perfectly valid. It seems to me that most bloggers who stop do so because the internal pressure to produce posts day after day finally stops being fun.


I'm sure all my Newshoggers colleagues will join me in wishing Hilzoy success and joy in whatever she does next.


Update: And in other blog-news, our good pal Cheryl Rofer has moved from WhirledView to phronesisiacal. We wish her the very best of fortune in her new digs.



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