Newshoggers Archive: A Video Message from Aung San Suu Kyi

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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Monday, November 29, 2010

A Video Message from Aung San Suu Kyi

By John Ballard

FP Exclusive, with transcript at the link.

This timely message speaks as much to the Wikileaks turmoil as to what happens in Burma. Listen between the lines.

When I came out of detention, on the 13th of this month, I suddenly found myself in a new world, as it were. The people who came to support me, to offer me their greetings and their continued belief in our cause, were much younger than the ones with whom I had worked many years ago. A whole new generation -- or perhaps I should say, several new generations -- had joined us, and so it is a younger world. At the same time, it is a startling, stranger world because all these young people were so much more familiar with the new IT revolution than I am. And that really made me happy; it encouraged me, it invigorated me, because IT technology means simply better communications; better communications between different peoples, between different generations.

It takes very little imagination to connect the Wikileaks document dump with the next generation's preoccupation with video games.

John Brown has been doing this kind of stuff for years