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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Thursday, February 24, 2011

Damn those foreign fighters

By Dave Anderson:


Most people don't like heavily armed foreigners who have at best a minimal clue of the local cultural norms and power arrangements.  This localized resentment creates accidental guerrillas and a quagmire where the foreigners won't leave until everyone who dislikes the foreigners is either dead or now likes the foreigners. 


The New York Times reports that the US military is starting to get this basic dynamic as the US is leaving a heavily fought over valley where the US presence was the impetous of the violence:



�What we figured out is that people in the Pech really aren�t anti-U.S. or anti-anything, they just want to be left alone,� said one American military official familiar with the decision. �Our presence is what�s destabilizing this area.�



 


 



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