Newshoggers Archive: Improvements

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, October 25, 2011

Improvements

By Dave Anderson:

I went to a jock high school During my senior year, we won at least four state titles. Our crowds were boisterous, obnoxious jerks. We would identify a few players on the other team and have five hundred people mock them in unison for the entire match. Our tactics varied as we used class-based, sexuality based, misogny and slut shaming attacks on a regular basis. The only type of attack that we did not use was ethnic/racial. This was for two reasons. First, my school was ethnically and racially diverse so it was often a Domincan, a Cape Verdean, a Puerto Rican and two red-headed Irish Catholics coming up with the chants. Secondly, we knew that if we went racial, we were getting tossed from the stadium as the school and league administration had no tolerance.

Last night, I was refereeing a WPIAL soccer play-off game. The game was at a neutral site, but the white team was from three miles down the road while the blue team was thirty miles down the river. The crowd was overwhelmingly for the white team. The crowd started to get into the game and found their player to pick on. They mocked his shoes. They mocked his lack of a left foot. They mocked his unwillingness to play through contact. They mocked everything about the player.

And then I heard "Hey #77 is a faggot"...

And within fifteen seconds, the rest of the crowd turned on the idiot who had just said that and hustled him out of the stadium. And then the crowd started right back on 77's case.

Minor progress here as that crowd self-policing behavior would never have happened at my high school when I was there.