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, December 13, 2011

The reason for the season

By BJ Bjornson

Yeah, it�s getting close to mid-December, so the War on Christmas is now in full swing, with the first major victory for the godless coming from sunny California.

Seems that Santa Monica had a lottery to distribute a bunch of display areas in a city park, normally used for a whole bunch of nativity scenes, and thanks to either a quirk in the drawing or just some rather enthusiastic participants flooding the results, atheists would up winning the majority of the available spaces. The Christian response to this fair and unbiased selection method? It�s an assault on their freedom of speech!


"By trying to push the Nativity scene out of the park and silence us, these people are infringing on our freedom and 1st Amendment rights," said Hunter Jameson, a Nativity organizer, said in a statement.


They haven�t actually been pushed out, of course, just had their number of slots limited, and as PZ says, that will likely get reversed in the future by their organizing a swamping of the lottery with their own applications. In the meantime, they will certainly use this as an example of how persecuted their poor overwhelming majority is in the nation, without the least hint of irony.

But while PZ looks at this as an opportunity for the Christians to get used to a minority position that he hopes will come down the pipe one day in the not-too-distant future, I�d like to ask the atheists in Santa Monica to take advantage of this opportunity to do some much-needed PR work for atheism.

The article doesn�t say much about the previous year�s atheist display except for its inclusion of a Jefferson quote about religions all being founded on fables and mythologies, which is fine so far as it goes, but with the added space available, something more positive from the atheist community would seem an excellent idea.

After all, most atheists and agnostics love celebrating the Christmas season, not as a religious ritual, but as a chance to get together with family and friends, and then eat, drink and be merry. I�m betting that�s the same kind of thing most Christians actually like about the season as well, so why not put up a few displays that show what the true enjoyment of the season is all about?

And on that note, enjoy my new favourite Christmas carol from Tim Minchin.



1 comment:

  1. Too Many Christians - not enough lions. What is it about the Abrahamic religions - no matter how big of a majority they have they are constantly being persecuted.

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