A little late for New Year's resolutions, I know, but there was Iraq Moratorium Day #5 to get out of the way. So starting now, you may notice some changes leaking into the venerable institution that is Fire on the Mountain.
For starters, check out the contributor's column! Added to the honor roll is the excellent Modern Pitung of All Out For The Fight fame. Check out his earlier contributions here.
Another worth noting is the rearrangement of the blog links listed toward the bottom of the right hand column. The old list had sat there for a year, and will still reflect the political blogs I personally favor. Some new ones have been added but the main thing is the reclassification, arrived at in a conversation with the Bronx Bolshevik a couple days ago. From the top, you'll find Active Duty--those which most frequently post new stuff; and In There Stroking--blogs with ups and downs, but new content often enough to call for a frequent look-see; Slugs and No Vital Signs--both self-explanatory.
I hope those who wound up in the last two categories will take this as a poke of encouragement, not a sneer. I miss your stuff, folks, and hope you will keep up the good work. I know it's hard to pump out content into what too often can seem like a vacuum, I know the struggle places demands on us that must take priority over posting on a blog, I know that sometimes folks find it more productive to contribute to active threads on others' blogs, I know that some former bloggers have kinda relocated to MySpace or FaceBook. Doesn't mean I don't miss you...
And keep your eyes open. More changes are coming. (Oh, yeah. At the top, that's the Hot Club of Cowtown.)
January 19, 2008
There'll Be Some Changes Made
April 16, 2007
The Rose And The Thorns
Boy, there's an awful lot of good thoughtful people out there in the blogosphere critiquing the system of white supremacy and white privilege. A recent click-by run at the esteemed Yolanda Carrington's The Primary Contradiction steered me to a site called Double Consciousness. These folks who run it are, some time in the next couple of days, hosting something I (clueless newby that I am) learn is called a blog carnival.
The idea is that every month a new blog owner volunteers to take on the task of assembling (and curating) a set of recent posts around a particular theme or topic volunteered by the original bloggers. In the case of the Erase Racism Carnival, the posts deal exactly with white supremacy and white privilege. So once a month, around the 20th in this case, the great all-enveloping swamp of the blogosphere opens out onto a clearing, a patch of higher ground where bloggers of various nationalities, political views, class backgrounds, ages and so on have laid out their recent thinking on these crucial matters.
I like the idea, a "socialist new thing" in terms of the self-organization of the blogosphere and the archived month or two of the Erase Racism Carnival I've had a chance to peruse include some fascinating material. I kicked in a couple of recent pieces from FotM and am waiting to see if I make the cut. Will this supplant forms like the Day of Blogging Against White Supremacy kicked off earlier this year by Nelson Hawkins at Pottawatomie Creek? I don't see that it necessarily should, but time will tell in this rapidly evolving intellectual/social space...
When I went back to Double Consciousness today, they had a new post which tended, as the time-honored folk saying hath it, to harsh my mellow. It is a video, not a music video, just a little slice of everyday life in which a young Mexican sister gives us, close up and live, an unsolicited testimonial to the power of white supremacist and heteronormative hegemony in this society. I could write pages about this clip, but instead, I will just kick it to you, dear reader (with a hat tip to Carlo Montemayor at Double Consciousness).
Whew, hunh?
In a forthcoming post I hope to look at another good news/bad news scenario around white privilege, this one related to the invaluable new book, The Cost of Privilege.
