New Kid: “Is it just me, or is pundit taking on a kind of negative connotation?”

If it is, then that’s all for the best, but the people who seem to be most under the sway of the “pundit” spell (such as, for example, the “pundits” themselves) still seem to be under the impression that it’s something good to be—if perhaps the occasion for a little phoney self-effacing humor.

So, just to make sure that lines of communication remain clear, I’ll stick to calling them “know-nothing blowhards” for the time being.

I got hit with a similar flood of trackback spams earlier today. Unfortunately one of the reasons that I am still sticking with stupid old MovableType (spam control tools) didn’t come through as well with the pings as it has with past waves of comment spam. (Basically because there is no concept of “moderating” TrackBack pings in MovableType, so one of the layers of interdiction between your front page and the spammer is removed. The only filters that go through are the ones that are set up to block—e.g., known spammer URIs that have already been posted somewhere.)

Do you know what’s available for Drupal in the way of spam-quashing utilities? If this hasn’t been a matter of module development I should hope that people will get working on it soon…

“A friend of mine and I are thinking about starting up a community blog for southern Democrats, possibly called “Yellow Dawg.” It would be focused on trying to get the Solid South back — revisiting historical political trends, the FDR administration, etc. and trying to see how to reconnect Democratic party principles with the values of southerners.”

I’ll be interested to see it. But watch out about the “solid South,” rebuilding, etc. rhetoric. Until 1968 or so there was a solid Democratic South, but of course the reason it was solid was that the Southern Democratic party was unabashedly the party of militant white supremacy, and it was not until 1968ish that the combined effects of LBJ’s realignment and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party broke the back of the Klan primary vote. I’m all about the social justice tradition in the South, but the Democratic “solid South” isn’t it (not even vis-a-vis FDR and the New Deal–white Southern Democrats’ support for the New Deal was thoroughly intertwined with white supremacy, in the same way that their later support for “populists” such as Orval Faubus, Bull Connor, or George Wallace was.)

If we are going to build our presence in the South so that it’s worth anything, we won’t be rebuilding, at least as far as the Democratic Party goes. We will be making something substantively new.

The performativity of sexuality and gender in 10 words or fewer:

“Relax kid, everyone’s in drag.”

(Now the political implications thereof and critiques of some people’s understandings of those implications and so forth—there will be the tricky part. But of course you can do it. Rock on. And congrats!)