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Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

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Cure Your Tunnel Vision

This is a post aimed at the IrregularTimes.com blog writers; Jim Cook, JClifford, Peregrin Wood, ect.

You all know I am a long time poster and an even longer time reader. I have nothing but respect for the news you bring and the corrections of falsehoods you can give, but what I have noticed lately is a case of Tunnel Vision. The sum of the articles I’ve been seeing have been aimed at just a few subjects such as the war in Libya, No Labels, Americans Elect, and the Military Commissions Act. Now, I won’t debate the merits of these subjects, they’re important and need to be covered by someone. But they should not be covered at the expense of so many other important stories on both a national and a local level.

An example of a neglected story would be the rise of Emergency Financial Managers. The Daily Kos covered a story involving the arrests of teen mothers and children after they conducted a sit-in in protest of Michigan’s Emergency Financial Manager closing down their highly successful school. Emergency Financial Managers have broad, unilateral powers, including the ability to dismiss elected officials, sell off public assets (like schools) to private interests and dis-incorporate entire cities. And aside from The Daily Kos, the only other person I’ve seen covering this story is Rachel Maddow.

Another example of a neglected story, one I’m really amazed you guys didn’t jump all over, is the Florida Senate Judiciary Committee approving (right along party lines of 5 – 2) SRJ 1218, a bill that actually funds Churches with state money. With such a blatant display of contempt for the First Amendment, how could IrregularTimes not pick this up and at least give it a glance?

Or, how about the story of how America has fallen so low that it is now cheaper for Ikea to build their cheap Swedish crap here in the USA than it is to build it in Sweden? That isn’t so bad, but what is bad is how Ikea is abusing it’s employees by forcing them to work overtime, ordering them to go to meetings where they’re “discouraged” from unionizing as well as other abusive policies.

And let’s not forget Texas establishing “Traditional Values Centers” because they’ve gotta protect their precious, innocent Gawd-fearing Christian students from the evil baby killing LGBT students.

And if you want to turn your gaze back to Florida, you’ll see the Governor cutting funding for the mentally disabled.

Or, if you want to pay attention to the national stage, how about the Supreme Court shielding prosecutors who convict innocent people, even if it’s proven that the prosecutor knew in advance that he was innocent, and even if that prosecutor hid or destroyed evidence of that suspect’s innocence?

As I said before, I love this website and have nothing but respect for it. But please, focus on some of these other stories that get little attention but have big consequences.

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Date: April 21, 2011

Author: Damen

Categories: Be Afraid, Blogroll, Broken Taboo, ethics, general, liberty, links, local, media, mysteries, Outrages, personal, Uncategorized

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  Jim

  in April 21st, 2011 @ 17:39

  Thanks for your honest words.

  I’ll tell you in few words why we haven’t covered all those topics — unlike DailyKos or the RachelMaddow Show, we’re not llcs with research staffs. It’s just us, and that means our ability to write on subjects is limited, especially as we’ve moved to writing more on the basis of our own research. That means yup, we’re going to miss some things.

  Do you have any ideas about how we could expand coverage within our time constraints?

  Again, thanks.

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• 

  Jim

  in April 21st, 2011 @ 20:10

  Something else occurs to me, a more structural point: I don’t watch cable or network TV, so the Rachel Maddow show isn’t something I’ve actually seen. It’s not a source for me as it is for many people on the left, and therefore I hadn’t even heard about the Florida kerfuffle, I’ll have to look into that.

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• » Writing with Specificity vs. Breadth: What’s best for Irregular Times? - Irregular Times

  in April 21st, 2011 @ 20:43

  [...] Long-time reader Damen writes a diary today in which he notes the appearance of “tunnel vision” in the subject matter of writing at Irregular Times lately: a lot of consideration of the Patriot Act, the war in Libya and Americans Elect, to the detriment of a number of other subjects of interest. [...]

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• 

  J. Clifford

  in April 21st, 2011 @ 20:47

  Peregrin asked that I pass this note along:

  “Damen, I respect your breadth of reading, and I’m glad that you’re still here, because you’re obviously reflective about what you read.

  As for me, I write somewhat often (really just three or four times a week, though yes, twice today) about the American involvement in the war in Libya. That’s because I think that it’s important when this nation is taken to war with almost no advance notice, in violation of the Constitution and the law. When an issue is important to me, I don’t like to let it drop.

  I try to keep in mind that we have many readers, some of them frequent like yourself, but some of them coming only once or twice. That’s why I write about some topics repeatedly, while mixing in other topics as well.

  Topics I’ve written about this week include: The 10 Commandments resolution introduced by Louis Gohmert, a peace march in Upstate New York, the Roy Moore for President bore, the PowerShift weekend of activism and the relationship between liberals and Barack Obama, budget cuts to WIC and spending on nuclear submarines, and the shooting of protesters in Iraq.”

  As for myself, this week, I’ve written about Libya, true, but also about multilevel marketing and a short piece noting the Gary Johnson for President campaign. As Jim has said, as we’re currently structured, we can’t possibly cover all the good stories that are out there. We don’t have interns. Maybe we should get some.

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• 

  Damen

  in April 21st, 2011 @ 21:32

  To be honest, I rarely find these things out on my own. I frequent another forum and the posters there will often pop on with some little known story from whatever corner of the map they post from. I’m not really sure how they find them, if I knew I’d be more than happy to share that knowledge.

  But what I have noticed is that I can find quite a lot of interesting stories just by looking at Yahoo News or Google News.

  For example, just by peeking at Google News and Yahoo News, I’ve found:

  Senator Ensign is announcing his resignation: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-22/nevada-senator-ensign-announces-resignation-effective-may-3-1-.html

  Police are using iPhone 4 tracking data in criminal convictions: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2383945,00.asp

  Obama has given the OK for deploying Predator Drones over Libya: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110421/ap_on_re_us/us_us_libya;_ylt=AlbX_xrV_2cgRc9wd32k36ms0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTFlb2ducHUyBHBvcwM4MARzZWMDYWNjb3JkaW9uX3BvbGl0aWNzBHNsawNvYmFtYW9rc3VzZW8-

  The unemployment rate in my home state of Oklahoma dropped in March: http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2011/04/21/business-ok-oklahoma-unemployment_8428273.html

  Also from Oklahoma, we’ve got two more nigh draconian anti-abortion bills on the books: http://www.thefrisky.com/post/246-todays-lady-news-042111/

  And Terry Jones is up to his bigoted hijinks again, this time wanting to protest in front of the largest Mosque in the USA: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/21/us-protest-mosque-idUSTRE73K8ID20110421

  Granted, these are somewhat more well-known stories. But you can do a rather generic search for, say, “child labor laws” and end up finding nuggets of information like, for example, Maine trying to loosen child labor laws, ensure that anyone under the age of 20 can be paid $5.25 an hour and 16 – 17 years olds can work longer hours than the 20 a week they’re already restricted to: http://new.bangordailynews.com/2011/03/29/politics/bill-to-loosen-child-labor-restrictions-heads-to-maine-senate/

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• Torture of U.S. Children Continues » Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

  in June 5th, 2011 @ 13:02

  [...] Cure Your Tunnel Vision Political Buttons 50 State Activism [...]

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