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We missed this on Monday, but it’s just too good to ignore: Up-and-coming blogger “Libertarian Girl,” it turns out, is a Russian mail-order bride. Well, kinda. A commenter at the blog Catallarchy noticed that the picture on the Libertarian Girl site matched one on a mail order bride site — in short, s/he was a fraud. That prompted the faux-girl to come clean and rechristen himself “Libertarian Loser Guy.” In his post admitting to the hoax, he writes:
One thing I learned from this blog is how easy attractive woman have it. When I had a blog as my real self, no one linked to me, no one left any comments, it was as if the blog existed in a vacuum. But things were different for Libertarian Girl. Every day I’d check Technorati and discover new unsolicited links. It was like I had warped into an alternate universe where all the rules had changed.
Seems Libertarian Loser Guy discovered something that Nick Denton knows all too well.
In other news, conservatives are looking for the “Jeff Gannon” of the left, and they think they’ve found him in Russell Mokhiber, the liberal publisher of the obscure newsletter “Corporate Crime Reporter,” who recently asked a question at a White House press conference about Israel’s 1967 attack on the USS Liberty. “Maybe we should ask Media Matters if they’re going to protest Mokhiber’s appearances at press conferences,” writes “Lonewacko,” with the slightest hint of sarcasm.
Bloggers all over the ‘sphere are sounding the same notes — conservatives want Mokhiber’s head, while liberals say he’s no Gannon — but Max Sawicky, looking for some perspective, makes perhaps the most interesting point:
[I]t is interesting that brouhahas now seem to summon up their adversarial, political twin. When somebody on one side is attacked, his or her sympathizers find or invent some mirror-image target on the other. This process is abetted by the inanity of much of what passes for political commentary on the Internet.
Holla.
Fred Clark at Slacktavist believes America needs to promote democracy, but that “the point of the sword and the barrel of the gun are not the most auspicious or appropriate tools for promoting the spread of democracy, freedom and human rights.” So he suggests we create “a little piece of America” directly adjacent to a country with radically different values. Also worth checking out: Clark’s continuing series on the Left Behind books, which gives “an evangelical Christian’s explanation of the appalling theology and ethics the Left Behind series presents as Christian,” in the words of Obsidian Wings. (A sample: “Tens of millions of copies of the Left Behind books have been sold. That doesn’t just mean that tens of millions of our fellow citizens have horrible taste in literature. It also means they are being taught to oppose — to condemn as immoral and ungodly — any effort that goes under the name ‘peacemaking.'”)
Finally, as you may have noticed, this blog report featured some of the slightly lesser-known names in the blogosphere. Part of the reason for that is an email we received from web pioneer Rebecca Blood, politely castigating us for our reliance on a dozen or so popular blogs:
When CJR Daily does a “Blog Report” you link over and over to only a few sites, as if they were representative of the entire weblog universe. Since many of the political sites have devolved to little more than a text version of talk radio, I have to question your judgment. By amplifying the voices of only a few ideologues, you are doing the rest of the blogosphere — and your readers — a disservice. The thoughtful voices are there, but — probably because they are not so rabid — they are less popular than the usual 10 or so that appear over and over again in the media. To find them would require more than just skimming through a familiar set of links. I’ve seen you take down traditional media over and over again for this very thing: I think you usually call it “lazy reporting.”
It’s a fair point. Unfortunately, it can be tough to uncover the most thoughtful posts, coming as they often do from obscure sources. (Even those who see the blogosphere as a meritocracy must acknowledge that the cream doesn’t always rise to the top.) So we’re asking for your help. If you’re a blogger and have a post that you think deserves a wider audience, please let us know. With your help — and a little more diligence on our part — we’ll try to bring more diverse and thoughtful voices to our readers.
–Brian Montopoli
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