a dime a dozen blog
My kid brother just called Cathy and he has had a baby girl. It only took 14 minutes too. Fantastic. I can’t wait to see her.
The year of hell is finally over. My birthday was Friday and I had a massive cold, but now everything will finally be perfect.
Oh, and bonus, her birthday will be easy to remember!
After much procrastination - I’ve finished the November listings for Canada’s Top 25 Political Blogs.
Here’s the methodology:
A common measure of a blog’s ranking is the The Truth Laid Bear ecosystem (TTLB). This measure combines a blog’s inbound links and page visits per day. Page visits are calculated by sitemeter.
It’s a good measure but you have to actively go out and list your blog there - which a lot of people don’t do. So, while it’s good, it’s incomplete.
There is a work around for this - you can use Alexa data instead of Sitemeter, and as for the TTLB links measure, you can calculate the same from a simple Google Links search (i.e. ‘links:URI’), but I prefer to use Google Page Rank for this.
Here is how page rank works:
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.
In other words, some blogs may have a lot of links, but many of those links could be from sites read by 10 people a week. Google discounts the value of those links and inflates the value of links from, say MacLean’s or Reuters, or HotAir or what have you. So Google Page Rank provides us with a qualitative measure of a blog’s influence and Alexa tells us it’s overall traffic .
There is one thing you will notice in the listings and that is the notable absence of Paul Wells, MegaPundit Kady O’Malley. Their numbers are indistinguishable from MacLeans Magazine, so I can’t get data for them. I’ll email them and just ask them what their numbers are and if I get a shout back I’ll put them back in the rankings.
Current Rank Site Google Page Rank Alexa Traffic Rank October Rank
If you know of any Canadian political blogs that you think should be in the Top 25, please let me know in the comments section.
My favourite podcast - Shire Network News - has gone off the web because of the internecine fight between Conservatives over the Vlaams Belang.
The Vlaams Belang - or VB - are the Dutch Belgian separatists with a shady past. By shady I mean this:
That’s a Belgian who became a general in the SS. The VB’s predecessors were active collaborators with the NAZIs - to an extant that even today, a central plank of the VB is amnesty for those same collaborators.
Many on the anti-Jihadist right are willing to overlook the VB’s checkered past and excuse their troubled present because of their shared opposition to the growth of Islamist enclaves in Europe.
One of these apologists is from the AtlasShrugs blog (and I do want to make it clear that in no way would I ever accuse her of being a supremacist of any type):
I find it difficult to believe, even for a moment, that Vlaams Belang and the Swedish Democrats chose to support the Brussels Counter Jihad summit and host Jews like me and Andrew Bostom (to specifically speak on the legacy of Islamic anti-semitism, no less) while really, secretly being neo Nazis. To what end? What Nazi does that?
She’s very reasonable and these are good questions to ask.
Shire Network News asked these questions to the leader of the VB. You can listen to that interview below.
The point of it is that, after listening carefully and allowing the man to speak his mind, we end up confronted with the fact that the VB leader, Dewinter is a fascist and the VB is a racist party. A quote from the VB leader:
Our own people first!! And yes, Vlaams Blok chooses a Flemish Flanders. And yes, Vlaams Blok chooses a white Europe!
Is there any ambiguity there?
Being of the right isn’t about being against everything, it’s being for liberty, democracy, and capitalism - and not one of those is compatible with racism. Each of those, most of all capitalism, are corrosive to the idea of racial supremacy and exclusion.
For God’s sake the man had the nerve to attack the exile, Ayan Hirsi Ali and the martyr, Pim Fortuyn!
He’s not on our side. Yes he’s right on one thing - but for the wrong reasons. He doesn’t help us.
You can read more about the debate here at Little Green Footballs.
During the SNN interview, the VB leader Filip Dewinter spoke about his party’s policy towards immigrants. That policy was, in essence, to launch an anti-immigrant inquisition to test them for their Belgian-ness.
That sounds a lot like a proposal from Canada’s own Parti Quebecois. For those who don’t know, the Parti Quebecois are French-speaking separatists with a checkered past:
Kind of - not really. But they are fond of flying the flag of the outlawed FLQ. It’s flown in great abundance over the separatist’s Fete Nationale parade each year. And their former leader did blame his defeat on Jews and the ‘ethnic vote‘. So there you are.
Regardless, the Parti Quebecois, have aped the policies of the Vlaams Belang. While the PQ won’t go so far as to deport immigrants who aren’t sufficiently Quebecois, they will deny them all the rights of citizenship.
In the scramble for a purified and cleansed Quebec identity, various politicians are proposing or mulling over a shocking series of democratic limitations on anglophones or “foreign nationals,” including newcomers from the other nine provinces.
The right to run for office, vote in any election, even pick a neighbourhood to live in would be limited by a person’s French-speaking prowess, if assorted proposals of highly questionable constitutionality come to pass.
It’s a curious synergy. Belgian Nazi’s and Canadian separatists, but ethnic and racial politics always seem to end up in the same place - no matter where they start from.
Shire Newtwork News’ Canadian correspondent, Damian Penny, has a good take on this - though he hasn’t (yet) connected the VB to the PQ:
[SNN] did the right thing in calling out this neo-fascist, and that mainstream conservatives should have nothing to do with European ultra-right political movements like the VB, the Sweden Democrats, the Swiss People’s Party or the British National Party.
A commenter at LGF put it best: “Anti-Islamofascism is not anti-Muslim or anti anything but anti-fascist. An alliance with fascists who are opposed to Islamofascism is still an alliance with fascists.”
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