Online Blogintegrity

Here at Online Blogintegrity, we have a tendency to cut marionette capers, act the goat, and generally stumble around like silly-assed fucking fools. However, our dedication to crude, quasi-lobotomized humor in no way prevents us from appreciating more sober forms of drollery. I'm thinking, for instance, of Aziz Poonwalla's re-re-re-re-reclarification of what "online integrity" really, truly, honestly is and is not:

[T]his site is not a watchdog group, checking for compliance to the OI principles amongst the endorsers. In fact, to avoid any illusion of responsibility for how individual blogs behave, the blogroll has been disabled....[I]t will be upon their own conscience alone to adhere to them, and the responsibility of their readers alone to hold them to it.

It's just what the Internets have been waiting for! Finally, we have a firm philosophical framework that allows good people to be good, and bad people to be bad, just as their conscience dictates.

And it gets better:

An OI logo and button will soon be made available to blogs to display as they wish to indicate their endorsement of the Principles....

Soon? Who can wait that long? I've come up with an OI logo here and now, and there's no doubt in my mind that it shrieks "integrity" louder than Josh Trevino on a Yohimbine bender:


Now, in theory, it remains possible that some blogger might put an OI logo on his or her site, and still do something not at all integritudinal, like (for instance) publishing the home address of an insulting commenter. And it's also possible that instead of holding this blogger to the OI Principles, his or her readers might actually harass the commenter themselves...just as the blogger hoped or assumed they would right from the start.

Then, too, BushCo dead-enders seem to agree pretty much across the board that the Left "wants the terrorists to win"; for them, America's survival requires fighting this liberal Selbstschutz by any convenient means. It's no wonder OI has thusfar been a slapstick disaster that would make a cat laugh.

All the same, we have to give this thing a(nother) chance to work. We mustn't underestimate the power of a logo - and the ill-defined, unenforced "principles" it advertises - to keep delusional and emotionally crippled bloggers from overreacting to legitimate criticism, bad language, or unpalatable facts.

And if it doesn't work out that way this time around...well, I guess it serves us right for expecting too much.

Thers Adds

OI has an Open Thread up. I see this as a good thing, actually. I for one have never been against the general concept of a site discussing integrity, just the way it's been implemented. I've already asked over there about what the comments policy might be, and got a fairly reasonable response. So, it's a step. Be perlite please if you head over there, ye lot o' cabogues. Would it kill ya to put on a tie?