roachboy

actually fugly, i havent presented myself as anything and i dont think of myself as doing anything particular beyond researching within the limits of the wall of pseudo-information that is the press a disastrous situation. it's happening too fast for there to be many layers of publicly available information: there are reports, there's layers of commentary and there's a scattershot level of documentation. these layers operate in that order in terms of speed. in terms of reliability, it's like anything else, a function of the sources that you isolate and how you use them.

for the news stuff, it's mostly guardian, ny times, financial times, washington post.
for the commentary, the oil drum
for the documents, things are more diffuse, but the links often come from one of the previous two.

there's not a whole lot of original research. if anyone wants to pay me for my time....

anyway, if i think about the thread at this point as anything other than a thread on a messageboard, it's a space that i can use to position a bunch of information in one place and that may help me and maybe other folk figure out ways to make sense of what's happening.

but no-one's stepping outside the media bubble. it's just being organized on the fly in a more horizontal way than it sometimes is.

there is an interpretive line that i've developed anyway that i present, when i do, as an interpretive line. it's pretty accurate within the limits of available information and types of expertise. if you dont think it accurate, make a counter-argument. drive-bys aren't counter-arguments.

the main limitation in that line is the emphasis on the ways bp has set up to control information makes it difficult to treat bp as a viable information source on its own. the same has extended to noaa and the coast guard. so there's a problem in moving into and out of those more official sources. i don't know any more than what i just said about the legitimacy of the suspicion that underpins this. but in any interpretation you take your chances based on the information you have.

i dont know where you get the idea that there's any "watchdog" function happening.
to think that way for real would require being unhinged from reality, confusing posting to a messageboard with political action in meat-space.

when you're writing about political questions it seems almost inevitable that rhetoric will turn up that gives the appearance of a confusion in registers reality of messageboard/reality in meatspace. but thats usually rhetorical. when it stops being that there's meds that can help.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite