Some People Want The Moon On A Stick

NL-based Pyjamas Media “liberal conservative’ (no, I don’t get it either) member blog The Van Der Galien Gazette has the blegging bowl out:

…we want to make this blog one of the major players in the blogosphere. We wish to – as always – offer comments and analyses to and of news, but we also want to offer original reporting. We want to make the blog more accessible and we want to offer you higher quality posts and articles. We also want this blog – which we believe has a lot of potential – to grow significantly in the coming months. We want to become something that doesn’t, in our opinion, exist today: we want to become the center / right-of-center website on the Net: a place where moderate liberals, centrists and conservatives feel at home.

Here comes the hit…. wait for it….

If you want this blog to grow, if you want it to become bigger and especially better, if you enjoy all the work we put into it, please consider helping us collect the money to improve this website.

Pyjamas Media. There’s their first mistake right there.

Anyway, what does it actually cost to host a WordPress blog? Not a lot. So how much do they need? They don’t say: there is no maximum. It’s open-ended. I wonder, what do they actually need this open-ended amount of money for?

But I suppose when you’ve got an editor-in-chief and founder, an assistant editor and administrator, an assistant editor and contributing authors, columnists and resident experts to support, you’ve got to get out the blegging bowl now and then, especially when you have big ambitions and you’re ranked a respectable but by no means hugely popular 10,736 at Technorati and the ad revenue from Pyjamas Media is what? Miniscule? Negligible? Are they even making any money?

If people like your ideas and writing, they’ll beat a path to your door and even then you’ll be lucky to get a voluntary contribution. If they don’t they won’t, and you can beg for contributions till the cows come home. Even the newspapers don’t make money from online content. Anyone hoping to build a online politics media empire from contributions or even ad revenue is deluded, unless they are very, very determined and have a unique yet populist idea and good backers from the outset. I don’t see that here.

But keep on feeding this kind of twaddle about Amsterdam to the wingnuts and he’ll soon get the hitcount up, at least:

To My Government: Please Round Up the Moroccan-Dutch “Youths” Terrorizing Amsterdam

This is just the kind of hysteria the wingers love to hear about Europe; it feeds right into their fantasies of ilsamofascists coming to kill us all in our beds and into the narrative of weak Euroweenies giving into terrorism while America holds the line against the rampaging Moslem hordes.

Actually two police officers were stabbed when a mentally ill Dutch-Moroccan man with ties to the Hofstad group invaded a police station: he was shot dead by a policewoman. The facts are undeniable. But Amsterdam terrorised? Oh, please.

There has been rioting by local Moroccan-Dutch youths, but it’s localised to Slotervaart and nothing like on the scale of the riots in the banlieues. To read that post you’d think the city were on fire and that Moslems and non-Moslems at each others’ throats, rather than just a bunch of disaffected minority youth in a deprived neighbourhood being deliberately wound up by a few ideologically-motivated rabble rousers. Nope, it’s all “Aiiee, run! Islamofascists!”

But the post fits right in with the usual tenor of Pyjamas Media‘s European contributions, most of which seem to consist of stories about how those dreadful multicultural socialist lefty types do the poor hard-done-by Eurowinger down. For example:

When conservative columnist Joshua Livestro was confronted with censorship at the Dutch public broadcasting corporation, he didn’t get mad – he got even.

I see that the same carefully cultivated sense of victimisation in the US right wing is rife in Pyjamas Media contributors in the Netherlands as well:

1] Don’t let your arguments speak for themselves
2] Bully and be obnoxious and
3] Demand that your strident views on the free market and the crucial importance of Judaeo-Christian morals to humanity’s survival be heard, even if no-one actually wants to hear it.

It’s that sense of entitlement to the political space that gets on my nerves.

Most of us bloggers get it that if your ideas succeed they’ll succeed because they’re good ideas: but conservatives expect to be paid for spouting their opinion and not only that, they expect to be able to build a media empire on the back of it too. They accuse the left of expecting the world to owe us a living but they really do want the moon on a stick.