Once again, thank you, thank you for your support this year. It means the world to me and I couldn’t be more grateful. This is a labor of love and it is certainly gratifying to know that people appreciate what we do here.
One thing we’re not is professional fact checkers. There are people with far greater resources at hand to do that. But that doesn’t mean we don’t check facts. I think one of the most important goals of political analysis has to be the ability to wade through all the spin and propaganda to get to the truth as best you can. It’s not easy. One of the things that’s changed dramatically in the past couple of decades is the way social media now bombards us with false information from every direction. On Facebook or Xitter or even any of the new ones we are getting fed certain news by an algorithm that thinks it knows what we want to see and it’s not always what we need to see. (In fact, it’s not always what we want to see either — except adorable animals.) It’s easy to get sucked into a vortex of despair or anger when this happens.
I hope that we can provide a little bit of an antidote to that here at Hullabaloo. All these years of daily blogging have honed our bullshit detectors to be pretty keen. They’re not perfect but when you work in this online world seven days a week you get good at spotting the BS and finding the news and information that at least rounds out our understanding of American politics and what’s happening in the wider world. That’s the hope anyway and we all try to get it right as much as we possibly can.
We’re going into the most important presidential campaign year of any of our lifetimes and that is not BS and it’s not hyperbole. We’ll be here, following the story as it unfolds every day of the week. And we’ll try very hard to go beyond the conventional wisdom and also sort through the chaos of social media and propaganda to synthesize what is happening and try to figure out what it all means.
If you care to help me keep the lights on here as we try to get through the year, I would be most grateful. It’s probably going to be a dark and tumultuous trip but together we’ll get there.
cheers,
digby
Happy Hollandaise, everyone!