Category: Blogging

2025 Website Security Fundraiser

Blogging 25 Comments

The business model of SDA has always been “this blog runs on the volunteer effort of people who enjoy yelling at radios, but your donations are appreciated”.

That said, there are costs involved, and the most significant is the annual renewal of the security plan license.

If you’ve recently donated or contribute monthly, please ignore this – you’ve done your part.

However, if it’s been a while, we’d appreciate a bit of jingle in the tip jar to cover that expense. Any funds raised over and above that cost will be shared with the guest bloggers. Etransfer is the preferred method, but there’s a link to the Pirates of Paypal on the sidebar as well.

A huge thanks to all you glorious misfits who help make Small Dead Animals the deplorable thorn in the side of left-thinking Canadians everywhere. It’s with your help that we make the magic happen.

(Security Item Addendum: If you’ve signed up as a subscriber in order to comment, only to find your account deleted, it’s because your signup or email info are consistent with spam account activity. I suppose it’s possible that you’re a retired grain farmer from Perdue using biplie354@anon.store.ru as your email, but you’re getting nuked all the same. If I did happen to delete your account in error, send me an email).

Blog Notes (Pinned)

Blogging 106 Comments

After many years of warnings, requests and reminders, the persistence of a few readers to troll one another ad nauseam has forced my hand.

Comments have been reconfigured, and anonymous comments will no longer be published.

Sorry for the glitches. To sign up for authenticated commenting, open the comments box, and click the link where indicated:
A login page will open, then register for an account.

(This post will stay pinned for a couple of days, new content follows below.)

Blog Notes

Blogging 46 Comments

While my low intensity posting may look like post-election funk, the truth is that we’re midway through our first real vacation in 15 years.

We started with the Kentucky Derby weekend and are now in Nashville (perhaps my favourite city in America) with tours of Civil War battlefields planned for the coming week, before we hit the road for home.

Many thanks to our capable co-bloggers for holding down the fort! Be good to them.

The Year Reheated

Blogging Forward! 5 Comments

A compendium of progressive pretence and odd mental contortions:

In February, we learned, via a Canadian socialist podcaster named Nora Loreto, that habitual car theft is a “victimless” crime, a trivial thing. Even a third conviction for thieving someone else’s car should not result in incarceration or any physical impediment, because the victims of car theft – who do not exist, apparently – “get new cars though.” “I write books and I know things,” announced Nora, who lives in Quebec, where, in the last year, the rate of car theft has practically doubled.

Other topics included an educational effort in San Francisco, in which elementary school children were expected to “disrupt whiteness,” and to have – or at least regurgitate – strong opinions on the Israeli military. Needless to say, this focus on political indoctrination and imagining “a world without police, money, or landlords,” came at the expense of more mundane subjects, with English and maths scores hitting record lows, and with less than 4% of students considered numerate. All in the name of “removing barriers to learning.”

And we pondered the weirdly woke marketing of retailer John Lewis, whose customers were doubtless inspired to shop harder and more often thanks to photographs of store employees accompanied by details of their mental health problems and niche sexual leanings. Among them, Mr Marc Geoffrey Albert Whitcombe, now known as Ruby, who was thrilled by “the chance to express my true inner self,” and who was photographed in an enormous rose-adorned wig and while clutching a cat o’ nine tails. Customers intrigued by this in-store display soon discovered Mr Whitcombe’s social media presence, which consists of hundreds of selfies in which he attempts erotic poses, complete with ladies’ lingerie and while gripping sex toys in his mouth.

Oh, there’s more. Much more.

Blog Notes

Blogging 26 Comments

In the past few weeks many readers have emailed to report they were hitting “403 forbidden” pages, having comments disappear or most recently, were unable to access the site at all.

A bit of background: in September, our original hosting company was sold, and as a result, SDA was moved to a new hosting company and server. All seemed well at first, but as the reports of problems began to escalate, I ordered a site audit. That has been underway for the past couple of days and a number of issues were discovered that led us back to the hosting company and their service being inadequate and misconfigured for this type of site. Without going into the gory details (and they are gory), the issue has been found and (fingers crossed) resolved.

I apologize for the difficulties that so many of you have dealt with, and that it took so long to tease out the problem.

Blog Notes

Blogging 29 Comments

I’ve had a couple of reports that the site isn’t accessible to some people, (or accessible by cellphone data but not wifi). I have no idea what’s going on, nothing has been changed in the firewall rules but if you’re experiencing the same (and can read this through some other means), drop the details in the comments.

Econ 101

Around The Blogosphere 9 Comments

Konstantin Kisin- The Cobra Effect: Why Good Intentions Don’t Solve Problems

The Cobra Effect is based on a story which may or may not have taken place during British colonial rule in India. Despite its unconfirmed authenticity, it remains a powerful illustration of how bad incentives can undermine good intentions. In my view, it should be taught as early as possible to anyone who intends to run, manage or operate any system of almost any complexity.

The Birth Of The Blogosphere

Blogging New Right Media 1 Comment

Glenn Reynolds;

We live today in a post-blogospheric media age. The blogosphere hasn’t disappeared by any means, but it no longer plays the central role that it played from roughly 2002 to 2008. This is partly the result of natural media evolution but also the result of very deliberate action on the part of some big players in government and tech. The blogosphere’s successors, such as Facebook and Twitter, lack its independence, its decentralization, and its free-flowing nature. On the other hand—very much against the wishes of their creators—those entities have nonetheless empowered ordinary citizens to push back against government- and media-initiated disinformation (to the extent that there’s a difference anymore) in a way that remains within the finest tradition of the classical blogosphere.

I had been a regular and prominent commentator on Slate’s then-excellent discussion board, The Fray, for quite some time, and the Slate editors were quick to include InstaPundit in their “Me-Zine Central” directory, at which time I thought I had really made it. I remember by late August I was talking with a colleague about my traffic, at the time around two- to three-hundred visits per day, and we both thought that was a lot. Links from Slate, Virginia Postrel, and James Taranto’s Best of the Web feature at The Wall Street Journal boosted traffic, and by September 10, 2001, I had reached the heady heights of more than 1,500 visits per day. The next day was September 11, 2001, and everything changed.

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