Zumbogate Wrap-Up
According to the Zumbogate timeline at Standard Mischief, I was the first blogger to cover Zumbo’s now-infamous “terrorist rifles” career-suicide note. I was not aware of that. My post was short and, in light of what was to come, very mild. But it happened to catch the eye of Tam, who proceeded to fire off a truly magnificent broadside (Note to self: try not to piss her off).
So, since my obscure little outpost on Algore’s Internets played a part in The Great Internet Gunblogger Shitstorm of ‘07, and since we now have a few days’ distance from those events, and since there ain’t much else to do on a Sunday night, I’ll offer some thoughts on the whole thing…
Jim Zumbo is certainly not the first gunwriter to step on his dick in front of a national audience. As Tam pointed out in her An Army of Davids, illustrated post, back in the Good Old Days, if a magazine writer blew it, he was pretty well sheltered by the one-way nature of the medium. “Never argue with people who buy ink by the gallon,” as Tommy LaSorda once said. And that cover got abused; back when Smith & Wesson signed The Agreement, more than one national gunrag ran condescending, insulting “shame on you” editorials chastising those of us who boycotted S&W. That kind of stunt wouldn’t fly today; the balance of power within the community has shifted rather dramatically. And as Zumbo learned the hard way, when you’re blogging out on the Untamed Intarwebs and you say something really dumb and offensive, thousands of people can call you out on it, tout de suite.
That’s an important lesson to learn, but it’s mostly aimed at The Sporting Press; bloggers already knew it. The bigger lesson, for everyone involved in the shooting community, is that the “black rifle” crowd is fed up with being seen as a sacrificial lamb and now has the might to make itself heard. I’m not going to say more on that point, as it’s been covered well, and at length, just about everywhere else.
I do have something to say about this “Fudd” bullshit, though: knock it off. It’s stupid and divisive and doesn’t help anyone except the antis. Look, the hardcore antis (the Brady Bunch, VPC, etc.) are set in their ways. We’re NEVER going to win them over by discussion and persuasion; call them whatever names you want. But a lot of hunters who CAN be won over are instead being alienated and driven away by this name-calling and stereotyping, so give it a rest. What we SHOULD be doing is exactly what Sebastian did in his outstanding post When Hunters Attack. That is, we should show them that we ARE on the same side, with the same interests, and with a common enemy. Win ‘em over, don’t drive ‘em away!
By the same token, we don’t need a witch hunt to bawl out every writer who ever turned up his nose at an AK or AR. What happened last week was huge; I’m sure that every gun/sporting/outdoors writer has gotten the message. Let’s move forward.
Oh, and Zumbo did teach us one other lesson: don’t blog drunk (… said the guy nursing his fifth White Russian).
You seem to be first, and I’ve read a lot of post lately over the Zumbo thingy. There also is a clear linky chain from Instapundit >> Tam’s >> You. I’ve been trying to use other tools, unfortunately, Technorati seems to get stupid if you search back beyond a week or so. Google Blogs is not all inclusive enough either.
Making the timeline was interesting exercise in sorting information. I wanted to work in my language-as-a-virus phrase “sport of kings” (which Kevin Baker seems to have picked up subconsciously) and whomever coined “eat their own” but finally decided it was not significant.
Sadly, searching through Technorati clearly shows that the Zumbo bubble hasn’t burst yet.
Comment by Standard Mischief — February 26, 2007 @ 9:06 am
your comment counter seems broken. I think you need to upgrade to spam karma 2.2
saysuncle.com/archives/2007/02/20/test_post/
standardmischief.com/2007/01/22/wordpress-no-comments-problem-resolved-spam-karma-2/
Comment by Standard Mischief — February 26, 2007 @ 9:15 am
Agreed, “Fudd” needs to go.
Comment by Rustmeister — February 26, 2007 @ 10:05 am
Disagreed. I’ll lighten up on the name calling when they stop trying to sell us out.
Comment by pdb — February 26, 2007 @ 3:08 pm
I don’t actually use Spam Karma 2.2 or even have it installed; I still do comments manually. Although as comment spam is becoming a bit of a bother, I’m investigating my options. Any recommendations?
Comment by T D — February 26, 2007 @ 3:52 pm
sorry, I clearly saw my comment being displayed, yet the counter was at zero. It was a small bug when Wordpress 2.0.1 came out, if you were still using Spam Karma 2.0, well, SK2 could not deal with the new way Wordpress handled comments.
I lived with the comment problem for forever, and finally did a google quest to figure it all out. I learned two things, 1)the search over at WordPress.org sucks, and 2) there was an upgrade for SK2.0 .
Anyway, I upgraded to SK2.2, kept whatever defaults were set, and have only had to manual kill 2 or 3 comments in a few months. I’m assuming those few were hand inserted.
You get an email every day with any comments that were close, but still got marked as spam. Works great. Zero false positves in the last 2 months.
Also, there’s a XSS vrunability, You should be at either 2.0.9 like my Wordpress bolg is or the new 2.1.1
Comment by Standard Mischief — February 26, 2007 @ 8:24 pm
Yeah, I’m on the verge of updating to the 2.1 branch; I held off because (A) I wanted to wait for the first bug-fix release and (B) I wanted to give the plug-in coders some time to get their stuff working with 2.1.
I’ll probably migrate sometime in the next few days.
Thanks for the advice re: SK!
Comment by T D — February 26, 2007 @ 9:45 pm
Hey I did sport-of-kings too, the eat-their-own is way-good, don’t give up!
Comment by DirtCrashr — February 28, 2007 @ 12:17 pm
Yea I know. Technorati makes some really neat tools. I didn’t coin “eat there own”, but I seem to be first with “sport-of-kings”
Whether or not my language was a virus or we all came up with it independently I’ll never know, but tracking that stuff is more fun than using grep on your access log or being an obsessive-compulsive sitemeter junkie.
I think I counted 20 bloggers alone who quoted Tam’s “wordprocesser” sentence (so I had to jump on the bandwagon too)
Comment by Standard Mischief — February 28, 2007 @ 8:23 pm