The terrible amnesia to which humankind is prey is undoubtedly one of the principal causes of our inability to learn from history. The invasion of Occitania and particularly the massacre on 22nd July, 1209, of the 20,000 inhabitants of Béziers on the pretext that the town harboured 230 heretics whom the town council refused to hand over to the Crusaders, dramatically recalls similar events in modern times, such as the Spanish Civil War triggered in 1936 by Franco's army with the excuse of the Communist threat and the division of Spain, the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939 with the excuse of the Sudetenland, and the invasion of Poland by Hitler's German troops, in September 1939, over the question of Gdansk. More recently, we remember the wars in Vietnam (1958-1975), Afghanistan (2001), those launched in retaliation against the terrorist attacks of 11th September, and the Iraq war (2003) with the excuse of that country's supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction....
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It doesn't seem to have occured to anyone that the reason I embed links to other OAOP posts is to add value, and that I couldn't give a stuff where my blog appears in primacy tables.
Hyperlinks are the point of the internet guys.
"the refreshingly unselflinking Alex Ross"
Oh please, I'm starting a blog on rabbit breeding.
Oh please, I'm starting a blog on rabbit breeding.
Hahahahaha.
Yikes, my fellow Yanks. I've noticed that Americans in general have an amazing ability to leech every last bit of fun and interest out of things by turning them in to surrogate sporting contests, marketing opportunities or, more commonly, putting a dreary Puritanical gloss on them.
That's surely a joke, because if you took away Mr. Ross' links to his New Yorker articles, TRIN would be pretty thin gruel at times.
The Sounds & Fury ranking is a useful, but debatable, guide to the ranking of classical music blogs for those that need one.
But it may be worth considering that the apparent popularity of OAOP is due to the fact that readers actually like both the content and the embedded links, rather than being achieved by some cunning and arcane mathematical manipulation.