Boycott Andrew Sullivan

Not a single link.

This is motivated by NRO linking him for his genius idea to start posting YouTube music videos from the eighties.

Well, he sure is an innovator.

He sure is.

It's not so much that I made this up -- I didn't; Bill from INDC's been posting funny, odd, or obscure videos on his site for a while -- it's just that Andrew Sullivan is pretty egregious about swiping video and the like from other people's sites without the courtesy of a hat-tip.

So, I started with the Five O'Clock Flashbacks and then, a couple of weeks later, so did Sullivan. And of course I know he reads the site; after all, he called Michael or JackM. (forget who) a "Caesarist" when the guest-poster wrote about Rumsfeld.

Video shows up on another site he reads -- like The Malcontent -- and then it's on Sullivan the next day. No hat-tip, nothing. (The Malcontent posted one of the smoking-gun swipes -- he must have gotten the video I'm thinking of from The Malcontent, because The Malcontent was just about the only guy in the universe to post it, because it wasn't very good at all. The Malcontent posts lots of funny stuff, but the thing I'm thinking of was lame. And yet this lame-ish piece of video shows up on Sullivan's site the next day. It's just wasn't the sort of "viral video" that people would be frantically emailing each other.)

So, he steals, he swipes, and does so without acknowleging with a hat-tip, which is standard in the blogosphere, even when it comes to "enemy sites."

If there's anyone shabbier in this regard, I don't know of him.

And to compound it, he then gets links off of it from heavy hitters like NRO.

It's time for everyone to simply stop linking him altogether. Quote him if you like, take big chunks of his turgid, hysterically overwrought prose to fisk, but don't link him. He not only considers himself above other bloggers, but above the common courtesies and rules of bloggers.

Well, he relies, as everyone does, partly on links to drive his traffic.

Deny him that traffic unless and until he abides by the rules that everyone else does.

The rules of linking are suspended when it comes to someone who won't link to their source themselves. No, you can't pass off his writing as your own (who would want to?), but it's enough to just say it comes from Andrew Sullivan, without providing the link.

posted by Ace at 09:04 PM

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