Alan357's BLOG

Run for your lives - SWINE FLU is here! That's the kind of headline the media has effectively been trumping over the last week or so. But behind the hysterical facade there are people actually trying to figure out how to counter the possible pandemic. And they're finding help from the unlikeliest of sources.

If you haven't heard of swine flu by now then you're either very stupid or very out of the loop. Either way, you're probably one of the lucky ones. The threat of a pandemic is very real, but as we've already seen, the amount of scaremongering and hand wringing over the virus and its spread around the world has been over-the-top and full of misinformation.

Canada.com reports that in 2005, a virtual virus tore through the WoW landscape infecting millions of players. It acted in the same way as a real-life plague would, spreading and killing as it traveled around the in-game world. An estimated 6 million of the 6 million players (at the time) were infected, with many of their......

The story was newsworthy in large part because it came just as some mainstream black groups were attempting to form a constructive alliance with it. News of the speech loosed a flash flood of reportage and commentary on the subject, and at that time we began the kind of weeks-long investigation a cover story like this one requires. At the same time, we published an article on one telling aspect of the larger story: the fact that some black leaders were offended when whites called on them to denounce racism in other black leaders while seeming to ignore offensive remarks by whites—as, for example, WoW power leveling, who had some time before made a supposedly joking reference to an African delegation as cannibals. The larger issue was that blacks feel they should be presumed to abhor anti-Semitism and other forms of racism without having to say no, and that they resent the attempt by whites to script their views, behavior or alliances.
Three weeks ago, a story we published put us......