Word: championing
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With his first official visit to China scheduled for this week, U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has been at pains to ease frictions between the world's two largest trading partners. Despite its ballooning trade deficit with China and the loss of American manufacturing jobs, the U.S. remains a champion of open markets, Paulson said in a speech last Wednesday, noting: "Protectionist policies do not work and the collateral damage from these policies is high. We will not heed the siren songs of protectionism and isolationism...
...know, I know, I should toughen up. Blogging is a knockabout sport, and as a writer I'm fair game. You'd think I could just ignore Ed Champion (you can find him at edrants.com yeah, go ahead, don't all click at once), and most of the time I do. But it's harder than you'd think. Blogs reach a big audience. People read him. People link to him. Google frickin' loves Ed. Not long ago I set up a website of my own, and despite the fact that it's my website, and it deals with nothing...
...want to oversell this. I'm pretty sure I spend way more time thinking about Ed Champion than he spends thinking about me. But Ed isn't my only weird, ectoplasmic Internet relationship. My life is increasingly being invaded by these people. There's a woman (or a man, or possibly a robot) named MoFlo4Sho who e-mails me a couple of dozen times a day with her various insane thoughts about religion and celebrities. It's one of the singular features of our little social-technological moment that people all over the world whom we otherwise would never even...
...suppose it's only fair. I mean, here I am impinging on all of you on the back page of Time magazine. Why shouldn't Ed Champion get to talk back? In a way writers do have a superpower, the power to transmit our thoughts to other people around the world with a few keystrokes. Why should we be the only ones? Why should we get to be in the X-Men, while everybody else is merely human...
...reason at all. But listen, Edward Champion, if that is your real name (and if you're the Champion, what does that make me?): Now that we're all superheroes, all I ask is that you use your powers for good. Let's take each other seriously and respond in good faith. Let's not bandy words around thoughtlessly or maliciously--there's enough of that going on already, what with Uwe Boll and MoFlo4Sho out there. After all, at the end of the day, we're not so different...