Political blogging
Someone has been taking me to task in comments over not weighing in on the most recent blogspats, the three with which I’m most familiar having to do with race and blogging. One centered on feminist blogs, one in the LiveJournal fan community, and one in the science blogging world. All three were trivially avoidable, recurring fights in what I increasingly think of as the Battlestar Galactica mode of blogspatting: “This has all happened before, and it will all happen again.”
Commenter said, among other things:
There are important arguments going on in the blog world about, yes, things that matter, but you all just keep pretending the Endangered Desert Mouse is more important than those things.
I was thinking about having been there and having done that, and recalled this post of mine from 2007, over which I took quite a bit more grief than I expected to, and which stirs up enough moderately painful memories that I hadn’t read it for a while.
But I went back and read it, procrastinating on doing some writing on a topic of some actual importance, and I found this paragraph:
Assume the most conservative Democrat in the field of Presidential candidates wins the general election. Tell me — with a straight face, I mean — that at least 70 percent of Progressive Bloggers won’t suddenly go eerily quiet about her policies, even if they’re substantially similar to Bush 43’s. Say a date is set 18 months in the future for withdrawal of troops from Iraq, with an option to postpone at the President’s discretion. You tell me there’ll be a chorus of outrage across the Progressive Blogosphere. If there is, it’ll be a departure from past performance.
Obama just announced a plan to withdraw from Iraq in 19 months, leaving some 50,000 troops in Iraq after “withdrawal.” The tone of the “progressive blogosphere” is one of cautious support.
People got impatient during the late years of the Bush administration when those of us with some historical memory talked about 1993, and the onset of the Clinton years after 12 of Reagan/Bush, and about how conservatives were able to mobilize while “progressives” went to sleep, the fabulously evil 104th Congress being just the most immediate result. People didn’t want to hear it.
This has all happened before. It will all happen again.
Comments
Dude, as someone who keeps getting dragged into one of those blogspats du jour, I am quite certain that saving the desert wildlife is the right call.
And if those readers who think you ought to be speaking up about X are managing to post comments here, I’m willing to bet that they can post comments on other blogs, or even start their own blogs, thereby empowering them to raise their own voices on the issues that they deem Really Important.
I’m tempted to ask what any of this has to do with Gaza, but some readers might think I’m serious.
Motor on, friend.
=v= Nothing on Mary Worth? Nothing?
I haven’t read Mary Worth since the Contra Costa Times dropped the strip in 2001.
Has anything happened since then?
Oh, shit. I haven’t been talking about progressive blogs and blogspats in my crossword blog, but I could probably come up with something if I worked at. And I think I’d be as scintillating as Chris used to be on such topics. Why am I being discriminated against? Why is my blog not being targeted as an Epic Fail for not talking about blogspats? Is it not incumbent on us all? Must we not all be responsive to the wishes of those readers who aren’t interested in the topics we choose to focus on? Damn, I should talk about NASCAR too. And knitting. It’s my solemn duty, and Chris Clarke’s.
The 12-year-old in me relished the mouse-fart thread at that other post.
I havent read Mary Worth since the Contra Costa Times dropped the strip in 2001.
Has anything happened since then?
You’re being coy. I know that you know that the likelihood of anything happening in Mary Worth in eight years is as the limit of 1/n as n approaches infinity. Same wih Judge Porker, er Parker.
I thought that this weks Tom Tomorrow had some resonance with the topic du post, though:
http://www.salon.com/comics/tomo/2009/03/03/tomo/index.html
Pardon me.
That was meant to be “Same with Judge Porker…”and ”...this week’s Tom Tomorrow…”.
And maybe I should have italicized “topic du post”.
I agree that a number of political blogs tend to go around in the same circles with the same arguments and people never seem to get tired of voicing the same opinions and getting very upset with the same opposing opinions. It happens on list-serves too. I noticed it recently in one (having nothing to do with politics ostensibly) recently with respect to the G-word mentioned above. So yes after voicing my own opinion, I usually move on. My life is too short to spend it going around in circles. But you know what? Even if the arguments weren’t repetitive, why is saving the desert mouse unimportant? Isn’t that kind of egotistical and short-sighted?
I always felt that by writing about political topics, you were building a readership that probably wouldn’t read about nature and conservation otherwise, and as a result you were probably doing more for the conservation cause than those who blog about nothing else. But if “Friend of Creek Running North” is any indication, I was probably kidding myself to think that anthropocentric readers could be so easily swayed. Clearly at least one person thought of CRN as a political blog with a little bit of nature thrown in for ornamentation. Makes me wonder if we were even reading the same blog!
(Geez, three “probably"s in one paragraph! and I call myself an editor.)
I’d rather read about the mouse.
Political bloggers and those who write about them are not an endangered species; if anything, the population could stand a bit of culling.
When one stakes out some turf on the far left of the political spectrum—predicated on the fundamental and necessary principles of deep ecology—, it necessitates the need for direct political action to garner attention for all the other than human species. We live in the Anthropocene Era, and everything we can all do is acknowledge that each individual human beings shares a piece of the responsibility.
I knew it! You’re the final Cylon!
Orange, until you start blogging about cryptic crosswords (The Guardian has good’uns), you are wasting your, and more importantly my, time. Please rectify or I will not put you on my (theoretical) blogroll.
Page 1 of 1 pages
