Jan
31
Quick Advertisement, and a Question
Filed Under blogging | 4 Comments
A new social bookmarking site called “Right Bump” is up and running and it isn’t perfect, but I think people should be submitting and debating there, if they’re conservative. The other social bookmarking sites lean very heavily “radical,” I’ve been shouted down there many a time by the DailyKos crowd (some of whom are really nice, except when they’re shouting at me).
Another blogging thing, in case any of you know: I’m looking for a site where RSS junkies can find the blogs they like, and subscribe. You know, a matchmaking site for people that want their RSS reader to work like a cable subscription. Does such a thing exist, or am I gonna have to create it?
Technorati Tags: blogging, RSS, conservative
Another blogging thing, in case any of you know: I’m looking for a site where RSS junkies can find the blogs they like, and subscribe. You know, a matchmaking site for people that want their RSS reader to work like a cable subscription. Does such a thing exist, or am I gonna have to create it?
Technorati Tags: blogging, RSS, conservative
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Jan
31
On "Blog Bling"
Filed Under blogging | 2 Comments
I attempted to post this comment at performancing.com, in response to this post about “blog bling,” but it was probably thrown out as egotistical tangential raving, which it was. Contrast it with the comments on-topic there, please - I really don’t like my comments being thrown out, rightly or wrongly.
Agreed entirely. It [a feature called Snap, which if you haven't encountered, count yourself lucky] is an awful experience for those of us who read blogs.
I suppose the more critical task now is to ask, “What makes blog bling, generally speaking, good or bad?”
Clearly saying “It’s my blog, and since people are there because of my personality, whatever I decide is good is good” doesn’t work. At the same time, total catering to an audience means that one doesn’t blog as much as pander.
I’ll put forth my own criteria, which I suspect are contentious, and see how the debate goes, if there is any: Blog bling is good inasmuch as it helps the reader discover more about the poster and what influences him, and helps the blogger discover more about his readership and what their interests are.
In other words, blog bling that is excellent is like that giant list of post labels Jeff Jarvis has on his Buzzmachine sidebar. God, I’m jealous of those. If you want to find out what Jeff thinks about a topic that you haven’t seen come up recently, or better yet, engage him in conversation about a topic that requires knowledge of other stances he has taken, you have an excellent resource in that sidebar. Other blog bling that’s great is that Feedburner icon, which I just drag into my RSS reader and just like that I’ve subscribed, and I am using Feed Flare to find out about my readership. And yes, MyBlogLog is fun, too, and notice how all this bling keeps the information flow from reader to blogger to blogger to reader going.
So, does Snap do that? Of course not. If it did promote the information flow, we might put up with it - God knows we’ve put up with worse on blogs. All it does is put something my eyes can barely make out while interrupting the information flow that occurs through actually reading a blog post.
Technorati Tags: blogging, blog bling
Agreed entirely. It [a feature called Snap, which if you haven't encountered, count yourself lucky] is an awful experience for those of us who read blogs.
I suppose the more critical task now is to ask, “What makes blog bling, generally speaking, good or bad?”
Clearly saying “It’s my blog, and since people are there because of my personality, whatever I decide is good is good” doesn’t work. At the same time, total catering to an audience means that one doesn’t blog as much as pander.
I’ll put forth my own criteria, which I suspect are contentious, and see how the debate goes, if there is any: Blog bling is good inasmuch as it helps the reader discover more about the poster and what influences him, and helps the blogger discover more about his readership and what their interests are.
In other words, blog bling that is excellent is like that giant list of post labels Jeff Jarvis has on his Buzzmachine sidebar. God, I’m jealous of those. If you want to find out what Jeff thinks about a topic that you haven’t seen come up recently, or better yet, engage him in conversation about a topic that requires knowledge of other stances he has taken, you have an excellent resource in that sidebar. Other blog bling that’s great is that Feedburner icon, which I just drag into my RSS reader and just like that I’ve subscribed, and I am using Feed Flare to find out about my readership. And yes, MyBlogLog is fun, too, and notice how all this bling keeps the information flow from reader to blogger to blogger to reader going.
So, does Snap do that? Of course not. If it did promote the information flow, we might put up with it - God knows we’ve put up with worse on blogs. All it does is put something my eyes can barely make out while interrupting the information flow that occurs through actually reading a blog post.
Technorati Tags: blogging, blog bling
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Jan
30
Links, 1/30
Filed Under links | 3 Comments
Just some links that are definitely worth your time. I’m not really posting today because I have to catch up with reading sometime.
1. Josh muses on the nature of sin and its consequences in two separate posts. If you go back through his recent archive, there’s also grappling with SK’s aesthetic and ethical levels of morality, and thoughts on what the Church has become today. Highly recommended reading all around.
2. Amy King’s poem “I’ve Opted for a Heart This Mid-November Morn” plays with numerous associations, and threatens to bury the ill-equipped reader with them all. I’m still sorting through them, but I’m taken by those first two lines of hers especially.
3. Protecting one’s reputation on the Internet can be a problem, esp. given who’s doing the “protecting.”
(h/t PTN)
4. I don’t know if you’ll find this useful - I certainly haven’t yet - but there is a social bookmarking engine called blogg-buzz.com that allows self-promotion. Most of the articles on there aren’t terribly high-quality just yet, but maybe it’ll become something decent. I dunno (and no, I’m not whining because my articles haven’t gotten any votes there).
1. Josh muses on the nature of sin and its consequences in two separate posts. If you go back through his recent archive, there’s also grappling with SK’s aesthetic and ethical levels of morality, and thoughts on what the Church has become today. Highly recommended reading all around.
2. Amy King’s poem “I’ve Opted for a Heart This Mid-November Morn” plays with numerous associations, and threatens to bury the ill-equipped reader with them all. I’m still sorting through them, but I’m taken by those first two lines of hers especially.
3. Protecting one’s reputation on the Internet can be a problem, esp. given who’s doing the “protecting.”
(h/t PTN)
4. I don’t know if you’ll find this useful - I certainly haven’t yet - but there is a social bookmarking engine called blogg-buzz.com that allows self-promotion. Most of the articles on there aren’t terribly high-quality just yet, but maybe it’ll become something decent. I dunno (and no, I’m not whining because my articles haven’t gotten any votes there).
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Jan
29
Beyond Right and Left: Manifesto
Filed Under politics | 2 Comments
I got whiny on Buzzmachine about the state of politics today, and how I’m right and everyone else is wrong, and I think I had better write something that states more directly what I want:
I still get asked by people, when they ask me what I study and I answer “political science,” whether I want to be a politician or not. And it is funny that we would think being a politician a matter of some expertise in a sense, as if one had to learn through study how to be a “man of the people,” which is how all candidates package themselves. No one says they’re the “man of special interests,” or “the man bought out by a foreign government,” after all.
We have such a narrow conception of what knowledge is that it is remarkable we can call ourselves a people. Everything for us depends on “experts,” but other ages had a unified body of knowledge they could appeal to. They had traditions, and those traditions made them closer as a people, enabled them to state what was obvious, and finally allowed them to create and stand for something, both at once.
We cannot create, for we do not stand for anything. The whining about our spiritual malaise does not go far enough. Our concept of freedom is “live and let live,” which is why President Bush is now merely “Bush” and his policies are held in contempt by all on the Left and Right. He is only respected by those who agree with him on particulars.
Anyone who stood for anything would see that the Presidency is a title accorded to one who has to conduct this thing called a “foreign policy.” One has to have a foreign policy, of course, well before acts of terrorism occur on one’s soil. “Live and let live” doesn’t help negotiate tariffs away; it doesn’t keep the seas free from those who would pirate; it doesn’t keep us secure in our homes, or help maintain anything like peace on earth. It rather assumes we are all peaceful, and moves to take as much as possible from others as long as another does not complain.
The funny thing is that the President, for all his problems, does stand for something - tyranny of the sort Saddam Hussein stood for is unacceptable - and that he and the Armed Services and all of those civilians working in Iraq might help create something, when all is said and done. No one has asked what everyone would say if Iraq were successful, whether a country that is stable and that has patched up its ethnic tension to a reasonable degree and is peaceable toward its neighbors moreso would be worth the sacrifice given now.
The tradition that inspired this enterprise was not uniquely American, was not tied to manifest destiny. It was rather tied to the old British mindset, the one that helped create America and beat the totalitarians who would have literally conquered the world otherwise. It was not a perfect mindset, and one could dissent from the imperialism using the same principles it articulated, and maybe that’s one reason why the mindset helped create a world where we can work towards being more humane.
Everyone now, though, is an “expert.” They know, or know of the people, who could solve all our problems in Iraq. Or they can see the problems with our domestic situation, and know that if this tax were lower, or this right were had, everything would be better and all problems would disappear. Our spiritual malaise stems from the fact we think we know everything and are trying to say that such a lack of knowledge is our “right.” There are legitimate reasons for dissent regarding the President’s policy. None of them have been articulated, for shouting and voting or not-voting is all we can do. Our “expertise” lies in the fact that we have citizenship merely for being, and we can exercise and demand rights for that “reason.”
The only way around this problem, where there is no genuine dialogue between people with sensible positions, is to make it clear that the populism we have is a terrible thing. The only way to do that is to convince people that populism in America means “live and let live,” that the Right tend toward economic libertarianism and the Left toward moral libertarianism, and that these tendencies more than anything else show that we think we can get away with anything if we have the money or complacency from others.
If populism of this sort can be destroyed - and remember, this is not something that happens through elections, but rather through education - then we can have what we need to have, which is a populace engaging each other’s thoughts through their sense of tradition. We can appeal and criticize the past, and do so trying to appreciate it and what it has given us as best we can. Through it we can be united, even while dissenting. In a sense, it cannot be attacked too much, for such an attack will give us the “politics” we have today. But in another sense, when we ground what we argue in our true ancestry - that someone else who once was thoughtful and in a similar situation thought something like we did - we will be more moderate and able to talk with each other by default. Right now, an appeal to tradition is done under the mantle of “expertise,” where one knows more than another, and can throw “facts” at them, and that’s yet another reason why we have no Spirit as a people, and if this continues, why we will collapse on account of our own dead weight.
Note: It should be mentioned that all this talk of Tradition might earn me the title “fascist.” I should be clear now that it is possible to have a sense of tradition where other traditions are not denigrated just because they exist. If such a thing were not possible, we would not be the country we are today. But there is a limit to tolerance in my thinking.
Technorati Tags: politics, elections, discourse, spirit
I still get asked by people, when they ask me what I study and I answer “political science,” whether I want to be a politician or not. And it is funny that we would think being a politician a matter of some expertise in a sense, as if one had to learn through study how to be a “man of the people,” which is how all candidates package themselves. No one says they’re the “man of special interests,” or “the man bought out by a foreign government,” after all.
We have such a narrow conception of what knowledge is that it is remarkable we can call ourselves a people. Everything for us depends on “experts,” but other ages had a unified body of knowledge they could appeal to. They had traditions, and those traditions made them closer as a people, enabled them to state what was obvious, and finally allowed them to create and stand for something, both at once.
We cannot create, for we do not stand for anything. The whining about our spiritual malaise does not go far enough. Our concept of freedom is “live and let live,” which is why President Bush is now merely “Bush” and his policies are held in contempt by all on the Left and Right. He is only respected by those who agree with him on particulars.
Anyone who stood for anything would see that the Presidency is a title accorded to one who has to conduct this thing called a “foreign policy.” One has to have a foreign policy, of course, well before acts of terrorism occur on one’s soil. “Live and let live” doesn’t help negotiate tariffs away; it doesn’t keep the seas free from those who would pirate; it doesn’t keep us secure in our homes, or help maintain anything like peace on earth. It rather assumes we are all peaceful, and moves to take as much as possible from others as long as another does not complain.
The funny thing is that the President, for all his problems, does stand for something - tyranny of the sort Saddam Hussein stood for is unacceptable - and that he and the Armed Services and all of those civilians working in Iraq might help create something, when all is said and done. No one has asked what everyone would say if Iraq were successful, whether a country that is stable and that has patched up its ethnic tension to a reasonable degree and is peaceable toward its neighbors moreso would be worth the sacrifice given now.
The tradition that inspired this enterprise was not uniquely American, was not tied to manifest destiny. It was rather tied to the old British mindset, the one that helped create America and beat the totalitarians who would have literally conquered the world otherwise. It was not a perfect mindset, and one could dissent from the imperialism using the same principles it articulated, and maybe that’s one reason why the mindset helped create a world where we can work towards being more humane.
Everyone now, though, is an “expert.” They know, or know of the people, who could solve all our problems in Iraq. Or they can see the problems with our domestic situation, and know that if this tax were lower, or this right were had, everything would be better and all problems would disappear. Our spiritual malaise stems from the fact we think we know everything and are trying to say that such a lack of knowledge is our “right.” There are legitimate reasons for dissent regarding the President’s policy. None of them have been articulated, for shouting and voting or not-voting is all we can do. Our “expertise” lies in the fact that we have citizenship merely for being, and we can exercise and demand rights for that “reason.”
The only way around this problem, where there is no genuine dialogue between people with sensible positions, is to make it clear that the populism we have is a terrible thing. The only way to do that is to convince people that populism in America means “live and let live,” that the Right tend toward economic libertarianism and the Left toward moral libertarianism, and that these tendencies more than anything else show that we think we can get away with anything if we have the money or complacency from others.
If populism of this sort can be destroyed - and remember, this is not something that happens through elections, but rather through education - then we can have what we need to have, which is a populace engaging each other’s thoughts through their sense of tradition. We can appeal and criticize the past, and do so trying to appreciate it and what it has given us as best we can. Through it we can be united, even while dissenting. In a sense, it cannot be attacked too much, for such an attack will give us the “politics” we have today. But in another sense, when we ground what we argue in our true ancestry - that someone else who once was thoughtful and in a similar situation thought something like we did - we will be more moderate and able to talk with each other by default. Right now, an appeal to tradition is done under the mantle of “expertise,” where one knows more than another, and can throw “facts” at them, and that’s yet another reason why we have no Spirit as a people, and if this continues, why we will collapse on account of our own dead weight.
Note: It should be mentioned that all this talk of Tradition might earn me the title “fascist.” I should be clear now that it is possible to have a sense of tradition where other traditions are not denigrated just because they exist. If such a thing were not possible, we would not be the country we are today. But there is a limit to tolerance in my thinking.
Technorati Tags: politics, elections, discourse, spirit
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Jan
29
A Curious Thing
Filed Under love, politics | 2 Comments
Every time I rant to myself about love or relationships, I think through my problems, and the problems of others, and while I don’t have everything exactly right, I know I have it right enough, and am open to better thoughts if they do come.
But thought fails to satisfy, utterly fails to satisfy. It feels like the best part of me is wasting away.
I don’t know how to make myself any stronger. I keep telling myself that this self-pity is stupid, for others are going through so much worse, and that anger in my case is far more justified than hope, despite the mistakes I made. None of those things work to satisfy, though they’re true. I still feel empty.
There is just no way to be loving and not have erotic love be engaged in some way, I don’t think. I know others are going through this problem, and I don’t want to say “my pain is so great.” Truth is, it’s a drop in the ocean, and all of us who want a more satisfying life while being willing to give have to find some way to stand strong in solidarity.
These are trying times for us. I used to think that the problem of not being loved “in that way” connected us with ages past. It does and it doesn’t. In ages past, people still got married and understood the value of family. This might be the first age that considers itself beyond all that, for we have complete control over reproduction and our morals through our technology and rhetoric. If that is the case, and part of me suspects it is, then this pain I’m feeling is a drop in the ocean before the flood. This is a pain that runs too deep among all of us to be acceptable by any measure, for it is as simple as what has been taken away from those of us who are loving is the ability to have what we do called “love” anymore.