Rethink.

8 Comments

• Tina Kubala wrote:

  June 18, 2009 at 1:39 pm

  I’m read­ing more polit­i­cal blogs than ever. As a Republican/Libertarian, I am both ener­gized and fear­ful in our polit­i­cal cli­mate. While I am not a polit­i­cal blog­ger myself, I fre­quently post links on Twit­ter and Facebook.
• ashok wrote:

  June 18, 2009 at 1:48 pm

  @Tina — I guess we could extrap­o­late that sev­eral ways. One thing might be: since lib­er­als won, they’ve got­ten com­pla­cent already.

  But do take a look at the num­bers for Republican/conservative blogs — they’re all hurt­ing sig­nif­i­cantly, save for Instapundit.

  So I’m curi­ous — whatcha reading?
• amanda wrote:

  June 19, 2009 at 8:53 am

  I think that from the per­spec­tive of the aver­age Amer­i­can noth­ing is going on. The only media I’m really exposed to is the internet…a few min­utes of radio– a 2 minute trip to work and I hear maybe 3 com­mer­cials in the car… and nobody is yelling about any­thing, nobody is try­ing to rile up– any­thing. I know that’s not true, but they are being unsuc­cess­ful at draw­ing people.

  At work the phones play the radio and some­body had set the sta­tion to talk radio AM some­thing or other, I don’t know what the local sta­tion is with Rush and Sean Han­nity, etc, etc, and every time I hear them on it’s dis­in­ter­est­ing. I’m not remotely inter­ested in lis­ten­ing to them yell at callers to start with, but they’re talk­ing about noth­ing. Hours and hours com­plain­ing because “Obama is going to ruin the econ­omy in Las Vegas because he said pub­lic fund­ing shouldn’t go to trips to Las Vegas”. Yeah, this is only one exam­ple, but it’s a com­pletely ridicu­lous argument.

  That’s the state of things how I see it, but I don’t know what the expla­na­tion for it is.

  Maybe lib­er­als are happy and going about their busi­ness and maybe con­ser­v­a­tives are still antsy about being crit­i­cal and so there’s just noth­ing much to read.
• Shelton wrote:

  June 19, 2009 at 1:34 pm

  I can’t speak to what would make a con­sis­tently engag­ing polit­i­cal blog. The blogs I visit tend to explore a mix­ture of dif­fer­ent gen­res. The best have a strong philo­soph­i­cal point of view that is applied across a broad range of subjects.

  Take for instance Orrin Judd’s “Broth­ers Judd Blog”: he cov­ers not just pol­i­tics, but also fic­tion, food, phi­los­o­phy, music, film, etc. He cov­ers these sub­jects not just as ran­dom links but from a strong and uni­fied point of view. He goes through cycles in which he focuses more on pol­i­tics, and that is when my vis­its drop off.

  I search for blogs that fea­ture con­tent I haven’t been exposed to, express ideas that I wouldn’t have thought of. I want to read writ­ers who are smarter than me or dif­fer­ent from me. Many polit­i­cal blogs are just link dumps and echo chambers.

  This goes beyond blogs though. I sub­scribe to the Weekly Stan­dard among other print mags, and lately I’ve found myself read­ing the first para­graph of each arti­cle and instantly know­ing exactly every­thing the writer is going to say. Orig­i­nal think­ing, find­ing new angles, chal­leng­ing assump­tions, mak­ing deeper con­nec­tions; these are rare to find in polit­i­cal writ­ing lately.

  The recent news drought may have some­thing to do with it this. With the trou­ble in Per­sia and the Korean mis­sile cri­sis I find myself seek­ing out more polit­i­cal essays. Maybe the trick is to focus on pol­i­tics dur­ing days of high intrigue, but switch to other inter­ests when news is slow. I don’t know.
• thag wrote:

  June 19, 2009 at 6:22 pm

  One of the biggest prob­lems I see on sites like Real­Clear­Pol­i­tics that link to a bunch of arti­cles is that every­body seems to write in a fer­vor about a sin­gle topic for about a week or two. For exam­ple, I saw so many arti­cles on Sota­moyor (sp?) in a week span that I was dizzy by the time I was done. Same to gay mar­riage, which a cou­ple weeks ago was really buzzing around, and Iran, still going strong.

  One can only take so much of this before it all seems the same. My blog itself is very guilty of rep­e­ti­tion, but I also don’t call my blog any­thing high qual­ity. I’m try­ing to change that, but it takes lots of effort when there are a mil­lion other things going on in your life, as you well know.
• thag wrote:

  June 19, 2009 at 6:27 pm

  On the other hand, I do feel like the polit­i­cal cli­mate right now is very terse and high-strung, with lots of excit­ing things going on. I’d have to dis­agree with some oth­ers in this respect. It might not be as crazy as Octo­ber 2008, but there is no lack of mate­r­ial for those blogging.

  So in my opin­ion, I think you are right. There is news — plenty of it — but no sane per­son is going to revisit old news in the way that they might reread some posts like yours, and, for exam­ple, remind them­selves of the sig­nif­i­cance of Lincoln’s Get­tys­burg Address (hope­fully that isn’t wish­ful thinking).
• Britt wrote:

  June 20, 2009 at 12:56 am

  Well, I was search­ing for an e-mail address by which to get into con­tact with you, but I can’t seem to find one.

  I have been fol­low­ing your blog for quite some time now, and I actu­ally used to read you over at Sub­stan­tial. Any­how, I am cur­rently devel­op­ing my senior exit project, and I was won­der­ing if you’d be inter­ested in a link exchange (the project is linked).

  Also, feel wel­come to participate!
• ashok wrote:

  June 21, 2009 at 8:58 pm

  Sorry about that — was away from the com­puter for a bit — thank you all for a great com­ment thread.

  I’ll try to get responses and some­thing more thought­ful up soon, thanks again.

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