What's Wrong With Blogs (Free Republic mentioned)

The more time I spend in the blogopshere, the more it seems to me that many blogs are merely online cults.

It's an easy comparison to make. Notice, for example, that blog audiences simply do not cross over. Most people who read and contribute to Free Republic stay away from DailyKos, and vice-versa. Once in a while, some brave soul wanders over to a rival blog, as it were, and is invariably banned by the owners of that blog; more rarely, there is a full-fledged flame war in which members of rival boards virtually invade each other's territory with the goal not of exchanging viewpoints but of causing maximum damage.

Notice how this behavior is perfectly typical of what, in the real world, we call cults.

*Cult members do not leave their own cognitive and/or physical environments. Online, this means spending most, if not all, of your time in the echo chamber of blogs aligned with your point of view. This has the benefit of inoculating you from even the possibility that your position might be wrong or at least in need of more nuance.

*Cult members have no empathy for rival views or the practitioners of those views. Opponents are devils; sympathizers are angels. Orthodoxy is all-important; dissent is unthinkable.

*A cult represents organized commitment to small-picture idiocy; a gang of what Berlin called philosophical hedgehogs (those who know only one big thing about the world). Overlay this with tribal ingroup-outgroup biology and you get the inescapable conclusion that a blog, far from being a progressive community of seekers, is more often a kind of prehistoric hunting expedition determined to go after big game.

Words are important. One of the curses of being educated is understanding the subtlety of words and their use, and seeing how they are constantly mis-used.

"Column fodder" in the place of "Cannon fodder" and "rather then" as opposed to "rather than" being two of my current pet peeves.

It's so EFFING simple. "Then" is a time; "Than" is a choice. How hard is that?

"The problem with this can be illustrated by recourse to my pro wrestling analogy. The whole of pro wrestling is dominated by quick, decisive moves. You pick up someone and body slam them. You apply a sleeper hold. Every punch is a haymaker, every kick is apocalyptic, every move is dynamic.

Real wrestling is the opposite. You can be deadlocked for minutes at a time. Even matches between experts can, to the untrained eye, be quite unremarkable. There are very few decisive moves in the pro wrestling sense. Victory is far more subtle."

Next election cycle...new liberal busswords instead of "Red Meat" introduced simultaneously on multiple different mainstream liberal media outlets when a conservative mentions anything regarding pro-life or real tax cuts, the new ones: "fake wrestling", "pro wrestling" or "body slaming"

While are a good observations about the difference between pro-style wrestling and real-wrestling, they provide more insight into the mind of liberals.

Good writing and speaking is concise:

Being concise doesn't mean that one hasn't thought deeply about issues.

from Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style":

http://www.bartleby.com/141/strunk5.html#13

Omit needless words.
"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."

Liberals like to ramble on and on without making a point.
Liberals arguments are quite unremarkable even to the trained eye. If liberals would make strong arguments for what they actually believed in, nobody would vote for them.

Liberals like to ramble on and on without making a point.
Liberals arguments are quite unremarkable even to the trained eye. If liberals would make strong arguments for what they actually believed in, nobody would vote for them.

Or if they do make a "point" it is rarely something that is remotely achievable hence testable.

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