Superstition aint the way
October 5, 2008 1 Comment
I started attaching tags to my posts a couple of weeks ago in the hope that my pitifully low traffic would pick up a bit. I’m not sure how successful this has been; the graph of my visitor numbers has been as erratic as the Dow:
I did get a comment yesterday, for the first time in a while, from Ann’s New Friend. It was a bit snarky, but any attention is good I guess. I felt it was unfair of him/her to imply that I wasn’t interested in reading opinions that conflicted with my own; I look at right-wing journals and blogs all the time. I was just worried that readers might interpret the fact that I had linked to Real Clear Politics without any comment as meaning that I had some sympathy with the views expressed therein.
Hats off to ANF’s work rate though; I had been feeling pleased that I had managed six posts in a week, but he/she is a true stakanovite who produces fifteen in a day. It’s interesting that the biggest item in his/her tag cloud is “Obama” (as indeed mine is “Palin”); it’s always easier to talk about your opponen’s failings rather than your candidate’s qualities.
It did make me think about why I bother commenting on the US election; hardly anyone reads these posts, and those few who do are unlikely to be swayed by a few links to stuff they’ve probably seen before anyway. I have previously expressed the opinion that blogs are vastly overrated as a medium of political discourse, but I am finding myself more and more drawn into the cross-linked world of the political blogosphere.
I made a light-hearted reference to voodoo the other week, but the more I think about it, the more it seems that blogging has a lot in common with primitive religious rituals. (No offence to adherents of voodoo; I’m using “primitive” in the sense of “uncontaminated by civilisation”).
Faced with a process that is likely to affect my life in many fundamental ways, yet which is completely outwith my control – like a volcano, or winter, or the US Presidential race – I am reverting to simple superstition, offering tribute to the secular gods of liberal elitism, and bowing before the mighty deity that is Tina Fey.
Second Life Shrink 
Hello. I’m back. Sorry if I sounded snarky, but you sounded sniveling. So what if you were to have “sympathy” with conservatives? Why not have sympathy with all of humanity? But it does put the lie to the so called “diversity” embraced by self described “liberals.”
Anyway, thanks for the hats off though I am not usually able to post as much as I did yesterday. However, that said, I write two blogs. The other covers topics in a specialized discipline and makes no reference to politics. And I posted three things in the other blog yesterday, so I was regular little steam-roller of a blogger.
You make an interesting observation that one has more to say about the opposition than about one’s own side. It says much about the nature of innovation. However, I think it does sharpen one’s views to have to engage an opponent. It also broadens one’s awareness when the argument is genuine, that is: when ideas are really fleshed out and debated. You begin to recognize why other people believe as they do, a path to true liberalism, in my opinion, as opposed to the fake and narrow ideology presently called liberalism.
As to tags. I would be creative in their use. It focuses your thoughts to find a really good tag. You have to think like the reader. Another exercise in sympathy.
Meanwhile regarding “to blog or not to blog,” I think it’s rather like having a conversation with a stranger on a bus. It can be very neighborly and eye-opening.
Best wishes from snarky ANF