October 5, 2008
by secondlifeshrink
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 