Where are the Smart People?
This is something I've thought about for ages. Pathfinder used to print that snarky Internet forums meme sometimes attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt that goes something like this, "Intelligent people talk about ideas, mediocre people talk about events, dumb people talk about people." The idea is that the smart people are so hifalutin they live in the stratosphere of Platonic ideals which they manipulate with impressive flair; the mediocre people are rubes who have to have entertainment and things to watch with their jaws agape to talk about, and the real dummies only talk about each other, gossipy little magpies.
But of course, ideas can only be embodied in events and people. They don't exist merely as abstractions. If you want to discuss pyramid schemes and banks, you have to discuss the news, whether this bank closed or that one, and you must talk about people, whether this banker was unscrupulous or that one skipped town. It's completely silly to artificially segregate these areas into categories and capacities because they overlap all the time in real life. The self-conceit of Terra Nova or the SL forums is that there are these "intelligences" who debate "ideas" but don't descend into "personal attacks" or "talking about people," but of course they make huge blanket judgements about people, talk about them, and call them names under the radar (tin-can rattlers).
So where are the smart people if they aren't at Terra Nova? (of course, there are some there, because some of the posts can reliably be counted on to be intelligent. Those of Thomas Malaby, whatever his unadmitted ideological slants; those of Ted Castronova aren't very intelligent because they are always short, and usually sort of snarky. Dan Hunter has little or nothing of intelligence to say; Greglas does at least do workmanlike prose on the subject but is stuck on games. And so on. It's always surprising to me to get a slew of posts when I write on TN from smart people who say they no longer read it. Including Peter Ludlow lol. If he doesn't qualify as a gamer egghead, who does?
So..where are they?? Well, fortunately, my urgent sense of vocation which has haunted me since the dawn of my Second Life in 2004, is abated now as other smart people have shown up or tuned into Second Life now and then so you can read them. Interestingly, some of them write as long -- or longer -- posts as me, but people don't complain, because they've established RL credentials as smart people or they just don't criticize quite the same targets, so they are left alone.
Let me eliminate some from the list, first, so you get what I mean:
o The Second Life Herald (no link, because they don't let me link to my blog in my comments there). Although once the locus of a tremendous amount of smart -- and smart-assed -- news and views, it's now about as thoughtful and funny as tooth-ache and root-canal. It grinds and grinds the same joke discovered about 2 years ago, the gosh, there are these griefers that are hard to catch, they annoy sincere people like Prok, and provide fodder for cynical people like Mr. Pixeleen and endlessly anonymous script kiddies writing "lurk moar" and "tl;dr" in the comments. Even when the Herald tries to draw its tattered, grimy skirts around it and try to lurch off half in the bag to "research a story," it falls and cannot get up like a five-dollar 50-year-old whore. It takes along a former fake-reformed griefer with some name spelling something retarded in alphabet-soup kidnapper-writing like "DeAdlY CodERR" (wow, that's unique and original!) and imagines it is "getting the facts" but it's all so lame that you feel actually embarassed. The worst stuff there is by Jessica Holyoke, who takes whatever "law school learning" he has retained (or made up) and applies it literally and densely to subjects that need journalistic work, which is different. Lawyers make the case for their clients. That means sometimes, they lie -- or they are selective about the facts. Journalists, at least by the code of their profession, are supposed to dig for the truth. The Herald misses story after story, comes in late on many more, and serves up really, really re-warmed Bazooka comic type slapstick humour mixed in with some porn and sensational extreme sex stuff. Ok, we're done there.
o Massively.com Second Life section. I'm trying to think why the old Blingsider was better written. I'm not sure. Different writers? Writers who were fresh 2 years ago and aren't now? People who don't actually log on but rewrite press releases? Again, that feeling that it is about as interesting as a broken fifth metatarsal bone you have to walk on all the time -- because to "keep up," you find you do keep reading massively.com or at least clicking on Mal's link to it on Twitter. Tateru Nino also grinds not only those numbers that are already visible on the Lindens home page, she never analyzes them usefully over time. The Lindens never analyze log-ons and economic statistics over 6 months; this job could be done by Tateru and others but isn't, or at least, very seldom.
Worse, Tateru has that kind of ingrained stubboriness that you find in people of her profession and condition that they feel entitled to endlessly impose on you. It's this irritable, coy, cunning literalism, and denial that your detection of their agenda is in fact not spot on. Instead of answering the question, or providing more information to prove her point. Tateru always irritatingly says, "Oh, you think you can read my mind, can you?" "Oh, you're wrong about reading my motives, as usual." To which you can say, um, ok, hon, if that's true, can you please prove it by answering the issues addressed here? This tactic is repeated so often, it begins to feel like the toothache mentioned above with the Herald, so now you have tooth *and* foot ache and your morning has just begun.
o New World Notes There's a fan base of sorts that think Hamlet nee Linden Au is one of the smart ones -- they certainly put him on all the panels, and now he has even congealed the stuff into a book. Yet he often seems to me to be lazy, palming off the content work to his minions like Rik or Gwyn who work there, writing a mere paragraph about some fabulous contest that he's flogging (pages and pages of this -- it's odd) or game conference he's at. Or wringing his hands and whining about the Lindens' new adfarm policy that he thinks will chill creativity. OMG, that it could cause legions of angry land barons to force creative innovative builds off land where they reside legitimately! *Blink*. Um, did that happen yet, anybody?
o Virtual Blind isn't smart, either. And that isn't because I don't like Benjamin Duranske or disagree with him. It's because like the tooth ache and the bone ache, with VB, you now have a sinus ache. The articles all involve swelling tissue -- "look at me, I'm a lawyer...still! even if I'm not practicing!" or snottiness "I don't have that take on terrorism, actually. No, griefing is playful, actually, not serious," etc. etc. If Benjamin Noble, Esquire is too busy being fabulous, then he puts on guest authors or links to them, and gushess about them, too, in really unreasonable ways (like his stupid exulation about the 8 generators guy, whom I've thrashed down below, or his raving about some kid who published something about copyright theft that was completely shallow). One of the particularly asstard things that BD does is maintain a permanent page about me (!) which he changes as often as my grandma used to change her gloves. I marvel at each iteration, and chuckle because I have my rebuttals pages which serve as wayback machines. Perhaps on the advice of a real lawyer, he took out some of the more defamatory stuff on there, but it still only causes more curiosity and attention and discrediting of him than it discredits me, I laugh every time I see in my stats another person hopping over from BD to see what's up with the evil Prok who deserves an entire dedicated link and page on this ridiculous pompous ass' blog.
o Your2ndPlace. I wish this could be put in the smart category, because Sarah Nerd who blogs there has good insights based on real experience, and others who blog there have often the best news and views really authentically taken from actual SL practice (unlike massively.com which always seems like, well, a toothache.) But, with Nobody busybodying around there, with each post containing his heavy fingerprints in one way or another, it's hard to see through the thicket. His reporting on banking is good, but he also fills up his pages with silly denunciations of me. I'd be happy to declare a page is smart even if it bans me, but regrettably, another thing that drags down the level there is a tendency to allow just anybody named Brittany or Jamie or Heather post stuff about their dress businesses or whatever. On the one hand, this is good for, um, building community, I guess. On the other hand, it has a crappy feel to it, kind of like the sinus headache VB induces, because you sense that somehow, this is basically a campers' station. That Nobody has sort of bought out these people, bringing them all there, to gain traffic for his reputation, his books, his articles, to get his consulting jobs. You have a sense that he maintains this site with other people's hard-working content -- people who earn Lindens, and earn it the hard way -- so he can boost his resume to earn the real dollars or euros. Unfair? Well, maybe. Perhaps everybody has to do this at some time or the other, working these virtual worlds is hard. I can only tell you why it doesn't feel smart to me, however.
o Dear God, if we had a toothache, a foot ache, a sinus headache, now with Second Sex we have full-bore PMS cramps. Hey, if you believe the "28" and the "Afghanistan" for "Lillie Yifu" I guess you can believe...uh...the rest of the act. This site always has such a nasty edge to it, and so much unwillingness to hear the slightest bit of criticism from me especially, and is so whiney, that you as smart as it thinks it is, it isn't in the smart box. Here's a typical first-day-of-your-period kvetch: "I've been persuaded after many long arguments that I don't like the word "values." Vlaues seems to always be soemthing that the other person demands, and I have to just live with. So for example, one value" is never having to hear about evolution."
LOL -- I always wonder where all these evil people are that don't "believe in evolution" (the new religion). They exist as a fiction that enables people like Lillie to have something to blog about. Hey, Evolution is God's Plan for Our Planet, damn right! BTW, if you want to fill up your reader with other one-sided stupid blogs of that sort, my old pal General JC Christian, who loves to bang people over the heads with his lame parody act that only looks more lame in SL, now posts a calendar of "liberal events" in SL (usually, these are conservative hard-left events, I do make that distinction, as I'm an Obama voter, too). If mind-numbing sessions on politically-correct ecotourism, fake sectarian support our soldiers' events that are really anti-war, etc are your thing, here's your toothache, waiting for you.
o Sophosyne. You can always tell a world is still in its infancy when a blog and something calling itself a "salon" like this can be taken as the cool people's intellectual cafe. Urk. Anyone who has as their religion the ideology of Extropianism is, by definition, somebody who can't be smart. It's like the way people get infected with Communism or Pentecostalism. "God loves me and has a plan for my life" is a lot easier to accept as an arrant stupidity than to find out that there isn't a God but the plan is that my brain has to be uploaded with other aging hippies and code monkeys in an eternal Internet soup run by a Few Guys Named Ted. Pass me the Holy Spirit again, please, I gave at the office.
o Well, there are hosts of other stupid blogs out there. Vint Falk is often hailed by her fanboyz as posting bright and original topics, but her take on them is always the hackneyed conservative leftwing approach, mixed in with the creator-fascist approach ("I hate people who copied my idea called SLArt and even copyrighted that how dare they!"). There's there usual gaggle of coding manginas in the comments in so many of these places. Like I said, manginas suddenly seem to me to be visible EVERYWHERE lately. And as I'm a shenis, so I get to say that.
SO WHERE ARE THE SMART PEOPLE!!!!???
METAVERSE AT LARGE
o Of course no discussion of smart people can happen without starting out with a mention of Raph Koster. He doesn't write about Second Life that much because it just doesn't compel him for some reason, but that sort of reminds me of what Scoble said on Twitter the other day, that when he found himself locked out of the cool kids' club, he just made his own interesting life and gradually found himself photo-walking with Annie Liebowitz, and of course he interviewed all those fabulous rich and famous people at Davos. Raph is making his own game, of course, and he has a lot of thinky pieces about the game industry that can apply pretty well to the VW industry, although...not really on some things. It would be hard to justify for Raph spending the time, and enduring the aggravation, that you have to put into Second Life to get to the larger issues. I wouldn't honestly recommend it for someone who is already tremendously busy being a Renaissance man.
o Virtual Worlds, the sites around the Showtime Initiative company that puts on conferences about virtual worlds, including one I'll be attending in April, has had the best, the fastest, the most insightful, and the most professional commentary on virtual worlds anywhere. And you wonder, why nobody else did this, since the formula didn't seem to be that hard: a) hire a professional journalist and pay him b) have him behave like a journalist. Not rocket scientist, but not something that, of course, other blogs and such can afford.
o Information Weekly. Mitch Wagner is likely the most beloved real-life journalist embedded in Second Life. Ziggy Figaro inworld actually goes...inworld. He goes there sometimes just to hang out, made himself a house, terraformed the land, and really kept coming back to it (so many of the others never do that). And to totally rehabilitate the otherwise sordid reputation of the supine and sycophantic tech press, Mitch quite briskly will say that Linden Lab needs a new CEO, or that all the hype about terrorism in SL has missed the boat...and stay on the story for two pieces, and make sure the second piece picks up the slipped stitches in the first. He also seems to PRODUCE to actuall DO WORK, which is something I don't see the others doing as much -- Ziggy will be filing a lot of other tech stories about i-Phones or whatever even as he works the SL beat.
o Reuters. Eric Reuters has turned out arguably the best investigative journalism in SL, other than the Herald and your faithful correspondent, but since Eric actually went to J-school, it counts and has more readers and we don't count. And that's life in the big city. Reuters should look at how the New York Times does their blogs, however, and stop banning and trying to edit critical commentary.
o Collapsing Geography. Cory Linden was probably the only Linden with a PhD, and now he's left the building. His blog was always fairly smart in the past, but he had no time. You can now see what he'd write if he had had the time (and encouragement) as a Linden, and it's even better. It always has a genuine thought and good explication. Cory is also one of the few to have actually written coherent papers about the Metaverse that aren't arrogant and turgid resume polishers. Unfortunately for us in SL, I guess, he doesn't chose to write much about SL.
CLOSER TO SECOND LIFE, HOWEVER there are new bloggers that not everybody has discovered that I want to mention. These people don't necessarily like me or agree with me, or I, them. You don't have to agree with me to be dubbed "smart". Being smart means being to mount arguments with a theme and rheme and backing up with good, insightful examples
o Dusan Writer. While he may have started somewhat slow and quiet, Dusan is now regularly putting out good content, and pieces as long as mine that the leftwing and socialist minded won't mind because they'll agree with everything he says. In fact, his posts double my length only induce adulatory wonder in his readers, instead of nasty cracks, even though they are usually 65 percent cotton wadding over the aspirin bottle by then. Dusan can't seem to learn the newspaper term "thumbsucker" and keeps putting me up as a straw-man target that can't "understand art" and think it is like a toddler's behaviour. I've tried and tried to explain -- oh well. The important thing is that he consistently thinks, applies logic and reason, uses rhetoric, and otherwise behaves like someone with a college education that still had at least some remnants of Socratic teaching in it, plus he also seems to read about -- and think about -- books, you know, those old-fashioned analog knowledge embodying devices.
o Danton Sideways. Are you smart if can take a 10,000 Prokofy post and digest it into 857 words? Of course you are. But more than that, Danton, albeit Yet Another Socialist On the Internet, tries to think and keep an open mind and parse things through. He's taken on the history of the various government experiments as no one has ever attempted, or succeeded at.
o Not Possible in Real Life. This is one of the gems, as it contains all the information about fascinating new builds pushing the envelope, and good commentary. It has some of the best and brightest of SL -- the sort of real FIC, the Noopsherists as I call them. They are a little snotty, however, by not letting anyone but their screened and filtered crowd become actual writers/members/posters, but only join a fan group.
o The Sheep Blogs. I'm going to give them a "credit of faith" and keep them on the smart list. Forseti Svarog and others there were consistently putting out smart commentary. Again, as I keep explaining, I don't have to like or agree with commentary to dub it "smart". Their own blogging on their own interests is smart. Lately, I guess they're more busy and have less time to blog, but they should, it's part of building the industry's infrastructure.
o Roland Legrand, Mixed Realities says it's a blog about Philosophy, Economics, and Virtual Worlds and doesn't disappoint. Short, and usefully very honest and thoughtful.
o Gwyneth Llewelyn Much beloved by Lindens, massively.com, Hamlet, and all the "liberal establishment", Gwyn can get away with posts twice and even three times as long as mine, and nobody ever, ever mentions it lol. Gwyn is *this close* to being the kind of ache you get from, oh, writer's cramp or carpal tunnel syndrome, because after you are done reading her long pieces, you have trouble using that annoying OpenID to log on and post, and then even after a surfeit of insights that have you coming back for more, you are suddenly given a cramp with Gwyn's propensity to publish Extropia. Sigh. Well, what's a picnic without ants, I always say...
o Ugotrade -- Hey, YOU go trade lol. This blog is as annoying as a hangnail to me, because I don't like the politics/leftoid world view under it and tekkie rectitude and beatide and attitude, but for most people, it's a 5th Avenue manicure. It's hugely long, and nobody ever complains, like they do about me (see, how length and meaning is in the eye of the beholder). Occasionally, I find something to say there, and it's banned by the owner. Oh, well.
There's others I've very likely forgotten or not heard of, so think of this as a work of progress to be updated and just add below. There are so many people who are indeed smart, i.e. on Twitter, like Crap Mariner, or with artworks, for example, like Crap's elaborate avatar costuming and propping and staging, but it's therefore not a blog with windy essays on it.
There are people like Henry Jenkins or Steve Rubel who are as smart as all get-out but they just don't write about SL or even virtual worlds that often so they aren't on my smart blogs list. There are blogs like The Arch (Keystone Bouchard) that are run by perfectly smart people, but they read like corporate advertisements and the kind of relentless program of events that you face trapped on a cruise ship or a week at Club Med, you get tired because you can't talk about them with any depth.
I publish this list of smart blogs hastily, with a sense of urgency, because I feel as if the membrane holding back a lot of stupidity is about to break, as I'll explain later. Please add.
Seems to me the smartest thing that smart people don't do..
is blog.;)
jonas
But this wont be clear for another 10 years.;)
Posted by: jonas avaro | March 02, 2008 at 09:38 PM
Oh, I totally agree about that. It's clear now. The smartest people I know in real life don't blog or write email. They don't have time. And it dilutes their ability to affect real things by writing short little talking points and memos that affect stuff. I have seen much of that in my field in real life.
But I mean the yardstick for smartest here in our dark cave, that's all : )
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | March 02, 2008 at 09:52 PM
Adding then to both categories:
Smart:
Ordinal Malaprop
http://ordinalmalaprop.com/engine/
Her dear brother Cardinal's lament about lost laissez-faire is one of SL's sleeper classics lol.
Dumb:
http://blog.secondlife.com/
The posts on the further "input" sought from the residents by the DPW was among the most embarrassingly retarded things I've ever seen coming from the Lindens, I have to look away...
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | March 02, 2008 at 11:06 PM
That "Not Possible in Real Life" covers some amazing and fascinating stuff!
coco
P.S. And yes, the smartest people don't blog. The pay sucks and the audience is slim.
But - don't let that stop anyone! I do like to read them!
Posted by: Cocoanut Koala | March 02, 2008 at 11:17 PM
That "Not Possible in Real Life" covers some amazing and fascinating stuff!
coco
P.S. And yes, the smartest people don't blog. The pay sucks and the audience is slim.
But - don't let that stop anyone! I do like to read them!
Posted by: Cocoanut Koala | March 02, 2008 at 11:17 PM
I have a disturbingly short... attention span.
So, I try to avoid posting anything that I'd end up losing my train of thought ov... ov...
Um, did I feed the cat tonight?
Posted by: Laurence Simon | March 02, 2008 at 11:36 PM
"The Second Life Herald (no link, because they don't let me link to my blog in my comments there)."
Now that was "smart", considering that you DO have a link to SLH just on the left of the above smart phrase. It's actually one of the three SL links you've got... lol
Posted by: Alex Kazan | March 03, 2008 at 05:30 AM
Prok... you wound me by not including my small efforts in either dumb or smart. Maybe you need a 'Wry Smile' category and then I could make it in. Or 'Enjoyable Drivel'. Or maybe 'Meh' or 'Mostly Harmless':-D
Posted by: HBA | March 03, 2008 at 07:43 AM
Oh, you're a smart blog, HBA, not to worry : )
http://headburroantfarm.wordpress.com/
Alex, thanks for pointing out that old links page, it's all out of date and I need to fix it up and remove the Herald in fact. Normally, I link to anything, I truly don't care. I think link banning is ridiculous.
But the Herald has kept up such a jihad of preventing me from ever mentioning any article in my blog (they are so peculiar and jealous) and constantly barrage me with accusations that I'm pumping traffic for my blog (silly) that I have to push back by not giving them extraneous links.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | March 03, 2008 at 10:47 AM
Yay! I'm a smart one... although I'm still going with 'charmingly dim' :)
Posted by: HBA | March 03, 2008 at 11:40 AM
Should I be greatful or upset that I am not listed as either smart or dumb? I'm primarily limited to 700 characters per post unless I go messing with my clients xml files after each update. Perhaps that puts me in the lazy category since I keep putting it off.
Posted by: Dedric Mauriac | March 03, 2008 at 01:15 PM
Dedric, your blog is mainly an ad for your products and a few rhapsodies about tech. It just doesn't seem to be one of those big thinky smart blogs. As I said, there are smart people, but they put out product ads for their products. If I'm wrong, shoot me with one of your funny gizmos.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | March 03, 2008 at 02:35 PM
May I propose my choice?
The dumbest of all http://secondlifesofian.blogspot.com/
The smartest without any hesitation http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/
The criterion? The more boring, the higher rank.
Posted by: Sofian Mannonen | March 04, 2008 at 06:17 PM
been kicked off this blog...lol
Posted by: jonas avaro | March 04, 2008 at 06:42 PM
Ah, I hadn't really realized. I don't really do much else then script all the time and talk about my goals. Perhaps I should meander a bit more. I also blog about a lot of different products from other people, groan about bugs, and talk about events when I crawl out from under my rock. If there are a few things you are particularly interested in, give me a shout and I'll send them your way. The catalog is kinda big and disorganized.
Posted by: Dedric Mauriac | March 05, 2008 at 03:15 AM
Well, Dedric, I quite concede that you are smart, but whenever I see your blog on the feed at World of SL, it looks like product liner notes, yours or someone else's. It doesn't seem big-picture thinky. Spend one day a month doing big-picture thinky things and write like 8 reasons why open-source is the future of the Internet and virtual worlds are dead (except your business, of course) and only a precursor to mobile phone ARG theater, and then you're in the smart list : )
It's like my top 20 blogs. It's not that some other blog isn't good. It's that it's too niche to be in a general top 20.
But as you can see, people disagree about whether my blog is smart or dumb, so I let them talk : )
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | March 05, 2008 at 08:17 AM
I assume that when you consider whether a blog is smart or dumb, you factor in how the comments forward the overall conversation/ exploration of the subject matter, right?
It's interesting to go back through "The Top 20" and see how comments/the reader community enhances a blog's smartness/dumbness/relevance. Especially where the author continues the discussion/investigation/conversation.
Or, when you see a lack of that, where moderation/censorship/etc. withers a thread before it can reach what you'd think would be an interesting conclusion... or the basis of another blog post.
Posted by: Crap Mariner | March 05, 2008 at 02:27 PM
Well the top 20 I made were just blogs that are in the top 20, it included probably dumb ones, because the Blingsider, even being dumb -- or especially being dumb -- is still recognized as being in the top 20.
The smart/dumb is another list, which is really about whether a blog has smart commentary and open debate around it. That's what I mean about all the pain analogies, the debates at massively.com are usually painful and stupid.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | March 05, 2008 at 05:38 PM
You panned an event schedule? And you did so because the events are too "conservative hard-left." Was it the Argentine folk singer? They're a shifty lot. They make their water swirl in a subversive direction as it empties out the drain.
Posted by: Gen. JC Christian, patriot | March 05, 2008 at 11:21 PM
They *are* conservative hard-left? Duh?
And I say this as an Obama voter.
Oh well. You people ensure that the Democrats never manage to get elected these days.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | March 05, 2008 at 11:23 PM
Which events on this reprehensible schedule are "conservative hard-left?" And why would you attack a fundraiser for Books for Soldiers? Let's be honest. This is more about me telling you to do yourself when you expected a ring kissing, isn't it.
Posted by: Gen. JC Christian, patriot | March 06, 2008 at 12:41 AM
I don't expect any ring-kissing, because I'm not the Pope of Second Life. You're the General Jesus Christ of the Internet, not me.
Your entire act is the sort of stupid hard-left thing in the blogsophere around the so-called Democratic party that registered, voting Democrats find so annoying and even repulsive. Hackened, stupid, hateful memes, repeated like a toothache for days, years on end, stupid, redundant childish humour that never finds a following except for a handful of other children.
There are so many ways in which you are annoying, that it's hard to go into it all in a blog comment, but it basically consists of the entire stupid act stereotyping and demonizing religious believers and various topics you think are somehow "symptomatic" of the right wing, but they're only "symptomatic" of your hysterical and exaggerated take on things amplified by the Internet.
Many people are religious believers who have nothing like the politics you imagine of these right-wing born-agains that you so hate and despise. Your notion that there are all these people in America going around obsessing about creationism is absurd. They aren't. Even those who believe in that doctrine aren't obsessed with it anywhere near as much as YOU are, and they have many more pressing issues where you might recruit their votes if you would get over your *infantile cultural hatreds*.
Yes, that's what it's about, an *infantile cultural hatred,* which you indulge in for the sake of getting cheap hits, when for many people, what you are doing is taking the name of the Lord in vain. And there's no need to do that, frankly, in politics and in an inclusive social movement. There is only a need to do that
in a hate group, which is all you are.
The schedule of events that was linked to isn't somehow in itself something so bad, it's merely indicative of this entire hard left awful culture that is a turn off, is sectarian, and is just plain ineffective. That's probably the worst thing that can be said about it: not working, not getting elected.
NOT GETTING ELECTED.
It's so patently obvious that people with far more hard left sectarian politics sit around (as they did in the early days of moveon.org) and dream of things they can "put over" on other people who are "to the right" or "more conservative" than they are, sort of "smuggling it in."
And one of these entire memes that the left has dreamed up is this "Support Our Soldiers" dreck. This is a "clever concept" dreamed up by Trotsyists or whatever to sort of harness people's patriotism, but harness it in a direction that focuses not on the war or its objectives, but just on the troops.
The idea is to first ideologically attach these vacuous patriotic hordes that you hope to harness into a Support Our Troops meme, where they begin to see they can focus on troops, not war (hey, clever!) and then gradually wean them to the concept that the BEST way to Support Our Troops is then to BRING THEM HOME.
Now, wow, was that ever clever and subtle! Woot!
See, I oppose the war in the Iraq, I wasn't for sending the troops, I don't countenance Hilary's vote for it, and I'd support any candidate who could find a way to end it. There is a big debate to have around HOW but WHETHER should be pretty obvious.
But I hate ideological manipulative. All this fake stuff around "Support Our Troops" was supposed to be a substitute for an antiwar movement -- one that couldn't get going by the various lame leftoids after 9/11 who cannot get elected.
Books for Soldiers may be a perfectly fine group -- but it's a placebo, it's being used by those who are ideologically manipulative, like yourself, to try to pull the switcheroo I'm outlining.
Your "Funny haha" remarks about the drains running the other way in Argentina is typical of the sort of automatic high-dundgeon victim-drama you fall into.
Again, you cannot get elected. And getting elected is important. So I'm happy to stand up to people like you much more than I used to because you really are filling the space that could be held by more moderate and truly liberal Democrats who might be bringing around more people to a position that really could defeat the Republicans this time. That's all there is to it.
And I will note that I normally don't debate real-life politics on this blog, which is mainly about Second Life, because the people who try to debate about real life politics are usually so unequipped and uneducated to do so, that I don't have valid interlocutors.
"Do myself". Gosh, is that what the kids say instead of "fuck you" now?
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | March 06, 2008 at 02:14 AM
I didn't know if "fuck' was acceptable on your blog.
Yes, I opposed the war from the beginning. I suppose that makes me either evil, naive, or stupid. It's been so wildly successful, after all.
Could it be possible that we genuinely support the troops? Many of my daughters' friend have been to Iraq. Some are still there. Some are going back. These are kids who spent a lot of time at our house when the girls were in highschool. We, my family, were particularly found of three who eventually went to Iraq. One lost his legs. Another does nothing but watch cartoons and smoke pot all day. His parents tell us he has nightmares every night. The third, the nice Jewish boy we loved like a son, is filled with a hatred of "hajis." He talks about "waiting" them with glee in his voice. He lost his soul there. We love these kids. We care for the human beings who wear the uniform. Don't ascribe motives to people you know nothing about. It makes you appear ignorant.
As for whether people like me lose elections for the Democrats. I think most people are actually more interested in the candidates and the ideas than any particular person who identifies him or herself with a party. I can't think of anyone I know who would say, "I oppose torture and i want habeas corpus restored, but I'm voting Republican because you ridicule the Christian right." But then maybe your circle of friend is different.
Posted by: Gen. JC Christian, patriot | March 06, 2008 at 03:39 AM
Um, are you stupid, in addition to being, such a "class act"?
I said *I* did NOT support the war FROM THE BEGINNING. I marched in demonstrations AGAINST it. Do you imagine only YOU and your little brats can be for this position? So why would I think being against the war is evil or stupid? Can you READ? Being against it not for the sake of being against an unjust war, but merely because it's "an artifact of American imperialism" is part of that stupidity.
I don't believe that you genuinely support the troops, frankly. That is, I realize you may have worked yourself up into a high emotional drama about it with "my daughter's friends" and all the rest of it (I can get started on that road, too.). But it's bullshit. It's a fake ideological meme cooked up by cynical ideologues as a shill. It's manipulative and stupid. I see through it. Others do, too.
Be against the war, instead of being limp dicks and pretending you "support the troops" like some abstract exercise, completely separate from the war and American foreign policy.
My God, these soldiers CHOSE to be there. They take a political and ideological position THEMSELVES to go there. It's not about being drafted there. Not at all. They CHOSE to be there. So if they chose to go and die...for something...many of them say it's for "their country", then you are absolutely false if you claim you are "supporting the troops" because YOU do not have a position that is *for* the war, and is *for* young men dying for their country. Nothing of the kind. So stop being a goddamn phony about it.
Sure, it's terrible if your friend has no legs. I have friends who are *dead* with no legs in Iraq. Do you think you are special? It's not going to work on me, fake emotional drama bullshit like that. You don't get to seal off debate by getting all misty-eyed and talking about "our dear boys overseas."
Take the consequences of your beliefs, and be a man. Your friend who got his legs shot off -- and even your friend smoking pot all day -- these are men who take the consequences of their beliefs. You don't. You sit on a blog and make fun of other people.
I'm HAPPY to ascribe motives to people "I don't know". Because it's really HIGH TIME you and the left and the Democrats pumping this bullshit be CALLED on it. You do not support our troops. Supporting the damaged people left over after a failed foreign policy is humanitarian work at home; sending a package to a friend's kid as a friendly gesture is sending a package.
It's not about SUPPORTING OUR TROOPS. That is fake. Fake as the day is long.
People like you DO lose the elections. You think it's hilarious to go around mocking this total caricature of the right -- and you imagine because you have some little following that chuckles along with you that you are making an impact. You aren't. Making caricatures of your opponents isn't persuasive. It sure doesn't persuade me, and I'm in the same party as you. I will rush to vote for McCain with this crap, truly.
I know lots of people in fact who will vote for McCain because of some of these insane positions that the hard left takes, and their fear that Obama represents that, underneath. PLENTY of people. They are people for habeus corpus, against torture, and also made uneasy by the demonizing of the religious right because they're religious, period, not rightwing, but merely religious, and not even Christian religious.
Of course nobody YOU know thinks this because you imagine that the people you know is "everybody". It's not. I'm here to give you a big wake-up call to that fact.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | March 06, 2008 at 04:31 AM
Good to see you, GJC.
I think it was Bernard Goldberg who wrote in one of his books an observation regarding: "Of course nobody YOU know thinks this because you imagine that the people you know is everybody."
It was a part of his growing awareness of the Manhattanite liberal mindset, someone saying at a party "Well, I don't know anybody who voted for him" ... I'd have to look it up for the context and the exact quote, but it showed the... walled garden of liberal attitudes, how that pushes the media centers in NYC further left, etc. And also how to many from that side of the spectrum, Alan Keyes, Pat Robertson or Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh are the typical conservative. (As if Danny Glover, Ted Rall, or Michael Moore were the typical liberal, I suppose)
Is it fair to prop up an extremist as a point of condemnation of a larger and more diverse movement/group? Probably not, unless they're lionized as heroes of that movement (which I think makes Moore a fair target as a symbol, but not someone like Keyes).
Posted by: Crap Mariner | March 06, 2008 at 09:40 AM