One of the nicest things about blogging is being able to congratulate other bloggers on (what you believe to be) good blogging, so it’s unfortunate in a way when you are seen as part of a gang because, if you congratulate another supposed gang member, then doing so looks like cliquey back-slapping. Worse, if the objects of your admiration are famous, then name-dropping gets added to the charges. Regulars know I am, however, unforgiving of bad thinking about big issues, even when it comes from people I would otherwise agree with—even when I agree with their conclusions. As far as politics is concerned, this is easy for me because I have been arguing with stupid Lefties for decades. Mr Good Intentions and Mrs Intellectual Rigour aren’t going to be inviting Hello! magazine round any time soon to photograph “the beautiful home where they have lived for many happily married years”.
Anyway, I’ve been meaning to link to Paulie at “Never Trust A Hippy” lately because he’s been throwing a lot of thoughts-in-progress out into his blog (as he admits is his style) to see what others have to say about them; but they haven’t been getting as much feedback as I reckon they deserve. Or maybe they are and he’s deleting it. Or maybe everyone else agrees with him. I don’t always, but I can’t think of a time when I feel I’ve wasted my time reading what he has to say. His being thoughtful is useful. Doing his day-job, Paulie talks to people who actually have some power and I’d rather they listened to him than rather-less-thoughtful people, like many professional lobbyists for example.
To give you some idea of how long I’ve been planning to point you his way, most of the following links are from May. I enjoyed reading his “case for a public service movment“, this one poking a stick into questions of data privacy, and this and this asking what value MPs attach to their current jobs.
More recently, other bloggers have been linking to Paulie because he wrote this, from which I excerpt the following [Paulie’s emphases]:
The ‘everyone agrees with me‘ fallacy is—I suspect—one of the biggest causes of disillusionment with government by the elected, and the perceived disconnection between politics and the general public. The recurring question is often ‘why can’t they do what we want them to do?‘ Sadly, the answer is that they often try to do exactly that—and they really shouldn’t be doing so in the first place.
While I’m at it, Tom Freeman makes a good point well here. Admittedly, Tories complaining about the social divide between neighbours in Westminster is something of an open goal for anyone with a memory that extends back further than fifteen minutes, but have you ever tried putting a penalty kick away?
He is very, very good, one of the few blogs that I can truly say influences what I think, rather than just expresses what I already know in a better way or gives me information I don’t have. In some ways he reminds me of Seth Finkelstein, without the Cassandra Complex.
But in terms of deserving more feedback, in reading his stuff I’ve received the impression that he doesn’t like short, ‘memebot’ comments, doesn’t like long, detailed comments, and isn’t that impressed with commenters, especially regular ones, who don’t have their own blogs, preferring blog-to-blog ‘conversations’.
Wow. *blush*. Thanks for that. I may quote you on parts of it….
Chris – I shall Google Seth Finkelstein and ‘Cassandra Complex’ to find out if I like the comparison.
Apologies if my attitude to commenters is not very accomodating – it’s probably a personality flaw on my part.
I like long detailed comments if they’re on other people’s blogs – but when they’re in your own comments box, they are a bit oppressive. I’ve had commenters who have posted a 2000 word + comment and then treated the fact that I didn’t address every single point that they made as an omission that undermines my whole argument. If they criticise you on their own blog, you can have a more tangential discussion with them – a much more productive and dynamic way of discussing things, I think?
The ‘memebot’ thing really only applies to either pseudo-left clones or bloggertarians – because you already knew what they were going to put in your comments box before you wrote the post, and you wrote it anyway. In being a bit curt with them, it’s because I hope that it will discourage them from bothering me again. (It sometimes has the opposite effect – they keep coming back moaning about it).
I should say, since there’s loads of different Cassandra Complexes, that Seth Finkelstein’s isn’t thinking he can predict the future, but rather of the persuasion that often he finishes a post by saying how pointless it all is because nobody is going to pick up on this and it won’t be heard. For example ‘And this post is an exercise in futility.’, Which is often true, but that’s what you expect from a Casandra; the truth.
As for comments policies, sua case es sua casa. I imagine if you were either a happy-go-lucky sort who encouraged lots of comments or a miserable grump taking great pleasure in dismantling 2000-word posts again and again until they give up in tears then what you actually post wouldn’t be so damn interesting.