a quite large contingent of normally sane Democrats have gone round the bend with regard to anything having to do with the Bush administration
Just as so many Republicans did with Clinton. A contagious phenomenon, it seems, and not a terribly productive one.
When faced with this grab-bag of perfectly incoherent ideas it becomes very difficult to have any kind of rational conversation.
I have that problem with both right and left, and I’ve largely given up on even attempting rational conversation in the flesh. It’s easier to feign disinterest. I hate running into people who say they’ve read my work; it always seems a prelude to being called either a right-wing apologist for the corporate crooks or a left wing appeaser of evil. The only challenging part is trying to anticipate which accusation it’s going to be.
The Right and the Left are living in completely different world-views these days.
That’s nothing terribly unusual. The right and the left have always lived in fantasy worlds of their own construction, which is why we’ve generally preferred leaders from a range spanning a no more than a few compass points from the center. Is there still a center? Where is it hiding?
The bloggers feel that since the newspapers have abdicated the provision of news, bloggers might as well fill the gap.
The problem is that bloggers can’t fill the gap. They have no direct sources of news; they are still reliant on somebody else’s reportage. They can criticize, but they can't originate news. Bloggers add another source of marginally informed commentary, usually poorly thought out - a necessary result of the stream-of-consciousness blog format. You don’t generally find finished, coherent thought in that sort of stream, the format simply isn’t conducive to it.
The bloggers link to each other, connect postings, do research, and fact-check each other, which provides a continuous voting mechanism on the worth of any one post and its commentaries, which amounts to a de facto and extemely rapid collective grading and correction mechanism.
I suppose that if you read them all you could achieve some sort of balance, but that would be a full time job and you’d have to wade through one hell of a lot of useless ranting. What I see – and I’ve looked – is the evolution of what could be called blog circles – groups of bloggers with similar perspectives who link to each other’s sites and to news stories selected to support the prevailing bias, reinforcing their own prejudices and allowing readers to maintain the illusion of multiple sources without leaving their ideological comfort zone.
I have found no reason to change my belief that most blog readers are looking for affirmation, not information. |
