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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (78385)	2/28/2003 9:10:41 PM
From: Dayuhan	Respond to of 281500

That might be viable if you look at "the blogosphere" as a whole, but you can't look at it that way. Nobody reads the blogosphere. They read individual blogs. My observation is that they tend to choose bloggers that agree with them, and that various corners of the blogosphere quickly devolve into mutual admiration societies. Individual bloggers has complete control of their own sites, and if a criticism emerges that they don't want to face, they just pass it by. The impression I get is that people read blogs not to learn, but to reinforce their own pre-existing opinions. The stuff on den Beste's site is riddled with unsupported assumtions and gross oversimplifications. As I said of another blog, it's an edifice of hot air on a foundation of thin air. That stuff would never be published in a respectable journal; no editor would have it. If he tried to put it up on a community site of any quality it would be sliced, diced, and thrown back in his face. He gets away with it because it's his site. The man clearly has a mammoth ego, and I just don't see any substance beneath it. We're all free to read whatever we want, but what we choose to read says a great deal about us. I can read a blog, or I can go to foreignaffairs.org, or similar sites, and read the work of people who have studied the issues in question for years, achieved distinction in highly competitive fields, and submitted their work to strict review. Why would I waste time on the former when I can have the latter?