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January 11, 2006

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P.I. Tchitchikoff

Hits are fine and rewarding to the bloggers who get them, but they're not a real measure of effectiveness. Not unless the people occupying the offices where something might be done get on the ball.

Peter Daou says:

A flurry of activity among bloggers, online activists, and advocacy groups is met with ponderously inept strategizing by the Democratic leadership and relentless - and insidious - repetition by the media of pro-GOP narratives and soundbites. It's slow-motion-car-wreck painful, and most certainly NOT where the left's triangle should be a half decade into the new millennium, as the Bush-propping machine hums and whirrs, poll numbers rise and fall, Iraq bleeds, scandal dissolves into scandal, terror speech blends into terror speech. The landscape is there for everyone to see, to analyze. Enough time has elapsed to make the system transparent. It is dismaying for netroots activists to see the same mistakes repeated despite the benefit of hindsight.

The time servers reap the benefit of the fund raising and volunteer hours, often to the benefit of their cronies as well, but give nothing back other than some ego strokes and a place on dozens of direct marketing lists.

Phil

Agreed, but the progressive blogosphere still seems an isolated outpost of progress. What else have we got these days?

P.I. Tchitchikoff

Oh it is! It certainly is. Other organizations than the Democratic Party benefit in a real way and do many, very good things. I'm venting about the conflation of Democrat and progressive, which are often mutually exclusive, and griping my way to something that may be a way to work around, or in spite of, the time servers.

Turning something like the progressive ideals into the "conventional wisdom" goes strongly against the major currents. I didn't mean to come off sneering.

Phil

How received wisdom is formed is an interesting topic. Don't you think the progressive blogs do that, to a degree? Help us create a public voice from private conversations? Not so easy, hunh? Comparing GH and WB? "Being yourself in public" does not come easily.

P.I. Tchitchikoff

I think, Phil, that at this point they offer a refuge more than a means of influence. Still, there are influential people who notice the to-ing and fro-ing and there are people in the "mainstream media" (ghastly phrase. How about the received wisdom industry instead?) who consider some blogs credible sources. But I don't think that's going to cause the NY Times to stop printing op eds from nutty, discredited people like Charles Murray, or cause the management to put a halt to the celebrity columnist culture.

What I'd really like to see are some principled conservative voices in the media. Not the kept crackpots. Have you seen the Diogenes Awards (pdf)? Check out the awards for darkness, too, if you get a chance.

Getting back on topic, what makes it hard to be yourself in public is the certainty that you will be wheedled, bullied, subjected to time wasting psychic wingnut tricks and that these things are considered legitimate ways of communicating.

Phil

Thanks for the links. Yes, honorable people come from all across the political spectrum and getting engaged with them is of the essence. Verbal abuse from bullying types does not inhibit me much; on that ground I feel pretty good about giving lessons in the martial arts, he arts of Martial, but what does in inhibit me is the nearly universal deference to the plain style of moderation and mutual recognition among those who are "educated," who are "in the know," who are part of the infrastructure of WB. As soon as you accept that we must treat one another cordially, and one of us is lying systematically, you have a dysfunctional system. What we have are highly educated knaves who play us for fools. To treat them cordially is to become at best part of the spectacle, a knave among knaves or a fool among fools. This dynamic is literally 3,000 years old and the rhetorical countermoves are at least that old, at least 2,000 years old. We need to stuy them, use them and win with them. I do not recognize as my peers those who lie for money, except insofar as they work for WB. They are with WB or against WB. The only think tank thinkers I respect work for Candidia out of the same Dumpster I do. The rest can be consigned to outer darkness. (Spoken as in parable, as did my Master Jesus, and for the same reasons.)

P.I. Tchitchikoff
Verbal abuse from bullying types does not inhibit me much

I've noticed ;-)

Phil, I think we might be using different terms to describe the same thing. When you say,

what does in inhibit me is the nearly universal deference to the plain style of moderation and mutual recognition among those who are "educated," who are "in the know," who are part of the infrastructure of WB. As soon as you accept that we must treat one another cordially, and one of us is lying systematically, you have a dysfunctional system.

That's the style I call "psychic wingnut tricks". The goal of that is to force a descent into a discourse where meaning is obscured, when present at all, and terms take on the function of weapons. The merely descriptive becomes accusing and imbued with tactical potential. Here's an example.

No honest exchange is possible when one party is determined to impose a zero sum fallacy on communication, where each exchange has to have a winner and a loser; where the vocabulary consists entirely of sneaky code words; where the goal, as you say, is for one party to play the other for a fool.

There's not a dime's worth of difference between the apparatchiks and nomenklatura of WB and their fellows in the old Soviet Union.

Phil

The uses of language are well understand, have been studied, codified and mastered. The techniques are used with proficiency by PR people, political pundits, speech writers, attorneys before a jury, propagandists. The countermoves are less well understood. They do not consist of candor (fool's response to knave), nor do they require knavery (knave against knave). The countermoves are found in another tradition, often reborn under empire, sometimes from the top down, othertimes from the bottom up, the tradtion that Baktin embraced, exaplained and honored under Stalin, the tradition as he called it of Menippean satire, Carnival, and "dialogism," the sound of many voices. Lies come in two forms: Propaganda and Art. Candor is the Fool's response to either, but even a Candid Fool, using his own personal name, per the protocal at Court, may unlock a door in the Palace for the Mimes to enter.

P.I. Tchitchikoff

Our friend Lenin has a nice piece on rhetoric, and Tom Matrullo keeps a site where I found the Silva Rhetoricae.

The resources for Carnival are endless. What's lacking are enough mimes. Or maybe the mines can't see the door you're pushing open.

Phil

"Funny money" means counterfeit money. No such thing as funny real money. Serious people take serious money seriously.

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