Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Blogger. Tough to believe, but I'm not making this one up, really. Pretty much all you need to know about Jeff Jarvis's ear for language—not to mention his political-marketing savvy—is revealed in his enthusiasm for the German term "Volksmedia" as a fancy name for the corps de bloggers.

It has a funky, retro, populist, Volkswagen feel, of course, with that buggy attitude. NYTimes Executive Editor Bill Keller complained that "citizens' media" -- my moniker of choice, was a bit pretentious or at leas [sic] presumptuous. I don't disagree. He proposed "people's media," but that seemed all too Internationale to me. I once called it "populist media," but that brings too much baggage.

Ain't that just like a crypto-rightist? Populist has "too much baggage": but Volk is apparently baggage-free.

posted by michael  10:25:16 AM  
tell me about it []  

 

You had me at goodbye. Exiting his stint at Josh Marshall's blog, Jonathan Chait has to go and ruin the good impression he made writing against Social Security privatization. His (intended) final word exhorts us all to go read and subscribe to The New Republic: and some reaction to that prompts an add-on:

I've gotten several emails from readers who claim they won't read me, or won't read TNR, because of this or that disagreeable position we've taken. To be perfectly frank, if you think like this I pity you. Why on Earth should anybody confine their reading to those writers with whom they agree on everything? The best way to learn is to read arguments you disagree with. I voraciously consume analysis with which I disagree, both on the right and on the left.

TNR, more than any other magazine, publishes a range of dissenting views. Yes, we editorially criticized Howard Dean and supported the Iraq war. But we've also run plenty of pro-Dean and anti-war articles, including prominent cover stories. It's fine if TNR isn't your cup of tea. But if you spurn it or any other voice solely on ideological grounds, you're dooming yourself to small-mindedness.

Sorry to get preachy. I just find this mentality baffling.

Sorry to get preachy, but I just find this kind of condescending self-righteousness shit-stupid.

Do they require some kind of training in political obtuseness at neo-lib school, Jonathan? Possibly the reason that people like me don't read you, or that rag you used your last TPM post to hawk, is because of your habit of gratuitously insulting us, viz. this from one of your earlier TPM posts:

Marshall [Wittman,of the Bull Moose] responded [to criticism of his whitewashing Lieberman's cloture vote on the bankruptcy bill] by launching a counterattack on "dogmatic idealogues" and "hyperspace lefties" who gang up on Lieberman. That's fine as far as it goes. I actually agree with Marshall and the DLC on the suicidal purity of the Democratic party's left wing, embodied by the Howard Dean movement and its fanatical internet contingent, even if I disagree with his support for Lieberman in particular.

You can disagree with support for Lieberman all you want, Jonathan, but here's a clue: your employer is the spiritual and institutional home of Joementum, and has been since long before Joementum even had a name. I don't read TNR, not because I'm afraid that its "range of dissenting views" will open my narrow, blinkered little left-wing perspective: I don't read it because your shit is tired. I don't give money to TNR for the same reason I won't give money to Lieberman in 2006, or Biden (or Hillary) in 2008: because I want the (corporatist, Vichy) tendency you represent in the Democratic party to wither and die.

I gave up my subscription to TNR years ago (many years now), and reading Jonathan Chait this morning renews my lack of regret over that decision. I don't need TNR to find analysis I disagree with, and I don't need it to save me from smallness of mind. [Since Chait's only prior blogging experience was running a TNR anti-Dean blog, he may be unaware of just how easy it is to find occasions for disagreement in this opinion space.] But there's the rub: TNR types like Chait don't really credit honest disagreement, not when it comes from their left. They spend a lot of time congratulating themselves on how much braver they are, how much wider their ideological horizons, than us nasty lefty dogmatists: but their "bravery" is only brave on the southpaw side, and their "broad-mindedness" is really just a reckless willingness to truck with the Right. Leave them to their Republican and crypto-Republican friends. Meanwhile the only goddamn good being done in the Democratic party will continue to be done by, and under pressure from, the organized Democratic left.

So long, Jonathan, and don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out of history.

posted by michael  9:39:37 AM  
tell me about it []