Less than impressed

Knife is less than impressed with political blogs. It's certainly a good rant...

As for my thoughts: The sameness is mostly because there are only so many political memes in the noosphere... and because the pro-American Randroid Libertarian (as opposed to Nozickian or left- or un-American Libertarian) cluster is vastly overrepresented on the Net. Most political blogs are primarily reactive - they follow the real media - which means that the same issues crop up again and again and again. Taxes. Drugs. Crime. Human rights. Whether a new century starts in 00 or 01. State-funding of this or that. If you're lucky, you get some decent commentary which looks at something from a new angle, or differs slightly from what you see in the newspapers. But normally, you get the same old unoriginal and uninspired crap (and I'm as guilty of this as everyone else). But this is no different from the "letters to the editor" columns in newspapers, or from usenet. There's nothing new under the sun in them, and there's nothing new on the blogs either.

As for people thinking its "up to the blogosphere", most blogs are run by amateurs and have tiny readerships compared to their wider societies. I'm under no illusions that what I do is even close to journalism, or that the few people who read my ravings are enough to have any effect on the public consciousness.

This doesn't mean I'm going to stop, though.