Take Another

First off, I missed commenting on it during the week(end) of bacchanalian revelry that was my birthday[1] but fuck Mickey Kaus with both barrels. It's piling on the fat kid so I don't make a habit of mentioning it, but in fine tuning my media input he's one of those pundits I've learned to cheerfully ignore because it's not worth churning through the mountains of dross to get to the few nuggets of wisdom. See also: Saleton, William, and Ponnuru, Ramesh, and Broder, David among others whom, reasonably, other people take seriously[2]. I have such a blind spot when it comes to these people that it took me several minutes of blindly googling just to make sure I had their names right. But, loss of efficiency aside, it makes my life much more stress free and the best part is, whenever they do say something smart, someone I do pay attention to is likely to flag it for my perusal.

Of course the downside is that occasionally, it's not the contribution to the collective wisdom that's noted but the mindbottling outrages. And, with slowly dawning horror, I'm forced to remember why I don't pay attention to them in the first place. This fear of untrained and unqualified bloggers/pundits is one of the latter.

However, at least some good might have come from this little episode in the form of inspiring yet another not-so-timorous voice to find their way into the conversation. Namely, the quick to adapt young blogger known as Whippersnapper. Who is apparently from the class of 2012 which makes him, roughly...carry the one and... too damn young to be so smart. I wish I was capable of being that intelligent in high school but I think I was too busy figuring out the latest Final Fantasy game or how to avoid doing my homework. Oh well, I guess he has to get in while the getting's good because, not only is the whippersnapper window[4] rapidly closing, 2012 is when the Mayans say the world ends. So, know-it-all punks who are younger and likely smarter than me, yeah, enjoy that graduation party.

In all seriousness, though, it's good stuff. And anyone who gets a nod from both Mr. Klein and Mr. Yglessias (Who's got some sage advice to anyone looking to start a blog.) has to be doing something right. I can certainly understand the motivating force behind contradicting Mr. Kaus. Because as someone who was and is a frequent lurker and avid reader with nothing but time and internet access on my hands, if I didn't already have a blog thanks to post-election elation and a “well, everyone else is doing it” attitude, disproving Mr. Kaus's premise would be reason enough to start one up. If only out of sheer, bloodyminded contrariness. Because there's no greater refutation available than people like Whippersnapper rising out of the faceless seas of the internet to challenge the Mickey Kaus's of the world to defend not just their positions but their ideas.

I'll agree that we're not likely to see the rise of another Kos or Atrios or, say, a superstar pundit who's famous only and solely for having a well-trafficked blog any time soon, if only because those waters have been thoroughly explored by this point. So, maybe if you're trying to start a blog and get rich and famous, it's not the best thing to do anymore. However, if your goal is influence (Or, like myself, simply to a constructive part of the conversation rather than just a passive listener.) then all you need to do is have a voice and articulate it well. A blog's low barriers of entry are particularly well suited to giving new voices such a starting point. And while I can understand why that might threaten people who've built a career and an institution out doling out their opinions from a rarefied air, I'm convinced it's a good thing for public discourse as a whole.

Each voice, each new opinion, added to the overall discussion makes that discussion better, overall. While it's true that most of those opinions are going to be ill-founded and ill-formed, it's the interplay of ideas that's the important part. In exchanging ideas with others you're forced to defend your own either strengthening them by rejecting a false logical branch or reinforcing them with a supporting concept. The net result is that everyone taking part walks away more enlightened and informed in an agglunative process. Not a zero-sum game where one position has to take dominance over all others. That line of thinking – that there is one, single, ideal idea both known and knowable - however, seems, to me anyway, to be behind the urge to exclude voices on the grounds of inexperience. But it's a position borne out of laziness – a lack of desire to wade through the seas of information to find the warm water currents – and one that only breeds ignorance.

So, although I'm far from the most qualified and possibly the least capable - it's no doubt the grandest heights of hubris for a small-time, struggling, unnoticed, nearly readerless blogger like myself to make such a gesture - let me congratulate not just Mr. Zeitlin but all those like him who'll follow in his footsteps one day, for taking that step into a brave, new world. Welcome to the party, I hope I enjoy your stay.

[1] – A bit of hyperbole as, sadly, being torn to shred by drunken women was not part of the festivities. Close run thing, though.

[2] – Which is a quite a different category from the people who inexplicably taken seriously. See Malkin, Michelle[3]. Basically, it's smart people I can't be bothered to listen to because they've lost my interest through repeated and malicious “not saying things I like”.

[3] – The Wikipedia disambiguation page for Malkin - because, yes, that's just how thorough a researcher I am – lists one definition as “An old woman, especially if unpleasant, or a woman who is slatternly, lewd, or drab”. If this is true, snerk. If untrue, god bless the internets.

[4] – Something like the blogosphere's version of peak oil. Only with memes and influence instead of hydrocarbons. Does this mean we need to pre-emptively invade, say, InstaPundit and establish permanent commentators to preserve important ideological space in the coming idea wars, though?