Day: July 28, 2002

Playing catchup tonight & sorting through posts / email that’s been piling up. One such item comes from Chad over at Steelypips: he counters call for more bloggers with a call for fewer pundit bloggers:
“The “blogosphere” is overrun with journalists and pundits and wannabe journalists and wannabe pundits presenting their view of the world. We’re swamped in political opinion pieces, most of which end up looking very similar, even when they come from different parts of the political spectrum…
But what I’d like to see is more occupational blogging. I’m getting tired or journalists and pundits, and people pretending to be journalists and pundits. Let’s get some more people writing about what they do for a living in other areas– teachers talking about education, editors talking about editing, caterers talking about catering, detective talking about detecting, garbagemen talking about trash collecting. 90% of such web logs will be crap, of course, but the 10% that are good will probably be fascinating in the same way that ‘True Porn Clerk Stories’ is.”
Well, I don’t know about that — porn’s pretty interesting, and all. But Chad’s point is well taken, and not at all in conflict with my original rallying cry.
I just want more bloggers, writing about whatever it is on Earth (or elsewhere) they find interests them. If that’s their career, great. I don’t promise to read them all, but I’ll be happy to know they are out there.
It’s hard to argue that there’s a lot of armchair punditry going on, and that much of it is — well, redundant is probably as kind a word as I can use accurately. But one point I was trying to make in my earlier post was that especially now, in a time of war, I think it’s important to have a healthy and open public debate on issues that affect us all.
You don’t have to be a pundit to express your feeling about what kind of society we should be: where you feel the best balance between security and freedom lies, for example. It’s that kind of contribution, not necessarily the Monday-morning politicking, that I think each and every person can make, if they choose to.

Something a little different today, if it wasn’t obvious already.
To present this post (well, posts, really) the way I envisioned it, I decided it needed its own template. So the link to the actual body of the post itself is here.
To allow folks to comment & trackback it, however, I’ve created this entry.
I present the post without comment for now, but would very much welcome feedback, comments, and thoughts.
-N.Z. Bear
By the way: One source of inspiration for one of the major threads of the piece was Holsinger’s StrategyPage piece on the potential impact of a smallpox attack (which Glenn linked to last week). And if you’re still wondering, yes, the kind of worst-case scenario described in Holsinger’s piece is (one of) the ghastly future events I’m presenting.
Update 7/29 AM: Thanks to all who have linked! (And to those who haven’t: please? Pretty please?). Still haven’t hit Blogdex or Daypop, but I’m hopeful. I’ll be a lot more excited to see this piece getting wide visibility than I was with that stupid TIPS satire. (Side note: I’ve even gotten hits from a Spanish-language journal on that one: it’s gone really far and wide…)
One thought I wanted to throw out: I find it interesting that (to my perception at least) folks seem to be reacting most strongly to the “we might end up building our very own totalitarian state” aspect of the piece. This is interesting to me because I thought the other part of it was kind of scary too — the fact that the scenarios I’m posing imply billions of people have died worldwide.
The core idea of the piece is that it’s possible to sacrifice our freedoms and lose the war. But it seems like folks are picking up more on the former, and less on the latter.
Not sure if that’s just a failure of writing clarity on my part, or if it says something more meaningful about the mindset folks have brought to the table in reading the piece…