Conspiratorial liberals
As many people will have seen, some of the great and the good of the liberal/left of the UK blogosphere have come together to form an uberblog called Liberal Conspiracy, named with tongue firmly in cheek.
It’s raisons d’être are, I think, threefold: firstly, to give the liberal/left region of the UK polity a place to discuss things amongst itself without harping from the right; secondly, to come up with a set of discussion points to frame the former; and thirdly (I believe) to show that there is a problem with the blogosphere and to show a potential solution.
The problem is that an awful lot of comments on some of the bigger, better-known blogs are, frankly, inane. There is a lot of name-calling, fatuous remarking and not very much engaging with argument. In short, people want to rant but not to listen and try to convince without being prepared to be convinced. I had been thinking about writing that the best responses to posts were not in comments but in other posts that linked back to the original. Looking at Liberal Conspiracy, though, I begin to change my opinion. There is actual debate, with give and take, going on in the comments on each post.
I declare an interest here. I commented here about justifications for hate-crime laws on a post from Sunny of Pickled Politics and these comments were posted by Sunny on Liberal Conspiracy here. I’m delighted to have someone think my comments are worth reproducing and to have them on a blog like Liberal Conspiracy, so thank-you Sunny.
The name of the website reminds me of a mailing list amongst the right at LSE – the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, aka the Very Right-Wing Conspiracy.
xD.
November 18th, 2007 at 11:30 pm
Dave,
Well, if you hadn’t written that comment in that thread, I’d have tried to write the poor man’s version. But you did it far better than I would have done, and did it very succinctly.
Clarified – for me at least – what was an itch, about what was wrong with that thread. I thought it was a very good comment. And deserved it’s promotion.
November 19th, 2007 at 9:32 am
Hi Dave,
I’m delighted to have someone think my comments are worth reproducing and to have them on a blog like Liberal Conspiracy, so thank-you Sunny.
Of course your comments “are worth reproducing”. LC may have been dismissed – several times – as an echo-chamber for the “liberal elite”, but in my opinion, the platform has to be used to widen debate, bringing in many more voices from beyond the usual suspects.
November 19th, 2007 at 10:31 am
Well, thankyou Aaron!
I don’t think the echo-chamber accusation stands up. The different people on LC – from Dave Osler to Chris Dillow – give the lie to that.
Anyway, hope you keep reading the quite liberal and slightly conspiratorial blog of Dave Cole
xD.
November 19th, 2007 at 10:58 am
How do you define “left” and “right” these days?
November 19th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
To be honest, I try not to use those terms. They are a shorthand, and they are misleading. I think the political compass is a better way of doing it, but association with a particular world-view or set of ideas is better.
November 19th, 2007 at 8:55 pm
We righties are always harping, Dave. Still, a good read.