I originally thought ‘LP’ referred to one of those four wheel drives they had in ancient Rome? But that interpretation always seemed too reactionary for leftists who drive around on bicycles and in Prius’s.

Perhaps ‘LP’ has religious significance – a blood drinking rite to cast out sin or perhaps something scatological? Maybe the original lavatorial sin…

Rog,

I don’t see the advantage in being hung with others. You are still dead. It sounds a rather selfish attitude.

We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately

As to your other comment, I don’t propose to open a discussion of a thread on LP here. One of my objections to metablogging is that it fractures conversations. The most appropriate place to discuss a post on LP is at LP. For similar reasons, I don’t feel that I am obliged to defend myself against hc again, because it’s very clear that no amount of evidence that LP isn’t a Rudd-lovin’ echo chamber is likely to convince him, so it would be a futile use of my and everyone else’s time.

‘Join my group – I am just like you’. Or, ‘keep away – you are not welcome here’.

Jacques, Not only is there no duty to do this it is foolish to do so.

It is interesting I had not read much inrto the banner at the top of Troppo. A different atmosphere here.

Fair enough. But weren’t you surprised at this ignorance? I don’t know about QLD, but in NSW, Keating is featured very prominently in the high school curriculum. I was chatting to a first year bloke a few years ago who told me he wrote essays on Keating in each of English, History, and Economics HSC exams the year before!

Oh and by the way, I am suficiently comfortable with my reading skills without needing any typically bitchy advice from you. OTOH, as I said, you would do well to sharpen your own communication methods.

And it augurs well for LP’s future that an extremely unusual thread whingeing about Kevin Bloody Donnelly has been posted. How so extremely unusual? The author is Kim, not you. Perhaps you will follow up with a reassertion there is no high and low culture?

If anything, your blog seems to be the odd man out in not declaring its political prejudices up front.

Is there such a duty?

Ooh, I just got a Usenet nostalgia attack.

Careful! Your valves are showing!

Can an adjective modify a verb?

Only if the verb is a gerund (in English, the present participle of the present continuous tense – e.g. “JG is diligently excising his adjectives, give or take one or two minor lapses” – is … excising is the present continuous of the verb “to excise”).

‘Perhaps harry thinks a blog can only be influential if its able to convince lefties of the error of their ways and come over to the dark side?’

Absolutely not, Troppo and John Quiggin’s blog would be counterexamples to such a claim.

Its not only a matter of ‘preaching to the converted’ but taking off the blinkers, holding your hand outstretched, taking a good look and counting four fingers and a thumb.

What does it mean when you say that a blog like LP ‘discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective’? Doesn’t this inevitably imply blinkers?

Things are not that complicated to analyse in terms of organising information. In politics, policies are espoused and you may or may not agree with their objectives (then you can discourse over the objectives to pursue) and then hold what is to me the more interesting discussion about whether the policies advanced will hit the spot or not.

That’s a hell of a lot better than saying ‘I am a leftie’ and establishing that as a premise that you, vaguely, don’t like markets, love public servants, dislike things American, split the world into honourable lefties/dishonourable people on the right etc etc etc. Its this type of nonsense that induces the cheerleader, echo-chamber atmosphere on LP.

It doesn’t cost you a lot in political discourse to work in terms of putting a position to start from scratch and make your point. Surely rationality and reason should be organising principle rather than blinkers. Naive ideas are often right.

Politicians like the late John Button and Bert Kelly were pretty good at doing this. Those at the centre of modern politics these days typically are not.

It also means that if you get it wrong that you admit you are wrong. After all the point is to get the argument right not to defend some hack politician and not to retreat into evasive verbiage or party-political stock responses.

Ooh, I just got a Usenet nostalgia attack.

Oh, and also diligent excising of adjectives in articles posted.

Like ‘diligent’, you mean?

What I was interested in – as a datum, if you like – was what they thought about Keating not having lived through the Keating era as adults.

NPOV, Daily Kos has funnelled donations to Democratic candidates before, and that’s the context in which the debate takes place. You might also like to consult Hillary Clinton’s statements on how the influence of the “netroots” worked against her.

It’s hard to see why the Democratic party would be particularly affected by anything that goes on in the pretty tiny “far left” movement that exists in the U.S., or why anyone in that movement would care much about the Democratic party, given it’s never shown any interest in far-left-type concerns (and minimal interest in what would be considered medium-left-type concerns in the rest of the world).

The problem with LP is that Howard has gone. It’s tone and perspective are far too reliant on the experiences of its main article-writers whose coming of political age coincided with Howard’s reign. After 12 years of unremitting anger, bile, snark, sarcasm, and pathological fixation on The Oz opinion pages the poor dears are now at a bit of a loss. Where this is most obvious is in the “quality” of the “analysis.”

They cannot look at the world in any way apart from Howard Boo, Not-Howard Hurrah! A hell of a lot of other economic/sociological/psychic/cultural events and trends emerged over this period, which they missed. LP largely – though as others above have noted, by no means not exclusively – reads like a series of extended Letters to the Editor to The Oz.

A prime example of this is Mark’s recent surprise that his undergrads were not very informed about Paul Keating. I must say I have always shaken my head at Mark’s deifying of Keating. It just shows a tin ear to the shifts in Australia over the 1990s. Another time he was excited that a Rudd government would ‘be a return to real Labor values, such as under Keating.’ Some Luvvies say the darndest things.

Unfortunately Mark and Kim will go to their graves still fighting the same Culture Wars they fought over the past decade.

Perhaps harry thinks a blog can only be influential if its able to convince lefties of the error of their ways and come over to the dark side?

I’m pretty sure he thinks that they are the dark side.

But surely there is a fair point there too. Consider the lack of any real impact of moveon or dailykos in actually getting people elected. If anything, they have probably cost the Democratic party by re-inforcing the far-left echo chamber!

Perhaps harry thinks a blog can only be influential if it’s able to convince lefties of the error of their ways and come over to the dark side?

Everything you say about the difficulties of this is spot-on. Related to your first point about the audience is of course the potential to put noses out of joint, a potential we’ve thoroughly demonstrated. This is a problem because goodwill is quite important to projects like this.

I think that in principle you can publish and get feedback as you go along. According to my own conception of the academic profession, I think it’s important to get this stuff out in public as it comes up, and use it to provoke discussion. I guess we’re hoping any methodologies will be applicable beyond just electoral politics type blogs, but whether they’re as immediately applicable is an open question.

The literary influence stuff is interesting, and an approach I hadn’t thought of. Relatedly, I have wanted to talk for awhile about issues of literary style and genre in blogging. Idiosyncratic essayist-type blogs like Andrew Elder’s are really interesting to me, and seem innovative in ways that talk of influence is just not going to be able to pick up. I am not sure whether we’ll get to it soon, but now you mention it it’s something I’d like to look into some time, Laura – I think literary scholarship has resources that I for one would like to draw on.

Yes, you’re absolutely right – I was noting this and feeling a bit bad about it before you pointed it out just now, actually. If I could manage to get over being not very interested in citizen journalism takes on blogging I would try to give you some more thoughtful feedback. As it is I have only got these thoughts Jason:

- you’re showing your preliminary/in process results to what’s quite possibly the worst possible audience for it, ie blog tragics who already do the crawl and scrape themselves, manually, every day when we log into bloglines or whatever. The first response of lots of these people is going to be: ‘*shrug* well, der Freddy. Now tell me something I didn’t know.’ I think perhaps you’ll get a less weird reception when you move on to more analytical work, and/or present your findings to people who aren’t immersed / permeated in the blogosphere already.

- On top of this you’re publicly reporting on your work while you’re in the midst of doing it and I can’t imagine how tricky that must be. I would not want to try it.

- I’m glad you’re not actually concentrating in this research on non electoral politics blogging, because I’m still liking blogging enough that I would rather just read it than be prodded to think about it analytically.

- I’m curious about whether you envisage doing work on influence and blogging that draws on theories of influence from literary studies – TS Eliot or Bloom for instance.