What kind of blog is Troppo?

I have no complaints with the ‘pamphleteering’ label. It’s a noble old tradition.

“I have no complaints with the pamphleteering label. Its a noble old tradition.”

Ditto.

So I look forward to all the things that Doc Nick could say on the record about the Cutler Review that he can’t say off the record.

I mean really Nick, half of it was pinched from the NIA, half was just stating the bleeding obvious (Yes son, a tradition among consultants) and the half with good ideas was not the half with new ideas. Basically it was put together by people who couldn’t add up four halves.

And instead came up with “Ventorous” as a buzzword. It’s like “Incentivation” – which, as Hawke beautifully explained, sounds like something you do to cats.

When I was at university I bought a monochrome poster of Michelangelo’s David (remember how you used to buy those big posters from Poster Shops and put them on your college room wall?). When I got sick of it, being b&w and all, I got out a pencil and marked it up into areas of what I considered to be four shades of grey. Then I painted each area a different colour, probably purple, red, blue, green or something. What I created was an interesting image, I thought. I was very pleased with the very striking effect. But it had nothing to do with the David, except for the outline and it utterly hid, by intention, any nuance. So while it might have been interesting it no longer bore any relation to the reality of the artwork or the sculptor’s intention. It was interesting but it wasn’t “useful”. It didn’t tell anyone about the David, but it told them quite a lot about me……

Mine’s a ‘I’m in charge of the world’ kind of blog.

And Margaret knows what she is supposed to be doing right now!

What kind of blog is “Troppo”?

How’d it start? If memory serves, a bloke with a sense of humour and clearly skilled background to say the least, which from admission had swerved to the left at times, had chosen to walk the middle path. As armadillos do, apparently.

KP from memory wrote some riveting pieces, and engaged in the rough and tumble. While the work at the time has ebbed, what lingers (sadly, for my part for sure) are the times when KP went full bore, and if that didn’t work at his site, comments were deleted, included the author’s, with the bat and ball solidly packed in the bag and homeward bound.

Obviously I’m going to be corrected here.. happily so. But those days were remembered by this commenter as passionate, concise but for the dummy spit (well, they were concise, but about people not topic), obviously articulate and knowledgeable while not for me to make a call on the latter.

And that’s a point. As a blue collar reader, KP’s original blog allowed us some entry into the space published. We sat back and thought upon the posts, if we didn’t understand them we felt a part of it in some way at least. Some chose to throttle the bastard, some picked up on a bitchiness living within, but while raw in today’s standards it was open.. well, except when it were shut.

But it was always clear cut, and driven by a person(ality), who had achieved in the blogosphere serious cred.

How’d it go then?

Nicholas Gruen entered – invited, or self-promoted? One remembers some early days as promotion for Peach Home Loans (and Alan Kohler comes to mind) and the whole blog had changed.

Sure, great posts have been made by today’s two owners, while all of that was happening.

You want a reader’s answer to your question?

The blog as one man’s vision and effort with all its foibles had established clear success for that person’s quality of effort. It became then “Club Troppo” and a new element had entered (not just personality). And for quite a while it was a Club.

But as a blog it is a club no longer.

No doubt where Troppo excels is in its own hemisphere. When the brilliant minds of KP and NG do their focused thing. As a reader, I sit back and watch those years of study, hardship, training and knowledge go. When it’s delivered in concert with the writer’s area of expertise it is riveting reading even when as a reader I know nothing about it. KP on this blog has a history of writing this way (and probably much more aways), and Nicholas Gruen kicks it to bits when on professional task.

Those things obviously this blue collar guy can’t comment on other than to table the above para as the beginning of the mark of respect.

To continue to answer the question posed at top, tho, it has to be acknowledged that those professional skills and that serious history talks really only to an informed crowd.

Outside of that, “Club” Troppo does not succeed. It’s not a club, as one expected it to be from its early design and as presented, but a clique. A brilliant clique, no doubt, to those in that brilliant professional sphere, no matter those challenges or conflicts as presented from professional compatriots. And but a poor club with flubbergut or poncy attempts to “strongman” others from it who “don’t get it” accordingly. The latter is worth a second and third look, with respect, if you want those readers to stay on board, though it could be said many have been lost in the while.

Pamphleteer? No. Deservedly vying for unique apace, yes. A force or power? Yes.

Middle of the road? Centrist?

Only so far as a silent elitism can go.

Sorry, guys, and I don’t include here the wonderful contributors otherwise, but for KP, and NG, seeing you have asked, I would say Club Troppo has grown with a stain of elitism pulsing through its veins which renders it brilliant but isolated at best (as a public space); a wary acceptance into that space – a clique – covered quite well by acceptance of the norms of rational argument/procedures; into tryhard efforts to say you’re actually good blokes when we inherently feel, or want to feel, you are; into, well… so-called Club Troppo lost a lot of people recently with its “competition”.

What kind of blog is () Troppo? Dunno. You guys have to choose, and then make it so.

Hi everyone at Troppo.

Just to let u know that I’m developing an expose of Margaret’s intellectual bankruptcy, so you may not wish to put much stock in her analysis of the blogosphere (or anything really) until you read it.

Good times, good times.

Actually, the entire expose is unnecessary.

Blame it on a lack of sleep and my mother’s lecture on the importance of expressing oneself without swearing.

She just doesn’t understand that swearing is sometimes appropriate, especially when it indicates a real level of disgust with someone else’s behaviour. Although in this case that behaviour was not intentional, just a result of an unwillingness to get to grips with complexity.

Or so I hope…

But why Margaret??? When the answers were out there? Why did you not raise the possibilities I had suggested? Possibilities that did not require excessive red tape?

Why?

You were my ally…

I must say I’m in agreement with Melaleuca, whose blog I’ve just discovered and I am slowly taking a peek at. I certainly wouldn’t describe Troppo in any vein of elitism unless you count when economics is discussed, the other two main blogs mentioned are leaps and bounds ahead on that front.

Out of the options provided, I would go with a Gate Watching blog and assessing things solely on their documented merit and the evidence. I differentiate this from the “Pamphleteering” described as those blogs seem to be based on their opinion of the evidence.

I guess it could be described as “Popular Mechanics” for Public Servants.

I am surprised that people seem so upset by the “pamphleteering” word. I certainly intended nothing pejorative. Pamphleteering is indeed an old, honourable and important tradition. Pamphlets have been at the centre of every social movement of the last few centuries. If blogging is reviving pamphleteering after their near crushing by the dominance of mainstream op ed pages, I think that is something to be celebrated.

Nor did I mean to suggest that LP and Catallaxy and the others only sing one song. Rather they are a venue for the publication of “pamphlets” from different people with many different points of view on different issues. Certainly, like most “publishing houses”, these blogs have a particular range of interests and world view, but I did not mean to imply that these blogs are only ONE pamphlet. They are publishers of many pamphlets.

As I said at the start of my piece, it was a first stab at a taxonomy aimed at getting some debate going. The main stimulus was the way in which Mark Day and others – including some of my fellow speakers at the recent Melbourne Writers Festival – tend to make all or nothing statements about the effect and usefulness of blogs. I think blogs are now doing so many different things that statements such as Day’s are close to meaningless. We need to try and define the terms. If others can do better – go for it. I am not claiming any special expertise here.

I considered whether Club Troppo was pamphleteering or not, and couldn’t make up my mind. Sometimes it seems to me to be more of an alternative op ed page, which is different to a pamphlet – but perhaps not all that different. I’d probably tend to say it is a pamphleteer, and I mean that in the nicest possible way!