[Note: This post, a reflection on the New York launch of Pajamas nee Open Source Media, is a consolidation of the original six-part essay into one, easily-linkable piece. Links to the original six pieces are given in the end of the essay. -S]

Ask not on whom the Joke is… the Joke is on Us

Everyone writes with an audience in mind. To some extent, what we write says something about what we think of that audience: Are we condescending? Demagogic? Demanding? Generous? Some of the above?

Bloggers, especially the political bloggers who form the core of the new Pajamas Open Source Media, got their start by writing to an imagined audience that wanted to hear what they had to say even if, initially, they had no idea how large an audience that might be (and any expert in the MSM would have told them to forget about it). Above all they broke the matrix of MSM mimetic desire, the now suffocating arrogance of the gatekeepers of public discourse, those who get repeat parts in the public discussion, those who adhere to the powerful, if invisible, consensus as to what the “public” wants (entertainment, lifestyle issues, national news, all packaged professionally) and what they need (images that encourage respect for other cultures, that do not give fodder for right-wing warmongering).

I once read about a fish that is programmed to follow the fish in front of it, so that they all follow each other and the whole school moves in a kind of Brownian motion. But when experimenters took one fish and pithed the part of the brain that made it follow other fish, it swam off in any direction and drew in its wake the rest of the school. Although far from pithed, or random motion, the bloggers who form the core of PJMedia’s initial launch group, and those who follow them, are not random swimmers followed by mimetic idiot(arians). They are mavericks followed by independent thinkers, and they do break out of the Brownian motion of the MSM. No phenomenon illustrates better the workings of the invisible hand in the market place of ideas, than the sudden, stunning, and salutary rise to the top of the blogosphere of such independent minds as Richard Fernandez, Glenn Reynolds, Charles Johnson, Roger Simon… ah, the list could go on forever.

So going to the launch of PJMedia promised to be a delightful experience. It was like going to a convention of people, all of whom, were they at the procession where the emperor paraded naked, would have said – indeed they have said – “Daddy, why is the emperor naked?”

But every time a grass-roots movement institutionalizes, or as Max Weber says, goes from charisma to rationalization, certain dangers emerge. This week we’re studying heresies in my medieval French history course. Repeatedly movements that started out charismatic, independent, passionate, gained immense popularity thereby, and got drawn in the direction of institutionalization that all too often distorted the very source of their initial strength. Francis of Assissi, pressured to form an order by the Pope Innocent III in the early 13th century, ended up resigning from his order, so unhappy was he with the results; and before the century was out, institutional Franciscans were executing spiritual Franciscans for heresy. Now modern grass-roots movements like the blogosphere need not be as extreme in their demands, nor as violent in their transformation, but... you get the idea. And since Pajamas Media was such a nice term – like the Lollards or the Quakers, a name given to the group by disdainful outsiders and accepted by the group as a way of turning the insult around – the idea that it would be discarded in favor of something more neutral made me uneasy.

Would the process of institutionalizing contribute to shifting from a primarily free-wheeling discourse that rewards plain talk and common sense to one that worries about who speaks rather than what they say. As OSM becomes a portal to the blogosphere, it runs the risk of shifting attention in this direction, and ending up more as a gatekeeper than a portal. How much effort will now go into catching the eyes of the institutionally powerful decision makers, rather than into addressing the very audience of plain-thinkers who raised them to prominence? This can be the beginning of the slippery slope of mimetic desire that leads to a group of people who, taking their cues from above, end up praising “the emperor’s new clothes.”

Pushing that thought to the back of my mind, with the prospect of hanging with all the lively independent minds, I made my way over to the W hotel on Wednesday night with Pedro Zuquete (my partner in crime), just glad to be there.

Getting Warmed Up: The Root Causes of Terrorism

The first evening, after spending a delightful time with, among others, Sol (Solomonia), Pieter Dorsman (Peak Talk) and Stephen Green (Vodka Pundit) on the lobby of the W, Pedro pointed out David Corn of The Nation to me.

“We used one of his writings to illustrate the PCP (Politically Correct Paradigm) slogan, poverty breeds terrorism.”

“Really, so what’s he doing here?” I asked, thinking that that was a pretty idiotarian position to hold.

“He’s the token leftist on the steering committee.” (On the panel, Corn referred to himself at the “token liberal”).

“Great, let’s ask him if he really thinks that.”

We finally reached him by “joining” a conversation between him and Pamela, of (don’t mess with) Atlas Shrugs.

“Is it true” I said, with the kind of incredulous tone that tends to make people defensive, “that you think poverty breeds terrorism?”

“I didn’t say that,” Corn responded quickly, “I said that addressing poverty is a way among others to reduce terrorism. I didn’t say that poverty breeds terrorism [ah, cyberspace is so merciless]. I’m just arguing that if you have programs and help the economic situation, then you’ve going to reduce terrorism and… the influence of jihadis,” he said, gesturing to us as if to say, “you know, the people you’re so worried about’).

“That’s not helping, that’s extortion money,” Pamela shot back without missing a beat. Pure PCP vs JP. This was going to be a lot of fun.

First Panel: Whimper of Joke?

I didn’t check the program, trusting that it would be stellar. We finally sit down, at our tables with outlets and wireless, and then have Roger and Charles tell us about OSM. Good stuff… I’m following on my computer – what a great way to take notes at a conference, look up anything I want while the speaker speaks. And then the first panel. Lifestyles.

Lifestyles? I look up from my computer and watch in astonishment and growing horror as a bevy of smart beauties take their seats, introduced by a witty moderator, each one a specialist in that great lifestyle arena – fashion. And behind, occasionally adding a comment in a disembodied voice, the great Manolo, whose Dadaesque blog on shoes and other fashion accessories I quickly visited.

“Wait a minute,” I thought, “the last time I looked in my computer, France was still burning (smoldering the MSM would insist), and we’re listening to what?”

I look at Pedro with astonishment. He smiles at me and raises his eyebrows. Then the panel begins with Elizabeth Hayt, fashion columnist for the NYT and author of I'm No Saint : A Nasty Little Memoir of Love and Leaving (2005) and when asked the very deep question “what do you think the blogosphere means for fashion?” replied with refreshing candor: “I’m not sure why you’ve asked me here, I don’t blog, I don’t even think blogging is useful, it’s for rich people with too much time on their hands.” I blinked. Excuse me? Wait a minute, what’s going on here. Isn’t this woman making a fine career in fashion, that field for people with too little money and too little time on their hands? Did I go to the wrong place. Is this the People Magazine blog launch?

Pedro leaned over and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “It must be a joke.”

I looked around to see who got it. The faces were wonderful. Some staring in disbelief, some smiling, some annoyed, the people with computers started to work… Sol had a poker face with the traces of a bemused smile on the edges of his lips, no way to tell what he’s thinking; Tom Bowler pulled his glasses down and a blank stare descended over his face. One of our tablemates leaned forward and whispered in Pedro’s ear: “I think they’re waiting for Larry Kudlow.”

The situation became particularly surreal when the nice looking blonde girl on the panel, began talking about the make-up styles of celebrities: “I trash them every Saturday.” Stunned silence. Some people started moving uncomfortably in their seats, others looked bemused and, others like Pedro, were slowly becoming aware that the joke was on us. I felt like the Roman soldiers in Life of Brian trying desperately not to laugh as Pontius Pilate talks about his fwend Biggus Dickus and his wife Incontinentia Buttox. I wondered how many people out in cyberspace were dropping out in astonished dismay.

As Austin Bay put it later, in an interesting conversation with me, neo-neocon and Pedro, Elizabeth Hayt “was quite admirable in her lack of curiosity.” What? New York Times? Uninterested in the world around it? How can you say that?

Second Panel: Which Century are We in?

The middle panel was good, although much of the discussion revolved around the kind of sport’s thinking that Charles had deplored in his opening comments. It does not help to think in terms of liberal, conservative, right, left, the two teams that you try to “balance” in order to be “fair” or “objective.” And yet the panel had been stacked to give us those 20th century notions center stage, especially with David Corn and John Podhoretz (author of Bush Country : How George W. Bush Became the First Great Leader of the 21st Century---While Driving Liberals Insane) who started going at each other before we even heard from Claudia Rosett. Much reworking of the old debates about objectivity and facts vs. opinion and partisanship, about the difference between gumshoeing (what the best of the MSM claims to do – gathering facts) and thumbsucking (what the worst of the blogosphere thrives on – ruminating narcissism). Richard Fernandez of Belmont Club illustrated the sterling quality of the best bloggers, ferociously smart, modest of demeanor, thinking about the question he’s been asked, speaking in paragraphs.

He explored what it is that makes information as accurate as we can shape it, how we pursue theories (I’d prefer to call them “working hypotheses” – like, is the first panel an intentional joke?) and see how they firm up over time as we take in more data (after five minutes, apparently not), how we need to think about what would have to be true in order for what we (or someone else) think has happened to also be true (someone thought this would be a great way to show OSM’s broad spectrum of interests, and managed to convince the board). Listening to Richard was in some ways like revisiting the very exploration of thinking about reason and reality-testing in the 16th and 17th centuries, that made the West an open society, the place where both modern academia and modern science were born after the advent of printing.

The discussion ended with an observation on the difference in our idea of what’s going on in Iraq that we get from bloggers there and from the MSM here, prompting Podhoretz to make the classic “right-wing” argument that we really won the Tet offensive, and that the MSM (thank you uncle Walt), took it away by presenting it as a catastrophe, an observation that Austin Bay affirmed later that afternoon. But to bring this argument up to speed, John took it a step further, proffered the interesting analogous argument that, had there been bloggers in Vietnam, we would have won the war. Interesting, perhaps going too far. Worth a thought, an exploration.

"Oh yeah,” responds Corn in classic “left-wing” style, “well what about Latin America!”

“Oh yeah,” says Podhoretz, “well what about Irving Stone!”

And with a crescendo into the puerile arguments that have produced our current state of self-ghettoization, the panel came to an end with a promise to look further into these matters. (I hope OSM follows up on this one.)

At lunch we talked about the morning sessions, and I remarked about how it would be nice to know the statistics about who was following the webcast, and be able to trace what I suspected – looking at the members of the audience “drop out” – was a precipitous drop-off as the first panel went on. “It was webcast?” one of our table companions gasped, blushing bright red. Ouch.

Keynote: Preaching to the Great Unwashed

But the best was for after lunch. Glenn Reynolds (a.k.a InstaPundit) introduced keynote Judith Miller. Why Judith Miller? Why not Glenn Reynolds (whose book “An Army of Davids : How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths” with a scheduled date release of March 2006 is already a best-seller at Amazon)? Like Elizabeth Hayt in the first panel, she admits she doesn’t blog, she only really found out about them when she was in prison and didn’t have internet access, and actually, she admitted later in the discussion as she entertained the suggestion that she really should blog, she finds the prospect quite “terrifying.”

Why is she here? Because she’s the Martha Stewart of journalism? The current MSM celebrity? Because various key legislation swirls around her case? Okay. Whatever. I guess I just happen to have other concerns. But wait, what’s that she’s saying?

“Let me tell you the five commandments of journalism.”

Huh?!? What does she think she’s doing?

Apparently she views herself as the representative of serious mainstream journalism who has come to give some elementary ethics and advice to these junior journalist bloggers so that they too could aspire to the heights of mainstream excellence.

Is this dramatic misreading of the audience due to “lack of curiosity” as Austin would put it dryly, or the result of such intense cocooning that she doesn’t know to whom she speaks? (Are these two sides of the same coin?) Is this a whiff of that characteristic arrogance that has given us so much MSM misbehavior, including the Olympian disdain that prompted Dan Rather to talk about those “those guys sitting around at 2:00 AM in their pajamas”? Oh wait, she’s also NYT, or was.

It could only get surreal from this point on. Her first three commandments were elementary, known to anyone in the room, perhaps useful to recall, but hardly keynote timber. But then the whopper: “Fourth commandment: If you are wrong, acknowledge it prominently, and follow up with further stories.”

Silence. My jaw dropped. Even she squirmed, distancing herself sotto voce from the NYT editorial policy on this. This woman wrote for a paper with a scandalous record of “correcting itself,” with some of the worst misreporting on its record, including the Holocaust on the back pages just to name one of the more staggering… Nor does it have any institutional memory of such catastrophic failures, as it careens into a similar lack of understanding and a systematic downplaying of another round of genocidal ferocity aimed at Jews.

One of the main causes of the blogosphere’s success comes precisely from the brick wall that descends from the MSM any time serious corrections are in order. The case we work on at Second Draft, that of the “martyr” Muhammed al Durah (launch of dossier next week, really) is one that had spectacularly destructive initial impact and never got “followed up” on even as plentiful evidence emerged that the media had gotten it wrong emerged… with few exceptions that really went nowhere, for five years now. Embarrassingly wrong. Anyone who has read Renata Adler on the combination of superciliousness and arrogance that characterizes the NYT attitude towards self correction had to laugh at this lesson in MSM ethics. Or cry.

After all, what characterizes the blogosphere – and may explain Miller’s terrified attitude towards it – is that if you have a thin skin, you’re doomed. Don’t expect polite coddling, don’t expect to escape correction – immediate correction – if you mess up. (How many of my “quotations” from the talks are accurate, when I haven’t gone back to consult the actual talks? Someone will probably tell me if I’m wrong pretty quickly.) Bloggers are accustomed to a level of give-and-take which the MSM has systematically insulated themselves from with tragic consequences. (Could we say that blogging is on one level the record of letters to the editor that the MSM refused to publish?)

Who’s in Which Century/Millennium?

At first I didn’t quite get it. Everyone I talked to who blogged was uniformly interesting, no matter how much we might not agree on some matters. Independent thinkers all, combining nicely two difficult traits – assertiveness and modesty. What a delight. It really was a convention of the people who, at the emperor’s parade, would have been unashamed to ask embarrassing questions. And as I contrasted the quality of conversation in the halls with the panel discussions, I realized that I was walking through liminal terrain, between the two-dimensional, colorblind paradigms of the 20th century, and the emerging stereoscopic color-rich vision that begins to emerge from the blogs.

Want to know what’s going on in France? Check out Belmont Club, Brussels Journal, or Jihad Watch. They leave MSM coverage in the dust. Red pill or blue pill? How do you want to reality test? Read them both, all, by all means. What's really happening? We won't know until later, in the meantime, without the blogs, we would have very little idea that there's more to this than what the MSM report.

A discussion later on about one of the more colorful of the bloggers having been “on the bus” with Ken Kesey, reminded me of a story Tom Wolfe tells in Electric Koolaid Acid Test about when Kesey first took acid as part of hospital experiments conducted in the 1950s, shortly after its discovery. Some were given the drug, some a placebo. Within a short while, it was obvious who got the acid and who got the placebo. Within a short while in any given conversation, it was clear who was in the 21st century, and who in the 20th. How stimulating to talk with OSM bloggers. How familiar the holding actions and resistances of those who, weighed down with the baggage of political correctness, still have a reflexive confidence in the MSM.

All this became clear in a random conversation with a photographer who came to see one of his friends attending the launch. We were at the bar later that evening, talking about the MSM and the blogosphere, and I remarked that the difference in coverage of the French Intifada was stark, with the blogosphere on it from night one, and the MSM waiting till the end of week 1 before mentioning it in the back pages.

“Not true,” he insisted. “The pictures were up at a newswire services the first day.”

“Maybe, I don’t know,” I replied, “but what you say makes it worse. The media had these pictures from the start, and didn’t use them or mention the story for days?”

“Look, the MSM have to make decisions about what’s important to their readerships’ lives, so if they didn’t cover it for a couple of days, that makes perfect sense. It just wasn’t that important.”

“First of all, it was five days, not two. Secondly, that very attitude is part of the problem. The blogosphere understood immediately how significant these riots were, partly because they have been paying attention to RoP and Eurabia whereas the MSM have been systematically ignoring these issues. And so, when the MSM finally wake up to the riots they didn’t deign worthy of attention until day five, on day six they already know what they’re about, explaining to us that it has nothing to do with Islam, but its really all about poverty and discrimination.” (As if the two are mutually exclusive.. as if eliminating Islam from the picture will make things clearer…)

I spare the reader the blow-by-blow, although if you want the other guy’s version (with me as a gung-ho supporter of OSM, and demonizer of the MSM), it’s here, with me as “Boston Guy.” My suspicion that I was speaking with a PCPer is there confirmed. “It sounded like classic rioting with all the classic reasons for rioting. It was horrible but wasn’t directly affecting my life, as I was working very hard to get a guy elected governor of New Jersey. People riot for a reason, things burn and then change comes for better or worse.” Probably worse, as long as people continue to think in terms of “classical” rather than religious terms. Of course that would mean overcoming cognitive egocentrism.

Finally, when he had repeated his comment about, “so what if they didn’t cover it for the first two days, it wasn’t important…,” Pedro stepped into the conversation and quietly asked, “Do you blog?”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

[It turns out he has his own blog, with occasional postings and no mechanism for comments.]

“Let me tell you about a French expression,” I cut in with what may have been an excessively triumphalist tone that lacked the modesty I normally praise, ‘c’est très deuxième millénaire,’ that’s very second millennium, or, to be a bit more immediate, you have a very 20th century attitude. You might want to get up to speed in the 21st century.”

“You don’t know anything about me, and I find that presumptuous and insulting,” he said as he grabbed his stuff and left, apparently thinking that I thought of the NYT and the MSM as an “evil… conspiracy.”

I’d prefer “persistently incompetent MSM.” I guess we all hear what we want to hear. I'm actually quite critical of thinking conspiratorially or projecting it onto people who do not explicitly embrace it. But I had been abrasive and probably deserved it.

There’s a wonderful passage in C.S.Lewis’ The Great Divorce, his answer to Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, where he describes how people first respond to heaven. They are overwhelmed by the intensity, they are unprepared for it, they are fragile, the very grass cuts their thin skins, they need time to adjust. Of course that takes the ability to acknowledge that there’s something to adjust to.

[Previous: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4]

NB: This next section was written, the day after the launch, before the recent (and welcome) change back to PJMedia.

What Were They Thinking?

Okay it’s easy to make fun of the MSM, what about OSM?

As Roger Simon put it, “what a day of juitjisui – we invite them, give them a place, and they illustrate what we’ve been saying along.”

Is this read a brave face on a miscalculation? Or triumph of the Art of War?

Inviting them seems more like a positioning move than a trick to get themselves to reveal what idiotarians they are. This was, a number of people sagely explained to me, “reaching out to the MSM” by giving them a place in the process whereby PJ Media sheds its maverick garb and attempts to establish itself as a portal from the blogosphere to the MSM.

Okay… but who is inviting whom? The MSMers clearly don’t get what’s going on; and hopefully the people driving OSM won’t forget what’s going on.

“Don’t forget who gave you your prominence,” I said to one of the suited young Turks in OSM at the cocktail party, “don’t forget it is independent thinkers who form your most precious audience and took these blogger stars from obscurity to celebrity.”

“No one is forgetting that,” he replied. (Was that a defensive response? Working hypothesis…)

“Well the opening round, with all the MSM people showing us how little they understood, rather than featuring the bloggers and exploring the future, wasn’t very promising.” I said, choosing the role of gadfly rather than pressing the flesh and looking for a way in with this gatekeeper of OSM.

“We put a lot of effort into this event,” he replied (firming up the working hypothesis).

“That doesn’t mean you necessarily made the right choices.”

“You’re freaking me out here,” he said, leaving me. (Maybe one shouldn’t criticize people on their launch day.)

I guess I can’t count on a call from him to join in planning new projects.

Fortunately, Charles, in a similar conversation, was far less thin-skinned.

Pedro on the other hand spent most of the time talking to the two other Europeans (“united against Eurabia?”) at the party: Paul Berger Englishman in New York (who, after discussing Israel and Palestine for almost an hour, said to Pedro “you’ve exhausted me!”) and Pieter Dorsman from PeakTalk (who, like Pedro, will probably apply for ‘political refugee status’ in the US).

Late night conversation around a fire with Pedro, Glenn Reynolds, Mary Madigan, and Judith Weiss. Very smart, informed, opinionated people, unencumbered by the PCP baggage that normally chokes conversation. These are people who would not, as the French and Europeans do, choose slow strangulation rather than risk the embarrassment of saying something that might be considered racist.

It occurred to me, as I heard a number of people mention that they used to be on the left (Charles, Roger, Neo), that the blogosphere represents an interesting refuge from the increasingly self-ghettoized “left” that has, both in academia and in the MSM, isolated anyone who brings up politically incorrect attitudes. This process, of long standing, took a sharp turn to the insane with the outbreak of the second Intifada in 2000, and showed its full and astonishing lack of understanding, with the response of many on the left to 9-11 – “it’s all our fault; we’re the real terrorists; and if only we could change, they wouldn’t hate us so.” The more idiotarian they get, the less they can tolerate serious criticism, the more isolated they must become, driving out anyone who has the nerve to suggest they’re getting it wrong.

As a result, they shun, as Jill Hunter, in a variant on Neo’s experience, put it in the title of her self-published book, How I read the Quran and Lost all my Friends. So you get a left that is literally incapable of reality testing, so intent is it on avoiding any criticism. Some of the people thus shunned, end up on the right, neo-cons and beyond. But some of us refuse to be driven out of the left (if by left one means progressive thinking about freedom, decency and fairness), by people who have hijacked it (again) for loopy utopian projects laced with a not so secret admiration for vicious aggressors. As the conference continued it occurred to me, now I know where at least some of us go – the blogosphere.

NB: This final part was written the day after the launch. Notes added on final revision in [].

Working hypotheses: Whither the Blogosphere and OSM?

So what's the bottom line? What's happening in the blogosphere and its first "portal" OSM?

How about some working hypotheses? (Feel free to offer others.)

Working hypothesis 1: The launch was a goof easily forgivable since it brought so many great minds together and the planners deserve the benefit of the doubt. Getting MSMers to show their colors was not really a high priority: it's not like the blogosphere needed further demonstrations of their "lack of curiosity," and was only embarrassing to the MSMers invited (if they noticed). The choices made for panels represent a dangerous tendency to "cash in" the power acquired from slaying the Rather dragon, and an over-eagerness to get a place at the MSM table. To raise the money, the organizers had to compromise, shed their maverick appearance, put on suits and ties - not Charles! - and get with the program. This long-term trend is towards OSM as a gatekeeper of bloggers wanting to go mainstream, rather than a portal.

Working hypothesis 2: The blogosphere will not let them get away with it, and the OSM organizers will, like the bloggers they are, and not the MSMers they are flirting with, admit the mistake, hopefully with humor [and grace], and pull back. [I am delighted to report that this is already the case.] The blogosphere is only in its infancy. (Before coming, I asked my students how many read blogs. Only two out of forty. It was like my asking who had emails in 1995. Within a couple of years I imagine they all will.) OSM will become the first, but only one of several portals that link the two dramatically different worlds of the blogosphere and the MSM. Neither, eventually, will be able to do without the other. But neither should they merge.

I came to the launch partly as an historian of communications revolutions, one who over a decade ago, accepted the analogy that cyberspace will be to the 21st century what printing was to the 16th. That meant several expectations:

• The emergence of "new religious movements" (in the 16th century, Protestant sects ranging from the initially revolutionary but eventually conservative Lutherans to the radical egalitarian Anabaptists).
• The emergence of a new generation of self-taught intellectuals whose conversation, through the new medium of print, circumvented the monopoly on intellectual discourse that the medieval university clerics maintained ("city of letters").
• An ever evolving set of technological improvements that would change the very nature of discourse in the "public sphere," including radical changes in the nature of news collection and dissemination (broadsheets, newspapers)

Now all of these changes five centuries ago took place over the course of decades and centuries, but with the dramatic transformations of the social and cultural dynamics at work at the time, we could expect cyberspace to evolve at a much faster pace.

I have not been disappointed with the developments such a perspective has led me to notice, with the appearance of global Jihad as the most worrisome "new religious movement" to use the internet as a major venue, and the appearance of the blogosphere as the most delightful of such developments, the equivalent of the pamphlet culture of early printing (Protestant Reformation). For me, this McLuhanesque creation was not just historical, it was epochal. And I came to witness and participate. Not entirely to my surprise, but much to my disappointment, the planners seem to have focused on a set of concerns that don't even make it to historical, much less epochal concerns, and definitely did not make it out of the conventional thinking of the 20th century. Let's hope they tune back in. This is, after all, not just the 21st century, it's the third millennium.

Hopefully, the forces that created this opportunity will continue to shape the dynamics, and this launch will remain an embarrassing misjudgment and no more. Many of us are aware of how perilous our current global path, of how blind our MSM have rendered us, and how important it is that the blogosphere save the MSM from its own idiotarian stupidity, not join it. I don't know about fashion, but I'm pretty sure that the kind of blogging that should go on at OSM [now OSM PJMedia], is not about rich people with too much time on their hands, but clear thinkers aware of our present peril and not weighed down by the (perhaps unavoidable) political correctness that so constrains their abilities.

Blake informs us that one of the proverbs of hell reads: "Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you." It seems to us that the MSM needs to cook a bit more before they can go from complacency to curiosity. And we'd hate to see the blogosphere invaded by people who are not ready to speak their minds. As another proverb of hell has it: "Opposition is true friendship" - and that seems to be a good motto for the relationship of the blogosphere to the MSM, at least for a good long while -- however long that is, in the quickening of time in our day. Vive la difference!

Richard and Pedro
The Second Draft
www.seconddraft.org

[This post original appeared in Six parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6]