Kari wants to be a judge of what is lefty or not.
My Response:
For technical merit I do like the project. It will be a useful resource.
Yet I find the whole notion of your culling process a bit silly and fruitless.
Here is a snippet from a comment made on a local so-called leftyblog.
Portland Communique: Lobby, Lobby, Who's In The Lobby?
"Associations that are concerned with community livability might instead be analogized to the function served by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).
Community involvement involves the mechanism of individual expression working its way from the individual up, and then to be presented to officials at the top in a decision making capacity. Art is likewise an individual expression that is no less political than was the Statue of David. There are folks at the national level, those that control the purse strings, who object to the placement of a likeness of Jesus within a vat of urine. It is undeniably true that such expression is Art, but the issue is the control of the dollars and the means used to either limit particular pieces of Art, that which some find objectionable, or to limit the entirety of all funding for the NEA. Speech, by a lonely little citizen, or collection of citizens, that does not fit within the City's vision of [Neighborhood Associations (NAs)] is far more complicated than just whether an NA is transparent."
If you have success at crafting a definition of progressive or of lefty I would surely like to hear it.
Try applying it here to these posts
- Demand Inspection And Release of Legal Advice Over Lipscomb Matter . . . As It Is Now Concluded. Yeah Right.
- Context on the Nuclear Power of the Word MOOT (Oregon PERS Case)
- Ignore the Settlement – Look Only To The New Rate Ruling – Recalculate The UAL Too, As It Would Have Been
then let me know how they fit or don't fit the definition. I will be the advocate of last resort to PERS folks against the arbitrary use of government power against their interest, where the unions are even complicit in the attack.
If you created a RightyBlogs list and placed mine there would it seem just a tad bit embarrassing? I offer these thoughts here only because I at least see hope that you might mature, but that is entirely up to you. This is from a real live critical economist.
Here is a suggestion:
Create a mechanism for voting and ranking by blog authors themselves. Treat it much like that of of a Survivor show. But place the reject pile of RSS feeds into an alternative site, like RightyBlogs, or rejected lefty blogs or whatever, and then let the audience glean from such selections what your site(s) have to offer. You might even create a too-left for reason site for argregating a list of out of bounds thoughts.
You could even let some folks rate individual posts themselves as an individual blogger can be all over the map in terms of ideology. You have got to know your own limits of judging all things by all bloggers.
One Man's Troll Is Another Man's . . .
PDX Media Watch dead? - Looks like PDX Media Watch has died a sudden death, or at least gone into hibernation. Sorry for those who wanted something useful. The trolls ate my site. Thoughts?... [BlueOregon]
Search For Common Ground, Someone Has Got To Do It
My prime motivating intellectual drive in the 1980's was anti-RayGun but I suspect that it would all be lost on you.
It is too easy to categorize people than it is to categorize analytical methods. I view analysis of ideas in the same vein as I view the scientific method; it is indispensable.
The very same thing that repelled and revolted me about the Young Republicans also repels me from the Young Democrats and their buzz words like "progressive." I can swap the adjective to regressive and test my frequently articulated proposition that a gullible army of do-gooders are the victim of someone else's skillful framing.
I do like to find structural things upon which everybody can agree rather than to focus on shepherding a flock; for which ideology is but a tool.
Criticism of Marx is often isolated to his minor musing about a possible remedy to his own criticism of certain features or tendencies of capitalism. But that itself is not sufficient to rebut the validity of the criticisms that he offered about capitalism. By the same token, the mere offering of remedies by "progressives" to perceived ills do not themselves either validate those criticisms nor assure a nexus between the proposed solution to the perceived ills. We have been down this road before, in many experiments throughout the world; with the resulting common feature of authoritarianism.
The drive to achieve political purity often shifts the nature of debate to the outer limits of myopic radicalism and further away from the interface between competing ideas in a search for some overlap upon which all can come to an agreement. Do not misinterpret criticism of all-things-progressive-in-your-mind as the very essence of radical right-wing-nut unless, of course, your goal is to select for the most radical extremists in your midst with a like mindset to your own.
At what point will folks say get me off your list of approved progressives? It is inevitable if you make it so by filtering on your view of progressiveness. Again, articulate a definition that describes your view of progressive, if you can. I don't think you can. Let your selected RSS feed authors make up their own mind and voluntarily remove themselves.
(Onward with demands for liberty against those who would deny it in the name of liberty.)