This week is my tenth blogging birthday. It is a bittersweet time for me for a bunch of reasons. First of all- it is because I am at a loss to explain recent actions I took to rather vociferously fight a pretty stupid fight. Definitely alcohol fueled-poorly thought out, but nonetheless representing of the passion I wish could still bring to blog writing. I am a passionate person-I believe strongly in the things I believe, and most importantly when I want to believe the work I have done matters. And truth be told, I am beginning to think it didn’t matter. I probably, in the view of hindsight, made some pretty wrong choices. I could be and hope I am wrong- but I wonder……….
I began this blog out of a sense of frustration responding to a huge personal disappointment in my life; created by nothing but sheer stupidity on the part of other people……..on the part of the “big bad establishment”. My disgust with their simplistic trying to slot people into molds, set me off on the path of blogging to begin with. I guess I had lived a naive existence up to that point, since I had already had the pleasure of being fucked over by people who betrayed the naval ideas and ideals several years before. But there was a key point that existed when I started that does not exist now. I was having fun. I was traveling around Asia, living a life I enjoyed-and living on my terms. Following my move to shopping mall, the “fun factor” went down-but I still got to have fun including two summers in Romania. After 2011 I came here to Germany which has both been fun and not so fun for different reasons. I am happy to be overseas again.I am happy to travel as much as much as I do and where I do.
But there is also another aspect that diminishes the fun factor. 1) over ten years and you are passionate and out spoken you get outed. My post on the PR crazy Navy and its stupid pursuit of stupid headlines in 2012 was a huge torture exercise. 2) it probably does not help that I am also outspoken on social media. I want to be passionate, sharp and outspoken on social media. But as Andrew Sullivan pointed out when announced he was quitting blogging, social media has become a tyranny-and what’s worse it is not a conversational media. It rewards a lack of thought.
Ezra Klein acknowledges it:
Blogging encourages interjections into conversations, and it thrives off of familiarity. Social media encourages content that can travel all on its own. … The incentives of the social web make it a threat to the conversational web. The need to create content that “travels” is at war with the fact that great work often needs to be rooted in a particular place and context — a place and context that the reader and the author already share. I think we’re getting better at serving a huge audience even as we’re getting worse at serving a loyal one.
Moreover social media thrives on demanding conformity.
The difference is that the illiberal policing of speech, the demonizing of dissent, and extreme identity politics have now transcended the academy and arrived in social media with a vengeance. Twitter and Facebook encourage mutually reassuring groupthink, in which individuals are required to “like” anything that isn’t white, male, cisgendered etc., in which an ideology is enforced by un-friending those with other views instead of engaging them, and in which large numbers of Twitter-users can descend on a racist/sexist/homophobic etc miscreant and destroy his or her career and social life in pursuit of racial/gender/orientation “social justice”.
The right has its own version of this, of course. Many of us dissenters were purged and rendered anathema years ago. But look where that has actually left today’s GOP. It’s turned into this. And the left’s new absolutism on identity politics – now taken to an absurd degree – should, in my view, worry liberals more. Because it is a direct attack on basic liberal principles. Chait:
Politics in a democracy is still based on getting people to agree with you, not making them afraid to disagree. The historical record of political movements that sought to expand freedom for the oppressed by eliminating it for their enemies is dismal. The historical record of American liberalism, which has extended social freedoms to blacks, Jews, gays, and women, is glorious. And that glory rests in its confidence in the ultimate power of reason, not coercion, to triumph.
And in the aggregate, the combination has left me emotionally and somewhat physically drained. I want the conversation to continue- I just can’t do it as often. But the sight will remain here-and I will from time to time publish.
I’ve been grateful for all the supporters and for the contraians who argued vehemently against me-but also kept coming back. The trolls-like those who came out in January of 2012 and on other occasions I could have done without, just like I could have done without the mediocrity the overall military and political blogosphere has descended into. I’m still passionate and I still drink-so I will probably make mistakes yet again.
Its been an interesting decade. We will see what the next year has in store. Happy Birthday to me!