Got an essay posted on tha Intarwebs

[symbot]

Okay, I'm gonna try using LJ as a notification board when I post things online.

Test case: I just posted an article on BlogCritics.  I wanted a different, less boring title, but the content of the essay is fresh from my brain Saturday night.  Synopsis: a simple meta-political rubric for making a mark on the political sphere.  If you've got any

Comments

Type O

[prometheisbound]

Stop, think about what you were going to do, and find a way to do it better. George Orwell would be proud.

A few things:

You said Mythbusters when you meant Adbusters, which I think makes an amusing parallel.

I believe every declared presidential candidate has a myspace page (all of which are reviewed hilariously in Time by Joel Stein http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1627004,00.html )

Beware of making any statements (especially in an article like this) about the "left" doing this or the "right" doing that. Regardless of how accepted the characteristic may be it still provokes a reaction to people who haven't quite passed your level one criteria (and many who have but are trying to weed out those that haven't on the fly by tagging any and all statements like that with red flags).

Also, my body broke out in hives midway through the sentence where you mention Micheal Moore in a positive way alongside Martin Luther King and George Orwell. I suppose this only serves to prove your point; I now feel better about actually kindof sortof wanting to go see "Sicko."

But I still don't like Michael Moore. Mostly.

Re: Type O

[symbot]

WOAH. You're right. I put a comment on this at the end of the article... hopefully that will curb some of the flaming that might result from such a fuck-up.

I know what you mean about critiquing the left/right divide, too, but part of this essay is a response to partisanism. I wanted to write something about the two distinctive trends in political communication, but I didn't want to pitt them explicitly against one another.

And yeah, I have a lot of friends who bristle at the name "Michael Moore," many of them with political views that are similar to his. Lately, I've been entertaining the idea that democrats need to get a lot better at selling their ideas, marketing their philosophy, and even (egad) sensationalizing their issues. Although it's annoying that Michael Moore is self-righteous and moralizing, he does manage to turn his issues into pretty engaging media phenomena.

Go back to the book I cited, Dream (Stephen Duncombe) for a little more on my thinking in this area.