Monday, September 12, 2005

Name that Blogger

In The Weekly Standard's 10th anniversary symposium, smart people are asked, "On what issue or issues (if any!) have you changed your mind in the last 10 years- and why?"

Andrew Ferguson's answer is the best, naturally. But this passage sticks out in particular:
Under the circumstances, it's not much of a surprise that the threshold Buckley tried to maintain has collapsed. I suppose any philosophical tendency, as it acquires power and popularity, will simplify itself, define itself downward. That's democratic politics for you. But something more corrosive is also at work. Marshall McLuhan was righter than anyone ever would have guessed. The medium really is the message. Conservatism nowadays is increasingly a creature of its technology. It is shaped--if I were a Marxist I might even say determined--by cable television and talk radio, with their absurd promotion of caricature and conflict, and by blogs, where the content ranges from Jesuitical disputes among hollow-cheeked obsessives to feats of self-advertisement and professional narcissism (Everyone's been asking what I think about . . . You won't want to miss my appearance tonight on . . . Be sure to click here for my latest . . . ) that would have been unthinkable in polite company as recently as a decade ago.

Who on earth could he be talking about?

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

can't believe you left out Ferguson's dig at Sean Hannity. I hate Hannity and I especially hate his book. When it first came out he would plug it on his radio show nonstop, referring to it as "the hardest thing he's ever done". He would tell his guests and listeners how he personally wrote the book and his late nights writing were really tough. Here's the funny thing: He didn't write it, it was ghost written, and Hannity doesn't even have the balls to admit it. I know this because I know one of Hannity's regular guests and he was willing to admit it to them, just not to his radio listeners.

Anonymous said...

OK, please tell us! Cause I plug each of those three phrases into Google and come up with... nothing.

Anonymous said...

al, it's instapundit, king of self-promotional blogging.

Anonymous said...

Well, that's what I thought too, until I plugged those phrases into Google and came up with nothing. Seems to me that if you are going to make fun of somebody for saying something, they ought to have actually said it.

Anonymous said...

al,
instapunkass says it about every other day. just go check him out. yesterday he claimed "i was prophetic in 2003"-
just because google couldn't match those phrases to insta doesn't mean he doesn't say it all the time.

Jimmie said...

Andrew Sullivan's taking potshots at conservative bloggers for excesive self-promotion?

Given his "I need a bazillion dollars for bandwidth" drive and his melodramatic "Oh! I just can't blog anymore or I shall fairly swoon!" post that presaged his half a nanosecond hiatus not long ago, I'm surpised that he didn't explode from the sudden release of a planetary-sized mass of irony.

Anonymous said...

I found a guy who sells used pianos at great prices. Find him here at ActionPianoMoving.com and he'll even move the piano for you. Excellent, experienced piano guy!