Not Ready To Talk Yet… Or Later
What Joshua Foust speaks of in regards to the great deal of incredibly loud and pointless chatter about the Afghan elections is actually how I’ve grown to feel about blogging.
Much of the time I no longer feel comfortable spending a fair amount of time offering relatively uninformed opinions on current topics that I don’t have a formal training in or firsthand experience of.
So much of the blogosphere is a well-meaning bout of “I don’t really know but let me throw this out here for you all” type of conversation. Its good 10% of the time for fostering ideas, challenging a prevailing narrative, etc. but you still have that 90% that is pure cotton candy.
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Much of the time I no longer feel comfortable spending a fair amount of time offering relatively uninformed opinions on current topics that I don’t have a formal training or firsthand experience.
Hear, hear. I suggest that’s partly a function of personal humility, and partly because there are an awful lot of people out there who simply don’t understand that an opinion is just an opinion, rather than carte-blanche for starting a campaign of character assassination.
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Are you trying to depress me?
Hah, but what’s the difference if, rather than posting on your own blog you visit n-number of other sites and leave “pure cotton candy” comments?
I am beginning to think that my best posts, and the only ones I can really like, are those I write to myself in a kind of self-dialogue. That others may come along and read them, and comment on them, is a bonus at best. Incidentally, this self-dialogue is probably pretty trustworthy, since you’ll only write the things that interest your self; in other words, the pointless cotton candy crap is so boring to you, it won’t make it past that filter.
Another strategy I am discovering: always write as the self-watchful skeptic. This comes fairly naturally to me — witness the qualitative “fairly” in that statement, as an example! — but in any case, anyone reading what you write will witness it as a self-exploration rather than as some statement of dogma. This is something the best essayists tend to do anyway, or at least my favorite, like Montaigne.
I suppose the other worthy strategy would be to find something that a) interests you and b) you actually know/understand, and write about such things.
Now to reach the limits of my pulpit: When every-day Americans give up contemplating and communicating what they think and/or feel about the issues of the day, Democracy will have died. The point is always to express what you really have percolating through your brain rather than what you think percolates in other brains — unless what percolates in other brains is what your own brain is trying to figure out.
@Curtis
1. self-dialogue
2. what interests you
3. what you understand
Three pretty positive take-aways from this, I reckon. Sometimes it’s easy to lose track of those mantras.
Eddie, we’d like to invite you to become one of our Authors in Alexandria. You may mirror your existing posts from here or elsewhere or produce original posts there, on anything you wish, as you desire, but I would bet our long time Author Steve would appreciate your posts on military matters.
For your contributions and participation we will blogroll you with no reciprocation required. Come contribute your perspectives and opinions to the ongoing conversations there. Contact us through the site for full invitations and instructions.
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