Eschaton Screenshot; Saturday, November 27th, 2010
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There were a large number of blogs I used to follow when it was a new phenomenon -- Hey, you can hang out there and pretty much say whatever you want!. By now, as with any industry, for those bloggers who have continued providing analysis and entertainment to the Intertubes, they've developed into tribes, circles of mutually-supporting friends, each with their own sites.
Woe betide you if you bore them, piss them off, or are identified as a Troll. Commenting at their sites is a bit like appearing, the stranger, at someone's party and if you just don't quite fit in... Well, ostracization, 'Blackballing', 'freezing out', or simply "being asked to leave" is what it was once called; I believe the blogging term is they don't get to sit at the cool kids' table, and for the most part, that's pretty much the level where it's at.
I don't try to sit at the kid's table; I'm not a concise or especially original blogger when it comes to social commentary or Left politics, and even when I make jokes as a commentor it's as if I'd made a bad smell in the room.
But, if acclaim as a blogger, or 'getting a name' as a commentor on other blogs is the reason why someone posts, they should forget it. That's the functional equivalent of going into acting just to read the reviews.
Since Before Nine was launched in the Fall of 2008, after a hundred-plus posts and perhaps a thousand individual pageviews, I've had... five comments. It's nice for anyone to receive compliments about what they do, but that isn't why I write; I'd hazard a guess it isn't why the Kool Kidz do their blogs, either.
Eschaton, one of the original, Left blogsites (the Right has it's own, but fuck 'em) I still read for the Pithy, and the links to other things I ought to know -- such as The Irish Crisis (about to be played out in Your Town), and the reminder that the Top Two Percent of America's wealthy
It may not help in a practical way -- but to know that there are others who recognize The Crazy as well as yourself, and are capable of expressing concisely and (hopefully) with humor that Yes, You Did Not Get This Wrong; We Are Fucked Beyond Measure... well, validation is incredibly important. And, we need voices to be raised when The Crazy comes -- as a testament, as a protest, as an assertion of our basic humanity.
As DailyKos is referred to fondly on Teh Left as The Great Orange Satan, I refer to Eschaton and its creator (who may or may not be named Duncan Black) as "The Great Curmudgeon" (If you read his site, you'll know what I mean; it's both a personal observation and a wry one -- somebody has to be the Blogger equivalent of the old man, shouting at the political Right Get Off My Constitution And Stop Fucking Us Over, Ya Damn Kids).
Anyway, Black doesn't need my poor Doggy seal of approval for his work -- he gets about a bazillion hits per week -- but if you don't at least occasionally follow his work, you should.
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