Tom’s Big Picture

I must thank my readers for the growth of my blog so far. As of yesterday, Google has updated with a PageRank 4 ranking (quite high for a blog) and Alexa, a traffic rating service, puts the site in the 200,000’s. This is well within the top 1% of websites, as traffic follows a Zipf distribution on the net.

With success comes attention, some approving, and some disapproving, as recent events have highlighted. I have heard Rush Limbaugh talk before about the inbred liberal blogging subculture- the folks who brought us Howard Dean as the frontrunner before the money men in Hollywood and New York, who provide 70% of funds for the Democratic Party, came to their senses and united behind someone like Kerry more skilled in fooling the American people and with a longer track record of trading votes for dollars. Dean is the man of whom Karl Rove said, “Please nominate this man.” Unfortunately for Rove, Dean lost it in the Iowa caucus speech, and Bush went on to be re-elected by an anemic margin of victory compared to a real conservative like Reagan. But enough about faux-conservatives.

What accounts for the liberal leanings of scribblers, whether of the blogging or journalist variety? I think it is rooted in biology. All of us have talents that are unevenly distributed- some of us have analytical skills, others verbal skills, those being the two great areas of useful talent. Analytical skills are useful for describing reality. Verbal skills are useful for creating realities.

Those of us with analytical skills will thus be more constrained in our writing- it must be based on some analysis of reality. Verbal skills, on the other hand, create their own reality, and thus the verbally skilled writer can, like Mozart, write “as the sow piddles”. This accounts for the leftward distribution of blogs, journalists, lawyers and others with skills primarily in the verbal department. (As an aside, TFLE is also why it is dangerous to take seriously the ideas of musicians, popular books, etc, Christian or secular, as they are more likely based on the created reality of a verbally skilled person than a rigorous analysis of reality- get your theology from theologians, science from scientists, etc).

I call it “The Fruit Loop Effect”. TFLE is simply acknowledging that any sample of media content will be skewed toward a liberal worldview, where realities are created on the basis of what the writer wants reality to be than rigorous analysis of what reality actually is. TFLE is one of my motivations for blogging, as our side needs more voices in proportion to the numbers we represent.

There could also be a demographic basis for TFLE. Conservatives, as a group, are statistically more likely to be employed (it is much easier to be gainfully employed analyzing reality, say as an engineer, than to be paid to create reality, say as a journalist), to be married and to have children, all time-consuming tasks prohibitive of copious amounts of blogging. Thus, those that DO have the time to blog copiously are statistically more likely to be liberals. I post three times a week if I’m lucky, and I feel like it takes a lot of time (while employed and married with children, toddlers no less), but the Deaniacs measure their posts by the hour!

As a conservative blogger, what are the practical implications of TFLE?

First, as recent experience has shown, as soon as you have any level of success (meaning that sufficient PageRank to your blog pushes your results to the top of a Google search), and if you allow comments, you will be ambushed. And when dealing with people with a contrary worldview, there will be no agreement, convincing or even agreeing to disagree. It is simply a war of ideas, both sides trying to get the other “off message”, a tactical political exercise but ultimately of no value to readers if no new ideas or real discussion takes place. The worst part for conservatives, for the demographic factors described above, is that there are more of them and they have more time. An arms race of “who has the most free time” ensues, and underemployed liberals always win that game.

So a proposed heuristic for conservative bloggers:

1. Once you exceed a certain threshold of success, it is absolutely necessary to moderate all comments. This is a step I am going to have to take starting today. There is a silver lining I think: the longer the delay between comments, because of delays in their appearance, the more thoughtful the replies will be, as people will be less reactive in what they say.

2. The site owner decides which comments appear and which ones don’t. You have to take control of this. I recall a conversation talk show host Dave Ramsey had with a caller who was asking if he should delay paying off his house so he could use the money instead to provide startup capital for a business. Dave’s response was to ask the caller if he would take out a loan on the house if the house were already paid off, to which the caller responded no; and Dave explained that the two decisions are equivalent. The same applies for a blog, which is not primarily meant as a forum, but as a platform for a certain writer. Before allowing a certain comment, it must be clear that it adds to the discussion. Not that it must agree, but that it is a good faith comment, not an arrow in the war of ideas. The presence of obscenity in the first reply should have tipped me off to cut the discussion off earlier. There is actually a well-documented sociology of “trolls” in open forums. Of course, the liberal trolls will respond with much gnashing of teeth about “free speech”, but “free speech” refers to government censorship, not private property. Besides, it is always the liberals who restrict free speech: in Europe and South Africa, people serve jail time for simply pointing out historical facts inconvenient to the Marxist mythology.

3. Most people are not confrontational. Thus, when a confrontation occurs, most people’s response is to head for the exits. While wasting time responding to people not interested in what you have to say, people you would like to hear from are less likely to comment, lest they be attacked as well. I have a tendency to want to “poke the monkey” just to see what it will do in reaction- perhaps I poked the liberal monkeys beyond reasonable limits of entertainment this time.

4. Finally, it can be difficult for family members and friends to watch tasteless attacks upon a person’s character. This alone calls for limiting dissent to comments that do not involve personal attacks. We have to swim upstream to the culture anyway in our everyday lives, so why pick fights with the peanut gallery?

And so, finally, an appeal to my readers. I want to hear from you. I don’t mind responding, within limits, to the hecklers. The question is, do you enjoy it? Does it make you more likely or less likely to want to visit the site? Does it make it more or less likely that you will comment? I had thought that a good fight would generate interest, and there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Are my guidelines above mistaken?

Thank you again for taking the time to visit.