Category: Meta

Documdharma is a wonderful site. I have tremendous respect for what folks here are doing and the atmosphere here, IMHO, is much more positive and supportive than many others.

This is the place for me to inform friends that I’ll be taking a brief/long/permanent leave from diary/essay writing. Anyone who’s tried to quit understands that this sort of exercise is as much a letter to myself as anyone reading.

Why? Lot’s of reasons. Folks I like and respect are doing well here and in ‘meat world’. I’m  generally optimistic about the future.

That said, I feel generally out of touch with much of what passes for progress. I’m unimpressed with much of what’s happening politically. I find I have next to nothing in common with the most voluble and highly recommended diaries.

I don’t do drugs, drink or smoke. I pray regularly and don’t mind paying taxes. Our family functions fairly well and we’re generally grateful for the good things in our lives. I’ve had the same job for a long time.

I’ve enjoyed my two active years in the blog world very much. The memories that stand out are of your fine work rather than my own. I’ll keep my own tiny operation going and will surely continue to read folks here, and maybe even recommend the odd comment here and there, just to say hi.

I’d like to thank all the good folks I’ve met along the way. I wish I could say more to many who’ve already moved on without a formal good-bye. I’ve learned from you all in some way or another.

I’ll continue to write, but on different topics and in a different media. I won’t bore you with the arcane details.

All the best to one and all and forgive me please if I don’t post a comment jar or respond. I don’t frankly know what I could say to anyone here other than thank you and good luck.

See ya!

OK, so I've wasted a year of my life on the blogs.  And a little.  From this sad and fruvious abandonment, I've come to a sharply diminished sense of my own importance, a contradictory tendency towards arrogant and conceited assertion, and a great solidity in my belief that most people — myself included — are purely batshit.  However, I've also come to a few questions, which I toss out to the members of our invisible college for rumination, digestion, and perhaps (finally) deposit, messy or neat as per your nature.  To whit:

So there’s an article at New York Review of Books everyone here should read.  Not that everyone should agree with it or draw the same conclusions as does the author, Sarah Boxer — I don’t, for example — but it’s a nice musing on the nature of blog writing and heck, it’s in the New York Review of Books.

I’ll snip some as an incentive to read the whole thing and then offer my (rather lengthy) response, below.  

Some of you may have noticed my absence from this site. Most of you probably not. But to clear up any misinterpretations, I am not boycotting this site. It is just that I have been horserace blogging at my other site Talk Left. DD is not about that.

When I have something of substance to write about, you can be sure I’ll write it here as well.

Hoping that the New Year has gone well for all of you so far.

Effective immediately, I am resigning my post as a contributing editor of Docudharma and taking an indefinite hiatus from posting.

I wish buhdy and the rest of you the very best of success with the site and all future ventures.  This is a choice I have made for entirely personal reasons, and should not be seen by anyone as a comment on or criticism of any action or political position of the site or its management.  

I’d like to thank very much everyone here who has read and in particular responded to the various postings I have made here since the launch of the site.  Many of us have often disagreed about a great deal, but I have personally always greatly enjoyed the exchange.  You have my deepest gratitude for your interest and passion.

My best wishes to all of you for a wonderful and successful 2008.

The Bush Years might not have produced much to be proud of, but one thing the have produced is an abundance of theories about the origin of the Bush Years.  Many of them are quite good; they provide both historical/theoretic insight and also guides for practical action.  I decided to make a chart of some of them, which you’ll find below.

What I find most surprising and also invigorating about these ideas is that they are not “Marxist”; they are not merely rehashings of old-school dialectical materialism.  These new accounts are genuinely original takes on the way the world works, what’s wrong with it, and what best to do about it.  Some of them, most especially, I think, Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, are state-of-the-art — they bring an exhilerating clarity to events that are seen only dimly or darkly through the older lenses lying around on the critical workbench.

One thing we ought to be doing is deciding what to use in this near-embarrassment of riches and what to discard; what to expand upon and what to emphasize.  Which ways of thinking about the Bush years provide us with the best tools for digging deeper, and which (to use an all-too-apt metaphor) are dry wells?  

If we are going to blog the future, these Big Pictures can be Big Maps of the terrain as we find it.

or too few?

PLEASE GO TO moneysmiths PONY PARTY

She is a personal friend of Jack Nicholson.

PLUS-there’s a live webcam and whipped cream all over the place!!!

And moneysmith is taking all of us to the Grand Caymans to PARTY if you all go over there and stop commenting here!!

So when you discuss politicians, some folks seem intent in believing pols are not pols. My old refrain remains the same. During primary season, the cult of the candidates is strong. Consider this discussion of the non/tepid support for Ned Lamont and the strong support from Establishment Dems of Joe Lieberman.

As you can see, for members of a candidate cult, this is irrelevant. The most honest answer is this is what Establishment politicians do. They act in their own political interests as they see them. I never railed about these Establishment pols’ actions during the Lamont/Lieberman campaign because that is what I expected them to do.

Of course, some pols act against the Establishment position when they perceive it is in their best political interests. Chris Dodd’s admirable actions yesterday are an example of that.

Folks put too much stock in the motivations of pols. What matters is what they do, not why they do it. The answer to the why is always the same – to win elections.

Judge the what. Reward the actions you approve of. Condemn the actions you disapprove of.

Be a smart consumer of your politics. Remember that pols are pols and they do what they do.