Glenn Reynolds and Steven Pressfield discuss Afghanistan on Pajamas TV. Pressfield has leveraged his writing skill, experience and contacts into a serial of posts on Afghanistan. What’s fascinating about the Reynolds-Pressfield conversation is their description of the blogging process, which is familiar territory to anyone who has put pixels to screen. The most important ideas they float, which are actually larger than the writing process and speak to the emerging structure of the new information environment are:
- Internet content provision is a conversation. Pressfield realized that once you started providing content (in a blog for example) you had to keep it up. He teased Glenn for his uncanny habit of posting almost continuously — the trademark of Instanpundit.
- Glenn broached the idea that some content is provided as an asynchronous thread, though he didn’t quite put it that way. What he said was blogging ‘is how you turn procrastination into a virtue’. In reality it does more than that because the threads are re-entrant; they come back at some point into what you are already doing. Steven Pressfield took the idea further when he recounted his research process (“drilling”). The information gets pumped out of various wells, but none of it is ultimately wasted. They all flow back into the main thread of his work, which was novels, but which is now broadening out into blogging.
- But the key idea, which associates back to Pressfield’s idea of ‘tribes’ in Afghanistan and Reynold’s Army of Davids, is that bloggers (in general any content provider) catalyze tribes. This is a very powerful insight, possibly the key realization of the new information age. (Think of Chris Anderson’s concept of the Long Tail) It is the failure to grasp this point that underlies one of the key failures of the MSM. The Internet is a self-organizing medium; it’s a declaration of governance and independence whatever else it may be. The MSM has been trying to reinvent networked communications and return it to the Age of Kings. The MSM is the town crier model and its day is over.
At the moment the tribes are still finding both the membership and leadership; they are still in the process of discovery — finding themselves and others. But I think people will ultimately discover that even these processes are asynchronous. The challenge will be what to do with the outputs of these efforts — with the tribes — when they attempt to find re-entrance. The MSM has denounced the Internet as the agent of the great diaspora; what it fails to realize is that it will also be the scene of the great forum when the tribes come together on their own terms. The next great phase will be evolving methods for tribes to find peers (social networking is a primitive effort to do this) and cooperate.
Well I’ve gone on for too long. Go watch the Pressfield and Reynolds video and visit his blog. After reading Pressfield’s blog then go find a Think Tank paper on Afghanistan and read it for contrast. Both are likely to be products of intelligent men, but ask yourself the question: leaving aside the content, what is the difference in the meta-data of these two vehicles? Open thread.
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a monster lies in wait for me
a stew, of pain and misery
but fiercer still, in life and limb
is me that lies in wait, for him
This is the infancy of the new media of blogs. Massive new entrants that later shake out into fewer and fewer as the group together like HuffPo or PJM.
I have seen similar models in the explosion of new companies in the 1990’s of the telecomms. Once the startup money stops they fail and only a few survived and merged.
Think of how many car companies started in the early years and the reduction now.
Blogs are also not a profitable institution. They mainly exist as an outlet for the creative desire to be heard or to satisfy the ego.
Bloggers burn out as they have said all they could and get tired of reiterating same arguments. Blogs die as the passion of the blogger fails and there is no money to continue to sustain once passion dies. Better blogs bring in writers to share the load.
Instapundit is different. He extensively uses links and disperses his readers. He uses tech to continue have series of posts to satisfy readers. Readers like Instapundit since they get a wide variety of interests and can follow up the links that interest them. I have seen much news feed that try the same without the success. I guess Glenn has the will to be ruthless to compress his writing to the least amount possible down to the famous ‘Heh”.
Since blogs often are niche market and have their own followers the tribes get dispersed. I think that tribe grouping on blogs is too simplistic. They do self organize, but creative destruction also occurs as the next blog get created or the next passion.
The Tea Parties are a better example or grouping together in tribes. They have passion and enough general principles that larger groups can get behind. Political parties are a form of tribes and when the Parties no longer excite or engender passion new ones come up. The electoral structure requires each new party passion to get absorbed or take over an existing party. The progressive takeover of the Democrats and the Tea Party take over the GOP.
Successful political parties are nimble enough to absorb the new party.
Instapundit definitely incorporates the long tail. His posts relink to post years old.
Hot Air uses lots of video and some decent writing. Morrissey is a better essayist. They also use the news feed idea.
The best logs will have links connections to the all over interests. Left bloggers watch Redstate and right bloggers watch Huffpo and D Kos.
Pressfield has good insights and good material. The comment section doesn’t seem very rich.
Rathke of ACORN-SEIU has accomplished a remarkable feat in assembling a tribe in support of political action. But the tribe is weak in many respects, as we are seeing. In some respects ACORN seems like a kind of communist politburo, with Rathke and others as commissars and theorists. Breitbart and tribe introduced asymmetric action against ACORN, which has been unable to respond. If it could, ACORN would respond with violence, but now the lights are on it and its preferred tactics don’t work. For now. Breitbart has learned well from Alinsky and is keeping up the pressure.
The nation is a tribe of 300 million, but obviously it is not a cohesive tribe, though it was in, say, WWII. States are kinds of tribes, in a federal republic, as are members in the various kinds of mission-based organizations. Subsidiarity assumes tribal behavior, in a good sense. The family unit, while fundamental and even sacred, cannot exist outside of a tribe, or church, which is a tribe of a certain kind.
Belmont Club is a tribe. For some reason, it is the only place I ever contribute anything. Time is short, there’s a day job, etc. In the scheme of those who fight, those who work, and those who pray/think, Belmont Club tends towards those who think. That is important work. Richard has made important contributions to memes that begin discussion and/or incorporate important discussions and concepts, such as Pressfield’s tribalism meme. Comments, usually constructive and respectful, deepen the discussion. There is Belmont drilling, but also encyclopedic contextualizing, and poetry of language (including in comments!) There is hypothesis, antithesis, synthesis, moving towards some understanding of where we as a nation tribe are headed, sometimes all within one blog entry and comments.
Charisms come and go. The Jesuits have largely lost theirs. Richard, perhaps Ignatian at heart, has a role to play in working “towards the greater glory of God.” How BC blogging translates into action is beyond me, but good thinking, like good plumbing, is crucial to a nation and to a tribe. Good thinking is the more important of the two. As long as the nation has got some way to manage sanitation.
“The MSM has been trying to reinvent networked communications and return it to the Age of Kings. The MSM is the town crier model and its day is over.”
MSM as the town crier. I like this. Back in the day of Edward R. Murrow the newsreader was attempting to be in the midst of the news like the bombing of London. Cronkite did this until he made himself famous by becoming a part of the news. Then there was the decades long run of gotcha politics trying to take down conservatives since Nixon. And now you have a couple of gutsy independents dressing like they came from a college pimps and prostitutes party that are making news in a way that the MSM is now incapable. The MSM have policed conservatives to the point that conservatives dare not show their faces and all that is left are their leftwing brethren that they dare not impugn.
I think now that the MSM are a mutual admiration society with interwoven beliefs and purposes. They are the limelight glitterati and have drawn their own circle. They are clearly not objective. Why do Americans give them their loyalty? Well they wont forever. MSM will continue to circle the toilet while the bloggers will rise to the top on their own merit, as it should be.
I think one difference, at least with instapundit, is real time info updates and corrections. With old media, newspapers had to be printed, and with network news media, maybe they don’t have the time to go in-depth on a certain topic. A policy paper might be limited to old events relates to a situation that has changed or is changing rapidly.
I often save links on a topic of interest to me without figuring an opening for a post. Then one more bit of writing triggers me off and I’m able to finish what I had hopped to start. And of course I link to old bits of my own embellishing the original thought from a new angle or with additional evidence.
Eventually I think we will see that blogging is the entry level for a writing career. If you are good and can collect an audience you will eventually monetize your effort. And the very best part? Publishers can actually tell if you add value very quickly.
It is still the same old guild system without the gate keepers i.e. first you get hired as a reporter. It doesn’t hurt if you can do some self promotion to start. Or get noticed by instapundit.
Let me add that burn out happens to those not committed to writing. If you are committed a little time off and you are back to spewing pixels.
The biggest ace the political/current events MSM had up its sleeve was the ability to aggregate memes. It was a marketing tool that allowed editors to treat unrelated ideas as a unit. Better yet, memes could be “hooked” into an interest group which had a lot riding on it. Thus, news memes were in their own way an “organizing” vehicle. It created a town space dominated by about two dozen events at a time, which is all a “front page” would support. Think of it as a multiplex movie house with that many theaters with the films changed at intervals.
Those were enormous markets, much bigger than the micromarkets the long tail can now generate. These mass markets could be milked for money on two ends; it drew in the both the herbivores and predators to these two dozen or so “headline” shows. The editor or star writer of a great newspaper was like a ringmaster in the greatest show on earth, the king of his waterhole, of his “headline”. The herbivores were the audiences who came to watch the play, the advertisers and political pitch men were the carnivores who came to walk among the mass audiences. It was sweet.
Today, people are still looking for the same huge monopoly rents. But I think they’ll never be seen again. What the “media” industry will become is the meme-shadow of the real world, the narrative analogue of what people do. Any activity worth the name: industry, war, politics, science and technology, will evolve its meme-shadows, but they will be auxiliaries to the events themselves, as a shadow is attached to the living being it is attached to. It may never again take on a life of its own as a major industry, with a power and influence of its own, a separate existence from the reality which ought to have given it life.
Journalists will go back to being what they once were: the chroniclers of deeds. In a way we are looking back on the vanishing image of a unique era, and it glitters still, like luminous dust spread across the scenery. “Like a cut flower in a vase; fair to see yet doomed to die”
Let me add that Wretchard got me started in blogging back when he was on blogspot. The comments were getting out of hand and Wretch instituted blogspot registration in order to comment. Back in those days you had to start a blog to get registered. And that was the beginning of “Power and Control”.
Some one once tried to tell me that given the name I had “issues”. I said no. It was because of my engineering background in Power and Control. Of course it didn’t hurt that it is also a pun on politics.
I like the thoughts, but I wish the “leaders” would QUIT WASTING TIME WITH THE TALKING HEADS VIDEOS!
Videos might be an effective means of communicating with, say, the 30th percentile and below. But it is usually stifling for communicating at the other end of the bell curve.
The written word is much more effective for communicating complex ideas. Audio and video leads to two paths: off the cuff pontificating, or distilled sound bites. And both media are easily highjacked by those with a golden soothing voice and/or 90th percentile looks. And that’s what got us into this mess in the first place!
That being said, the video discussion you linked was a good one. But both participants are skilled and gifted orators, and unfortunately, that combination is exceedingly rare. So IMO, most of the content at such outlets as PJTV is a waste of bandwidth, and a waste of good brain power.
The Internet, and blogs in general, have been a revelation to me. I grew up thinking I was Just Weird. Nobody seemed to think like I did. Sure, there was my father, who was just to the right of Attila the Hun. My mother was nominally conservative, but mostly indifferent, as was my brother. None of my classmates in high school or college seemed to share my views. None of my teachers did, and they were worse than my fellow students. Nothing on TV or movies, nothing in newspapers or magazines, and very little in the books I read seemed to echo how I thought the world was. My Dad subscribed to National Review, and I read that a bit guiltily, like it was a secret shame. I just didn’t talk politics with people often, because it was more than likely to turn contentious. It wasn’t until I started reading blogs – and The Belmont Club was one of my first – that I realized that I wasn’t quite as odd as I thought. There were others out there that thought more or less like me. I am not sure even what I am, politically; there doesn’t seem to be a name for people economically conservative, socially moderate or even liberal, and diplomatically hawkish. “Conservative” can imply socially conservative, which I am not always; “libertarian” implies one who believes that chaos can be viable governance, which I don’t. I don’t know even now exactly what I am, but I have learned only recently that I am not The Omega Man.
A comment on Pressfield’s interview: I was surprised, shocked even, that Pressfield couldn’t name a single favorite military history novel. Not one. Since I very much enjoy a good military history novel – though they are really hard to find, and I’m always leery of getting burned – I’ve made a short list of some of my favorites. I put a few straight “historical fiction” books in there, too, as honorable mentions, even if they aren’t about military subjects. Here’s my list, in no particular order:
“The Killer Angels” by Michael Shaara
“Andersonville” by McKinley Kantor
“Unto this Hour” by Tom Wicker
“A Real Good War” by Sam Halpert
“Red Army” by Ralph Peters
“Piece of Cake” by Derek Robinson
“The Caine Mutiny” by Herman Wouk
“The Boat” by Lothar Gunther-Buchheim
“Shogun” by James Clavell
“Doomsday Book” by Connie Willis
“I, Claudius” and “Claudius the God” by Robert Graves
“The Far Pavilions” by M.M. Kaye
I haven’t read any of Pressfield’s books. If anyone else out there has a list of favorite military and/or historical novels, I’d be interested to see it.
The written word is much more effective for communicating complex ideas.
Amen jaymaster! I can absorb print information in a third the time it takes to suck it through the small-diameter tube of a TV screen, and with less distractions from the ‘actors’ meaningful looks, gestures, sound inflections and all the other means of telling me what to think.
Also good print journalists (like Wretchard) choose their words a lot better than the blatherists on the screen, and communicate complex ideas more precisely. Anyone can yell “fire!” and lead a stampede – NOT just anyone can educate us.
And that goes double for the oh-so-inflected condescending egotists on NPR.
Try Pressfield’s “Gates of Fire” and “Killing Rommel.”
This last couple of weeks I’ve started re-reading “The Secret History of the Atomic Bomb” – which is actually the edited de-classified contemporary documents produced during the research and development of the Manhattan Engineering District.
Fascinatin’ stuff. One thing it really makes you come to appreciate is the enormity of the industrial process needed to refine the tiny fraction of Uranium that can be used in an explosive fission bomb, and to refine all the components of the overall manufacturing process to the extraordinary purity needed merely to function nominally within all those processes.
As it relates to this post, there is a concept in the separation of isotopes that seems apt.
Isotopes, you will remember, are atoms of an element that have the same number of protons and electrons, but differ in the number of neutrons in their nuclei. This makes them more or less identical in their chemistry, and separable from each other only with great difficulty.
Many of the separation processes require a “cascade” of repeated iterations of a process that starts with a mixture and produces waste, and a mixture that is only slightly enhanced. The waste is then sent back to the beginning to be re-introduced for further processing, while the “enhanced mix” is sent forward to the next stage of separation.
Kinda sorta like blogging, in which a thread prises some small useful datum out of a plodding stream of excruciatingly tedius pabulum, and holds it up for inspection. On finding it seems to provide actual useful perspective, other readers begin their own extraction process on the same stream, and share information back and forth, as much asking each other “Am I crazy or is there really something here?” as anything else.
In the fullness of time, the contents of the river of tedius data have been sifted, strained, poured through active charcoal, filtered, assayed, sniffed, and peered at by thousands and thousands of skeptical people with as many agendas and opinions.
Sadly, it seems to be producing better information than the so-called Mainstream Media. The shame is that there are still responsible “professional” reporters and journalists in the employ of demonstrably decadent and corrupted organizations that used to actually serve the public.
Gotta figger out a way to keep their current employeres from destroying them.
The Dorsai series especially “Tactics of Mistake” and “Spirit of Dorsai” – Gordon Dickson.
Science fiction. Was once on the US military reading list.
===
Bill Whittle is very good on video. There are not many others. For instance I do like Instapundit’s general trend of thinking. I CAN. NOT. STAND. his voice.
I.S.,
I wonder if folks like you and me are in the minority? I don’t think so.
I do think a lot of modern folks have been habituated to video dissemination of information by growing up in front of a television set and listing to radio.
I’m an engineer, and I write quite a few articles and technical papers. I also make oral presentations at standards meetings and other technical forums. I’ve also been sucked into making a lot of “webinar” presentations lately.
To me at least, none of those forms of communication are as efficient as the written word, both from both the presenter’s perspective, and that of the readers. With the written word, it is much easier to stop, go back, and read (and re-read) sections that didn’t quite make sense the first time around. In a live situation, that is impossible. And in a video or audio recording, it means hitting rewind and pause, and rewind and pause, until we get it right.
And if we need to refer back to a few paragraphs prior to establish context or refresfresh a though, well, that’s near instantaneous with text. But that’s a major pain with video and audio.
Then again, maybe I’m just a Luddite…
I too like the speed and searchability of text, but I listen to a lot of audio, which I like because it allows multitasking along with physical chores.
—
Wish I could remember the name of the writer who recently published a book which was supplemented at the begining of each chapter by video content on the web.
—
…open thread:
Israel rethinks anti-Iran warnings
Even hawkish Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman now sounds skittish about his government’s long hinted-at willingness to go to war rather than see an enemy get the means to make a bomb.
—
According to one Barak aide, the risks of going it alone against Iran were brought home by a U.N. report condemning the heavy civilian toll of the January war in Hamas-ruled Gaza, an offensive that Israel says was provoked by Palestinian rockets.
DIRTY WORK
“Before the operation, the message we got from plenty of foreign players, including even some NGOs, was ‘Go in and do what you have to do to deal with Hamas’. But of course, that was all forgotten once the dust settled,” a Barak aide said.
jaymaster, I do not know your age, but I think it is in the main generational, this predilection for language over image. I am older and those of my age all grew up reading and writing. I am sure that there are exceptions in younger folks though. I notice a divide roughly starting at people in their mid forties.
Video, film, etc. leave me completely unsatisfied, particularly as a medium for thought, information and the like. Video supplies evidence at best, not thought.
But more OT, I do not think there are a lot of blogs like BC. It is sort of a nested PJM inside PJM. I do not know quite how he does it, but it is rather magical. There are a lot of good thinkers and writers out there, but the balance here is wonderful. And Richard as kept it up for so many years too. I dread the day when he decides to hang it up.
The discord of our times. Shall power flow up, or shall it flow down in the social pyramid? The idea that it should flow up is truly the revolutionary idea of the age. Socialism, and its ilk, is nothing but retrograde thought. Its essence is to return to the days before–but instead of being ruled by the aristocracies of yore, you can be ruled by the Wonderful Ones, who are much better people than they were. You can believe it–because they say so, and because they have a degree in Sociology or Oppression Studies.
At some point, I hope, people will wake up. I am here. I am waiting.
Just a quick vote for no video. I avoid PJTV like the plague. Written word only, please. Thanks.
It is to be hoped our host gets both positive reinforcement and some actual news and information from reading the comments sparked by his posts.
There are people here who seem to have actually been schooled in classical logic, to the extent that they can spot an unjustified conclusion, and also sufficiently good at diplomacy, conversation, and writing, to engage the errant thinker in conversation that both corrects and encourages further discussion, all without boring us all to shrieking stomping tantrums.
Like demokratische untergrund.
I ‘spicion that many of us read Richard’s posts with respect and a discomfiture at our own shambling inarticulacy.
Then we go to the reception following and swill down a few beers and sandwiches with our mates, and talk about the ideas that Wretchard laid out for us.
Great fun, and it always leaves fresh stretch marks on my brain.
“The Internet is a self-organizing medium”.
That, is Hayek.
‘The astonishing fact revealed by economics and biology is that order generated without design can far outstrip plans men consciously contrive. Our values and institutions are determined as part of a process of unconscious self-organization of a structure or pattern.
The extended order is transcendent–that which far surpasses the reach of our understanding, wishes and purposes, and sense of perception. It incorporates and generates knowledge which no individual brain and no single organization could posses or invent.
Adaptation to the unknown is the key in all evolution…the whole structure of activities tends to adapt, through these partial and fragmentary signals, to conditions foreseen by and known to no individual.
Evolution leads us ahead precisely in bringing about much that we could not intend or foresee.
In the marketplace, as in other institutions of the extended order, unintended consequences are paramount. Individuals, acting for their own ends, literally do not and cannot know what will be the net result of their interactions.’
As Churchill foresaw, the empires of the future are empires of the mind. We shall only see how they were formed after they form. Many people will hate that, already do.
Mongoose,
I’m 44.
Maybe you’re on to something….
One thing I always hated about newspapers was having to follow a story I was interested on to page 7 then go back to the front to start another story, follow it to page 4, etc, etc. Blogs solve this problem and I am grateful.
Because, as someone else pointed out, blogs do not generate large amounts of profit. This can actually be a benefit since those who blog are more interested in the content than the money and celebrity (mostly- Huffpo is an exception as I’m sure there are others). Older people who have a world of experience and are retired are national treasures in the blog world. Young people can learn a great deal by reading the right blogs.
random underdeveloped thoughts:
I see the Tea Party movement as leading to a new political party, and a new model for it. At least, it has that potential if we are lucky enough to get there.
The Tea Party can be an actual political party, and make the GOP go the way of the Whigs. Instead of the Tea party fielding candidates, the Tea party just needs to stick to a list of premises, and the people will sign on to the premises. Some of them will be part of the crowd, trying to run in front of it. That is good. That is better than the other option that some of them actually try to lead this crowd. Young turks in the GOP will walk away from it, knowing the branding is beyond salvation anyway. More, the candidates will come from the ideas, not the other way around.
Charisms do come and go, but the tribal aspect of the Tea party is that subsidiarity, and that subsidiarity allows them to naturally have local politicians come to them.
The Tea party shows that ideas still matter. That means BC and places like it need to keep talking and writing to develop those ideas. It’s not that think tanks don’t develop ideas, but they’ve staked out a position and fill in the data. But blogs create the data and the ideas emerge.
on a off-shoot related note: here in the Twin Cities, there are 2 new ad campaigns for health care providers. Both are cartoon drawings on billboards. Each billboard has a picture and a single word on it: “heal” or “pain” or some such on them.
Every time I see them, I think that Idiocracy was right about our future, but that the future is now. I can’t help but believe the ads are for the illiterate. The video world drowns out my parallel threads and does not allow me to be re entrant the way text does.
Greifer @ 24: But what core values does this new Tea Party Party stand for? What differentiates it from the Republicans? Is it mere attitude? Or is it philosophy? And if so, what philosophy?
Mongoose @ 17
You have stated very eloquently how many of us feel towards the wonder and joy brought to us for many years by Mr. Fernandez. I guess you are correct in that he would probably find some way to say it even more eloquently.
I also agree that the distaste with videos as a source for news is probably a generational thing. Those of us who predate television and computers have always thoroughly enjoyed entertainment provided by movies and later television but not informational content.
I do remember thoroughly enjoying the newsreels showing the tanks rolling into another French or Italian town as the GIs slowly regained Europe. Even then it did not register as “news”, but a graphic history. I know it may be unbelievable that Hollywood actually once celebrated our triumphs, but it is true.
Even when the news was primarily provided by television, there was always the recognition that you were only getting a brief glimpse of what actually happened and a suspicion that it might not have actually happened that way.
It’s taken until recently for the majority to realize that it probably didn’t happen the way it’s been described.
I hope I’m around long enough to see the way the next development unfolds.
WillDoMath…:
Where to start.
If you haven’t read All Quiet on the Western Front or The Red Badge of Courage, you could do worse.
The Obvious:
C. S. Forester
The Hornblower Series
Rifleman Dodd (aka Death to the French)
Brown on Resolution
The Good Shepherd
Patrick O’Brien
The Aubrey/Maturin series
Herman Wouk
The Winds of War
War and Remembrance
George MacDonald Fraser
The Flashman series (especially the early
ones)
Steven Pressfield
Gates of Fire
Tides of War
Alexander
The Afghan Campaign
Less Obvious:
Cecelia Holland
The Firedrake
Rakossy
Until the Sun Falls
The Earl
Jerusalem
Richard Hillary
Falling Through Space (aka The Last Enemy)
Gwyn Griffin
An Operational Necessity
Harry Brown
A Walk in the Sun
Zoe Oldenbourg
The Cornerstone
The World is Not Enough
Destiny of Fire
If there are any of these you haven’t read, I envy you.
I am with Jaymaster.
Somehow video just does not have the heft of the written word. Watching Bill Whittle`s videos is mildly interesting but I can`t see anyone looking at them in twenty years and saying `This is valuable, it develops an argument, it says something important about the time or the place,` whereas his essays definitely do.
#3 Mark – (and everyone here for that matter) well said; I agree – Wretchard is a gifted/elegant analyst of complex incongruities and a kind of witness to our times.
Slightly back OT. You see the antiquated ‘meme pushing’ of the MSM that wretchard refers to in the recent stories about bad manners in conservatives/republicans/the right wing (as though we didn’t put up with every slimy manifestation of Bush Dearrangement Syndrome for 8 years.)
Joy Behar featured Bett Midler denouncing Glenn Beck as a hatemonger tilling the ground or perhaps seeding the ground for hatred and mass murder on the scale of Rwanda. When I hear this sort of thing I know that Ms Midler has never heard Glenn Beck. In fact the other night he offered up a very heartfelt plea for some kind of sense and compassion in the face of the senseless teen murder in Chicago.
Then you read of Gore Vidal denouncing republicans as selfish mean fascits.
I conclude that conservatives can understand leftists but leftists cannot understand conservatives. That is, it is part of the leftist understanding of things that conservatives are not to be understood.
The MSM seems to want to perpetuate this awful misunderstanding.
Writing, as an intellectual process, is something quite different from speaking. As such, it cannot be made redundant; it can only lose audience as people become uninterested in real thinking and creation. But this can only happen as long as people are not threatened by others and hence not desirous of greater self-understanding as a matter of survival. Those more serious about surviving and winning conflicts will always be drawn to writers where available, even if these are relegated to monasteries; for example, does anyone serious about the markets make do with the Cramers and tv touts of the world?
The great competitor/opposite to writing is not so much any one medium as it is the unthinking performance of established myth and ritual, which is the real heart of the tribe and its priesthoods. A self-conscious audience for writers is a self-conscious market. In this respect, the blogs and the traditional newspaper (in a city of several papers) may have more in common with each other than they do with the more highly ritualized performances and mythic misrepresentations of tv news.
WillDoMathForFood — with regard to military novels, have you tried Bernard Cornwell’s “Sharpe” series? Admittedly, these are plot-driven male-bodice-ripper-battle-porn, but they are hugely entertaining. At the opposite end of the spectrum from Hornblower and Aubrey/Maturin, but you might want to give them a go — 20 novels in the series.
I am not sure why this article is titled 300 Million, but there are now about 300 million people on Facebook.
About the war novels, I’d add:
Count Belisarius, Robert Graves (B. was Justinian’s general)
Kilo Class, and other submarine warfare novels (Patrick Robinson)
Robinson wrote the official history of the Falklands War. He would ask the Admiral, in general conversation, questions like “Is it possible to hijack a boomer?” The Admiral would think a minute and say “Yes, and this is how you could do it.” Very interesting looks into national security discussions. I suspect national security discussions at this time, however, look different from what they used to look like. Perhaps they are now more like the Fire Department in Fahrenheit 451, which specialized in starting fires of banned books.
Aristotle considered fiction a higher form of inquiry than history since it is not limited to a particular set of circumstances and the limitations involved in investigating that particular set.
The written word is important, except when visuals are better.
WillDoMathForFood @10
I add “Life and Fate” by Vasili Grossman, a Russian war correspondent during WW II, who was at the Battle of Stalingrad and whose articles had the same kind of appeal to Russians as Ernie Pyle’s did to us in United States. “Life and Fate” has a similar scope to “War and Peace”, after which it was modeled, I a sure.
I would second those who have recommended Patrick Obrien’s 20 volume Aubrey-Maturin series. Obrien has been described as “the thinking man’s Tom Clancy”–with a sense of humor.
And thanks for your list. And you, also, J Lambie
Good reading,
Jim
I can read a whole lot faster than people can talk. I will pass up an interview such as discussed here. Don’t have a quarter of an hour to get something I could read in five minutes.
I liked Gates of Fire. However, Pressfield glorifies Sparta, making them almost philosopher-kings. Hanson, in Soul of Battle, is more accurate. A vicious, miserable, slave-holding fascist society which happened to have very good infantrymen, until Epaminondas and his Thebans.
I reviewed Gates for Amazon and suggested that Sparta was what we’d expect if a couple of SS divisions had found a fertile valley in Ukraine with forty thousand peasants already there, and simply checked out of the war, and nobody ever found out.
The origins of Sparta were, afaik, a warrior invasion enslaving the locals (helots), so that would fit.
In Pressfield’s next book, he does have a character suggest to a Spartan on campaign that they spend more time looking in–keeping their helots under control–than in looking out, guarding the encampment. But that’s the only connection.
Too bad a more congenial polity didn’t do what the Spartans did, and get the ink.
But maybe only the Spartans would do it.
Something to think about.
Hell, Vlad was one of the defenders of Christian Europe against the Turks. We owe him. Think about that.
The invention of the printing press in Europe is regarded as important but the growth and invention of publishing as a new service and industry sometimes gets a short shift.
It is something of a strain to make an analogy, but with the internet, both the writer and the reader have access to the press and the product.
Damn hard to ban the content without destroying the value of the whole thing.
As far as video vs. written I remember Kim du Toit saying that when giving a presentation that you couldn’t get over more than about 5 bullet points, despite the intelligence of the audience.
Richard Aubrey,
The Spartans were Dorian invaders but so were most of the inhabitants of the Peloponnesus. The inhabitants of the neighboring villages of Laconia around the three towns that constituted Sparta proper were the perioeci. They had a high degree of autonomy but followed the Spartans in war and peace. The helots were the conquered inhabitants of Messenia whose lands were divided into estates to support the spartiates. The spartiates were the true Spartans. The wiki seems rather difficult about all this. There does seem to have been a group called helots before the conquest of Messenia.
WDMFF@10
“If anyone else out there has a list of favorite military and/or historical novels, I’d be interested to see it.”
He didn’t really do much military stuff, but as far as I’m concerned, James Michener was the master of the historical fiction genre. He had a lot of classics from all over the country and world (“Centennial”, “Hawaii”, “Chesapeake”, “Iberia”, “Poland”, etc.) but my personal fave is when he gave a masterful picture of the history of Israel from the perspective of Jews, Christians AND Muslims in “The Source”.
It was published in 1965, so it’s very interesting in that the 1968 dust-up that colors so much thinking and commentary about Israel hadn’t yet happened. The first time I read that book, I was helpless to try to put it down.
The other historical fiction book I’ve read that somehow captured my imagination more than others was “Aztec” by Gary Jennings. It looks at Aztec society and the conquistadores from the Aztec perspective. I found the follow-on books to be pretty plain, but that first one was GREAT.
Brilliant comments!
A feast for the mind.
It’s a big world out there. Far bigger than the liberal bubble with it’s self-referential bias and destructive, nay, suicidal agenda.
Wretchard
old media liberal ‘aggregate memes’;
what a great way to describe ‘big lie’ 2.0
or in other words, the PC party line.
Without MSM censorship, we can start to deconstruct the media tissue of lies.
Suddenly we can see more clearly.
The light shines in.
What we see is the Polanski Hollywood/media, talent and depravity mixed together and serving each other and a very strange agenda.
Focusing on the elusive search for the ‘truth’ rather than ‘correctness’, can be very constructive. This too is a long term thing.
Obama is the Mahdi of the post-American tribe. Exposed, they may be failing and only the wreckage and detritus of their passing may be left. A little like a tsunami that sweeps and destroys and passes on.
Life of the mind.
That’s pretty much what I remembered.
And that makes my SS division analogy reasonable.
Seems the Aztecs did roughly the same thing. Cortez, after getting some creds with the Aztecs’ tributary tribes by whipping them, found he had 100,000 volunteers to help him fight the Aztecs.
Might have been a bad move in the long run, but it tells you what kind of bosses the Aztecs were.
Presumably, Aztec regulars might have pulled a Thermopylae had the tactical and strategic situation allowed. Still doesn’t make them good guys.
For mil hist fic, see Robert Low.
The Oathsworn Trilogy. A band of worse than usual Norse are wandering around in the interstices between civilization of a thousand years ago and the neighboring barbarisms. Hunting for Attila’s treasure, so forth.
Low participates in non-scripted Dark Ages battle re-enactments. Between that and his formidable research, it looks as if he gets it right.
“The Internet is a self-organizing medium; it’s a declaration of governance and independence whatever else it may be.”
Obama just gave away the internet to the “international community” with no discussion that I’m aware of, and only a few after-the-fact headlines announcing it as a done-deal.
When this idea was first proposed two or three years ago — allowing non-Americans an equal say in how the internet is managed (i.e., ICANN) — it was greeted with loud bellows of outrage and never-ever-never promises. So a new guy takes over the job at ICANN in July (after Obama is elected and in power) and less than three months later, he gives the whole shooting match away, out of American control.
Who is the new guy, who picked him (like are the initials “ACORN” on his resume any place?), and why was there no public announcement of these negotations?
Now, my next question is how long will it take before China demands world-wide firewalls and Saudi Arabia wants full-scale hate-speech protection against any criticism of the name Mohammad and/or Saud. Because you just know that now that Obama is in full appeasement and apology mode, he’ll make ICANN do anything anyone with a pot of money tells him they want.
P.S. The thought occurs that this would be another Manchurian Candidate symptom: what a bought-off President would do to bring down America at the behest of a puppet-master pay-offer.
I think that a goodly part of the preference for the written word over video is in fact generational. I am in my late 50′s. I grew up reading, and literacy was something absolutely demanded of me in elementary school, and expected as a given at any educational level that was higher. In high school, our teachers made us write our papers in footnoted college format and length, because they were preparing us for college. I read and write naturally [with the quality or lack thereof of the writing being in the eye of the beholder]. To me, writing is like having a conversation where I have to make my points rationally [and don't get interrupted while I make them]. I formulate my words in my head like I am talking to someone.
Schools today downplay literacy. Part of it was the “whole word” concept that became the fashion in the NEA. Part of it was the quality of the teachers. From the late 1960′s on, it seems that those who went into the field of teaching had a higher and higher proportion of those who were not capable of doing anything else, and whose own reading ability and inclination was questionable at best. Scholarship itself is something that our society has downgraded.
I admit that my own ancient system is incapable of playing most videos and that I have a certain curiousity as to the content of PJTV, but to me the written word and the complex concepts that can be developed and worked with back and forth are the real attractions.
#3 Mark
If it could, ACORN would respond with violence, but now the lights are on it and its preferred tactics don’t work.
At least for now. I expect that since ACORN, SEIU, and Democratic party workers and support groups have been implicated in violence at the Town Halls, at the behest of the President, that such will eventually become state-sanctioned somewhere around the next step.
#24 Greifer and #25 WillDoMathForFood,
I suspect it is both philosophical and attitudinal. The Republican party, when it can be torn away from the teat of power and perks [and every second October-early November] mouths the same ideals of freedom, limited government, and liberty as the Tea Party people. But for almost all Republicans in party and governmental office, it is just a script they are told to follow and they no more believe it than one of the Baldwin brothers would believe their script if they had to play an American military hero.
From my point of view, there is a thread running through the Tea Party movement akin to what I saw when I was working. Cops, firemen, EMT’s/Paramedics, the military, anyone involved real public safety; are simultaneously the most cynical and idealistic people in the world. They see the worst of humanity and how common it is. And they see the ideal. And knowing what most people are really like, they fight for the ideal.
Tea Party people know how intrinsically corrupt and evil most people are in government. They have been lied to so often that it is the background noise, and their BS detectors are set on vaporize. Yet, they believe in the American ideal of free people living their lives without the oppression of a nanny-state government. And they deliberately have put their collective tuchus‘s on the line [literally, because with the constant risk of Democrat sponsored violence and the plethora of non-media cameras recording everyone and everything taking a public stand carries a risk].
The Tea Party is one manifestation of the growing of tribes outside the template of control that the elites have laid out. And because they are inside the template, the elites cannot fully comprehend events taking place outside the template. And indeed, maintaining their place inside requires that they remain deliberately ignorant of that outside, lest they be accused of the political equivalent of heresy.
I noted an interesting bit of disconnect. POLITICO has an article up about how the Republican leadership [sorry about the cognitive disconnect in that phrase] thought that the only serious contender for the nomination in 2012 was Romney until Pawlenty just sewed up some of G.W. Bush’s campaign people and now it is between Pawlenty and Romney.
Simultaneously, we see that 48 days out from the issuance of the book, Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” is #1 at both Amazon and Barnes and Noble; and is the first non-fiction book ever to do that. It took just hours after the announcement of the book. She is still a Republican.
In any reasonably valid poll taken of Republicans, she beats the tar out of Romney and Pawlenty combined. Anecdotally, at any Tea Party gathering, there is a strong Palin 2012 meme. Is she going to run as a Republican in 2012? Or as an independent of some sort? I have no idea. But now she is the only Republican that has a wide base of popular support in the party, is the only one who can fill any venue she chooses to appear at. And yet to the Republican bosses and pundits who are inside the template, she is invisible.
She is not part of the Tea Party movement, but she is parallel to it. She is the only political figure now around that has the power to make or break the Republican Party and make the Tea Party if it actually becomes a Party. And yet, to those inside the template, she is a mythical creature that really does not exist. She, at most, is the figure drawn at the edge of the map, “Here there be Sarah!”.
I am reminded of those poor souls who watch the water pull away from them on the beach in the minutes before a tsunami, and think it is neat to watch and walk out farther than normally possible, not realizing that it is going to come back at them at the speed of a jet plane. The water is like the people and their support, and they are going to come back and wipe the template off of the map; and those inside the template will not have any real comprehension of what hit them.
I do not know where either Sarah Palin or the Tea Party will go. That is despite the fact that yes, I pre-ordered her book, and yes, I have been a speaker at a Tea Party [and got recorded by a bunch of non-media types across the street with some really long lensed cameras, as did we all]. But if electoral politics still obtain in this country by 2012, both are probably going to have a hand in reordering it, for good or ill.
As far as the lists of books, I second them with only the caveat that I believe that Tom Clancy is “a thinking man”, just in the field of techno-geek fiction. de gustibus non est disputandum
Subotai Bahadur
wonderful stuff, top to bottom1
Mark/33; The written word is important, except when visuals are better –”a picture is worth a thousand words” –yes, and of that important aphorism no picture can be made –
wretchard, I haven’t read the whole thread, but I see you concerned about the old MSM “aggregation” of ideas – which comes when they own, when they are, the channel. All true.
BUT, what that also provides is a “browseable” content, where you can become aware of things you might not even ask about or hear about otherwise. It’s sort of “broadband” in content, that we lose with much of the new media. Sometimes “shotgun” is good, when it includes us and our neighbors in some kind of rough equality.
… not to mix metaphors too much!
A hearty second to M. Simon’s #14.
Tactics of Mistake in particular can get you in the mood to find sensible yet igenious solutions to knotty problems. Teaches you not to be a man of the military but to be a man of war.
Very regrettable Gordon Dickson no longer on recommended military reading list.
Richard Aubrey @35: Few folks know or care about the role of the Magyar in the defense of Christian Europe against the Muslem armies. Nor the connection with the holdout of the last free space in Budapest during the 1956 resistance: a radio station on an island in the river. As the swine Soviets broke in the door, the Hungarians broadcast this message:
We Die For Europe!
And nobody came to help.
Nobody.
Thanks to all who made book suggestions. I’m always looking for a book that I will regret that I could never again read for the first time. I haven’t read most of the suggested books here, though Agoraphobic Plumber and I must have similar tastes, because if I had thought of them, I would have added both “The Source” and “Aztec” to my list, too. Thanks especially to J. Lambie for his long list. New books! Woo hoo! Happy days are here again!
Jaymaster,
Absoliutely. When I am reading I can stop, poper a paragraph, maybe look up an obscure word, or even take a whole twenty minutes to argue some point with myself, and then go back to reading where I left off. You cannot do this with an audio or a visual. I find a decent writer can develop a complex point far better in a paragraph than can be done in a visual clip – particularly a short 2 minute You Tube piece. But then I reached the age of literacy and was reading actual books before I ever saw a television. Yes. Another Old Fart. I will admit that audiovisuals allow for better use of sarcasm, but emoticons have been one useful innovation here. ;:
WDMFF. You sound like the brother I never had. Thinking you are “different” is a good way to build character and to develop the spine for standing alone. I also share your attraction to writing about military (& politics), though I generally prefer history to historic fiction.
Rurik: That’s funny. I actually prefer good fiction to good history, but I read a heckuva a lot more history than I do fiction because my standards for fiction are higher (or maybe it’s just that my disappointment in bad fiction is greater). If you’re a reader on this site, then you have more sense than my actual brother, who voted for Obama and thinks that Dick Cheney is The Devil. I love my brother, but his politics annoy me, and seem to be getting worse.
A good list of top military historical fiction should include Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War and War and Remembrance (one novel, in two books). i loved it –straight storytelling, great pace and distance, and a large extended family tightly but plausibly arranged around the real events. And the device of short sections of military analysis from ‘German General Armin Von Roon’s postwar memoir’ was just excellent as a way to both let the story readers read past, and the military history buffs linger awhile in, the novel context of the allied war effort as analyzed –between VE Day and VJ Day –by the German general staff.
James Michener – “The Bridges at Toko-Ri”, a short book compared to some of Michener’s other lengthy tomes. Contains a famous short soliloquy by Admiral Tarrant at the end.
Anton Meyer – “Once an Eagle”, a long book, but good (and a bad mini-series in the ’70′s). Read it a long time ago.
Edward Beach – “Run Silent, Run Deep”, a fast read, gripping and realistic. Beach was a sub commander in WWII. Also commanded the Triton in the first circumnavigation of the world, submerged.
Military SF? No one mentioned “Starship Troopers”? What’s the world coming to?
Or Keith Laumer’s “Bolo” sagas?
Or Jerry Pournelle’s novels about Falkenberg’s Legion?
I liked “Gates of Fire” very much, as did a friend who is a retired Army Major. (Also strongly recommend “The Afghan Campaign”, how timely!). But I agree that the Spartans were a little too dolled-up in the novel. It was a harsh time full of harsh men, so maybe it’s all relative. As Pressfield and Insta-Reynolds said, this was a pre-Christian era, and there were no strong scruples about mercy and restraint. And no Nieztsche or Sartre nihilism, either.
How primitive. Heh.
WDMFF, yes, a voracious reader of this site, which provides an ongoing intellectual equiivalent of an orgasm.Frequently I cannot even get through a single lengthy comment without taking a break to discuss it with myself. My real sister, who is one of those gentle souls, the sort wwho thinks there is no trouble she cannot pray her way out of, is only now coming to acknowledge the sort of sheepdog world most of us inhabit. Acknowledge, but still not able to accept it.
Part of the trouble with military history, is that so much of it has been so execrable. Failed attempts to satisfy academic standards by demilitasrizing it – no blood, or combat, or maneuver, but lots of sociology and feminism. My own specialty is Russian history, particularly military aviation. I hope eventually to make some significant contnributions myself.
In terms of suggestions, as fiction, I liked Peters’ “Red Army”, and as history I strongly recommend Anthony Beevor’s two books on “Stalingrad”, and “The Fall of Berlin”. Another tresure, if you can find it in a used book pile is “Commanding the Red Army’s Sherman Tanks”, by Dmitriy Loza, a memoir of his experiences.
Switching topics to 39. Robinsolana – Perhaps it is not really so strange that the “… Polanski Hollywood/media, talent and depravity mixed together …”. Many actors and entertainers have a very tenuous grasp on reality, or anything without a script. Nothing is really real to them, except for their own starring role in the drama, and after the scene changes, its all forgotten. This may be why pathological behavior seems so frequent among entertainers – OJ, Robert Blake, etc. I’m the leading actor . Come to think of it, this paradigm of a very stylistic narcissist, unable to function without a script might remind us of someone else?
Mr. Bahadur,
Thanks for doing the heavy lifting on what is different about the Tea Party and the GOP.
I agree with nearly all of your comments. To try and push the ideas a bit farther, the tribes are going to need to stay tribes, in some sense hyperlocal in order to maintain authenticity. The tea parties are authentic, and one of the main pillars of that authenticity is their own lack of demand for power for themselves. The GOP as an institution, as all institutions, and the individuals in it hold to the view that by being put in power, they can do something valuable. But the tea party movement says otherwise. It is about deleveraging that power.
Term limits for people, sunset clauses for laws. these are tiny ways that the tea partiers hope to structurally weaken the federal government’s stranglehold. Few GOP member candidates are really able to say with a straight face that they want less power for themselves, and most can’t lie well enough for long enough to maintain that claim for 2-3 years to get elected in 2010/2012/after. Most of the conservative pundits still seem to think America needs more brains –and by that, read Ivy Elite–to solve the world’s most complicated problems. But the Tea Partiers don’t think that we need mandarins at all. They think those brains got us INTO these problems in the first place. So again, the GOP can’t align itself with the Tea Party, not even in the populism of Huckabee, because it keeps picking the same advisors, the same 2nd tier. Don’t get me wrong: brains matter. Rummy and Cheney had brains, and we are safer and better for it. But the Tea Partiers don’t conflate brains to the Elite and to the opinion makers (Rummy and Cheney both were far more men of the midwest than of DC) because the Tea Partiers have to do something for a living themselves.
The Tea partiers also seem to be saying to the lot of the permanent govt and the likely candidates: we don’t want to hear what you have to say. You lie; we can tell because your lips are moving. Only actions will do now. The GOP may pay lip service to liberty and free market principles, but they too will have to show where the money is to get traction now.
And then there’s Sarah. So many of us what to hear what she has to say–we are still waiting to hear it, because we don’t believe that the media or McCain or the pundits told us the truth. And the populist sense that Joe the Plumber really would be a better president/senator/rep/ambassador/cabinet leader is played out every day: could sarah really have been WORSE than what we have now???
Maybe the Tea Partiers are waiting to find out if someone can represent that populism without class warfare. The tribes are distinct, but they have a common enemy: the permanent govt tribe. It will be interesting to see what she has to say.
cannot be trusted to stay outside
it is why e.g. term limits are desired but not enough. The centralization of power is corrupting to whomever is there.
Chief.
I read The Bridge at Andau–I was in the eighth grade when that was going down–and it was as much as I could stand.
Ask your friends who prate about justice and freedom who Pal Maleter was.
“Russia at War” forget the author but he was a Russian journo. Good. As my brother said, it was interesting to read a book on the Eastern Front where the Germans were the bad guys.
Dickson’s Dorsai books are good in several respects but Donal Graeme is handed one or two deus ex machina.
Of course, there’s the problem of how an ordinary man can write of a superman. Can it even be done? Maybe that’s the best that can be done.
Grew up reading the historical novels of Mary Renault. She was called a “male impersonator” for her male homosexual characters based on her own lesbian perspective. Despite that somewhat atypical perspective she did not use her art to advance an agenda. In fact she condemned the radical homosexual movement. Her recreation of the ancient Mycenaean, Classical and Hellenic worlds was vivid and generally accurate. It surprises me that they haven’t been made into movies but I fear how Hollywood would adapt them. Ideally they would be filmed “straight,” that is as written. The books are worth another look.
wretchard gets a couple “attaboys” from maggie’s farm and vanderleun.
(but i’m still stuck on stupid @ “luddy barsen”
)
A great read (though not a novel) is “The Reason Why” by Cecil Woodham-Smith, which tells the story of the Charge of the Light Brigade.
Every bit as absorbing as the charge itself is the author’s account of the Battle of Alma. In one relatively minor episode of the battle, a line of 550 men of the 93rd Highlanders and 100 invalids standing two men deep held the entrance to the gorge leading to Balaclava against four squadrons of Russian cavalry, who were forced to retreat. The Highlanders wore red coats and their stand in this action is the source of the now famous phrase “the thin red line”.
Just before the Russians charged, a battalion of Turks that had been with the Highlanders panicked and fled the scene. The author writes :
“As they passed the camp of the Highlanders, a soldier’s wife rushed out and fell upon them, belaboring them with a stick, kicking them, cursing them for cowards, pulling their hair and boxing their ears, and so pursued them down to the harbor.”
Like I said, a great read.
Regarding the internet – NRO has a discussion on Obama’s decision to cede US control over ICANN to the “international community”
http://tinyurl.com/ydpfkrr