{"id":2872,"date":"2011-05-09T00:01:41","date_gmt":"2011-05-09T07:01:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=2872"},"modified":"2011-05-08T22:47:56","modified_gmt":"2011-05-09T05:47:56","slug":"oh-the-irony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=2872","title":{"rendered":"Oh, The Irony!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I call it the Political Blogging gene. Consider yourself fortunate if you lack the trait.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nPolitical blogs are basically the same online creatures I experienced in the 1980s, back in the cro-magnon days of the Internet.<\/p>\n<p>No, make that the pre-Internet. The ARPAnet.<\/p>\n<p>Back then, it was the USCD Msg (Message) System that propagated endless threads of political tripe. Sure, you could also find bitter, heated, polarizing arguments on the small-time BBS (bulletin board system) networks of the day. But the Msg System was too similar to the blog battles of today.<\/p>\n<p>The Political Blogging gene is long-lived. That makes me wonder how people with the gene sated their wanton anger in the pre-digital days. But I digress.<\/p>\n<p>The silly thing about political blogging is that it never fixes anything. Speaking out at a public meeting for five minutes will do more for your cause than writing a carefully crafted, convincing argument on a blog. That&#8217;s because the blogs are populated by trolls and idiots who seek to do nothing better than infuriate you and invalidate your cause.<\/p>\n<p>Face reality: It&#8217;s impossible to deal with some anonymous bastard in any reasonable way. Being on the Internet doesn&#8217;t make the anonymous bastard any less anonymous or less a bastard.<\/p>\n<p>The best way to avoid the situation is simply to ignore the political blogs, which is positive to anyone&#8217;s mental health and possibly good for the country as a whole. That advice doesn&#8217;t stop the anonymous bastards, though, and it doesn&#8217;t help if you&#8217;re a carrier of the Political Blogging gene.<\/p>\n<p>The stupid thing about any Internet debate (and I&#8217;m not calling it a &#8220;dialog,&#8221; because it isn&#8217;t), is that people feel like the last person to post is the &#8220;winner.&#8221; After all, if you totally stomp your opponent and his silly political notions into the digital dirt, he doesn&#8217;t reply, right?<\/p>\n<p>Still, the irony in that logic is that by the time you are the last person to post on a blog, no one is reading the thread any more anyway. So that begs the question, what did you win?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I call it the Political Blogging gene. Consider yourself fortunate if you lack the trait.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2872"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2872\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2875,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2872\/revisions\/2875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}