• Third, I have an incredible degree of Bush fatigue; it is not that I cannot get outraged anymore, but there is only a finite roster of ways in which a government can lie, cheat, steal, kill, destroy, and oppress. Bush and his minions have long since done them all; I have long since taken note of them here; nothing surprises me, and my outrage is constant and numbing.



• And I have only a limited tolerance for my own frustration and despondency that a more effective movement of opposition has not arisen in response to his outrages. And I have no confidence that weblogs like FmH are change agents. (I don't know what would be effective activism these days, I guess, but I can no longer rationalize as I did for so long that FmH was an integral form of activist activity)
  
  [...]



• And, yes, the 'landfill' of useless blowhard weblogs proliferates, but so too are there more of those who do have something thoughtful to say, or something interesting to link to. They've gotten there first and said it better, whatever 'it' is.

It'a increasingly the case that many of the opinions that I would once have found myself compelled to post have already been posted elsewhere, many times expressed better than I could possibly achieve, so that any post of mine would wind up being mere cheerleading, the kind of "me too" writing that I've always found annoying in private e-mail groups -- so I end up not doing it. The few times recently where I've had an idea that I thought was interesting or not widely known, and I post about it, in the next day or so the idea turns up all over the place, a classic example of "great minds think alike" -- people with similiar orientations responded in similar ways to similar stimuli -- and since my circulation is so tiny, and theirs is so large, I don't even get credit for originality, because basically no one even knows I've managed to walk ahead of the wave by a couple of hours.

I know this sounds like I'm into blogging for the egoboo, and I suppose that's in some part true (and the lack of ego stroking contributes to my blogging fatigue because of lack of positive reinforcement), but it something more subtle than that: it's turned out that blogging is, in its own way, just as frustrating as yelling at the TV, except that I don't strain my voice.

Anyway, read what Eliot has to say.

Update: In the FmH comment thread, Medley makes some excellent points:

one way I avoid worrying about the originality quotient (and something I encourage TheGuy with too - as his weblog writing has fallen off even more than mine) is to note that I (and he, and probably you) have readers who don't read any other blogs (or read very few). So to them, it's fresh or new. *shrug*

I think for anyone with an academic or, especially, scientific background, the compulsion to break new ground or find some new take or analytical point to make is hard to shake. But, it's really not required in this medium. Another point: sometimes people need to hear an idea several times, in several different ways, before it sinks in. (In science... (and especially math - where I started a long time ago), the idea is that it should be good enough to say it (argue it, prove it) once.. and there, it's done! Sometimes I think part of my frustration with the world comes from thinking that assumption applies, when it doesn't.

About the business of things being good enough to be said only once -- in academic fields, your audience follows the literature closely enough so that that works. They got it the first time. The same cannot be said to be true of a weblog's audience, unless it is a very very technical/specific weblog.