Skeptic Lawyer, I also agree Crickey have been a bit hard on you. They’re just jumping on a reliable old bandwagon I guess – and they are pretty good at that.

Does anyone else here think Crickey has too much of the shit sheet about it? I mean, they do pay some interesting commentators (like Mark Bahnisch, of course, who is better informed than most of them), but Christian Kerr should be shot – if you want to leak a pernicious story without fact-checking, he provides a good story.

And the whining from Mayne about the whole Milne affair, aargh, get over it!

Answer: No.

I made that second comment because I asked a question at 2:26, and by coincidence your response was posted a minute later.

Ken Tankerous?

Leave it out Ken: if I commence (not ‘continue’) to think of you as anything at all, it will not be as …that, more likely as a person with inordinate fondness for slightly inept, unnecessary, but seemingly well-meant categorising. A bit like Oscar and his buttons.

I’m beginning to think that you will continue to sentence me to stereotyping as an archetypical obtuse male chauvinist irrespective of my actual words and actions.

I conceded some time ago that “whimsical” was an ill-chosen title for the section, because some posts linked there are anything but.

I agree also that there are often (perhaps even always) political dimensions to the best “personal” essays: the personal enlivens and illustrates the political and vice versa. That’s certainly true of both A. Duck’s and P. Cat’s posts linked yesterday. However, Duck’s reference to Abbott and RU486 was a single short asterisked postscript to a very long post, and was the only overtly/expressly “Political” element to that post.

P. Cat’s post had a more extensive political connection/purpose, but not one that relates specifically to any day-to-day political issue (as to which, see further below). P. Cat’s central argument is twofold:
(1) to defend feminism against the accusations of post-feminists like Virginia Hausseger; and
(2) to make the more general claim that “We live in a culture still deeply, deeply steeped in the notion that a woman with no children is some kind of pitiable freak”.

Those are certainly political issues in a broad sense, and I agree that they’re far more important ones than much of the trivial, ephemeral nonsense usually treated as news in the MSM. I suppose I could use Missing Link as a vehicle to challenge the prevailing MSM stereotypical view of what is “news” and “politics” and what isn’t. But that isn’t my purpose. My purpose is to highlight the fact that the blogosphere generates large amounts of writing that is as good as and better than anything found in the MSM, and to make that writing accessible to a wider audience. And, despite your arguments and my conceding much of their force, I still think that the best way of achieving that purpose is to categorise stories in a way a mainstream audience can easily recognise and with which it is familiar.

I quite deliberately set out to highlight the range of meaty day-to-day news and politics posts generated in the blogosphere, in part as an antidote to the prevailing practice of MSM outlets (and Crikey) when they bother mentioning blogs at all. They invariably choose to highlight only the quirky and idiosyncratic posts (look at Crikey’s Blogwatch almost any day), because it doesn’t suit their purpose to let their readers know that there is a huge range of free-of-charge material out there on blogs that deals with the same issues as Crikey but for which it charges a subscription. Both the MSM and Crikey have a vested interest in portraying the blogosphere as a place for erratic ratbaggery and not serious, well written journalism. It seems to me that the most effective way of negating that false perception is to classify posts in a similar manner to the MSM, which unavoidably means equating “news” and “politics” with the stories and issues treated as such by the MSM.

An unintended effect of pursuing my primary purpose may well be that I miss to some extent an opportunity to challenge a dominant paradigm about what is news and what should be regarded as important and worthy of the greatest attention. Maybe I’ll go there once I’ve succeeded in building up a significant general audience for Missing Link. For the moment, there’s nothing to prevent others from attempting their own Missing Link-type feature, and classifying and selecting posts however they like. Moreover, I’ve also invited expressions of interest from bloggers (LP ones in particular) who might be interested in participating in editing Missing Link, either in rotation or in relation to a particular section. Again you would then (at least to an extent) be able to shape it however you want during your editorship. So far I’ve only had one taker.

It appears so, doesn’t it.

And as for the faux seriousness of commentary about “Proper Politics” that Laura points to – I agree heartily that much of it is in fact largely shallow gossip mongering in the celebrity fashion.

I am interested to see whether the comments by Laura, Mark and Dr Cat have accomplished any of the “rather a lot of convincing” that Ken said would be necessary to shift his view.

Could I also make the point — and Susoz does it explicitly in the actual name of her blog, ‘personal political’ — that for many women the old slogan about the personal being the political is a simple statement of fact. Certainly my own aim as a blogger is to demonstrate (’show, don’t tell’) how one extrapolates from the personal to the political in order to write integrated commentary on daily life and the way it’s informed by how we are governed, and to demonstrate that the ‘personal’ and the ‘political’ are not antithetical but occur along a spectrum. I often write about the personal as a way of trying to make the political specific and engaging.

Here’s another example, not to do with feminism, to try to make the point another way: in another thread connected with this one (either here or at Troppo, can’t remember) someone commends Jeff Sparrow’s review of last year’s Best Australian Essays. My own essay in that volume gets a fairly value-neutral mention but is listed as one of the apolitical essays.

Which was a bit annoying, because it’s an essay about choral singing which built up towards an explicit if briefly made point about the nature of collective endeavour, something I would certainly call ‘political’. The post of mine being discussed here also built up towards an explicitly political paragraph about the uses of feminism. As Laura points out, I even put in a little ‘This way to the Gillard fruit bowl fiasco’ reference at the end. But does this stuff really need to be spelled out?

The acres of newsprint and many many intertubes filled with rants of the Virgina Hausegger type should signal the intense political contestation over gender and life choices (chances).

So, to cut a long story short, I definitely agree that Ken is narrowing his definition of politics to big P Politics, but I’d also argue that small p politics is now big P at the increasingly important cultural level.

I don’t quite agree with the idea, often met with in some form or other, that writing on trivia or domestic matters or pop culture or whatever is *not* being accorded its full value if it’s treated as light and ephemeral. I am planning to write a book on domestic animals in English literature and philosophy since 1800 but I don’t think this lends my blog ramblings about my cat any special glamour or profundity. (Hi Steve.) I sure don’t think that identifying oneself as a scholar of something is enough to make one’s views on celebrities more dignified or respectable than Who Weekly’s. (And I also think the converse, as many of us do: far too much of what’s presented as so-serious political & economic debate & commentary is fluffy & shallow; this goes for print and online writing equally.)

But I think Ken is demonstrably wrong in his claim that Ampersand Duck’s and Pavlov Cat’s recent postings are personal and not political in the broadest sense (granted you allow that “womens issues” can be political at all, I suppose.)

Duck explicitly discussed the present and past impact on her life that Tony Abbott’s opposition to RU-486 has had. I don’t propose to use my friend’s experiences as a debating point but I am a bit astonished to think anyone could read that post and not draw a bald and black and white conclusion about the outcome for womens health Abbott’s actions have produced.

Cat also wrote in the first person and with reference to episodes in her own life, but her explicit topic is the double bind STILL constricting women in Australia who are trying to negotiate work and gender, including reproduction, and once again the connection to governmental politics is made for those who require it, in the form of a reference to a memorably facile bit of media commentary on Julia Gillard’s childless unmarried condition. Again the point is explicitly political, and indeed I would argue it’s more fundamentally and essentially political than any number of commentaries on relatively minor and changeable matters of party politicking.