About that "scalping"... and other blogospheric collective activities.

After this post of mine questioning Lindsay Beyerstein's assertion that there is a right-wing term "scalping" -- meaning "pick a target and harass that person and his or her employer until the person either jumps or is pushed out of the public eye" -- and that it is exclusively the practice of the right wing, Andrew Sullivan says:

I hadn't heard this term before...

Marcotte is the alleged victim in [the case Beyerstein writes about]. But isn't the left just as guilty in hounding campaigns? Or are they too disorganized? Personally, I'm all for making life difficult for bloggers who have whored themselves out as paid propagandists for campaigns. But it's always best just to expose ugliness and dishonesty, not punish it.

Did Sullivan call writers who work for politicians whores? No. He said "whored." It's a verb, not a noun. (Remember that time on "Survivor" when Candice told Jonathan he was "trying to...weasel your way in...somehow," and Jonathan accused her of calling him a weasel, and she was all it's a verb, not a noun. She got voted off right after that, but still.) It is whoring, and it is propaganda. Let's call things what they are. Sullivan isn't saying it's morally wrong to sell your writing skills for the purpose of promoting a political agenda, just that it's a good idea to make life difficult for bloggers who move into that line of work.

And here's Ross Douthat:

Like Ann Althouse and Andrew, I must have missed the memo on this term - though it's certainly a real enough phenomenon, and "scalping" is a good a word as any. But Beyerstein's suggestion that it's the exclusive preserve of right-wingers - like most suggestions that some dirty trick is the exclusive preserve of right-wingers - is just silly.

He cites the case of Ben Domenech.

But re-reading Beyerstein, it's possible that her "unlike the liberal netroots, the right-wing blogosphere is capable of exactly one kind of collective political action" line wasn't meant to suggest that left-wingers don't scalp, but that they do other things as well, whereas right-wingers don't.

That is the better reading of what Beyerstein wrote. (Which was: "Unlike the liberal netroots, the right-wing blogosphere is capable of exactly one kind of collective political action. They call it 'scalping'...")

This is an overgeneralization, obviously, but it gets a lot closer to an interesting truth about the blogosphere, which is that the lefty blogs have become way better at doing political things - raising money, raising issues, and influencing elections at the grass/netroots level - than most of the right-wing blogs. The conservative 'sphere became adept at picking apart the MSM in the first couple years of the blogosphere, but it hasn't really adapted to the Kos/MyDD era - and its anti-MSM shtick has grown pretty stale since events in Iraq started proving Big Media right, and the warbloggers wrong.

I don't like the implication that there is a flow of things and that it goes in the direction of increasing agglomeration. Why isn't greater independence and individualism among bloggers a good thing?

Douthat points to this post by Daniel Larison:

Why have the big lefty blogs evolved into online “communities” that sponsor political activism that actually has a remote chance of influencing elections? Because the people on the left are very big into a) political activism and b) collective expressions of that political activism. They also tend to be generally outraged about the state of the world, which lends itself to blogging, while there is nothing more uninteresting than Hewittian, “Gee, I sure do support the President a lot” posts and the old chestnuts of “why aren’t they reporting the good news from Iraq?”

Well, general outrage about the state of the world is pretty uninteresting too. But what question are we asking here, how to write and interesting blog or how to be an effective political activist? Larison is really talking about the latter:

Consider that the big example of Hewittian activism today is an attempt to enforce party discipline against wayward backbenchers over a…non-binding resolution. This is not really grassroots activism, but the use of a megaphone to try to whip the Republican caucus in the media. It is furthermore the ego trip of some big name bloggers and pundits who want to display their servile attachment to the President. What is different between Kos and Hewitt? Kos actually wants to win elections and the Kossacks spend a fair amount of time thinking, however poorly, about how to do that. They haven’t had that many successes, obviously, but they actually want to expand the reach of the Democratic Party rather than retreat into the bunker with the last five true believers. Will the Kossacks become a pathetic White House-defending gang should the Dems win in ‘08? You better believe it. Nonetheless, the model of their blogs will continue to make them politically relevant in a way that the celebrity-blogging on the right never can be.

Well, I prefer what Larison seems to mean by "celebrity-blogging." And I'm quite happy to see that bloggers have trouble succeeding in their collective activities.

AND: Let me speculate that this old post by Kevin Drum is the source of the "scalping" terminology.

"I think there is an ethical line crossed when someone is actually being paid to sound like they're not being paid."

From an article about political campaigns infiltrating the comments sections of blogs. It shows the high standards of blogging, doesn't it? In normal life, there are plenty of places where you're paid for sounding like you're not being paid.

What is more charming than artists drawing sculptures?

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, Sunday.

A stray devil.

13th century stained glass from the Bourges cathedral in France. Seen yesterday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"As good as 'Idol' gets."

Adam at Throwing Things reminds us that this is the week to watch "American Idol" -- tonight and tomorrow. They've culled who knows how many from the auditions, and they need to do something to them now to shake out 24 contestants to move forward into the rounds where we'll be voting. (Not me, actually. I don't vote. I just blog so you can vote. Or avoid the show. Whatever you want.)

Any favorites? Adam asks. Well, of course, I'm for Denise Jackson, the one who called herself a "crack baby." She from Madison. Here's a video about her. Here's a local newspaper article about her:

"You know how you're supposed to have a childhood?" she explains. In the Chicago housing project where Denise lived off and on, "You don't really get to have that childhood."

With a mother who was largely absent and a father who vanished before her birth, Denise grew up thinking at times that her eldest sister, Nicole, was her mom.

"I think I've seen things that you shouldn't see when you're a little girl," says Denise, who moved to Madison with her grandmother at age 9....

Until she moved to Madison in 1999, Denise had never met a white or Asian person. "The part of (Chicago) I lived in, we never saw these people," she says. "You heard all these stupid things about white people, like white people are mean, they're racist.

"When I came to Madison, I found the sweetest people you would ever meet." Still, she was terrified when she learned her fifth-grade teacher would be a white woman; she'd never had a white teacher. Today she speaks affectionately of how that teacher tried to get her interested in piano lessons. "She would take me out for ice cream," says Denise.

Good luck, Denise!

(And thanks to all the great teachers in Madison.)