Piss and Vinegar

Political blogs - I know I've gone on about them before, but I feel compelled to once again state what a heap of shite they are. No, really. Political blogs are just about the biggest waste of space on the web. For some unfathomable reason, I decided to give the political bloggers another chance. Perhaps I'd misjudged them, or the ones that I'd looked at before were atypically crap. But no, I'd been right the first time. They were still, to a blog, utterly vacuous, offering no real insight or original perspectives on the current political situation, and all seem to be written by pretentious wannabes, who are more interested in slanging matches and point-scoring than genuine analysis. Sure, there are some where the author marshals all sorts of 'facts' and 'figures', at inordinate length, complete with graphs and pie charts, to 'prove' some point or other. And thereby lies another of their crimes - they're so utterly tedious! There's just no spark there! They are as dry as dust. Politics should be exciting, full of informed debate and intelligent discussion. Trust me, I know, I teach it.

Regardless of where they are on the political spectrum, the level of political discourse seen in the comments of these blogs is equally dismal. Again, there just isn't anything original there - simply the same old ideas reheated and rehashed. All too often it just comes down to name calling. The trouble is that they all seem to be written by, and for, a relatively small group of middle class smart arses who undoubtedly set the world to rights at their dinner parties every weekend and seem to think that their 'wisdom' is worthy of sharing with the world. Bad news, guys, the rest of us aren't interested in your middle-of-the-road faux radicalism. Not that there's any chance of them ever doing anything other than talking (or, in this case, writing) about politics. That's undoubtedly the worst thing about them, they're all piss and vinegar. Let's face it, if they were serious about political change, they'd be out there doing something about it, rather than just droning on about it and boring the rest of us.