Blogging

Mark Levin on Mocking the Ruling Class

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I recently posted my broodings about the American “Ruling Class”, in response to the much-discussed article by Angelo Codevilla on this theme. This post struck a nerve. It generated a huge number of comments, of exceptionally high quality.

I was very pleased to find out that Mark Levin discussed this post on his radio show. He begins that discussion at about 39:45. Mark says, “Lexington Green, though he may not know it, is writing about this show, and me.” He focuses on the idea that our would-be rulers should be mocked, that they should be disrespected, and that is precisely what he does. This is a strategy that he, and I, and many others, all agree about. I recall one sterling example: the roars of laughter when Gov. Palin mocked candidate Obama at the Republican convention, simply by telling the truth about him in a confident and humorous way. It was pure relief to have someone speak honestly about the man, it was like oxygen coming into a room full of toxic gas. The more of this the better, and the more it is done with humor and a sense of confidence in ourselves, the better for us personally (too much anger begins to degrade you, as I know myself) and the more effective we will be in convincing others.

I will have more on Codevilla’s theme, and the response to it, in one venue or another, going forward.

I rarely listen to talk radio, just because of the nature of my work and other commitments, so I am not a regular listener to Mark’s show. As a result, I only found out about this recently. I have his book sitting around here somewhere, but haven’t read it.

Many thanks to Mark Levin.

Sorry About That

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This blog was out of service for a few hours, possibly because of a problem with the “Recent Comments” plugin that displays reader comments in the blog’s right sidebar. I’m not sure if the problem is fixed, but I’m disabling the comments plugin until I can find something to replace it with. Apologies for the inconvenience. [UPDATE: I reactivated the comments display in the right sidebar.]

Can anyone recommend a comment-display plugin or feed-reader for WordPress 2.8x-3.x that will fit in a blog sidebar? We used a Grazr feed reader for this purpose and, aside from the minor annoyance of delayed comment display due to caching, it worked pretty well — you could comfortably read the entire text of each comment in the feed window and thus follow comment threads from the blog’s front page. But Grazr is no more, so I installed Recent Comments. This works adequately, but it’s a step down in usefulness because it lacks Grazr’s clever way of displaying the full text of comments. And it caches comments so that they don’t display for an unpredictable amount of time after they are posted. Is there something better out there? Thanks.

Alan Sullivan

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The blogger Alan Sullivan has died. This was not unexpected as he frequently blogged about his illness, but one wished him longer life. He was knowledgeable and opinionated on a surprisingly large range of topics. I enjoyed his political commentary, and his hurricane-season weather analyses stood out as exceptionally shrewd and helpful for those of us who live in affected areas. The discussion sections of his posts were lively and often gathered many comments, so he must have had a large readership. Alav hashalom.

The “Overton Window” and how to apply it

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With Glen Beck having discovered the “Overton Window” more than 2 years after I did, I thought this would be a great time to re-post my essay/post from Jan. 2008.

Being new here, I thought this might be an nice place to repost it.
Note that this was posted pre-Obama and pre-tea party. I think it is still wholly relevant, but I luxuriate in the fact that the “hand is on the other foot now.”
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I found a good post over at a pretty good lefty blog. Apparently, some Champaign-Urbana blogger named “The Squire” started blogging again, and he posted something pretty significant here. (clicking the link will get you an interesting and polite discussion)

The poli-sci concept is called “the Overton Window,” and if you want the very short version of it, I can boil it down to five words.

“The Limits Define the Center”

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Interviewed by Steven Pressfield

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Ahem…cough….hopefully Jonathan and the rest of the Chicago Boyz cast will not mind a brief moment of self-promotion.

In an unusual turn of events, I was the subject of an interview by novelist and historian Steven Pressfield, author of Gates of Fire and The War of Art. Pressfield was also a participant here last year in our Xenophon Roundtable .

Steve has an interview section on his newly redesigned site and I join a series of bloggers and authors like Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, Tim O’Brien and Seth Godin who have sat down, in a virtual sense, with Steve for a discussion about writing and creativity. Having done such interviews of others in the past, it was a good experience to be on the receiving end of questions, for which I thank Steve:

The Creative Process: Mark Safranski

SP: Mark, what is the ZenPundit philosophy? How do you decide which stories or posts (or even guest bloggers) you want to include? What criteria do you use?

MS: Good question. My philosophy is something I also try to impart in my teaching.

Marcus Aurelius said “Look beneath the surface; let not the several qualities of a thing nor its worth escape you.” Most phenomena have many dimensions, multiple causes and second and third order effects. To deal with all of this complexity, we simplify matters by looking at life through an organizing frame, which we might call a worldview, a schema, a paradigm or a discipline. Whatever we call our mental model, we tend to become wedded to it because it “works.” It helps us understand some of what we are looking at-and in getting good at applying our model, advances us professionally and brings prestige or material rewards. So we will defend it to the death, from all challengers!

That’s getting carried away. Our mental model is just a tool or, more precisely, a cognitive lens. We need to be less attached to our habitual and lazy ways of looking at the world, put down our magnifying glass and pick up a telescope. Or, bifocals. Or, a microscope. Stepping back and applying different perspectives to a problem or an issue will give us new information, help us extrapolate, identify unintended consequences or spot connections and opportunities. When I do analytical pieces, I try to take that approach….

Read the rest here.