Coupla points: “shunned by A-listers.” After reading your whinges about blog battles, leaves me thinking “What a load of crap those people are.” Totally junior high school Mean Girls — “You’re not in my club.”. It’s one thing to shun trolls, but to banish loudmouths from your own side? Indicates a level of insecurity and intolerance that’s equal to the rightists. I don’t read the A-listers for the same reason I don’t go to popular clubs — too crowded — but it’s nice to have people like you and the radio talkers at Air America to keep me informed if anything worthy is being discussed there.

As far as “culture” and “secret nomenclature,” that’s part of the fun of chirping on on blogs like The General and CFAV. “GCCCR, little soldier, etc.” There’s a bit of junior high club wanna-be in all of us, myself included. Authoring blogs, or posting comments, is all about ego. “Look everybody, see how clever I am!” Using the lingo is part of that. Do you see yourself developing a subcult vocab, “ACOTW” and such?

Lastly, about the wider political role of bloggers: opinion leaders. There is only a small part of the population in any society that thinks. The rest of the sheeple follow. Intelligent bloggers with new ideas drive the political consciousness forward. They attract readers who might not have thought of THAT particular idea, but get enthusiastic about it. And it’s a roiling intellectual ferment, with people adding twists to viewpoints that the original author never considered.

In the human brain, the better connected the individual neurons are, the more the whole becomes greater than the sum of its cells. I see that happening with the ‘Net. It’s like a brain that’s growing, individuals who are like brain cells literally all over the world, linking synapses to form a new organ of thought.

The key is how to turn that thought into action. So much blogging is just wanking at the keyboard. “I’m SO angry at this of that” but all they do is rattle off words that no one with power pays attention to. Political blogging is an evolving force, and part of its evolution should be to get people to stop acting only in the electronic world and get them active in the meat world. How’s that going to happen, JP?

Bloggasm recently interviewed me. A sample: "And now I’m about to say something very surprising. It’s not our job to tell the truth. I can picture the expression on your face right now. But I’m right in that it’s not our job to tell the tr…