poptimists | -- and shall kogan be king? (Reply)

when i brought the netroots into my previous post, it's true i was primarily looking at finincially sustainable systems, rather than "similar content"

but another element of overlap was (i sort of felt) actually content-related -- which is that the netroots gather round a cluster of highly critical pundits (viz atrios) whose energy and lure derives from the stubbornness with which they say NO to established media structures, habits, cliches and (this last important obv but not i think overridingly so) actual partisan political positions

so i was interested also -- less clear-headedly, somewhat intuitively -- in the idea that a broad self-generating structure could exist (and, to the point, already perhaps semi-exists) in which kogan-esque commentary MATTERED, precisely bcz a key part of his thought manifests as REFUSAL

i feel within what frank is asking is a potential conflict -- he wants DDR to be all-encompassingly open to types of voice and types of topic, and yet a lot of his personal project does in fact consist of saying (usually correctly) [xxx] IS ACTUALLY STUPID AND UNHELPFUL; in other words, while radically inclusive in one sense, it is also very much defined AGAINST something already in existence (or rather, two related things: what cultural journalism has become; and what the academic humanities have become)

my gut feeling has always been that this apparent contradiction, far from being disabling, has enormous potential gathering energy and liberating attraction, IF YOU CAN SET IT UP RIGHT (my motto when i wz editor of "the wire" was after all "have fun starting arguments")