Sometimes I’m surprised how much there is to blog about. At the Republican National Convention, Rudy Guiliani bashed community organizers:
[Obama] worked as a community organizer. [Said with a disparaging emphasis on “community organizer”] . . . Barack Obama has never led anything, nothing, nada.
So did Palin:
In this world of threats and dangers, it’s not just a community and it doesn’t just need an organizer.
The interesting thing about community organizing is that (a) anybody can do it (no need to be elected) and (b) you can organize about anything. This wide net, this all-inclusiveness, makes it a way that new ideas can become powerful. Self-experimentation is very similar: (a) anyone can do it and (b) you can study anything. You don’t need anyone’s approval, the research can be very cheap, the ideas you test can be conventional or wacky. Only if you believe that the already-powerful know everything should you disparage activities that help new knowledge come to light.
Seth,
Have you read any of Saul Alinsky’s books on community organizing? Reveille for Radicals is one of my favorite books of all time – and strangely, very relevant to the internet. If I remember correctly, Obama styles himself as being from the Alinsky school of community organizing and Hillary actually wrote her college thesis on him.
Ryan
No I haven’t read anything by Saul Alinsky. Thanks for the suggestion.
Seth – I think blogging could be looked at in the same way. Anyone can do it and the power derives from the empowerment to place correspondence (such as your exchanges with the Times jounalist) into public view and thus organisations or those representing them to give more considered responses.
I am currently pursuing a few retailers in this way, posting my questions about the foods they sell as ‘open’ emails to them and publishing their responses. It will be interesting to see how this pans out.
I agree, blogging is similar. Anyone can blog and you can blog about anything.
“Only if you believe that the already-powerful know everything should you disparage activities that help new knowledge come to light.”
The type of “communty organizing” that Obama and his like do has nothing to do with discovery; it has to do with milking the government and corporations for more money. So I’d say it bears little similarity to self-experimentation.
Come on now.
The whole Obama narrative, about walking away from Wall Street to do real work that’s helpful, isn’t fair either.
Of course, Seth criticizes only the Palin attack on Community Organizers. But lets be fair. Wall street workers play a fundamental role in up keeping our society.
Entrepreneurs as well seem a like self-experimenters. You have an idea, don’t need permission from authorities, can go out and give it a try, and see where it goes.