Couldn't Make It a Week, pathetic

Since becoming a progressive on the first of the year, I've been really charged. I opened the year with a new front against the oppressive traditions of the material bound American bourgeoisie.

Anyway, I got ahead of myself and started imagining the influence I will have with all of the links that will magically appear with the news that I am back in the fold.

I logged into blogger today to manage my follower list.

This brings up a grammatical question: Do you treat zero as singular or plural?

My twitter followers decremented by two. I am surprised that there's anyone in that list at all. People on Twitter should be more careful of the company they keep.

My technorati score is still 1.

Of course, as a pariah (a gentile in Utah's Zion) I've learned that few win the popularity game. Most of us must spin our webs from our own silk. Here is a picture of a spider web to illustrate:



In my eagerness to show my mastery of progressive thought, I broke one of the cardinal rules of the game: One should never discuss methodology in public. The intelligentsia seeks an avant-garde that practices the method without analyzing it.

That's where I always fall down. For example, in the last post, I lauded the native cunning involved in framing the economic debate as a foundational dichotomy between "regulation" and "deregulation."

My post should have been stuck to projecting the losing side of the dichotomy onto the people's enemies, while claiming the winning side for the party. My egotistical desire to show my mastery of the method undermined the effectiveness of the post.

Bad form. Bad form indeed.

The tact of was beautiful. The false dichotomy set progressives up for a power grab and mandate with the inherent ups and downs of the business cycles.

The method was carried off with such skill, that it was a thing of beauty. With a few Ponzy-schemes, short attacks and debt bombs, people spun about during the economic calamity without a clue of how to act. This was perhaps the most skillfully engineered paradigm shifts that any of us will experience in our life time. We should praise the engineers!

It would be so fun to jump on board and join in on the reaping of whirlwind. Unfortunately, my crotchety feeble brain always fails when I get into questions about ends justifying the means. This brain ends up rejecting both the ends and the means. Go Figure?

The economic chaos of 2008 has left us with a body politic demanding aggressive regulation and business community dominated by players begging government manna. Unable to get with the flow, I am still stuck on the question: Will increased regulation solve the problems that surfaced in 2008?

I will answer in the next post.

Unfortunately, before writing the post, I am left to concede that my effort to become a progressive failed within the first week.

Another New Years Resolution gone sour.

Dang.