Ricochet

Mark of New Jersey

Mark is a Founding Editor of The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, the predecessor of Ordinary Times.

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12 Responses

  1. Will says:

    Does Mark Steyn really need another fucking platform? I mean, really?Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Will says:

      @Will, Mark Steyn, at least, can be entertaining.

      I saw John Yoo and went apoplectic.Report

      • Mark Thompson in reply to Jaybird says:

        @Jaybird, Believe it or not, this is actually one of the things I like about the site – yeah it has Yoo and Steyn, both of whom I hold in extraordinarily low esteem. But the fact is that they are both very not only very much representative of the conservative mainstream, they are effectively point men for the conservative mainstream on their specialty issues. What Ricochet does is to put them in a forum where their views can be readily challenged and subjected to scrutiny and where there is a strong incentive for them to respond without hiding behind a bunch of straw men.

        This kind of a forum is thus one of the best ways of which I can think where one can ever hope to actually persuade mainstream conservatives to move in a different direction. Of course, the price of that is the risk that the mainstream conservatives will simply wind up moving their conservative leaning critics back towards the conservative mainstream. I view that as a risk entirely worth taking.Report

  2. Nevermind the politics for a second. I’m confused about Ricochet’s design and purpose. I understood it was meant to be some new-fangled new media contraption, but from what I can tell it is simply a blog that grants commenting privileges only to subscribers. Correct? If so, this is probably better than any more complicated scheme would have been.Report

    • @Matthew Schmitz, I think what I like about the site’s format is the way in which it seemingly (I haven’t decided yet whether I’m ready to invest the $3.47 a month) makes it easy to follow individual conversations and really puts an emphasis on dialogue. We tried to make conversations easy to follow in the early in the days of this site, but we lacked the technical resources to make it work out the way we hoped and the “conversations” features wound up functioning little different from a standard tag/categorization system.

      I think we’ve accomplished our goals with that in any event (thanks primarily to the quality of our commenters), but we’re also the League of “Ordinary” Gents for a reason. If the goal is to promote dialogue between actual opinion-makers, then creating a hurdle to participation by commenters makes a certain amount of sense, as does simultaneously deriving revenue from the use of the site’s unique features.

      I just don’t understand why they haven’t created a trial option that at least provides some sort of limited access.Report