It’s a bit humbling to take over the captaincy here at Ordinary Times. There are a lot of smart people with a lot of good ideas involved in our project. There’s nothing I want to see more than all of that creative energy unleashed. It’s humbling because i get to look around and see these smart people around me with all of their great writing and great ideas and great experiences, and I wish I’d been able to write what they are writing about. It’s humbling because I’ve come to admire Tod’s leadership so very much and I fear I’ll not be able to fill his shoes.
Mainly, though, it’s humbling because it forces me to come to grips with the realization that what I want to do, I can’t do on my own. I have to convince other people to do things that advance the community towards its goals. That begs the question of what those goals are, which leads to asking how we realize those goals, which leads to asking what it is that I want other people to do.
Fortuitously, Will has a post up today in which he calls out Markos Moulitsas, the proprietor of Daily Kos, laying down explicit rules limiting the scope of tolerated discussion at his online community. Kos has a teleology: the reason that online community exists is to elect Democrats. The rules Kos imposes aim at that goal and it’s not difficult to see the social norms there basically adhering to Kos’ rules. Read the post, it’s a worthy summation of a different sort of way for an online community to go than ours.
BSDI. This reminded me of my conservative friend Kurt, who has developed a massive Twitter following, principally throwing out snarky (and sometimes very funny) insults and quips at liberals, and writing 1,000-word-or-shorter essays on Brietbart and Townhall, musing on the proper strategies and tactics Republicans should use to get elected. He’s grown his followers and fellow-travelers large enough that it’s fair to say that he is the focus of his own online community, on a smaller scale than, but qualitatively similar to, how Kos is the focus and architect of a community on the other side of the aisle.
Kurt is quite convinced that conservatives who support Trump are fools, because Trump is not a conservative. 1 But at the same time, he would support Trump should he be nominated, principally because he believes that Clinton would be worse. I question his assumptions, but since I’m not an avowed conservative, by application of O’Sullivan’s Law, by definition I must be a liberal. My pointing out flaws in the premises 2 or the strategy 3 Kurt is staking out would mark me as a concern troll. I’d be hounded out of the room, as sure as the atheist sitting at the table of theologians in Will’s post and debatably with as much justification. So I leave Kurt and his people to their own devices.
There’s a couple of things to find in common — the communities that follow my conservative friend and that congregate at Kos are explicitly partisan. To the extent that different policies are debated within those communities, the evaluative lens ultimately amounts to “Which policy better advances the cause of [ideology]?” and it’s generally accepted as self-evident that all things [ideology] are desirable. If you question these self-evident truths, you need to take those questions elsewhere and your escort away from the premises may or may not be polite about it.
Echo chambers like that are the opposite of what this site is all about. We’re about polyphony, not echoes.
Perhaps it’s no accident that if you compare the community here to Daily Kos, we seem quite small. Mutually-respectful heterogeneity is difficult. Sustaining mutual respect in the face of intense disagreements is hard. Discovering that someone who is obviously smart and looks at the same thing as you do reaches a different conclusion is uncomfortable. Conceding that someone who disagrees with you might have a legitimate point to offer is painful and it’s a challenge to deal with that on its merits. Worst of all these, the position of classical argument requires an initial presumption of good faith and good intent on the part of an interlocutor, and the willingness to change one’s own position should a powerful enough argument be articulated. A lot of people find those sorts of terms too unpleasant to bear. But that process is what we’re all about.
Now, here’s another thing about us: we’ve never had length restrictions, nor minimums, for our posts. I don’t intend to start. Just yesterday I corresponded with a potential guest author, and I told her that the first and most important thing to do was to write what the muse sang to her. If the muse sings 1,000 words to her, great. If the muse sings 8,000 words to her, so much the better. We’ve run posts that long. Hell, I think I’ve written some posts of that length myself. Now, the conventional wisdom is that most readers don’t tend to go more than 1,500 words and can process only one relatively simple idea per article. I reject that conventional wisdom and do not see that it is borne out by experience.
Finally, Kos and Kurt offer focused subject matter: politics. Now, nearly everyone here enjoys politics at some level. But we’ve never been about just politics. For me, politics is an outgrowth of culture. Going back to the roots of the site as Erik Kain’s attempt to keep alive the spirit of Culture11, we’ve always made room here for music, the arts, entertainment, food, travel, science and technology, history, and religion. So as a result, you’ll likely find some political news and political discussion here at any given time, but there’s a good chance that you’ll also get something like a scholarly analysis of the religious beliefs of a member of the eighteenth-century colonial American intelligentisa. Or a link to some new music that you might not otherwise have known existed but find you enjoy. Or stories about Presidents playing baseball. Or a demonstration of how prostitution illuminates deficiencies in economic policy.
So we’ve got a community involving long-form essays containing complex and nuanced thought. We’ve got a community where we aspire to have multiple points of view interacting respectfully. We’ve got a community that draws intellectual profit from a broad palette of subject matters. That’s what we are. That’s what we want to be. We are what our culture aspires to be: a marketplace for ideas, a common ground for neighbors to know each other and become friends, a flower of Enlightenment ideals in bloom. For a place called “Ordinary” Times, I think we are actually quite extraordinary, because I don’t see much of these characteristics almost anywhere else.
Perhaps it’s more difficult to build up a community like that than to have a narrow focus on one thing and to make an overt appeal to partisan tribalism. I don’t accept, though, that we are doomed to be a smaller community than that enjoyed by Kurt or Kos because of that. Indeed, I’m confident that we can and should be reaching out to the rest of the world and proclaiming our presence.
My goal, and I hope your goal too, is to grow our community. I want to grow our community precisely because I think it is the realization of our cultural aspirations. I want more people reading what our authors write; I want more of the great writing that has earned us a place, however small, on the Internet’s intellectual map; I want more commentary and back-and-forth between people of different points of view on the topics and thoughts our authors raise.
As I wrote at the start of this essay, I can’t do that on my own. I’ve got some great people sharing space on the editorial level of the masthead with me, but even together, we can’t do it all on our own. What we need is you.
I am hereby deputizing each and every one of you in the readership. If you think we’ve achieved something special, unique, valuable, remarkable, or worthwhile here, then I ask that you help it grow.
Become evangelists for the site. I ask that each of you:
- Tell your friends about Ordinary Times. Tell them why you like it, why you keep coming back. Encourage them to check it out for themselves. Chances are, there’s something here they’ll like.
- Tweet, Like and link to the posts that make you think. Use these tools to encourage people to come check us out. Intellectual stimulation is only a click away.
- Seek out people with interesting ideas. Ask them if they want to write in a venue where they’ll get to write until the muse stops singing, and in exchange receive respectful, intellectually robust feedback from a wide variety of perspectives. We want their take on politics and current events, to be sure, but we also want their movie and music reviews, and vignettes of bon vivance, and their insights on their professional lives, and yes, their fiction and poetry too. Any writer worth their salt should salivate at the prospect. Get people like that in touch with the editors here. We have something to offer them and they have something to offer us.
- Finally, don’t be shy. My back-of-the-envelope calculations from our site data suggest that we have something in the neighborhood of an 1:15 participation ratio: for every person who actively comments, we have fifteen other people who are reading but not commenting. Maybe you don’t want to dive into the debate, but from time to time, tell an author that you enjoyed what you read. If other authors are like me, and I know I am, that sort of thing makes me feel praised and incentivized to come back and offer more in the future.
The other editors and I have a lot of ideas to grow and enrich our community. What you read above is why I think this is a mission worth undertaking. But we can’t complete the mission on our own. We need you — the person reading these words — to help.
So get on out there and let the whole world know that we’ve got a good thing going here, and that it’s only going to get better. Everyone’s invited.
Image by cogdogblog 
- You can tell because Trump has given money to Democratic candidates including Hillary Clinton and at least once took a friendly photo with the Clintons; Trump has said, and continues to say, nice things about Planned Parenthood; he has suggested that there could be good outcomes to adopting a single-payer healthcare mechanism.
- If Trump isn’t a real conservative, why would you assume he would still be better than Clinton? For instance, if Trump isn’t actually a real conservative, why would you assume his Supreme Court nominees would be conservative?
- Energetic volunteerism and GOTV efforts aimed at the social conservative base are indispensible building blocks of any successful Republican election effort, no? But you’re going to tell social conservatives that it’s okay to stay home just this one time because they didn’t get their first choice of candidate?
I like what you just wrote – really. Made me feel at home (I am one of the 15 others).
See? It worked!Report
Now you’re one of the 1! Wait, that doesn’t sound right. Anyway, good to see you, and comment more.Report
Welcome Roger, we see you, comment more, most of us do not bite*.
*Unless you ask us to.Report
And definitely read that “we see you” ominously. Now we know you’re here, we’re watching you… everywhere…. at all times.Report
I meant it in an affirmation way like the Naavi from Avatar! leave my comment alone Chris! Leave it aloooone!!! *cries and mascara runs*Report
I just wanted to say that even if I’ve gone over to the 14 of 15 quiet readers, I still find a lot of interesting things to read here at OT.
I retweet (to all 30 followers!) and share occasionally, but I should do a lot more of it.Report
While we’re on the subject of recruiting, I kinda want to know if we currently have a writer or could have a volunteer with a political compass score of about:
-6.0 Economic
-7.0 Social Libertarian/AuthoritarianReport
FWIW, I’m at:
Economic Left/Right: -8.63
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -8.0
Is that close enough?Report
Yes it is, do you have time enough to write?Report
Sorry for the incredibly late response, I just noticed this.
Yes, I have time to write. I’m not great at long-form writing, but if there’s a demand I’d certainly be willing to give it the old college try.Report
Excellent, now I need to see if Burt can put ya on steady. What do you say Burt?Report
We pay at the usual rate.
@zac and anyone else who wants to write should send the editors an e-mail. “eds [at] ordinary-gentlemen.com.”Report
Wait, you guys pay? Shit, I’ll get right on it, then.Report
Um.
Does someone want to explain that joke to @zac ?
I mean, I’d love to publish good stuff from a good commenter but I don’t want there to be any illusions.Report
I like the call to arms! Let’s build on what came before us to make an even better, more engaging community. My influence is small, but I definitely share wherever I can.Report
“Discovering that someone who is obviously smart and looks at the same thing as you do but reaches a different conclusion is uncomfortable.”
Nah, they just haven’t taken the time to really understand my argument. 😉Report
Or they are stupid. At least, that’s what people tell me on the internets.Report
Well put Burt, and quite timely. I share what I have written with friends and family, but will make sure to pass along what others are putting up withe the same 4 people.Report
“Echo chambers like that are the opposite of what this site is all about. We’re about polyphony, not echoes.”
Hear, hear!
Now onto the advancement of voting rights for dogs.
Jokes aside, I think another thing the League has going for it is our alumni network. We really are the Yardbirds of the Internet age.Report
So, if I may… I’m going to push back against some of what you’ve written hear, Fearless Counselor Overlord Burt Esq.
As I began reading this piece and got to your initial discussion of our size, I immediately thought, “I think we have a good size. Large enough to be lively but small enough to be intimate, to feel known, and to allow for dialogue. I’m not particularly active online… it’s pretty much just OT for me. But there are some other sites I frequent. One has a very small commentariat and while the content is solid, the discussions are pretty much non-existent. Others are quite larger and there never seems to be much dialogue there either; a site like Popehat springs to mind.
Now, maybe I’m mistaking correlation for causation. Those sites have other differences as well, many of them technological. I think OT’s site is designed somewhat uniquely in that the comments seem very intentionally setup to foster discussion (hat tip to CK there). I’ve only see one site with an even better setup and which leveraged a seemingly larger reader base into similarly lively conversation… and that was a rather niche site (Football Outsiders). So… maybe that disproves my thesis. Maybe our site can grow, gain readers and authors and perspectives, and sacrifice nothing.
But I’m skeptical.
This isn’t to say that I don’t want the excellent writers here (amongst whom I do not count myself) to have larger audiences. And I certainly don’t want them going elsewhere to find those eyeballs (I rue all the writers we’ve lost over the years).
I guess what I am saying is that I hope we grow purposefully, cautiously, and with an eye towards maintaining what makes this site so special. I’m confident in the great minds behind and in front of the scenes to do so.
tl;dr: Please don’t turn this into YouTube. Or ESPN.Report
I think Website of the Invincible Counselor Overlord is the desired outcome…Report
Yes. Yes! Finally, someone of vision.
You will surely profit from your proximity to the leader, @aaron-david !Report
And just to make PERFECTLY clear, nothing I wrote above should be construed as a criticism of WICO Likko or his vision. Just a concern. Perhaps concern trolling? Jesus, when did I get so old…?Report
Wait, are the primaries over?
If I put myself forward as Marquess, I promise to build an internet wall around the site, and the Daily Kos will pay for it.Report
If your against pun control, you got my vote. Twice.Report
When puns are outlawed, only outlaws will pun but they probably won’t realize it unless they went to a SLAC.Report
You don’t have to be a nuclear physicist to make puns.Report
People who go to SLACs are not likely to be nuclear physicists.Report
You must be thinking of the wrong SLAC.Report
Is there anyone more insufferable than a “special snowflake” that’s just too precious for partisanship? Politics is a matter of life or death, and BSDIism is complicity in murder.Report
Baby-killers! Baby-killers, everywhere!
…oh, wait. I think I thought of someone more insufferable.Report
So you don’t bear moral responsibility for your political choices? I guess having a conscience is “square.”Report
The Pareto curve demonstrates value left on the table through inefficient distributive strategies employed in objectively integrative contexts.
Forsaking an interest for the purpose of maintaining a position is one of the most common errors of persons untrained in negotiations (two main schools of thought, etc.).
It is also one of the more widespread.
A negotiator with only a little bit of skill could easily engineer a situation to harness that effect.
The reason I don’t do so now is this:
I don’t care to.
I am interested only in calling out the error, and doing so accurately with a view toward portability of the concept.
To be clear:
Partisanship is a thing I love, perhaps above all else.
But to choose a political party as the grounds on which that partisanship rests is distinctly imprudent.Report
http://youtu.be/b_29yvYpf4wReport
I plead guilty.
Me and David Broder.
We’re the real problem.Report
Different online spaces serve different purposes. You don’t have to condemn or eschew explicitly partisan fora to find value in non-partisan ones.Report
I’m one of the 15. This is my second or perhaps third comment, and one of the others I deleted after posting. One does feel a bit like intruding on a conversation between close acquaintances 🙂
I discovered OT via The Daily Dish – it’s been just over a year since Andrew has disappeared, I’m still in mourning. This site is the only place I can find that creates sortof the same intellectual environment. I enjoy the political posts, as politics are never just about politics but also about morality, and society, and economics, and all kinds of other interesting subjects. But as a non-American I especially appreciate the non-political posts.
I even discovered a post about Afrikaners – and even one that didn’t say anything bad about us!Report
@blomster you are absolutely welcome to jump in anytime, anywhere. I’ve a dear friend in real life from RSA and through her, availed myself, second-hand, of her insights into the pleasures and ambiguities of that remarkable nation.
A great ambition of mine is to visit — to see the animals, of course, but also to sample the wines and mingle with the locals, who seem to be mostly too busy building a future these days to spend a lot of time dwelling upon the past. Reminds me a lot of California, except with less Spanish being spoken in favor of a Babel of other cultures and languages thrown into the stew.Report
If you were ever to plan a visit to South Africa, I’d be more than happy to help out where I can. Even if it’s only a lift from the airport or some travel info, tips and contacts. Exchange rate is in your favour!
Is your friend from Cape Town? Cape Town does remind of San Francisco, which is the only bit of California I’ve seen. I’m from Pretoria and well, hm, it’s… not Cape Town, sadly. But it is the access city to many nice game reserves, so may the invitation entice you to go from ambition to action 🙂Report