the bsphere is a world of blather, but if you live in a society where citizen discussion can lead to substantive action, then you will quickly form a subset of like minded contacts to achieve your goals.

most of the world does not have this possibility of action. in that case, talk remains blather- or seditious.

Al,
The posts and conversations on this site are more than blather, don't you think?

Citizen discussion needs to be encouraged ---it's an educational process.

Well I guess it really depends on what blogs you read. Lots are crap like all those Lefty ones. Lots of political blogs really are just "Pasted Opinion" and really have no originality or display any effort to make the world a better place. They just criticize what the daily news events are and move on.
They are all wankers and should be whipped!

Les
if that's the criteria then this kind of material would fall into your crap box.

Reads much like Mr Levin has a gob full of sour grapes.

since ozzies can't vote for officers of state, and can't initiate referenda, they are in a permanent state of political adolescence, old enough to have opinions but incapable of effectuating them. if genuinely young, they march, if adult, they merely chatter.

neither gets results, yet there is no impetus to change the system. there is a genuine atrophy of the political muscles, due to growing up in a culture where politics is something only politicians do.

A lot of the opinion on political blogs in Austrlaia is informed and is a part of a national conversation.

Most of the Australian blogosphere are the fringe public intellectuals. Rather than write to the MSM (which some do) they moved online. MSM wasn't big enough to include them (such as yourself Gary), but the internet was. I would argue that the quality of the Auian blogosphere is higher than the US one.

Should also mention that the Australian market isnt as big as the US one economically in blogs; so we havent seen punk entrepreneurs in the same way we have in the US. Au hasnt produced a dailykos, a tpm or a redstate (the latter which got sold recently) because the market isnt big enough.

Cam,
I have never written to the mainstream media in my life, though I do read the letters to the editor.

Fringe public intellectuals? Interesting idea. Australia has few public intellectuals and those we do have like Gerard Henderson of the Sydney Institute are not that good.

Probably the media celebrities such as Ackerman and Bolt are public intellectuals in postmodernity.

Ackerman and Bolt are performers that hit their audience very well and deliver what is expected. Not much different to a Vegas act who do the same show five nights a week and leave the audience's expectations satiated . Public intellectuals they are not.

Australian public intellectuals have in the past gone through politics or academia. Most of the 'names' in Auian blogging are from both. Dunlop, Quiggin, Bahnisch, etc from academia; others like yourself, Norton, Gruen etc have been involved intimately in politics in policy roles. That is the normal path.

The successful business leaders and celebrities - which dominate US politics - are rare as horses teeth in Au. Turnball and Garrett are the exceptions. Public intellectuals in the US tend to be celebrities too. The Kristol's got elevated to celebrity status when their policies became the Administration's blueprint. But most of PNAC were heavily involved in government and business.

I suspect the reason that Auian blogging is so dominated by former fringe public intellectuals is that there was no room for them in the MSM and the Au market for blogs is too small for the entrepreneurial punks to dominate the landscape (like they have in the US).

Cam,
though Australia has a public intellectual network I regard public intellectual as a function that is specific to an area (as in the media or health or environment) and not universal. The JP Sartre conception of the public intellectual no longer applies. So artists or writers can be public intellectuals.

Secondly, lefty public intellectuals have been treated as scapegoats--charges of failure, betrayal and irrelevance levelled at the intellectual class---by Ackerman and Bolt in the culture wars. True, what we have now is an infighting or factional warfare within the ‘intellectual field,’ as various cohorts of intellectuals fight for cultural hegemony and seek to negotiate intellectual orthodoxies and heterodoxies.

These ‘culture wars’ over the role of intellectuals are increasingly fought out less between different professional groupings in the intellectual field, such as between writers and journalists, historians and literary theorists, academics and journalists than between different political factions of the intelligentsia.