Tuesday, November 29, 2016

It Might Be Time To Start A New Politics-Only Blog

... except that this one would deal with things in the distant past. The 1890s, say. Here's how it would work.

Take all of your current favorite hobby horses and pet peeves and apply them to newspaper articles from your chosen era. Walk through the events on a daily basis and write screeds and rants about all of the things you discover. Use quotes from the politicians of the day, mocking those who disagree with you unmercifully. Make predictions of boom or bust based on the way you see the world right now.

After a year or so of this, go forward 5 years and see how well you fared. Did things collapse as you said they would? Were there uprisings and riots like you said? Did the right nations prosper? What fun!

Best of all, you could rant and rave with wild accusations and slanderous assertions and no one would respond with rage and vitriol.

Mostly because no one would have any idea at all what you were talking about.

At the very least, we should all agree that Paul Krueger was a toolbox.
Whoever he was.

2 comments:

tim eisele said...

It might be hard to find a country where you could find the necessary past politics articles to rant about, while also not already knowing how it came out.

Although, now that you've been blogging for about a decade, you could do something similar to your own blog as it stands - go back to your own postings from 10 years ago, and add commentary on how things actually worked out compared to what you thought was going to happen*. I think that would be really interesting.

*I should do something like that myself, actually, as my tenth blogiversary is coming up in February. I should revisit one of my old insect IDs every week, and see how many of them I screwed up at the time.

K T Cat said...

Tim, when I go back and read my old stuff, I marvel at how ignorant I was. As the blog was partly designed to be a learning experience this isn't a bad thing.