Tuesday, September 24, 2013

New political blog

Ann Arbor has a new political blog just in time for election season. Middle of the Left is an anonymous blog by "a local Ann Arborite who enjoys following politics. The fact that they reference the long dead Arbor Blahg makes me think they have been following that local blogosphere for sometime now. Here's the description of Middle of the Left:
This blog will concentrate on political topics for our local Ann Arbor area and occasionally for state and federal issues. The main purpose of the blog is for people to have a place to go to read the truth. It will correct any misinformation that is purposely propagated by others so that readers can know the full story. I will supply references whenever possible to back up specific points that I make in my posts.

There will be no comments allowed on the blog posts. I find that the comments take away from the main point of the article and do not add anything to the discussion (most of the time). Maybe I will change that in the future, but for now the comments will be closed.

Currently, there is a lot of ridiculousness that is being passed off as policy making at our city council meetings. For those of us that pay attention to these things, it is incomprehensible how this happens week after week. This blog hopefully will show the elected officials exactly how their ideas appear to the public.

I have some misgivings about anonymous political blogs. That said, I can understand the urge to make your voice heard if you feel like it's often overlooked in the public discourse. So far, Middle of the Left seems to have focused mainly on calling out the "teapublicans" on Ann Arbor's city council. At the very least, this could make city politics a little more interesting.

6 comments:

  1. As a general rule, I avoid anonymous blogs and blogs that don't allow comments. I still have a bone to pick with whomever did the "Arbor Blagh" thing as he/she insulted my personally and that really, really pissed me off. So the referencing of that blog did nothing to endear me to this one. All of that said, I'm glad *someone* is doing this!!

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  2. Well, as someone who started my blog (Ann Arbor Schools Musings) anonymously, I guess I can't complain too much about someone else being anonymous. I did eventually loosen up and come clean about who I was, but I was worried about people being mean, having never blogged before--and also, being a schools blog, I was worried about negative feedback for my kids.
    But I don't really like the "no comments" approach--you can always moderate comments. To me it signals that you don't want to engage with the readers, you just want to state your opinion and be done.
    The other thing I didn't like about this blog (at least the post or two that I read) is that it seems to be invested in attacking people.

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  3. It seems like anonymity serves a good purpose if you fear persecution. At the same time though, anonymity for the sake of lobbing personal attacks doesn't seems a little dodgy.

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  4. My blog is semi-anonymous, but there is a picture of me on it somewhere. And the more you read it, the more you can probably figure out where I live and stuff.

    I tried my hand at a political blog once, got tired of it because of all the crap that is going on in the area and world. Plus it seems like everyone and their cat has a political blog. Taking pictures is much much more fun.

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  5. My "political" blog has always had my name on it, but my first blog (Voltaire's Garden) began as an anonymous blog because it was just scary putting my identity out there. But hey - now everyone is all over and Facebook/Google knows the color of our underwear (well, maybe not mine). Why should anyone pay attention to your opinion if you aren't willing to own it?

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