Neanderpundit

let me run a couple numbers past the people who say i’m “INSANE !!!111ONE! BLOGGING ROXXORS!!! WE CAN CHANGE THE WORLD!!!”

Here’s the thing. Blogging- at least conservative blogging- is pretty much an echo chamber. Anyone who feels otherwise is deluded.

But let’s take a look at the cold hards so everyone willing to learn can understand what I understand.

In the last presidential election, Dorkchopface got a little over fifty eight million votes. Wingnut head won with almost 67 million. Just about eight and a half million people pushed wingnuthead into the Oval Office.

So 8.5 million. let’s throw out the rest of the morons, and just focus on those eight and a half million.

Those were the people who needed to vote for mcpain to give us democrat light, as opposed to democrat sigmoid colonoscopy, which is what we got.

yes, I know the electoral college doesn’t work that way, but I’m not going to deal with this bullshit state by state, the final poiit will remain the same.

I don’t knw the actual numbers, but I can illustrate this easily by broadening the scope to the best case scenario. Follow along:

Let’s say there are 10,000 decent conservative blogs. I’m not talking about little shitboxes like this, I mean real powerhouses.

let’s assume they each get 10,000 uniques a day. That’s most likely an overinflated number, but I’ll let it stand. That’s a total readership (assuming that those 10k uniques return to the same sites every day) of 100,000,000 or one hundred million eyes. eyes.

Those hundred million eyes are not all unique, of course. Most people who read blogs read more than one, so let’s assume that’s 50,000,000 people out there, let’s assume they each only read two blogs.

if you look around blogs, you’ll find that the comments tend to be left by other bloggers. Just doing stats on my site, it’s about 80% of people that have their own blog are reading my blog. Granted, not everyone who reads comments, but even if we cut that number in half to 40%, it means that 20,000,000 of the 50,000,000 are already in at least tacit agreement with the principles of the blog owner. So there’s 30,000,000 left. And those, if they’re reading the blog to begin with, they probably also agree with the principles of the blog owner. So let’s say 75% of them have no need of convincing. This leaves us with 7,500,000

Those who are NOT convinced are there, commenting all over the place, spilling their bile and bullshit wherever they go, the internet trolls. Let’s say those are half of the remaining readership.

So 3,750,000 people that maybe aren’t convinced or are on the fence.

For every conservative blog running on it’s own, there are probably a half dozen liberal blogs being funded externally.

Now, let me talk about something you should know, but might not know.

Most everyone is an idiot. Most people, left to their own devices, would starve in a week, turn to crime, or be out begging other people ot fix their lives for them. If I said 20% of people were worth the powder it would take to blow them to hell I would probably be outrageously generous.

So let’s assume that of the remaining 3,750,000 people, there were 20% that

a: Were capable of learning, and
B: Were capable of looking at both sides of a discussion and arriving at the correct conclusion any substantial portion of the time.

That gives us 750,000 people who could be swayed to the side of right.

Assuming we factor out the miserable public education system, the effects of the constant megaphone of mass media, if all 10,000 conservative blogs busted thier asses all the time, maybe we could get these three quarters of a million people to yank their heads out of their asses at once. And then where would we be? Those bloggers would have spent an inordinate amount of effort attempting to sway a portion of the populous smaller than the margin of error, a numerically insignificant number of people.

But.

There aren’t 10,000 conservative.libertarian type blogs. They don’t have 10,000 readers each. There aren’t 20% of the people that have the brains God gave a duck. If they had, they’d already BE conservatives/libertarians. If you took my totally wild ass guess completely fictional numbers out of the above equations and put in the ACTUAL numbers, you begin to see the total and utter futility of using the internet and the blogging platform to accomplish anyt kind of a sea change in the minds of the nation.

it’s just not going to happen, folks. if it did, I would be surprised: Guess what? I’m never, ever surprised.

No, we shouldn’t stop blogging. Blogging is a great way to share ideas and become acquainted with one another, and that’s wonderful. I think we all ought to do more, and become more acquainted with one another.

Don’t think you’re gonna change minds, though, because you probably won’t. And even if you do, you cannot possibly have enough of an effect to make any kind of a difference.

We all know the hard things that have to be done to turn this around. The men and women who brought us this nation didn’t do so by yapping at one another, they took up arms. Oh,they made their intentions clear, but they did what they could to enforce their will, too.

You can disagree all you want, it’s a free country. Come back when you can prove me wrong in any way.

Voting, yapping, blogging, none of those things is gonna drag our bacon out of this holocaust. Sorry if you’re deluded enough to think so.

has always seemed to me like a gentleman’s sport, the fishing equivalent of driven pheasant hunting on British Moors, or shooting elephant with large doubles in India.

Hunting require some skill, but durability is more desirable in a hunter than finesse. Flyfishing on the other hand..

Reading John Venlet’s suggestions, and taking them to heart, I’ve purchased a beginner fly rod and reel, and begun practicing a bit.

Since I never had anyone to teach me anything before, its always been an undiscovered country to me, but John has been extremely patient so far in answering my stupid questions. I’ve also watched some Youtube videos, and seen some other instructional stuff, but nothing prepared me for the horror of…. threading the liine through the eyes on the rod.

Apparently the leader is composed primarily of a substance slightly superior to teflon coated with bacon grease, for just handling it is about as possible as canning snake farts. The first time I threaded it through the eyes, the transition where the leader met the line caught on one of the eyes and it shot back out like a rifle, puddling in a pile around my knees. The second time I managed to get the line all the way to the tip top before it snapped back through the eyes.

For the effort it takes to get the damned thing through the eyes in one direction, you’d think it would never move in the opposite direction. Here I will enumerate Ogs First Law of flyfishing:

1:The eyes on a fly rod are placed in the wrong direction; the line moves through of it’s own accord towards the reel, but away from the reel must be cajoled. Flipping the eyes would result in a self-threading rod, but the you’d never be able to reel the fish in.

After rethreading the leader into the eyes on the rod for the forty-fifth time, I managed to get enough line out that it didn’t automagically self-retract, and I tried practicing some simple roll casts, as described by this guy. His british accent makes him seem knowledgeable.

Anyway, I’m gonna try my luck with some poppers on panfish this weekend. I’ll also be setting some trotlines for catfish, which is more the kind of fishing i’m personally familiar with.

I’m the guy, for fishing, by the way. I haven’t fished a good deal in years, because I’m the guy who shows up to fish and everyone says “oh, you should have been here last week, the fish were jumping into the boat, filletiing themselves, and seasoning their own fillets before deep frying spontaneously.” or “Man, after you left, the fish started flopping up onto the bank” It’s a superpower. Not quite as useless as my other superpower(the ability to find the feminine hygeine product in the store with the barcode which will not scan) but certainly useless to ME.

So I fully expect to be skunked in a way unknown to humans since the beginning of time.

Don’t wish me luck, I don’t want to screw up my losing streak.