Motley Moose – Archive

Partly as a welcome to new members, and partly because the article is now behind a paywall and I’ve never posted it here, I’ll post below a piece I wrote about the collective origins of the Moose during the 2008 primaries.

It was written for a non-blogging UK audience, so most of it will be quite obvious to a lot of Meese. But worth a bit of reflection three years on.

Flaming for Obama

This year’s Democratic primaries weren’t just fought on the hustings and in the television studios. Some of the fiercest battles took place in the blogosphere

It’s been a stormy time in the science of climatology since various emails were hacked that revealed the British-based Climate Research Unit, a major contributor to the IPCC, had used bad data and dodgy coding in some of its reports.

The minimal scientific impact of this has been explored widely, but I’m more interested in the way it has regalvanised a movement which, dominant in the US blogosphere, and now increasingly vocal over here, seeks to deny the agreed probabilities of  both climate warming, and human contribution to it.

Once again, the blogosphere, while providing wonderful resources for fact checking, data analysis and corroboration, actually seems to be working in reverse, and actively promoting groupthink, irrationality and faith-based argument…  

Obama is a Corporatist Sell Out! seems to have become one of the battle cries on the liberal blogosphere at the moment, and partly  inspired by Al Giordano’s excellent article We Have Met the Corporation and It is Us (hat tip to Happy in VT for the link) this seems worthy of a wider moose moot. I was hoping to write something more linked and substantial and elegantly argued, but given the holiday season, thought it best to get this modified comment out there, sooner rather than later.

You may disagree but, from this transatlantic perch, it seems that there is some justice on focusing on the role of commercial and corporate interest in the US legislative life. As the Health Reform process has made quite clear, the US system of campaign finance, legislative checks and balances, is quite prone to effective lobbyists, paid handsomely by their corporate clients, surely because they get results.

But to go from this recognition of corporate influence, to a conspiratorial Chomskyite hegemony and argue that ‘everything is about corporate power’ seems to be – as Al Giordano says – to both state the obvious and miss the point.