Motley Moose – Archive

Since 2008 – Progress Through Politics

22 comments

  1. Chris Blask

    The Moose is certainly an inside crowd, though I have in recent times run across someone completely left field who reads what we say so lurkers do exist in the real world. Without some change over some period of time it would likely fade away, and that is possible.

    There are plenty of lessons I take from the Moose and apply to other purposes. Some found in content and others in style. I think it would be good to try to spin the old girl up to a chattier cafe some day, though in many ways I will miss the Cheers patina.

    IMHO the entire political blogosphere is a bit of an aged carnival, paint chipped and linoleum peeling. The Media as a whole is a field of Grey Goo, dissolved from Tom Brockaw’s Brain and still not formed into whatever replaces the Old that was Out With.

  2. Peter Jukes

    As Blasky says, the whole political blogosphere was changed.

    The remit of this site was getting Obama elected, and now we’ve done that twice…

    I spend much more of my time on twitter, with lots of debates, and then links to other sites and blogs.

    The Moose would do much better if we could get hold of its Twitter account again, and link to that….

    Who has the password?

    Kysen? John?

  3. Chris Blask

    Thankful today for the family I have here and the friends I have made everywhere. Thankful I get to see for myself how wonderful people everywhere are, most recently the warm hearts of Sana’a and Doha.

    Fortunate to have had such a diverse life, to see so clearly the folly of simplistic views that hold such strong attraction.

    Happy Thanksgiving to one and all, be glad for what you have in hand and what your futures may hold. :~)

  4. janicket

    I’m a relative newcomer, but this is one of the four blogs — indeed, the first blog — that I click into every day after checking the headlines.  I would sorely miss the lively and enlightening conversations here if the Moose were to fade into the swamplands of inactivity.

    Maybe I should ramp up the irrelevant photo diaries?  With the right tags they might snag some passing eyeballs* that would settle in to participate.

    *And isn’t that a lovely image in your brain now?  You’re welcome.

  5. rfahey22

    I’ve enjoyed coming of blogging age with everyone here, although I’m as guilty as anyone else of hibernating between elections.  Still, I hope not to do so to such an extent this time around.

    Happy Thanksgiving to everyone – I hope you are all safe, happy, and well.

  6. sricki

    it has less to do with the Moose and more to do with life in general — it gets in the way… a lot. But maybe that’s me being egocentric. Maybe my life just gets in the way all the time. It has for about 2 years now, so I don’t have a lot of excuses anymore… for one reason or another, I’m just not here most of the time.

    Places like DKos have so many users that it isn’t so noticeable when people come and go. One person disappears for a while, and there are three to replace her. The natural ebb and flow on that relatively “grand scale” is seldom cause for either excitement or concern. With us, peaks or lulls are very obvious to anyone participating here or watching, and they arouse a great deal of sentiment one way or another for those of us who care. I know a lot of us were excited when we experienced that brief influx of DKos users awhile back. It was fun, but anyone who expected it to last must have been disappointed. Some of them have stayed and been wonderful additions to the herd, and all of them were welcome then and now. But for the most part, they understandably returned to big orange… it was and is their home.

    Some of us made a home here. Lots of us were exiled from MyDD, which kinda stopped feeling like a home well before it collapsed under the weight of its own bullheadedness and stupidity. We who learned to call the Moose home will always feel affection and attachment. I do. Yet you will seldom find me here these days. Too caught up in my own shit. The extent of my involvement in the “outside world” (i.e., the world outside my immediate surroundings: my home, my cats, my job, my family, my limited social engagements) is pretty much… uhhhhh, nonexistent. I get preoccupied with my tiny little “real life,” and either A) don’t have the time, or B) lack the energy to engage much on the blogs. I miss it… but not enough, most of the time, to do anything about it.

    Now, all that is a personal problem for me. Everyone else, I dunno. I do know that silence breeds silence. The quieter we are, the quieter we become. No one wants to write diaries knowing they won’t be read or commented on. No one wants to hang out on a blog where no one comments or writes any new diaries.

    The solution? I have no idea. I’m part of the problem. Just throwing my 2 cents out there.

  7. DTOzone

    for people to vent frustration that turn into calls to action.

    How many of us here are in a position where we need to do that?

    My life, meh, its ok. I have a job, friends, family, home, food, a warm hoodie to relax in, wine, beer, Christmas lights, a cat. I got a urinary tract infection, which sucks, but doctor gave me antibiotics and I’ll be ok next week.

    I don’t have much to complain about. The worse thing to happen to me in the last few months was the tree where I built my little brother’s tree house collapsed in Hurricane Sandy, but he stopped using that thing last summer anyway.

    And Obama was reelected, and that came as a pleasant surprise to me.  

  8. Shaun Appleby

    I’ve been avoiding this comment for emotional reasons; the Moose is so dear to me.  But it is clearly a case, above all else, of “mission accomplished.”  I blew in with Obama, at MyDD and now here, and I’ve always had a hunch I would blow out with him when the time comes.  And what a ride it has been.  I had the feeling when Obama was re-elected that we had reached a milestone.

    That we would be an eclectic cohort of Obama supporters seems perfectly appropriate to our collective fandom, such as it is.  I can’t imagine sharing these remarkable and dramatic historical times with a brighter, funnier more well-intentioned bunch of people and I thank you one and all for that.  What a honk.  To have been a participant in this willing band is just the greatest honour I can imagine.  

    Which brings me to the next point, I had always pined for the opportunity to take a seat at the Algonquin round table and that’s now ticked off my bucket list.  As an inquiry into the “whole is greater than the sum” question among intelligent, well-informed seekers of truth this anarcho-syndicalist experiment in blogging seems an unqualified success and that’s both encouraging and instructive.  And above all else it was bitingly funny throughout in real-time which counts for a lot.  Again, an honour to be present in such company and share so many hours of, mostly, respectful good will and collectively profound insight.

    As for teh Twitter, well…  Best of British luck to ya, “paint chipped and linoleum peeling” notwithstanding.  I will trawl raw tweets at the first sign of momentous news but I never get the feeling I’m opening a good book.  SMS works for ADHD, Haiku, slagging and epitaphs.  It’s a blessing to the Dorothy Parkers of the world but otherwise lacks cogency.  

    That we just happened to participate here when the fashion was thousand word essays and multi-sentence comments is just one of those happy coincidences of Nature which keeps me Pagan.  I honestly can’t say where it goes from here but I am sure going to miss it if it goes.  Maybe we need coded signal rings or something.

  9. Strummerson

    I understand and/or agree with most of it.

    Take it as a love letter from Strum.  Just wish we were all popping down this lovely virtual pub/clubhouse a bit more often because I miss it/you/us.

    I have three major fora for social interaction in the digital universe.  One is an email list with a circle of dear friends in NY that waxes and wanes.  Most of us used to live in a toxic warehouse together.  Then there is a GreTscH guitar blog which offers me access to a demographic I would likely never spend any time with or on otherwise.  The there is the Moose.

    I came to the Moose like many of us from the train-wreck of MyDD, the nest that Jerome built and then crapped all over and abandoned.  DKos always seemed too big for me.  More an enormous nightclub than a pub.  Moose felt just right.  It’s precisely because of how busy I am with family and work that I treasure the Moose.  There is not Algonquin long table or authorian round table or village pub or cafe or coffee house or post-industrial communal living room or sacred lodge of the magic martian buffalo where I can spend time with people who share some of my playfully serious and seriously playful social and political sensibilities.  I’ve tried on occasion to encourage some of my NY crowd to join, but as most of us they are already spread thin in their commitments.  Some write and edit for 3QuarksDaily and The Smart Set.  So when the Moose is more active, I am enlivened in many senses, though Dr. Ms. Strum often has to augment her volume to get me to close the laptop and help feed the more recent humans who have claimed the right to live in our home.  When I’m squabbling with someone on DKos about homogenizing and fetishizing Palestinians, projecting their own crap onto them so they can feel like champions of justice, I feel more guilty about my divided attentions.  When I squabble with Moose, I learn and am nourished.

  10. louisprandtl

    Hopefully Moose will be alive and kicking inspite of twitter, Facebook, lame excuses like job,  busy, election specific, life..blah blah.  I’ve my own set lame excuses for my absence. But I do read the blog regularly only in a more reflective mode.

  11. HappyinVT

    Largely work is killing me right now; like a lot of industries the newspaper still needs to go whether there is a holiday or not.  Add a 45-minute commute at either end of the day and I only have so much time.

    Fog mentioned that I had an idea and since we’re talking out loud I’ll toss this in the comments: I’d like to see us look a redesigning the Moose to perhaps remove the “rec list” and go to a format more like either Balloon Juice or LGF.  Do we need a front page and a side bar?  Do we want to have featured front pagers and then “other?”  We do have people who can FP articles but should someone be more responsible for putting up something new periodically?  Is this something we want to put in an article (do we call it a diary these days) to get input?  I can do that since my day today actually might go relatively smoothly.

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