Blogism

Frankly, I make mistakes of tone all the time, and I say things I don’t have adequate support for. And I’m not going to claim that I will try to eliminate all of them; sometimes a mistake of tone is the price you pay for trying to say something sharp and original, and enough of those bets pay off that it would be unwise to forswear all stylistic adventurism. And on the factual-support count, I think if I really made a commitment to only make claims I had adequate footnoted evidentiary support for, it would be a form of dishonesty. Part of the function of a blog is to air our snap reactions and our generalized rough convictions about the universe, and a lot of that is stuff we couldn’t produce solid support for on the spur of the moment even though it’s clearly true.

Clear truths are often just provincialism.

. . . there’s a danger to defending the state as an institution by listing its productive integration into everyday life. For one, it’s important for educated elites in the U.S. and Western Europe to seriously consider the degree to which that state, the state that provides services and protections, is an institution to which those elites have privileged access. It is in some sense “their” institution: they provide its upper leadership and fill out most of the middle management in areas that process or generate expert knowledge and intervention. They feel more comfortable interpreting the state’s activities and interacting with its operations. If they feel at risk from the actions of the government, they’re often more comfortable negotiating or actively blocking those actions. (If nothing else, you’re going to be a more successful NIMBY if you’ve got some money and some education on your side.) When you feel more comfortable with government, it’s hard to understand why anyone else wouldn’t feel the same way.

My emphasis. Read both posts for context which reveals more ambivalence than the parts that I've abstracted to make my point.

Which is, that while there is nothing wrong with striving to write interesting blog posts, both the writer and the reader would do well to maintain a skeptical attitude and expect such posts to be disputed in ways that reveal biases worth noting, and make truths richer if not clearer. The best blogs incite conversations that do so. The worst blogs do not. OK, the worst blogs get little reaction at all.

Like here.