Gulliver has an interesting post up about how the politics of national security has affected his blogging, but I just want to briefly take issue with this characterization:
While the blog has suffered, I'm spending a lot more time lately expressing my feelings about all of this on Twitter. That's not necessarily a good thing for the blog, because it keeps me from writing longer-form things on occasion, but it's allowed me to broaden the network of people with whom I interact and to get a two-way exchange going instead of just screaming into the wind. I've met a number of really interesting people and been exposed to issues, opinion, and analysis that I otherwise wouldn't have been. It also means that my thinking and writing have reached a slightly greater audience, and some of those people are really mostly politics people who just like a side of national security in the morning. (This has the added effect of sometimes delivering ego-boosting moments like the one I had on Friday, when Adam Serwer linked over here and called Ink Spots an "excellent national security blog you should be reading." Which is really cool, but sort of makes me point for me: Serwer blogs for the American Prospect -- a no-bones-about-it partisan publication -- on civil rights and criminal justice, two issues which now brush up against national security but are very definitely not a part of my area of so-called expertise.) That's fine, and I enjoy the exchange, but I'm not sure it's helped in the big picture. I also fear that the self-selection of blog reading exists at an accelerated, micro-level with Twitter, and so I'm hearing and seeing and talking with a whole lot of people with whom I already generally agree.
The American Prospect is a left-of-center publication, but we're not a partisan publication. I hope that's clear from my fairly consistent criticisms of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party's approaches to national security, immigration, and criminal justice policies but it bears repeating. Being left-of-center means you know where the writers at TAP are coming from, but we're interested in talking about the implications of public policy, not making the Democratic Party look good.
