After returning for the election year, LP is closing once again. I’ll miss it. Blogs have transformed the media but, in the end, seemed to have been absorbed by more traditional forms. Feel free to contribute your thoughts on LP and the future, if any, of long-form blogs like this.
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John Quiggin 
While disagreeing with most of what LP says, I too will miss it. Blogs are like a letters to the editor that are not edited by that editor.Then you can make your own reply. Not that it changes much! Keep up the good work JQ even if I disagree with most of what you say!
Unfortunately ever since the site redesign, I have not found the place to be very user-friendly.
LP, the once and future king I suppose.
Now that they’re gone, I’ll just have to look around a bit to find informed discussion like they have had on LP. And keep coming back here too of course…
I learn a lot from left leaning econ blogs like this. Noah Smith’s blog is also excellent. I thought LP was embarrassingly bad and Mark Bahnisch a poor joke, almost but not quite the Steve Kates of the Left.
A left Steve Kates? Geez, that’s a bit harsh.
@desipis
Bahnisch a left Kates? That’s a lot harsh. I found Mark a little too conservative politically, but he is a genuinely erudite and thoughtful fellow.
More broadly, I too will miss LP. Some very good people were on the LP collective and they produced a blog where the tone was generally more civil than in most places, and mostly interesting.
The Climate Clippings section was always worth a read, and it was also a place where we lefties could relax and put aside our politics and chat randomly about our lives and what else was important without necessarily having to argue the toss.
I have great respect for all those who made the blog possible and kept it going as long as it did.
I thought LP represented the very worst of the Left, with its knee-jerk anti-capitalism; bizarre analysis of neo-liberalism; kumbaya cultural relativism; oppressive political correctness; black armband view of history; slavish adherence to western preternaturalism; pollyanna utopianism and oppressive brand of feminism. Leftists without a background in economics are in most cases vacuous in my opinion, altho of course there are some outstanding exceptions.
I should also add that I agree with Fran wholeheartedly when she says that most of the LP crowd were good people. But good people with dreadfully wrong ideas scare me much more than bad people with evil ideas.
A novel concept!
Perhaps instead of “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”, we could have “the road to heaven is paved by bad people with evil ideas”.
Interesting.
@Mel
It is interesting how differently some of us ‘see’ – and judge – things. I just didn’t ever see any of that, but I only started reading since they did their come back.
While one may argue that bad people with evil ideas are less likely to see them realised than good people with dreadfully wrong ones, I’d be surprised if a review of the record would bear this out. I suppose it might be hard to achieve a consensus on who qualified in the good people with dreadfully wrong ideas category, but if we were to assume Mel meant to include the LP collective in it, it’s hard to see any of them as the least bit scary, much less the equivalent or worse than bad people with evil ideas.
NB: I use the term “evil” with tongs. I don’t accept the concept but simply impute to Mel the idea of “harm to compelling human interest without the beginnings of adequate warrant”.
Mel, whatever you think of Mark Bahnisch’s ideas, at least he could write like he had a functioning frontal cortex. Steve Kates reads like some poorly implemented AI that has been fed nothing but right wing propaganda.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions AND bad judgement.
Hence hell.
At least that’s my recent philosophy on it.
Mel, are you sure you were looking at the same LP as the rest of us?
Apart from Mel’s rubbish, I’d go along with most of the comments.
LP lasted a long time and did the job, although the po-mo brand of “left” was self-indugent at times. But, with its collegiate approach and various contributors, it also worked spectacularly well, a lot of the time.
I am certainly better off for having been a reader of it, but won’t miss the worst of the some times arrogant moderation there.
Any way, the”old” blogsites are closing down, en masse. Technology advances quickly and many people have moved to other sources for news and commentary.
The other thing behind their thinking would be the disillusioning prospect of a Tory government into the forseeable future.
After all the work they put in, trying to inform and get people to think about social, cultural economic and political issues, to see a Conservative government, particularly a Tea Party one put in so emphatically recently, would have been a ball-buster.
They have above average brains and education; if others are too selfish or lazy to think on beefy issues, why not walk away, consolidate your own career, family life and so forth.
If they are like me, they probably half chunder at the sight of a newspaper or news service, at this time.
And finally, as this discussion is running hot and I don’t want to take someone else’s space, I’ll just say, apart from this site for good current affairs, try (Dr) Gary Sauer Thompson’s “Public Opinion”..this guy largely knows his stuff as well.
I found their ALP blind spot too nauseating to handle.
ALP=Good/LNP=Bad with no critique of anything ALP, no matter how neo-liberal or proto-fascist, just turns my stomach.
They can’t reach out to anyone who isn’t a card-carrier.
Good riddance.
@Megan
I don’t regard that as fair comment. The LP team spent much of their time sympathetically entertaining criticism of the ALP on climate policy, asylum seekers and gay marriage. The consensus amongst the commenters was probably closest to the Greens.
Yes, there is some balance to that.
Wedge is what shattered not just the left, but any form of rational political thinking. They were always kicking against the wind, given the cultural desert level the country has fallen to through msm.
In the end, being human, personal feelings DID enter into some discussions, from all quarters.
It seems some times politics is defined through “known unknowns and unknown knowns”.
The issues discussed were serious and complex, in precisely those fields where human understanding is at its least, to do with the human mind and heart.
Compared to the squander, squalor and destructiveness of the Murdoch press, say, it was a broadsheet revelation.
The thread intrigues me, I sense so much positive could come out of a mannered conversation concerning the end of LP.
It could encompass the difficulties specialists have in rendering complex theory to terms comprehensible to the masses without reducing the nuancing of theory, so collapsing it back to incomprehensibility through flaws in logic induced through oversimplification.
It could be seen as a phenomena inevitably emergent through a shameful vaccuum left by MSM, even for dolt level intelligence and curiosity.
You could ask, was it reasonable to expect perfection from people who weren’t journalists, but intelligent observers trying to colonise or retreive a cognitive desert left by barbarians like Murdoch and Packer?
If you consider this cultural desert as actual you may instead feel humbled at the high class efforts made by these Cincinatus-like folk, called out from their private lives to fill a critical gap left by the “regs” failure to “Defend the Republic”.
You could even feel a bit outraged that these folk were called away from their usual work as educators, as the likes of Sheridan, MacGuiness, the Devines, Shannahan, Albrechtsen and others proved too slovenly and detestable to even report the news straight, without omitting crucial truths for lies and propaganda.
I think they are largely burned out.. as Fran Balow might say,
” (constructive) change may not happen this generation, or the next or the next after that ( against, say, the forces of obdurate reaction typified by the current IPA puppet government)”.
Although my heart responds deeply to the complaints of old allies like Megan, the LP lot were, imho, sincere enough in their convictions and capable enough to at least try keep the flame alight, for a better times and if progressivist critiques are even remotely correct, this may have been the best even the most able, but inevitably fallible people like the rest of us, could accomplish in our era.
On this level, we can still can regard them with respect and proclaim their brave venture, by and large, a remarkable and substantial experiment
Megan @18:
Let me submit Exhibit A for the defence.
I just went through my own author archive at LP and found a number of posts I had written that included critiques of many things ALP. One of them was titled “The unemployed are financially bankrupt because the ALP is intellectually and morally bankrupt”.
@Paul Norton
Apologies, obviously “no critique” is wrong. And especially in your case.
Something like “unswerving support for ALP” would have been closer to what I should have said.
Larvatus Prodeo was much closer to the Greens and the various socialist splinter groups than then the ALP. My recollection of the line up:
Anna Winter, is an ALP member but she is on the far Left of that party. Intelligent and capable of presenting a nuanced, well reasoned argument that was impressive even when one disagreed with her. Probably the smartest cooky on the team.
Paul Norton is a former Communist Party of Australia member and current Greens member who describes himself as post-Marxist. Has a surprisingly balanced and nuanced take on Israel/Palestine but apart from that has entirely predictable opinions for someone with the said descriptors.
Brian Bahnisch describes himself as a socialist; routinely expresses anti-capitalist sentiments; opposes gm crops (the evil corporations can’t be trusted etc.) ; has an extreme doom and gloom outlook on climate change.
Mark Bahnisch routinely changes his self description- once describing himself as a libertarian with some social democratic inclinations but now apparently identifies as a social democrat. Notwithstanding this self-definition he subscribes to some outlandish far-left theories like Loïc Wacquant’s grandiose and essentialist theory of neoliberal hegemony.
Kim was an extreme cultural relativist who wrote a variety of opinion pieces that functioned as apologetics for Islam, including a piece that praised the wisdom of Sharia law. Apart from that her opinions were pretty much stock-standard inner city, university educated middle class left opinions.
Tig Tog- an extreme left-wing feminist with a definite touch of misandry who famously called for the mass arrest of all white members of Duke Universities male lacrosse team weeks before the case collapsed, the prosecuting DA was disbarred and jailed and the new DA declared the players innocent of all charges.
Robert Merkel- a technocratic centrist and a moderate, at least in comparison to the rest of the tribe 😉
Mel, you’ve made some quite specific and quite serious claims about the views of some of my LP colleagues (particularly Brian, Mark, Kim and Tigtog). Can you provide some links or other references to support those claims?
Which one is the most serious? We can start there.
Let’s start with:
On Kim’s apologetics you may remember this http://larvatusprodeo.net/2006/03/01/the-unbelievable-truth-about-sharia-law
Unfortunately the link is broken but you may recall the defence of Sharia Law in that post.
Mel, give it a break. I indicated I’d consider a return in the New Year. That wasn’t an invitation for the culture wars to be restarted in this blog.
If you want to comment here in future, please avoid any participation in intra-left disputes.
Well, back for a look to see if anything inadvertantly had turned up and to my surprise a rather nasty spat, involving Mel.
I won’t add, anything I say would only worsen things.
Yes, far more interesting to consider the era of LP, what things were like a decade or more ago, how blogsites like this one and LP got going and what features of presenting social issues to
to a varied public, might have occurred to the principles.
Btw, what are Mel’s credentials?
it was a great place in its prime; a diversity of opinion & mutual respect.
but the place went downhill towards the end with (1) partisan moderation, and (2) house rules selectively applied against people not favoured by the ruling clique.
i saw people ganged up on – dog piling – over a word, without intervention from moderators.
i saw slurs written about people (against house policy) that i would have been reprimanded for had i written them. again, selective application of the house rules & partisan moderation.
i saw moderators disparaging people’s ideas until the left.
there was a clique there that was determined to enforce its dogma and the place was doomed when they started.
i left before the end because i didn’t feel it was a fair or safe place anymore for anyone who didn’t toe the dominant dogma.
this needs to be put on the record.
this was not brian or mark.
and, no, i will not provide links.
alfred venison
Just the same, it was as you say, valuable and helpful when there was a dearth of decent current affairs much anywhere else.
I’ve got to say, the moderators who applied the same rough justice to me and you as to others outside the charmed circle, also deserve commendation in some ways. They worked at it for several years and applied their minds to often complex subjects and I doubt they got much reimbursement for it.
Thinking on it, this time I’m a little sad, because I think this time there will not be a comeback.
“Don’t it seem to go
that you dont miss what youve got
till its gone”?
As a former frequent commenter at LP back in the day (until I was banned), I think Mel has it nailed. They were, by and large, a pretty decent bunch. Mark was a good enough bloke, but he wasn’t quite as smart as he thought he was. Kim was usually effective at rhetoric and invective, which was refreshing, and she was only occasionally vile. As for the rest, they were as predictable as the sun rising in the east. Definitely no surprises. After all the righties got banned, it was an extraordinarily depressing echo chamber. I suspect they knew this, and that’s why they closed it – twice. That said, I’ve got nothing but good wishes for the lot of them. Some of them will eventually see sense and reconcile to the world. Others will not.
I just remembered another partisan thing about LP that really annoyed me.
“Behind The Seams” was going to be some kind of half-pregnant ‘moderate’ approach to getting to the truth about fracking and CSG.
It was launched in about February 2012 just in time for the 2012 Qld elections that would see the ALP reduced to a basketball team for (amongst several other contemptible things) their “deal is done” position on CSG. That project abruptly ended, apparently at the same time as their enthusiasm for informing people about the joys of CSG, a few days before the March 24 election.
In that case the ALP was wedgied again because Newman promised to save a couple of farms around Boonah whereas the ALP declared the entire state open slather for fracking.
As one who has taken a keen interest in the science/economics/politics & social impacts of fracking, I thought this project sounded promising but its blatant political purpose (attempt to save Qld ALP) was disappointing.
LP was a terrific experiment in collective blogging. I learned a lot from reading the posts and the responses; it provided the opportunity to test ideas and frequently receive thoughtful responses.
However, in the period of its latest incarnation, brought back to life for the Federal election, it appeared to me that moderator decisions became deeply partisan after the development of the ‘smash the joint’ response to media sexism and persecution of Gillard.
I think some moderators drank far too deep from the ‘smash the joint’ cup to the point where a previous insistence on fairness and fair play in dialogue was abandoned; slur, insinuation and character attack dominated over reasoned discussion.
I should say that the sorts of comments I’ve read here from one Mel pretty much fit that description. Sectarianism of any sort is always a dead end. Who doesn’t know that yet?
As a generalist with perhaps the only blinder being my delight that anything good could come out of Queensland (present company excepted, of course, Prof Q), I was more than a little underwhelmed by LP’s last manifestation. Having relied on this source during the time since I abandoned NewsCorpse, I found it recently much too sectarian on the opinion side, with not enough pointers to reliable factual information, Brian’s Climate Clippings being the honourable exception. The concept of the group blog seems to slipping away. Does this mean further atomization of culture is inevitable?
I will content myself with observing that if Mel’s comment @24 is accepted as substantially correct, some newer comments on this thread cannot be sustained, and vice versa.
no, Paul Norton, they can both hold. the law of the excluded middle doesn’t apply here.
these are personal impressions of the same blog. you were among the blessed & were never poorly treated, i’m not surprised you don’t get it. -a.v.
Thanks alfred for sustaining the discussion.
Paul, LP was a great experiment in democratic discussion within a community of association. As a way to utilise the technology, I’ve not seen its like for good information and generally well informed comment from a wide range of commentors. Its therefore important to speak dispassionately and truthfully about what appeared to me to be a breakdown in some moderators etiquette and ethics.
I allege moderator misbehaviour which took the form of deleting and altering posts without comment; my ‘screen shots’ at different times substantiate this. I won’t be providing the evidence, I just made my own study of how these circumstances worked themselves through.
Otherwise, I found the interpretation of house rules to be very unevenly applied such that it felt like playing with a crook umpire. I share a.v.’s view that a coterie of dogmatists, with moderator bias assisting, in the end created an unsafe online environment in which to conduct open conversation.
hmm well I spat the dummy and exited noisily from commenting on this site some time ago due to its sexism, but I still lurk here occasionally, and I find it too hard to let this stuff go by.
Yep, I agree there were some problems with moderation at LP, but I also think, Jungney and AV in particular, that you guys could whinge for Australia. I’m a greenie left wing feminist and I got treated just as harshly as you, worse at times.
I think what happened at LP was quite complex, and also had to do with people’s emotional and mental wellbeing, which was discussed at times but is not something one necessarily wants to go on about publicly. I remember Guy Rundle wrote a great essay on depression and its cultural meanings and impact back in about 2001, worth re-reading in this context I think. Anyway, some of the dismissive comments on this thread seem both unfair and unkind to me – I think Mark and all the LP crew deserve better, and I’ve certainly had run ins with them at times.
But I also think there is something in what Megan said – there were at times things going on at LP that seemed to be about protecting the ALP rather than being a genuinely open and progressive left wing forum. I guess the message is that blog owners and authors need to be transparent about their political allegiances?
hi Val
“you guys could whinge for Australia”. what does that mean? i know its a figure of speech, but you should read more carefully. for the record, i have not said i had been treated badly, i said i had seen other people treated badly.
i’ve been coming to this site for years mostly lurking, there haven’t been any threads on social credit where i could shine, but there was one on music once & there’s one on religious education in public schools today. on the whole though its 95% hard core economics and national & international finance even with equations & formulae when it suits. and with a vocabulary that is sometimes arcane & impenetrable to me and which i often cannot follow. my problem. i feel privileged to be able to sound off here occasionally & i accept when i come herer that i am coming to a place where some very well educated & intelligent left-leaning (for the most part) people who know finance & economics as well as i know music come to speak among themselves. -alfred venison
Fair enough Alfred, I accept you weren’t talking on your own behalf. And yes ‘whinge for Australia’ is a figure of speech, not meant seriously, just suggesting that you’re being a bit one-eyed in your complaints.
I thought you were agreeing with Jungney that there was a “destroy the joint” dogmatism (by which I take it he means feminist dogmatism) and I wanted to point out that I am a feminist and I also got treated pretty harshly at times.
cheers
@alfred venison
my post @ 44 was a reply to you, sorry.
I’ve also been lurking here for a long time from time to time. I read Quiggin because he appears to me to be an openly political economist. He and Ross Gittins are my go to writers for economics I can actually understand. I’ve never commented here before and probably won’t again except on this topic but thanks anyway for the opportunity to discuss what appears to me to be some of the misuses to which this new medium can be put.
As to ‘whingeing for Australia’ on any other day I’d cop that with a wry grin but it is exactly the kind of personalization of comment that was let slide at LP. It became the dominant tone to smear people. Like you, I ended up in the dungeon for what I regarded as the unscrupulous reason of simply not liking what I had to say.
As to you being harshly treated as a greenie feminist: heaven only knows what sorts of feminisms informed some of the commentary there; some I recognized, some had inherent logic backed by analysis and some appeared to be what happens when someone with a personality disorder adopts a philosophical position. Think of it as type of po-mo Stalinism. Anyway, perhaps you should see wear your harsh there as a badge of honour.
@jungney
The name of the group is Destroy the Joint. If you’re so sure what is wrong with them, you’d think you’d at least know the name.
…Exactly the kind of thing that was *not* let slide at LP, leading to the mods being denigrated as being too control-freaky. You can’t have things both ways.
yes it did slide Helen and of course it can happen both ways because different people form different impressions from their experience of the same place depending on whether they were on the inner or not. it hinges on whether “control-freaky” is felt an individual to have applied to all without favour. so we have the situation of apparently incompatible experiences because the rules were not applied uniformly. this is not a dialectic where you sift & sift until you come to one right answer. -a.v.
Helen, don’t for a moment take what I said above as applying to you. I’m afraid that your objective and good standards have been betrayed by others.
As to the matter of the correct name for a coterie of trashers, who will only ever aspire to be destroyers, whether named as ‘trash’ or ‘destroy’ the joint: why would anyone bother extending the courtesy of a correct name to a tendency when it has the attributes of a sub-type of infantile disorder.
It’s over.
helen, i’ve been hanging out to hear what Jungney said above & i’m pleased as punch to hear it said you were one of the fair & sensible people there. i felt it “in my bones” too but it is nice to hear confirmation from a source i trust. if one had to boil this range of experiences down to one answer i guess it would have to be that people’s impressions of the impartiality (or otherwise) of the moderation there are “mixed”. -alfred venison