PASWO Blogging
I’ve been meaning to introduce this acronym for some time. PASWO means “point at something with outrage,” and it comes from this Positive Liberty post where Jason Kuznicki describes the difference between PASWO blogging and substantive blogging.
I’ve been paring away my RSS feeds on Bloglines for about a month now, and among the first feeds to be unsubscribed were those blogs that had degenerated into little more than PASWO sources. I’m competent to come up with my own sources of outrage, and filling my brainspace with such poison is pretty much the opposite of how I want to spend my life. It’s true that some PASWO writers–Mencken comes to mind–are just brilliant, and reading their attacks can be fun. Vituperation, done well, can be served hot or cold and be just as tasty. But spleen is not a main course, and a dash of bile goes a long way. In the New Year, let’s resolve to end PASWO blogging for good.
3 Responses to “PASWO Blogging”
Amen, Paul. The only thing I disagree with in this post is the claim that the link is to a post on PASWO; it seems to be pointed to a slightly different post.
Phil, I was careless in my typing: Jason introduced the phrase “point at something with outrage” in the post, but he didn’t discuss it in full there; the fault is my own.
In an earlier post, Jason discussed the differences more completely:
Thanks as always for the link. It’s a good acronym, too, one that I’ll be sure to use in the future.
Mencken was a genius in part because his targets for outrage were so different from the things that outraged the mainstream at the time. In his pointing, he was doing a lot more than just reinforcing an existing party platform or ideological program. Instead, he was articulating what was for his time a new way of thinking, the modern secularist libertarian tradition that has since become a much more common way of looking at the world. It’s something that few to none of the PASWO bloggers can say they are doing today.