Demosthenes and Locke

From The Atlantic yesterday, on why you should read Ender's Game to understand blogging today, particularly the confusion that surrounds Dave Weigel:

Peter and Valentine are able to be successful--and more importantly--plausible in their guise as adult policy experts and demagogues because their online personas provide something that reading audiences want. Valentine, the kindest of the children, wins acclaim first as a militaristic, anti-Russian writer who even guides the opinions  of her unknowing father. She sets up the conditions for Peter, who tortured and threatened to kill his siblings, to step in and propose a plan for peace, and to become a world leader. Their age and identities end up mattering not in the slightest because their readers want to believe in them.

Obviously, what happened to Weigel last week was different. Unlike Peter and Valentine, his identity, and his personal opinions about what he was writing and reporting about have always been clear to anyone who bothered to look for them. But it does seem that part of the furor that surrounds his exit from the Post comes from the fact that people wanted to see him in different ways, and so they did. Whether they saw him as a conservative voice hired to counterbalance Ezra Klein, a tough, diligent reporter exposing the excesses of parts of the conservative movement, or a clever blogger-reporter who wrote with voice and energy, lots of folks were invested in their conceptions of Dave Weigel.

As I've said to some of you in comments and offline, I'm still working on how much of my posts will be visible in the feed, getting the RSS feed actually working (though Google Reader will create a feed for you), etc. Keep it up with the emails about things though: it helps me prove there's a demand for more text, etc.