Blogorama II: Though Cowards Flinch

“We all know what happens to those who stand in the middle of the road — they get run down.” - Aneurin Bevan

For the second Blogorama we're covering a blog run by a group of young bloggers called "Though Cowards Flinch". They write very intelligent and thought provoking articles on a variety of political subjects. For example here skewering the Right's ridiculous use of political correctness:

More and more it seems that the term “politically correct” is a bludgeon to be arbitrarily wielded against the entire Left, simply by virtue of being Left. The wonder of the whole thing is the implicit manner in which this construct of faulty reasoning is attempted: lefties are against hunting so it is politically incorrect. Lefties are scroungers, so having a job is politically incorrect. Lefties love abortion, so opposing it is politically incorrect.

Miles uses ‘political correctness’ at one point as a means of referring to toeing a line of consensus, in which case all creeds of politics are in some form guilty of political correctness and the term becomes essentially meaningless. She also uses it in the ideological sense mentioned above, reducing it to a doctrinaire battle-cry for the Right. No doubt the woolly thinking of Miles hasn’t considered quite so deeply this question, since beside such vacuous utterances on political correctness, she can record how she hates that Palin’s daughter is a cheerleader.

As a feminist I particularly appreciate their articles on gender issues, and I'm sure that those West Wing fans in the Labour Club will appreciate the reference in their recent article on polling.

From a blogging perspective they seem to hold the same goals as this blog; to create a community of bloggers, and to improve the efficiency of the disbursement of information by the Labour Party, and to raise the level of participation of members. The internet holds a myriad of opportunities to draw people together and allow people to interact without the logistical difficulties of time and place. It also a fantastic tool to teach people about our ideals, goals and achievements and in the process increase our supporter base and fundraising potential.

They make these points and more in this about on the use of "New Media". An especially vexing problem for bloggers, especially as compared to traditional media outlets which have large staffs and fact finders spread all around the country, is their difficulty in being able to get information about industrial disputes and other important events across the country. It is this fundamental stumbling block that can be overcome by the simple means of co-operation between bloggers in geographically disperse bloggers. However saying it can be overcome belies the difficulty of effectively co-ordinating a large group of people all of whom have differing levels of information and time available to participate. It is this difficulty that I hope to tackle working for the Scottish Labour Students Committee.

This spirit of co-operativity is summed up best in the penultimate paragraph:

These are some of the opportunities offered by heightened communication between bloggers and by the additional technology open to us through Web 2.0. I’d like the opinion of some of my fellow bloggers on just these subjects, so I’m going to tap Peter Kenyon, Mil, Paul [That's last week's blogorama subject and the person who suggested Though Cowards Flinch], Susan, Tom, Stroppybird and Penny for their own comments or articles, because I think each of them will have a distinctive point of view ranging from those of feminists to community activists to internet-lovers to ideologically aware Marxists. Also, The Yorkshire Ranter seems to have given this some thought already.

They also covered some of the same stories as this blog, take for example the releasing of the BNPs list of racist wankers members; here and there.

So why not head over there and see what you think for yourself. On a final note I found Though Cowards Flinch through being recommended it by a poster in the comments of last weeks blogorama, if anyone else has ideas for blogs we can cover or just interesting blogs in general please do tell us.