The Way the World Works

Here's a fundemental rule of the universe; if you fail you probably deserve to fail. You aren't smart enough or strong enough or persistent enough or good enough to succeed. If you were good enough or talented enough or creative enough, you would not have failed. There really is always room at the top - if you aren't at the top, you probably suck.

This blog is a failure.

This won't come as surprise to most of you, obviously. But it was underlined by a recent post at Firedoglake by Kenneth Quinnel who writes T. Rex's Guide to Life (and just to keep those link's coming, I was directed to it by this post by Pen Elayne on the Web, who had some reactions of her own). Edited to correct: this was not in fact Kenneth Quinnel's post, it was another guy named David Fergusons. I apologize for this mistake, but both go by the moniker of TRex. You should still go check out T. Rex's guide to life though.

Short background. Someone named Liza wrote a post about how she was not invited to a blog gathering at which the Big Dog (President Clinton) was present. She chalked that up to the fact that she is non white and non male. Quinnel took umbrage at this and wrote the following.

It seems she is forever bitching that Atrios, Kos, et al never link to her and she hangs the blame for this on the fact that she’s a woman. Whereas, everyone I spoke with assured me that if she would actually WRITE SOMETHING PEOPLE WANTED TO READ, they’d be more than happy to send her some traffic. It’s so much easier, though, to invent conspiracies and wail about The Man rather than accepting that she’s just not a very good writer and kind of a muddled thinker.

I don't spend a lot of time bitching about the lack of links I get from the big names in the field. Almost all of my traffic comes from my consistent posting at Democratic Underground. That said, I don't get links from any of the big dogs in the blogging world. I get links from Pen-Elayne on the Web and Bark Bark Woof Woof, for which I am grateful, but that is due to my membership in the Liberal Coalition, and not due to any specific talent on my part.

So following Quinnels logic I am left to conclude that I am just "not a very good writer and kind of a muddled thinker." If I weren't, one presumes I would be getting links from my betters.

I don't know what the implications of that are - I am approaching the 4th anniversary of this blog (10-28-06), and it might be time for some second thoughts.