Begun on September 4 at 7:05 P.M.
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Some have decried the proliferation of blogs and websites with their core or niche readers as promoting close-mindedness or division. However, blogs and internet websites can be a alternate means of education, a necessary corrective to the manufactured opinion or indoctrination by the mass media, MSM and news, public education, Hollywood, academia, and so on. Despite some criticisms, the androsphere is one such source of alternative commentary, though whether it has the potential to mobilize men into something greater than themselves remains to be seen.
The splintering of Americans into different groups of readers and followers, gathered into "virtual" communities dwelling around various websites, is an indication that sharing common beliefs, a common culture, is as important to group identity and the feeling of affinity as other factors (like blood-ties and physical proximity).
Fabius Maximus has this post, At the Tampa Convention Right & Left display our great illness: Tribalism. What he is really attacking is what I would call partisanship, which is similar to tribalism but it isn't quite the same because partisanship looks to membership in a political party for a source of identity. What I would call tribalism either ignores party affiliation or outrightly rejects it as a defining characteristic of the tribe, or people. So long as the group identity is limited to partisanship rooted in the duopoly, I don't see any real possibility for reform. Americans must look beyond political parties, and rediscover the importance of "natural" communities and friendship.
More on formation of associations and tribalism to come...
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