davidvoegtle.net

That’s a fair question. Demsothenes was an Attic orator from the period just prior to that of Alexander the Great. Wikipedia describes him as “generally considered the greatest of the Attic orators.” The name ties in a little to my interest in Classics, which I’d like to study more at school if I can manage it.

But really I took the name from a nom de guerre used by a character in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. (Although lest you think I’m a total poseur, I do have a fair collection of Greek rhetoric; now if I could just find the time to read it all!) If you haven’t read Ender’s Game, you should. It’s really one of the best of the genre, and the more bloggers seem to gain influence over society through their grassroots journalistic style, the more it seems to be that Card was particularly prescient with his polemicist demagogue charcters, Locke and Demosthenes.

We have “traditional” bloggers like Atrios and Kos and others who influence discourse on the left, and increasingly in the media. On the right there’s Instapundit, among others. There are “proto-bloggers” like Drudge, who showed what the power of the Internet could be (remember his role in the run up to Clinton’s impeachment). Conservative blogs were instrumental in “swift-boating” Kerry in the last presidential election and in putting pressure (however ill-placed) on CBS regarding memos relating to Bush’s National Guard “service.” If you’ve read Card’s book, this seems remarkably like the influential writers on the “nets.”

I realize I’m not the first person to make this connection between those characters and the blogging world, but not every idea need be original. So perhaps the name is a little overlarge for me right now. But I genuinely hope to grow into it, the write about things I believe need to be expressed, to add my voice. More on my beliefs next, and what you’re likely to read here.