I have to say that I find this phenomenon quite funny. ”Blue Mass Group” is a clever play on words (for which I am not responsible, by the way). First, it reminds one of the popular and very cool theatre troupe “Blue Man Group,” which features three guys with blue heads doing all kinds of wacky things with paint and other accessories. Imagine Bob, Charley, and me with shaved, blue heads, and you’ll get the idea. But we swap “Mass” for “Man,” to make the name refer to the lovely state in which we all live. Get it? Blue, for the “blue state” of Massachusetts; “Mass” which is short for “Massachusetts” but also kind of sounds like “Man,” so when paired with the aforementioned “Blue” kind of reminds you of the hyper-cool Blue Man Group; and “Group,” because there are three of us who run the site, plus all of you that make up the BMG community. Gosh, it’s just unbearably clever, isn’t it? ;-)
Anyway, so a little while back, we saw the formation of “Red Mass Group.” Obviously, they copied us for that name (they even asked permission), swapping “Red” for “Blue” since they’re wannabe red-staters. Problem is, the cleverness of BMG’s name is completely lost with RMG, since “Red Mass Group” isn’t reminiscent of anything except Blue Mass Group, so all that name does is remind RMGers of the fact that we were here first. Imitation does remain the sincerest form of flattery, I guess. So thanks for that.
And now, in light of the Senate race, we’ve got two more entrants: Gold Mass Group, which is backing Libertarian Joseph Kennedy and which says it’s paid for by “the Libertarian Association of Massachusetts Federal Political Action Committee,” and Purple Mass Group, operated by … wait for it … John Howard. Yes, that John Howard. Big John is running a write-in campaign for Senate, in addition to running his usual egg-and-sperm crusade. UPDATE And thanks to alert reader johnk for observing that Green Mass Group, too, is up and running.
Can “Black Mass Group,” the local Satanists’ blog, be far behind?
Discuss
49 Comments . Comments are closed.What's in a name?
Let's be honest... these are the same folks who proudly refer to themselves as "teabaggers" -- need we say any more?
Isn't it time for ...
"MetaMassGroup" (a community of color-MassGroup communities)?
Just think how much fun the MMG PAC could be!
Is Purple Mass Group...
...related to the person with an account of the same name on BMG?
no
She's whacky, too, but in a complete different way.
Re: john Howard
It must be fun being in a party of one.
Sure! Just ask Senator Lieberman
David must be worried about Brown
He must be thinking the race could be really close, maybe down to a few votes. So that's probably why he chose to publicize the additional candidates, to hopefully draw off some of Brown's supporters and split the vote, just like in the primary. Brown seems to be concentrating on winning the knuckleheads James Kunstler writes about, people just want to maintain their cheap gas lifestyle with big trucks, steaks, wars, torture, etc. He assumes the socially conservative and socially responsible have nowhere else to go, or at least he's hoping that they won't realize they have an alternative.
Just one or two write-ins for John Howard could tip the election, as we've seen in Minnesota.
irony
The PurpleMassGroup mission statement made me chuckle:
It's even funnier in conjunction with this:
For the record...
...back in the pre-EaBo days, I wanted to call the board 'Red Specks' after Mitt's comment that he was "a red speck in a sea of blue". Paul Ferro (POUNDS FIST ON TABLE!) deemed this too pessimistic, although I wanted a more independent name myself. Besides, Red Mass sounded like that lawyer thing.
And David - 'Black Mass Group' was my idea.
If the MA GOP listened to you more carefully
They'd have a lot more people in office, I think.
As to the Mass Groups, there is also the resonance with a religious mass, which I think most people who use these sites finds vaguely appealing.
Well as of now, nobody...
... has taken him up on his invitation to join. As of right now, a googlesearch of user pages yields nobody with at 'personID' higher than 2, which is JH. I'm guessing 1 is some kind of administrator account.
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q...
Red Mass
Does the Red Mass Group participate in the annual religious observance by Catholic lawyers and judges?
Green Mass Group
I proposed a Green Mass Group a few years back.
Taken ... David you missed one
GMG, this is insane....
Pretty sure I came up with it first.
:-)
I Came Up With GreenMassGroup Years Ago.
It was for my nose pickers club.
HAHAHAHA
Wow, that is hilarious. Who knew we had such a veritable rainbow of "Mass Groups" sprouting up?
the color implementations are the best part
My eyes still hurt from viewing GoldMassGroup and that GreenMassGroup green is pretty darn startling.
Toto
We're not in Kansas anymore!
www.JewMassGroup.com
the web site for the Massachusetts Chapter of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League.
It can run by Lenny Zakim's Daughter.
Did anyone read that story? What a stong, inspirational, and nice family. Seems like Lenny and his wife there are/were two amazing parents.
Good for John Howard
Some of you guys bullied him outta here, so at least now he has a place where he can blog and engage in conversation with people, despite perhaps having a different point of view than the majority crowd on here.
By $quot;here,$quot;
I assume you are referring to Planet Earth.
you assume incorrectly.
John Howard has always had his own blog.
In fact, his postings on PMG are almost verbatim from his "egg and sperm" blog. As are many of his postings on RMG, come to think of it. John Howard has never stopped there. For example, today he posted a defense of MassResistance:
Just in case you were wondering, "anti-family" is MassResistance code for "gay."
For awhile, RMG was mostly John Howard injecting "same sex conception" into every conversation and somebody (usually Electric Strawberry) counter-attacking.
His treatment here was actually much nicer.
Is he doing okay, then?
Quite funny or a mandate for responsibility?
I feel like a hectoring teacher here, and I admit it, but I'm going to say this anyway: you plowed the field with effective ingenuity; now you are the nominative authority by dint of your success.
I
implore
you
again
not to shrink from your success but to assert with confidence the authoritative influence you folks seem to bobble, juggle, toss and do something more with it. The issue is not whether to exert more control; the issue is to refine what makes you successful. Can we agree, perhaps, to disagree on that? Might that be worth a discussion with those who are longstanding and worth eschewing the impoverished among us?
You have to know in your heart of hearts which side of the aisle makes you worth reading. Just sayin'.
which reminds me
Did you see the reader comments section for David's Globe piece? According to some of them, BMG is the biggest threat to the Massachusetts Democratic Party, ever.
One example:
Clearly
some of these "readers" don't hang around long enough to achieve any meaningful context. That comment is simply ridiculous. Is "Kravitz," as they call him, the bete noir of the headline set? Fortunately those with firing neurons know better. Thank the cosmic dust for efficient synaptic processes.
What exactly is your suggestion?
We've already asserted that the collective goal for the BMG community should be world domination. What's next. Inter-galactic supremacy.
I mean, do you think BMG should become a political party, a news service ...
Perhaps you mean that rather than a hobby and Fulmination Center BMG should grow up into ... what.
Or maybe you just want us to pound any Republican who dares to post here into bloody mincemeat in a public display of gladiatorial prowess, for the sheer lusty satisfaction of it all.
On the contrary
Please, please, please think about how to help the useful conservatives survive as a minority in this community. Their contributions, when they do show up, are very valuable, but they are subjected to heaps of moral outrage. As I've written too often, the ratings system on this site makes it hard on minority opinions — even well-expressed, well-documented minority opinions.
The result has been that most of the conservatives that can engage in dialog have fled. Most — not all — of those remaining seem to specialize in taunting, accusing liberals of being crypto-communists, and accusing-for-fun.
Yes, yes, I know, stupid comments can inspire great refutations.
I'd prefer to be challenged, though.
I hate the rating system
Never use it, and never look at it, FWIW. I don't think it adds anything except for strife. I've urged my co-editors to remove it, to no avail.
All of which is to say that for BMG to go to the next level, as it were, we need a new platform, I think.
Traffic design
Just as the Boston area's gnarly, narrow roads encourage bad driving, some aspects of the structure of this site encourage breakdowns of dialog.
Really, though, I think it's a bad sign that we don't have more high caliber moderate, libertarian, and conservative commentators.
Figuring out how to make due with taunting won't improve that.
Perhaps because they are so rare?
You wrote "Really, though, I think it's a bad sign that we don't have more high caliber moderate, libertarian, and conservative commentators."
While I join you welcoming such commentary, it really must be said that the primary cause for the paucity of such commentators is their extraordinary scarcity in the larger population. My experience has been that most commentary on most blogs (including this one) spurs at least occasional taunting from some. The folks we seek are, by and large, fully capable of ignoring it.
High-caliber moderate, libertarian, and conservative commentators — in the spirit of William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater, and our own David Brudnoy — have been decimated by the relentless rightwing purges since the "Contract With America" days of the early nineties.
Today, we call those commentators "moderates" (and "Blue Dogs").
Other missing rarities
I might add that there are species on the left which we lack as well. There's no radical feminist commentator here. There's no socialist either.
One reason (here's your cue LightIris) is that most political differences are moral differences and tend to inspire moral outrage.
I'm no exception. Debating W. F. Buckley was challenging, but it was also hard not to think of him as some kind of moral monster.
I think that's how the "different-realitied" will tend to appear to us. Keeping the friendly moral monsters in the dialog requires some careful handling.
I would love to see a richer
exploration of political moral reasoning on this site, but I may be the only one who would appreciate that. There's only so much one can say about the political minutiae that informs the daily news. Would that there were serious and thoughtful conservatives willing to participate as that would enable us to disengage from the ideological food fights that tend to occur every time we bump up against the underlying morality of the views we take. I wonder if we could actually explore our differences in a way that might be meaningful. Short of that, I think we might all benefit from talking with one another about such matters even though we manage to line up on the same side of the aisle in the end.
Me too
I can't help but wonder if the "ideological food fights" are a consequence of differences in underlying "morality". Specifically, today's conservatives are, in my opinion, far more willing than today's left-leaners to accept and propagate demonstrated lies and distortions.
This is demonstrated most obviously in the "debate" about global climate change. Rightwing lies, from charlatans like Marc Morano, are repeated ad nauseam by allegedly "serious" conservative "intellectuals" even though those lies have been proven false over and over. For example, how many times have we heard or read allegations that "James Hansen promoted a coming ice age in the seventies"? This is simply false.
I welcome serious and passionate debate with those who disagree with me. I have zero time and patience with those who lie or who continue to assert alleged statements of fact that are shown to be false.
Agreed, and...
I ask you to bear in mind my second point — whether from the left or the right, the participants we seek are fully capable of ignoring the taunts and trolls and staying focused on the content.
I don't think the run-of-the-mill noise of this or any other blog drives away heavy-weight commentators. I think there simply aren't that many left in the conservative community.
Sadly, no
We have lost commentators because of the level of noise.
We have also lost some good conservatives.
Isn't that the truth!
If you and I were to look back at our old comments--you and I have been here a long time--I bet we could come up with at least a half dozen high-volume intelligent, articulate commenters who no longer participate. Certainly a couple of them were conservatives when engaged on an intellectual level rather than a Kraft dinner level.
Oh well
I think that stupid, vapid, middle-school-back-of-the-bus taunts and cheapshots are an unfortunate fact of the free voice the web gives all of us. There seems to be something about the medium itself that encourages such anti-social behavior (I wonder if its related to whatever it is that provokes seemingly normal people to act like raging maniacs when they get behind the wheel of a car). Perhaps we all carry around an "inner crank" :-)
A good salesperson has to be able to handle rejection. A good politician has to be able to handle gotcha questions and the byzantine horse-trading that comes with the turf. I guess that I think the ability to handle online negativity is a similar requirement for good online commentators.
I suppose I'm creating a circular self-fulfilling definition — in any case, I share your dismay about this unfortunate reality.
Or a well regulated community
Billmon's Whiskey Bar — and to an extent its successor, Moon Over Alabama — both had excellent, excellent commentary. Likewise Open Left and MyDD.
Not to mention great inspiration
From Bertolt Brecht
There are just lots of libertarians here, and globalists
and the same is true at RedMassGroup, and obviously GoldMassGroup. GreenMassGroup and PurpleMassGroup are both intended to be non-partisan, they're both intended for people to come together in a spirit of social responsibility. I'm glad GreenMassGroup is trying to "take back Green" from the libertarians that co-opted the Green message until it was merely more banal PC progressivism. PurpleMassGroup is also intended to take back each party from the libertarians that have started to dominate online debates and push each party away from the responsible center.
um, did you look at PurpleMassGroup?
It has one purpose: stopping "same sex conception."
There are just lots of libertarians here, and globalists
and the same is true at RedMassGroup, and obviously GoldMassGroup. GreenMassGroup and PurpleMassGroup are both intended to be non-partisan, they're both intended for people to come together in a spirit of social responsibility. I'm glad GreenMassGroup is trying to "take back Green" from the libertarians that co-opted the Green message until it was merely more banal PC progressivism. PurpleMassGroup is also intended to take back each party from the libertarians that have started to dominate online debates and push each party away from the responsible center.
The Other $quot;Blue Mass$quot;
I thought the name "Blue Mass Group" came from the 19th century medicine that Abraham Lincoln took to, among other things, relieve his chronic constipation. I am not making this up. Check out the Wikipedia entry. Sort of gives a new historical perspective to the whole BMG enterprise, doesn't it?
Blue Mass Group is Classic Coke
Everything else is just trying to play off the brand that has been created for "Coke", and none can ever match up.
Red Mass Group strives to be "New Coke." Sadly it's just Diet Coke: a watered down, bad tasting, sad version of Coke that is really just for those desperate to drink some form of Coke, but have fooled themselves into believing this version is somehow better for them.
:)
RMG = Scott Brown Campaign?
I decided to go next door to see what had made their front page. They are certainly very, very motivated to work for Scott Brown. Every single post on the front page is about the Senate race. That's singleness of purpose or monomania, take your pick.
My favorite has to be D. R. Tucker's The Moment which expresses the whole resentment theme of Republicanism going back a while. Opening:
This, by the way, is utterly Palinesque.
Does that mean ...
that we can expect Scott Brown, if elected, to step down in mid 2011?
Maybe he'll write a book called "Going Vogue" (springing from his much-celebrated career as a model).
:-)
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