The Scribbling Set

Though bloggers evidently hail from all walks of life, and blog for all manner of motives, there's a certain breed which, perhaps, is a spirtual descendant of the "intellectual" Schumpeter considers unsparingly in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy:

'Intellectuals are in fact people who wield the power of the spoken and the written word, and one of the touches that distinguish them from other people who do the same is the absence of direct responsibility for practical affairs. This touch in general accounts for another - the absence of that first-hand knowledge of them which only actual experience can give. The critical attitude, arising no less from the intellectual's situation as onlooker - in most cases also as an outsider - than from the fact that his main chance of asserting himself lies in his actual or potential nuisance value, should add a third touch. The profession of the unprofessional? Professional dilettantism? The people who talk about everything because they understand nothing? Bernard Shaw's journalist in The Doctor's Dilemma? No, no. I have not said that and I do  not mean that. That sort of thing would be still more untrue than it would be offensive. Let us give up trying to define by words and instead define "epideiktically": in the Greek museum we can see the object, nicely labeled. The sophists, philosophers, and rhetors - however strongly they objected to being thrown together, they were all of the same genus - of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. illustrate ideally what I mean.'
(p. 147)