Question 

How important do you have to be to "call for" something, and not hear sniggering from the peanut gallery? (No, I'm not thinking of calling for anything. Well, maybe a pizza.)

Because I dislike pomposity, I'm more likely to follow people and organizations whose authority I respect but who wouldn't presume to apply that language to their own rallying cries. It's somewhat different if somebody else characterizes a call to arms as such.

Geezer power and animal instincts 

Robert Scheer interviews Gore Vidal on the Democratic candidates, Hillary's character, the folly of belief in the afterlife, Tucker Carlson as the end of civilization. Slow 8-minute video from Scheer's Truthdig.com.

I'm generally with Vidal on the political ideology, but not on the elitist stuff about "people doing what they're supposed to be doing," his cryptic rant at the end that seems to be aimed at amateur writing on the web.

Why are even liberal artists so threatened by populism? If the writing or the audio programs or the movies are bad, they sink to the bottom of the heap. Amatuer work, readily available, doesn't take anything away from the genius of somebody like Vidal. There's an abundance of attention to go around, so why are they so fixated on limiting others? I wonder if they are able to see how defensive and threatened they sound when they dump on amateur journalism and performance.

I'm still lazily reading about mobs, and ran across another reference to mobbing behavior in animals. I wonder how often we revert to acting on the impulses of our reptile brain and are never aware of it. More than we'd like to admit, I think. Could the defensive attitude of the MSM be partly an instintive urge to protect turf? It might explain why old-line defenders of the "professional" in creative endeavors appear to fans of amateurism as slightly irrational, seemingly unable to contain their blurtings about it.

Or you could take a historical economic view of turf protection 

MSM zeal to protect their territory also makes you think about the fall of the guild system and a belief that the craft guilds hindered technological progress to protect their livelihoods. There seems to be a debate among historians about the facts behind the long-held belief.