|
[Previous entry: "Your blues artist name"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "The Council of Europe's "Right of Reply" proposal"] 17 June 2003: "Roll call"
Since I've been doing some rearranging on the blogroll lately, I thought it might be informative to give a rundown of what's on there, why it's on there, and why you—the reader—might or might not find a given item to be of interest.
I think this sort of public thinking aloud would be a healthy thing for academics in general, and an excellent way to ward off Chomsky Disease, a condition of late middle age in which you come to believe that you can drop chunks of poorly-justified rhetoric on people from a great height as long as it's prefaced with "Of course..."Ted is as open-minded as you can get without having your brain fall out*, and his blog encourages the reader to think for himself. Jeff Jarvis' BuzzMachine is one of the few "major league" blogs I read with any regularity. Jeff's background in "established media" serves him well in assessing points of interest in Blogoslavia. But it's a double-edged sword, in that it can also lead him to indulge in the circle-jerk self-referentialism which any medium is evidently prone to, witness several days' worth of reports from the Jupiter weblog conference. Jeff quotes Doc Searls, It wasn't a Big Time conference, but it was a culture-changer. Blog is Rock, in many ways. And the show had a lot of Rock & Roll to it.My gut response is that Rock is made jamming in a garage, not by holding a conference where one debates the price of guitar strings and how to join "the Establishment" as quickly as possible. (The phenomenon is almost worth an entry by itself, except I'd be shooting myself in the foot if I wrote it.) But, dispensing with my whinge, Jeff does a good round up of stuff worth looking at, especially Iranian blogs, and even when he does stray into "meta-blogging" he refrains from blowing his own trumpet. I came across Europundit via Gallowglass. It's written by David Weman, who is, I believe Swedish. David's fascination with the EU makes him an informed source on the topic, while he is sufficiently dispassionate about it to maintain objectivity. He sees the EU's flaws not as reasons to condemn the whole institution out of hand, but as points to work towards improving, which is an all-too-rare attitude towards supranational organisations. eameljenet is written by Ijsbrand, whom I also know from the 3WA discussion boards. Ijsbrand's Friesian, as is my mother's family, and the URL (and blog title) is a pun in Friesian, meaning "don't e-mail." The default language used is Friesian, with content in Dutch and English, so there's a limited number of people who'll understand all of it. In considering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it's worth reading Ohad "Civax" Barzilay's blog just to be reminded that Israelis are just people. Civax is a computer science student and, like most able-bodied Israelis, an IDF reservist; he considers a Palestinian state to be a requisite towards a lasting peace, but many of his posts indicate why "peace at all costs" is too much to ask of the Israelis (of course, "peace at all costs" isn't a problem for the people who don't pay that cost). Colby Cosh heads up the more or less libertarian section of the blogroll. I'm economically way too left-wing to call myself a libertarian, though I'm on roughly the same page as regards civil liberties, and as a result it's probably safe to say I don't see eye to eye with Colby on any number of issues. The list might even be longer if I was halfway informed about issues affecting Canadians in general, and Albertans in particular. Nevertheless, I link to Colby because he writes well and amusingly on a wide range of topics (how often do you find deliberations on the merits of poutine?), and because I think it can't hurt to know what affects my new neighbours to the north. Colby linked to Evan Kirchoff's 101-280 at some point, which is how I found that site. The bulk of my in-laws live in the Bay Area, so I cottoned on to the geographical reference immediately (well, almost). Evan's a transplanted Canadian. Like Colby, he writes on a wide range of issues, and does a good job not only of making them interesting, but making some good common-sense observations in the process. 101-280 is also the blog which pointed me to the aforementioned diachronic agency. I've linked to Brett Cashman's Tabula Rasa partly out of reciprocity, and partly because reading the opinions of a libertarian working in high tech keep me in touch with the political mindset of a number of those in-laws I mentioned earlier. Brett's been on a bit of a sabbatical lately, though; he hasn't posted in almost a month. Counterpoint has been updated sporadically at best since the end of capture of Tikrit. "Vae Victis," its pseudonymous author, was one of the first people to link to me, and he(?) turns up interesting stuff which I wouldn't have always found myself. The Dissident Frogman is a French blogger, who publishes his blog in English and French. A good source for whatever rebuttals to whatever the French government is saying, but in doing so, TDF tends to wax a bit too uncritically lyrical of the present American administration for my taste. It's odd he's not commented on Operation "Artemis" at all. Still, lovely graphics. Peaktalk is written by a fellow Dutchman living on the North American west coast, though Peter's in British Columbia. Politically, we have almost nothing in common; I might say that I read it so that I'll know when I start to think the same way that I'll have lost touch with my former (that is, current) self. And then there's Jim Treacher. He's funny, in an absurdist sort of way, though he's been having a bit of a hard time over the past week over some stupid blog ad taken out by one self-important blogger for the purpose of ridiculing some other self-important blogger, or something. Jim's the man who gave us Puce the Blogroach (CLICK), the robot SEKK-Z, and the Onionesque "Janeane Garofalo being fed into a plastic shredder" story. And if you can spare him a few bucks, please do. Missing from the roll is Diana Moon since she had to close down "Letter from Gotham"; she's working on other projects outside Blogoslavia at present, but if she returns, I'll let you know, oooh, within a week at most of Instapundit telling you. Updates: 1. RJM of the Illiterati seems a bit defensive about my "mondial and mundane" characterisation. I hasten to point out that I didn't mean "mundane" in any negative sense; I for one enjoy having the contemplation of world affairs interspersed with tidbit like cow magnets, recipes for side pork and what have you. 2. Pieter of Peaktalk likes my methodology, and wonders "whether we have both ended up on the wrong side of the 49th parallel." That's an interesting point, actually, though I'm inclined to say which side of the Cascades you're on might have some bearing on the matter as well. The main problems I have are (a) thinking in metric, which wouldn't be a problem in Canada, and (b) I keep forgetting prices in stores don't include sales tax. 3. I took BuzzMachine off the roll; there's a limit to the amount of underinformed arrogance towards the entire continent of Europe I can take in one week. 4. (24-Jun-2003) I've added Harry Hatchet & Friends and Oliver Kamm to the roll. Both are British, economically left of centre, and not opposed to use of force in international relations. Oliver specialises in delivering critiques of the more clueless elements on the left wing of the British political spectrum, while Harry is more of a generalist. Harry's also recruiting contributors to keep the content a bit more varied. * - The current issue of the Skeptic (Vol. 10, No. 1) features an article by James Hrynyshyn on the origin of the maxim "Keeping an open mind is a virtue—but not so open that your brains fall out." The results are inconclusive; the phrase is credited to a fair number of people, but the most cited is James Oberg. Oberg himself, however, denies having thought up the phrase himself, though he says he improved slightly on the version he originally read. Oberg, then, is analogue to James Watt in this scenario, but the analogue Newcomen is unknown. |
Navigation: home archives backgrounder Blogs:
au currant Miscellanea:
Care to contribute |
