Regular readers of this space may have noticed that I seem to be commenting more often on politics and media-coverage of same and less often about blogware and suchlike. I suspect the impending war has focused my thoughts in that direction, or made it much harder to focus my thoughts on the nitty-gritty of webhackery. After all, what’s the point of participating in a global conversation if all you’re going to do is talk about the mechanics of the conversational substrate?
It might also be related to the regular deadlines in my current project, which I’m not able to discuss publicly yet. This provides an incentive to procrastinate and a disincentive to tread in protected areas.
Some of the recent political or opinion stuff I’ve enjoyed reading online include the following:
- Orcinus, because I’ll take passionate rigorous advocacy over exaggerated screedings any day. In the midst of doing a bang-up job on Coble and the history of the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, David Neiwert recently posted a must-read account of the evolution of the Republican party from his own personal point of view, having grown up in a moderate Republican family.
- Mark Kleiman, whose coolly reasoned liberalism tempers some of the more shrill bleatings from the left edge of the ‘sphere
- Brad deLong‘s well documented economic arguments, again from a moderate-left perspective (people tend to forget that Krugman’s history seemed fairly centrist in terms of economics before he began his campaign of tilting against extreme windwills)
- For intellectually honest libertarian-style conservatism with a dash of linguistic debate, give me the Volokh Conspiracy group blog.
- When my leftish leaning yearn for some read meat, I reach for Zizka: Le Blagueur Superbe‘s unabashed partisanship
- As an antidote to the anti-European caricatures abounding in warblogs today, a dose of D-squared Digest (especially the cruel but smart Shorter Steven den Beste feature) does the trick.
- For over-the-top, you can’t beat Neal Pollack’s The Maelstrom.
From all of this, it may not be apparent that I am more convinced of a case for preemptive war against Iraq than I was about the legitimacy of the election results in 2000.
(And yes, o imaginary copyeditors, I realize my bullets are not parallel. Live with it.)