randomly

Interestingly crappy thread moderation by John Scalzi here. People who disagree with the dominant view in discussions should be afforded extra protection, not less. Worse, in this case I judge that the suppressed minority voices were making trenchant points.

Also interesting for a conservative (I assume) reading of LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas" I hadn't thought of in political terms - that the ones should have walked to the nearest gun store. This I think runs into the problem of where responsibility ends - plenty of children in this world live in Omelan circumstances.

Re LeGuin, having reread _TLHOD_, _The Dispossesed_, and the Earthsea trilogy recently, I read _A Fisherman of the Inland Sea_ and found it about evenly split between preachy failures and incoherent failures, with one beautiful story, "The Kerastion", in the middle. Really high peak, long decline phase, in baseball parlance.

Housecleaning

Maybe it's some nesting thing - I've finally gotten rid of my blogroll links to places I no longer read, due to their intolerance of atheism (Mark Kleiman), CDS and general mission failure (ObWi), inability to acknowledge blatant misuse of "mendacious" even when directed to a dictionary (Uggabugga), penchant for self-satisfied risibly-argued posts like this [and see comments] (Philosoraptor), or just lack of interest (etc.) - and without the detailed discussion my lack of energy for which was preventing said cleanup. Maybe I'll replace them with new links over the course of several tardy years if something better comes along. Suggestions (esp. for good poetry blogs) gratefully accepted.

Hendrick Hertzberg now officially a hack

I was sad to see this remarkably mendacious and small-minded essay by Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker, but I've not been in the business of collecting the informed-only-by-groupthink attacks from liberals on HRC, and I figured that, ok, he's got a little problem, but after the nomination process he'll get back to being ok. But, no. Here's the great Digby on Hertzberg's praise of Chris Matthews.

This is the kind of post I've been not wanting to write, which is a big part of the reason I haven't been blogging much. The whole enterprise of public comment is just too depressing.

Andrew Olmsted

I was away from the web most of the day and so only just now learned the terrible news that Andrew Olmsted, a blogger I liked and from all accounts a very good man, was killed in Iraq yesterday.

JFTR

I'm curious to see if this comment at Brad DeLong's blog stays up:

For y'all's info, Prof. DeLong has censored some of my argument above, leaving a distorted record of my position. I keep forgetting that, while this is a fine blog, it's not always open to the free exchange of ideas that irk him.

John Edwards and blogs

I'm sorry to learn that John Edwards has hired Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon (note the unfortunate "of all the candidates in the field, the only one worth my endorsement is x" rhetoric). I've commented in disagreement on her posts a few times and found her intemperate and unable to defend her positions. She's apparently scrubbed the site, but people have captures of embarrassing material I'd not want Edwards to get associated with. Fortunately he's also hired a very reasonable blogger, Shakespeare's Sister.