Sunday, 12 September 2004

Fair and balanced. Now that the USS Clueless has gone offline with some sort of warp core breach, my blogroll is skewing too far to the left. I try to at least maintain some degree of even-handedness in my online reading, if only to keep from falling into groupthink — and I find it rewarding to read thoughtful challenges to many of the opinions I hold.

Steven Den Beste will never be accused of brevity, and his articles often brought new meaning to the phrase "going off on a tangent" — but sometimes he came back from the deep end with an interesting analogy or a thought-provoking metaphor. He also kept one foot in reality and understood the difference between fact and opinion, which is a distressingly rare trait these days among people I disagree with.

(It's a problem for some people I agree with, too… but not as frequently. I made the observation the other day that most right-wingers go from "I want to believe X is true" to "X has been proven" without even taking any intermediate steps; Jeanne d'Arc said the same thing, but much more eloquently, here.)

So with Steven on hiatus, I'm shopping around for some insightful right-of-center blogging to wrestle with in his absence — and I'm having trouble finding a blog that fits the bill. I suspect part of my problem is that we're close to the election, which is driving many bloggers deeper into their respective camps; blogs like One Hand Clapping are more openly partisan than they were a year ago, and the right-of-center ground has emptied out.

So, I'll make this appeal to all five of my readers — help me find a blog that will balance out my reading list. A few criteria:

• I'm not a masochist, so right-wing blogs that are hostile, condescending, insulting, or insane are off the list. (I realize that right-wingers could make the same observations about left-wing blogs, but gratuitous insults are easier to overlook when they're directed at someone else and surrounded by an article I agree with.)
• Instapundit is out. Instapundit is the Reader's Digest of blogging, recycling the same seven articles over and over — but where the Digest has its monthly Trapped By a Grizzly!, Wonders of Science, etc., Glen Reynolds has his More Crushing of Dissent, Flood the Zone, and I'm Shocked the Media Isn't Picking Up on This. I'm looking for something with more insight and less deja vu.
• The blog should be mostly political, and measurably right of center. It doesn't have to be all politics all the time — I read plenty of those — but the "B" topic should at least be interesting. This rules out, say, Jeff Jarvis, who mostly writes about media with a little politics on the side (and who's too much of a centrist regardless).
• I wouldn't mind if the blog were not among the top 50 most popular, just for variety's sake.

So. Any suggestions or recommendations?

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 1:44 pm. comments.

Sunday, 12 September 2004

Interesting times. On the first anniversary of 9/11, we were still in mourning: The emotions were too raw to talk about, the anger and grief too close to the surface. There were formal ceremonies and solemn remembrances, but little in the way of catharsis.

On the second anniversary of 9/11, a little more time had passed; we gained a bit more perspective, more distance between us and a day that altered the course of history. People talked about what they did, where they were, how they felt, and shared stories.

On the third anniversary of 9/11, we're one step further removed. For a precious few of us, December 7th, 1941 is still within living memory — but for most it's an event we read about in history books, rather than experiencing ourselves. Time heals these wounds, by marching on with our without us; we'll never stop remembering, and we'll tell our children and grandchildren the stories of that day… but, eventually, 9/11 will cease to be the central theme of the American story.

My grandparents lived through the Great Depression, and some of the lessons they learned from that time stayed with them through the rest of their days. My parents remember the Kennedy assassination. In the words of the ancient Chinese curse, we live in interesting times — and in a time of historic blunders, there's always the danger that 9/11 will be replaced in our thoughts by something even worse.

History will remember these last four years as a time of missed opportunities — failures to prevent, failures to act, failures of strategy, and failures of competence — but I'm optimistic that we can do better.

We have to do better.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 1:53 am. comments.