Thursday September 11, 2003

HALF A ROLL IS BETTER THAN NONE. People ask why I don't have comments, or a blogroll. Well, for one thing, I figure if you want to tell me what you think, you'll take the trouble to write to me (just like in the good old days of wax seals, quills, and pistols at dawn!) or scathe me in your own blog. Let my little fame be spread widely if not thickly. Anyway, why should I support your squawks with my hard-earned web hosting fees? That's the sort of Bullshit Libertarian I am!

Also: I think even my most communitarian readers will admit that most on-premises commentary either starts as crap or devolves to it. Interestingly (and remember, you didn't hear this from me), some of the group gripes at Free Republic are more interesting than what you see in the usual vaccs or ratemymusic daughter windows. Within the winger community there are many cadres and schismatics, and their internecine slugfests can turn into donnybrooks a la Donovan's Reef, crashing through walls of logic and spilling into tide pools of paranoid conspiracy.

The only problem with those exhilirating spectacles is, those people are nuts -- starking, staring splitters of insanely fine and even insubstantial hairs. If you want to see sane people talking, you may find that at sites like CalPundit, where the topics are always meaty and draw an intellectually appetitive and often eloquent crowd. That's where the old dream of web community yet lives, and I salute its enablers.

But whom does Alicublog draw? I don't know. Never put in a Counter -- prefer to write as if no one is reading; question of epistolary discipline. I do know that what winds up on these pages is mostly dark mutterings, sometimes sardonic, on occasion comedic, and seldom general enough to facilitate roundtable discussion. I like to think I follow my subjects down rabbit-holes of extrapolative logic too narrow and winding for crowds to comfortably follow. Is that selfish? Should I not instead lay the floor open for a massive Maoist group criticism? ("Comrade Edroso is guilty of the crime of obscurantism! The Dixie Chicks are a topic great enough for all workers to share, yet Edroso would pound it into a nugget that would not last one hour in the furnace of the Collective Waste Processing Plant!") Sorry, comrade. Though I care what you think (do correspond! I shall read your letters in the light of the piazza!), I can't bring myself to lay the doors of my mansion wide open just yet.

(As to the second reason: I'm just hella lazy. Me and my 98-pound sidekick, Dial-Up Modem, muscle our way into Blogger, lay the incendiaries, and vamoose -- not leaving much time for redesign.)

That said, I will commend you to some spiffy weblogists who give me some fun and edification, and might do as well for you:

Roger Ailes. The Hunting and the Snark. Possessed of an attitude shittier (in the best sense) than mine, and more sharply on point.

Very Very Happy. Ailes pointed me here, to a superb post at a generally very keen site. And it's all good. Sample quote: "Holy hell, I can hear Luskin's erection. And I'm half a continent away from him."

Busy Busy Busy. Custodians of the "Shorter" format. My only complaint is that they should post more frequently. So many fools be blogging!

Fables of the Reconstruction. A reliable pisser. Nota bene: I give any poster of Victorian porn ten extra points.

Cursor. Not commentary (much) -- links. A pointer site, in the old pre-bust jargon. And chances are they'll be here, pointing powerlessness to truth, after the bust has gone nationwide (ETA: a coupla months).

Eschaton. Because he's/she's there.

Jesus' General. Super spotty posting -- but if you've never gone, go. He is especially eloquent on how Clinton damaged his "little soldier."

Orcinus. Prisoners incarcerated with G. Gordon "Will" Liddy used to say, "Better not mess with Liddy -- he knows something!" Orcinus knows quite a bit. Former Black Ops, or just an especially keen observer? I bow to his compound sentence structure.

Like Father Like Sun. He has spent his days capering with fools at the New York Sun when he should have been shaking all East Anglia with the thunder of his genius. But 'sokay. Plenty more where that came from.

Sasha Castel. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong BUT: sometimes capable of very sound advice.