Okay, I'm done looking (and it wasn't pleasant) so here's a request to any readers who catch this- can you recommend a left wing blog worth reading? By worth reading, I mean a considered, rational peace devoid of "Bush is evil, 100,000 killed in Iraq, Palestinians are driven to suicide bombing" moonbat nonsense. It all seems to go together.
Does such a thing exist?
4 comments:
Show me yours and i'll show you mine... (no really what did find out there that so vexed you?)
I'll get back to you on that, if i may - you laid down some harsh, and me thinks some debate framing rules there.
In the meantime i bring you Stef - a quiet South Londoner that roams around with a camera and fairly Centrist outlook on life (if you start reading from a little while ago - the current entries I'm guessing are going to wig you out, but i think he's great at what he does).
Just a note on labels as used in the greater B-sphere: To my mind "Left" and "Liberal" are two distinctly different parts of the political spectrum. (The Liberals are the ones on that high bit of ground (the fulcrum) in the middle - you can see for miles from up there.) Why have people/theMedia on the Right recently become so disingenuous as to not make this distinction anymore? It is the cause of some bemusement for me as it looks like a form of self inflicted mental castration for them and ruins debate.
I'm not sure at all about your separation of Left and Liberal- they seem to be one and the same to me but that could be because of the strident tone adopted. What would you give as an example of each?
My main problem with left-leaning blogs is the ridiculous language they use. For example, I tried out Hell is Other People and was appalled by two posts- one calling Melanie Phillips a racist for what I thought was a perfectly reasonable article and the other on right wing racists basicaly making up jihad. However, beyond this hysteria it seems that there is room for reasoned dialogue. It's just a shame that it has to begin with overblown rhetoric.
The problem I find on most of the left/liberal sites I've been too is that few seem to want to begin with a reasonable tone. As for Stef- he calls anyone who doesn't believe his conspiracy theory a credulous muppet. Good way to win people over to your point of view.
I have a big problem with the whole "Bush is evil" because it tends to ignore any other factor other that Dubya. So what if Democrats and Clinton were convinced that Iraq and Al Qaeda had links? So what if Congress had access to the same intelligence as the President (and the rest of the world I might add)? So what if Congress rejected Kyoto 98-0? What about the dreadful tax cuts for the rich? Well, isn't it the rich people's money in the first place? The tax cuts weren't about the government "giving money back"- it was a bout them "taking less". Never mind that they actually seem to have stimulated the economy and cut the deficit.
The reflex attitude seems to be to blame Bush first for everything and ignore facts. That's just stupid and it does nothing to advance the debate. Plenty of right wing blogs I visit do not like Bush much either on certain issues (Malkin and immigration for example, Kim du Toit calls Republicans the Stupid Party) but, to me anyway, they seem to be perfectly content to argue the case.
The 100,000 Iraqis dead figure seems to me to have been completely debunked. To still cite it is nothing more than deliberately misleading propaganda.
Finally, I don't believe that Israel is evil and Palestinians innocent underdog victims. Too many leftist sites steer dangerously close to the waters of anti-semitism for my liking. Suicide bombers kill innocent people pure and simple. I don't believe that there is any justification for deliberately targeting civilians in a political campaign. To argue that it's somehow okay because Israel does bad things is beyond the pale.
As for what I found "out there". Well, two examples- Daily Kos and Democratic Underground are filled with such bile and blind adherence to their beliefs- regardless of what the facts say otherwise- that it literally sickens me. The complete ingorance of the fact that some 50 million people now have a chance to live in free and democratic societies is subsumed beneath the "Bush lied" meme. It doesn't matter to them that the outcome of the war has been good, though a hard struggle. The "war is wrong" mindset is closed at that point. There's no room for debate about the benefits other than in purely negative terms. Of course there are questions to be made about how the war is being run, etc, but sites like this can't seem to see beyond the fact that it was wrong to begin with.
Anyone that supports or cheers the "insurgents" in Iraq is beneath contempt. 24 kids blown up to get at one US Army vehicle- that's not an insurgency, that's evil. It is aimed as much, if not more so, at the people of Iraq than the US troops there. Horrible.
As always, good to hear from you.
How about talkingpointsmemo.com? and its associate site TPMcafe? A definite left-leaning site, but I think a nice mix of reportage and analysis.
Many thanks for the suggestions- I'll have to go have a read.
Hopefully I'll have a few "left/liberal" sites to add to my links soon.
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