- William Brafford convincingly swats PEG. He's always been a sharp one.
- Charles Davis tools Radley Balko. When Balko is right (read: writing about drugs), he is so, so right. When wrong-- oof.
- Come September, the supple hair and fashionable glasses of Will Wilkinson will reside at a new venue, where he will doubtless continue to hate liberals far out of proportion with his disagreements with them. Note: the man's a fine, fine illustrator, and I wouldn't give out such praise lightly. Check him out at his new digs starting September 12th.
- Erik Kain, who has paid his fair share of dues and then some in the blogging game, is also not so hot on Zack Beauchamp.
- Karl Smith is one of those lonely voices speaking out against those who keep telling us dissenters that we don't exist.
- Ezra Klein demonstrates what it means to be a contemporary American liberal. He shows that welfare reform was just straight class warfare against the poor, but has to keep that "if" in there. Otherwise, what would the community think?
- Ta-Nehisi Coates again makes a great point and then drowns it in the bathtub of semantics and petty actor sorting. But his commenters loved it!
- IOZ.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
doin' it up right
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8 comments:
Since his return, IOZ has been batting like .950 ... almost every post has been solid gold
Thanks for the link, Freddie. I just started reading your blog a week or two ago -- I only wish I'd found it sooner.
Thanks for passing on the Brafford piece. I'd been bugged by the argument and it's satisfying to read a proper retort.
I think you are misreading Smith. He's saying liberalism is a precarious achievement of civilization, since blood-and-soil tribalism is more consonant with human nature. He's not saying there is some hope from socialism or the international working class.
I don't think Smith is talking about socialism at all. I find resistance to that narrative so rare that I celebrate it for its own sake.
Really? Almost every time Fukuyama is mentioned in public discourse, it is to mock The End of History. Clash of Civilizations always gets a more respectful hearing.
Of course, Fukuyama doesn't say the triumph of bourgeois liberalism is an unqualified good.
Good links Freddie. A few comments:
I'd like to see you expand a bit on your comments on the TNC post. I know you've both already written a lot of words on this topic so you're likely a bit fatigued, but I'm not sure I see the semantics there, so perhaps you could explain that comments a little more.
On the other hand, you summed up in two sentences exactly my frustration with liberals of Ezra Klein's ilk. Instead of just pointing out the bleeding obvious: welfare reform took a program intended to help the poor and crippled its ability to do so. He has to pose it in terms of questions in this smarmy technocratic way. And to my eyes, the reason is pretty clear, its to duck an actual meaningful critique of a Democrat. Its the same way that he (and other liberals like him) addresses issues where Obama has clearly failed. He treats them as thought studies and intellectual curiousities, wherein he's more concerned with pedantics and rhetorical questions rather than offering a clear eyed criticism. The total unwillingness of so many of the in-liberal bloggers (the Klein's, Yglesias's, Chait's) to write genuine criticisms from the left of Democratic leaders (whether Obama or Clinton) even when its clear that they see the evidence as crying out for such criticism is as nasty an example of groupthink as the right-wing, NRO, bs that liberals love to mock.
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