The Collected Writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Civil War

Ta-Nehisi Coates is not only one of the finest writers in the blogosphere -- one who writes with compassion, sophistication and grace about "how the mysterious mixture [of humankind] behaves under the varying experiments of Time" (to use George Eliot's phrase) -- but he's also an autodidactorial historian, who has been publicly teaching himself along with his readers about the Civil War for several years now. And in addition to his generous presentation of interesting history, his writing on it -- the crispness of his prose, the sureness of his judgment -- has simply been amazing. Coates is doing, in other words, some of the best writing on history you can find today.

And now someone has compiled a complete list of all Ta-Nehisi Coates's Civil War Posts, with links, ranging from his first post on the topic, from a little over two years ago, to his most recent, from yesterday.

And there was much rejoicing.

I haven't read all of them myself -- there's just too much, and my blog reading is too sporadic. But those I have read (quite a few) are fabulous, and I intend to read the rest as I have a desire to procrastinate the time.

In the meantime, if you want a few to start with -- just to get a sense of why I'm singing his praises -- I recommend this post on The Ghost of Bobby Lee as a good place to start.

Update (August, 2011): That link seems to have gone dead. But this is a separate compilation of Coates's civil war writings -- indeed, a better one, since it has annotations on (some of) the posts to indicate what they're about. So go, read, enjoy.

Best of the Blogosphere, Part 8: Axis of Evel Knievel on Ph.D. Dissertations in Retrospect

(Eighth in an occasional (at this point very occasional -- the last one was more than a year and a half ago) and entirely whimsical series. Other entries here.)

I haven't done one of these posts in a long time, but in honor of my current endeavor, I thought I'd revive this old series. This post certainly fits my criteria -- it's more than a year old, and well worth re-reading. I even recently found myself googling to try to find it again, always a signal that it was a very good candidate for this particular honor.

So, Noble Readers, I hereby present the eighth official Attempts Best of the Blogosphere™ award to the Axis of Evel Knievel post "Greetings from the Bell Jar". It's about the writer's return to their Ph.D. dissertation a few years later. Here's a bit from the beginning:

I offer today's post as a tribute to all the PhD. candidates out there groaning beneath the awesome, shin-splintering burden of their dissertations. You know who you are.... I come with a message from beyond the threshold: As much as you may hate what you're writing at this exact moment, you will only feel a more precise and exhausted loathing toward it later on. Your prose will seem more lame, your conclusions more uninspiring and aimless, your insights more delusionally smug than you can possibly imagine as you sit there today in your pajamas, choking with writer's block and wondering if you should take a nap, drink yourself sideways, or simply heave yourself beneath the tires of a bus....

And it only gets better from there. Go read it. Especially if it applies (or applied, or will likely apply) to you. You know who you are.

In the meantime, I'm ending here, keeping this post uncharacteristically brief. Figuring out the reason why is left as an exercise for the reader.

Best of the Blogosphere, Part 7: Teresa Nielsen Hayden's Credo

(Seventh in an occasional and entirely whimsical series. Other entries here.)

Teresa Nielsen Hayden is an SF editor at Tor Books and (along with her husband, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, likewise an SF editor at Tor) blogs at Making Light.

As I've noted before, one of the central criteria for inclusion in this series is being worthy of rereading. And one sign of that is when you're digging through their archives, finding that no damnit they don't have subject archives what about Google Yes! Google comes through and then rereading the post -- particularly if you're doing all of this years afterwards. It was when I was doing that for the second or third time for this particular post that it occurred to me that, yes, it really deserved an entry in this series. So I hereby present the seventh official Attempts Best of the Blogosphere™ award to Teresa Nielsen Hayden's brief, powerful blog post "Things I Believe".

It is an Easter post, a declaration of a unique, intelligent and deeply moral faith. I myself do not share Teresa's beliefs: she is a Christian; I am an atheist (with a Jewish cultural identification). But I found her declaration extremely moving. Unless you have an extreme, visceral negative reaction to any Credo of any sort, I suspect you will as well. For that matter, she includes some entries that even a die-hard atheistic naturalist can agree with, such as "I believe it’s a sin to throw out awkward data" -- as long as one allows for an interpretation of "sin" which fits it within an atheistic, naturalistic framework (as I do, and as I suspect Teresa would understand as well).

I don't want to quote too much of it, because you should go read it for yourself (or reread it if you've already read it), but to whet your appetite a bit, here's the opening:

I believe that if God is as advertised, God’s ways and means and purposes cannot always be comprehensible to us.

I believe in the God of the Burgess Shale*, Who not only made creation stranger than we know, but stranger than we could ever imagine.

I believe it’s a sin to throw out awkward data.

I believe that the God who made (among other things) light, and space, and number, and time, and the spiral curve of Fibonacci numbers, must be acknowledged to understand more than I do about why there’s pain in the world.

I believe God put that itchy spot on our backs, just exactly where we can’t reach it, to encourage us be to nice to each other.

I believe God doesn’t play mean practical jokes on His children; for instance, the ones He makes gay.

(That asterisk in the second item is a footnote, by the way -- but I shan't give it here since after all the whole !@#$% point is to get you to go over to Teresa's blog and read the post there.)

It's a wonderful credo, and if more Christians believed it, rather than the Jesus-is-all-about-giving-money-to-the-rich-hating-gays-and-starting-wars version that seems current in today's America, the world would be a far better place.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden is actually the first author of any of the posts in this award series that I've met. She (and Patrick) are regular attendees at Readercon, my favorite SF convention, and I have spoken to her once or twice -- nothing serious or notable, really, but enough to know that she is as gracious and intelligent in person as she is online. She also is good an panels, but that's a whole 'nother topic.

Teresa regularly says that one of the best things about Making Light are her readers, and that if you miss the comments you're missing half the fun. I think this is quite true, although in all honesty the comments on this particular post don't show the fact off as well as many other posts -- they're heavy in the "that was beautiful, thank you" vein, complementing Teresa's post in the praise rather than complete sense of the word. Some people, however, add their own beliefs to Teresa's -- in something like the way that (later) people would add their own entries to John Scalzi's post "Being Poor", featured earlier in this series. So do take a look at the comments if you feel inclined.

But either way, do make sure to read Teresa's post. I am far from convinced that faith in general is a good thing; but the faith she displays there is not only powerful and moving, but clearly a force for good. It is a Credo worth reading, and worth rereading, whether or not you subscribe to it.

Would that it was more widely shared: that more of today's believers held a faith so imbued with wisdom, with charity and with love. For I believe that such wisdom and charity and love are the greatest part of any life of good will, whether or not that life is a life of faith. I believe such a faith as this, truly lived, could help to save us all.

Best of (I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not) the Blogosphere, Part 2π: Zompist on Libertarians

(2πth in an occasional and entirely whimsical series. Other entries here.)

This post is not an entry in my by-now six-part series on the Best of the Blogosphere (which you can find here). -- Or, alternatively, it is the (2π)th part -- an irrational part that hovers somewhere between part six and the future part seven (now published here).

Because, you see, what I'm about to link to isn't a blog post.

Really, it isn't. But it's an I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-a Blog Post, because it's part of this awesome web site where the proprietor puts up all sorts of great essays on all sorts of topics.

So, in the spirit of the Hugo Awards giving Watchmen a "special" Hugo (which then vanished off the lists of past Hugo awards for years) since they didn't want to call it a novel but were hesitant about a work of, well, fiction winning the non-fiction award*, I hereby present the (2π)th (un)official Attempts Best of (I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not) the Blogosphere™ award to "What's Wrong with Libertarianism?" on Mark Rosenfelder's Metaverse.

It's a terrific essay. But first maybe I should tell you a bit about Metaverse. Because it's a really cool site all around.

First, it's not a blog. Even the part that is a blog (sorta) isn't a blog -- it says so right up there at the top: "something that looks like a blog and sounds like a blog, but it's actually a rant page". And it's not a bad blog, er, rant page, either. But the real meat of the site can be accessed from Metaverse's front page.

Basically -- not to put too fine a point on it -- Mark Rosenfelder is a geek. But that's okay; as Willow Rosenberg said some time ago, "It's the computer age. Nerds are in. They're still in, right?". And as geeks go, he's smart, funny, well-read, and almost always interesting -- always if you're interested in what he's talking about which (since he's a geek) you won't be. But you'll be interested in a lot of it -- depending on how much your inner geek and his overlap.

And Metaverse is just a collection of his writings: essays, humor pieces, dictionaries, how-to guides... it's quite a mix. In addition to the post under discussion, Metaverse has all sorts of charming stuff on it, clustered in areas like linguistics, comics, politics, SF and humor. (Anyone who knows me can see why I like the site.) Here are a few more favorite, roughly one in each of the above categories (although they overlap). For linguistics, Rosenfelder gives a tourist's guide to Quechua (the Native American language with the largest number of speakers (at present)) especially the grammar, that's a lot of fun. Even more quirky is his Language Construction Kit, a guide for those who want to invent a language (aimed at those with fictive rather than linguistic ends). For comics, just browse his reviews (which are a bit out of date, but otherwise are generally very good). For SF, his analysis of the original Foundation trilogy is great. For humor, it's hard to beat They Thought You'd Say This: Unlikely phrases from real phrasebooks, though I also like his Crib Notes for the Turing Test. In politics, in addition to the winner of the present august award, check out his essay on Why the Rich Should Pay More Taxes.

Rosenfelder wrote an "ostensive definition of 'American culture'" in reply to someone who said there is no such thing, which spawned a whole series of lists in the same format, so there are now Culture Tests for England, Germany, France, Mexico, China, India, Turkey and all sorts of other places. In some ways its a good example of what his site is: a quintessential web thing, not quite an essay (although it more or less has one at its core), with lots of participation, quirky and individual and fascinating. At least if you're a geek. Like me.

He has essays on Jane Jacobs, Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment, Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, how progressives resemble fundamentalists, writing English with Chinese characters, what the bible says about the poor, the Turing Test, English words derived from Arabic, French comics, and a wild and wide-ranging essay called "The Last Century -- What the Heck Was That?" In the less-essay-ish and more-widget/list-ish category, he's got an automated excuse generator, fun facts from his bookshelf, flashcards for learning hiragana (one of the Japanese syllabaries) and the numbers 1-10 in more than 5000 languages. He draws his own comics, although not very well. And this isn't even to mention his own meticulously documented fantasy universe, Verduria, complete with languages and history and all sorts of things... which, frankly, is one of the areas where he bores me stiff. But while those will differ from person to person, if you're interested in enough things to be reading this blog, you'll find something on his site that you'll like... or, more realistically, either you're already over there surfing around and enjoying, or you will be shortly, or you're too stuck in your ways.

In short, Zompist's Metaverse is a geek's garden of instruction and delight, and I commend it to one and all. It is precisely what a blog should be... or it would be, if you lined up all its entries in reverse chronological order. As it is, it's sort of an essay-and-widget collection, a bouquet of miscellanea. With more cool stuff than you can shake a stick at.

But the winner of this award is his essay What's Wrong with Libertarianism? -- currently in version 3.0, and linked to from the home page under the title What's Still Wrong with Libertarianism?, although the actual essay itself retains the original handle.

What's great about this essay, at least for me, is that it articulates very well a lot of things that I know and believe but hadn't yet assembled for myself. It's not that I needed convincing about why Libertarianism is wrong -- and I don't know if his essay would convince anyone, because I don't think that short essays in general are the sorts of things that can change someone's fundamental political world view. But if they could, this one would: and for those of us who feel strongly that Libertarianism, despite a lot of surface attraction, good talking points and some issues where they are bang on the money, is not only wrong but often a very destructive force in American politics, Rosenfelder sums it all up quite well. And he does it in an entertaining, chatty, smart, informed-but-not-scholarly style which is, for me, one of the hallmarks of much of what I love about the blogosphere.

Which is why this essay gets this award, with minor points off for not being an actual, y'know, blog post... but hey, it's good enough.

I'm not saying that the essay is the definitive philosophical take-down of Libertarianism. It's not meant to be. (The series of essays which Part Zero of this series highlighted -- a series which seems, alas, to have stalled out midway through -- might be that if Elizabeth Anderson ever finishes it.) It's an articulation of the basic liberal critique of it. And I admit that when, in an online discussion, I cited it as an articulation of my basic problems with Libertarianism, the response was basically 'Yeah, I've heard all that before'. -- But then, that would be the response: political philosophies don't tend to retreat from criticism, but rather come up with standard responses. Whether you feel those responses are definitive or laughably inadequate depends on the point of view you're coming from. (It's a far rarer essay than this one that actually changes an entire political movement -- and those tend to be, I think, small changes from within: changes in political movements, I think, tend to arise from events, or from large schools of thought -- a great many arguments each in many different versions and variations -- of which, hopefully, Rosenfelder's essay will eventually turn out to have been one of if Libertarianism is, as he predicts, eventually discarded as a political philosophy among all but a very few cranks, just as Monarchism has been.)

For those of us who are (broadly speaking) liberals, Rosenfelder nails the basic response to Libertarianism (with, of course, quirks and details which are original to him, and are the spice of the piece). Whether you're a liberal, or a libertarian, or something else entirely, it's worth surfing over and reading it: agree or not, it's well worth your while.

So swing by Metaverse and read Mark Rosenfelder on What's Wrong with Libertarianism? -- or reread it, since it's worth rereading (the fundamental criteria for inclusion in this series.) Then check out his other offerings. It's been said that if you're tired of New York (or in some versions London) you're tired of life; and I almost feel that way about Metaverse.

Enjoy.

________
* The graphic novel "The Dark Knight Returns" had been nominated in that category the year before, on the rather poor grounds that "non-fiction" really meant "miscellaneous".

Best of the Blogosphere, Part 6: Slacktivist Reads Left Behind

(Sixth in an occasional and entirely whimsical series. Other entries here.)

Some of you may be familiar with the greatest literary takedown of the Nineteenth Century: Mark Twain's marvelous essay, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses". It's a short, funny and utterly devastating demolition of a crappy novelist. Well worth reading, incidentally, if you haven't come across it before (even if you haven't read Fenimore Cooper -- which, after reading Twain, you won't want to).

Well, a blogger named Fred Clark, who blogs at Slacktivist, has been doing a similarly sharp takedown of what he refers to as the Worst Books of All Time: the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins.

Like Twain, Clark says a lot about literary technique along the way. Unlike Twain, he also says a lot of interesting stuff about a wide variety of other things -- especially Christianity, especially its evangelical branch, and that branch's premilleniast subculture. This is because Twain was writing a fairly short essay, and, therefore, stuck fairly closely to the matter at hand. Clark, it must be said, is writing at somewhat greater length. He is doing a page-by-page reading of the Left Behind books. He began in October, 2003; he's still at it; he is, I think, about half way through the first book in the (twelve volume (not counting prequels, spin-offs, etc.)) series.

The takedown is, as I said, just as sharp as Twain's. But it's a bit longer.

But -- and I cannot emphasize this enough -- I am not complaining. I'm exalting. An essay of Twainian quality is wonderful; more than 100,000 words (I counted (or Microsoft Word did, at my behest)) of near-Twainian quality is superb. I say "near-Twainian" -- the best of it is of Twainian quality; the rest is simply very good.

Still, it rather begs the question: why spend so long on these books?

Well, it's fun and funny. It allows Clark -- who, I should mention, is himself an evangelical Christian, only the sort who doesn't believe that Jesus's main messages were directives to increase the wealth of the rich, start wars whenever possible, and hate gays -- to criticize trends in evangelical culture that he dislikes.

But it's more than that. This is a subculture, set of beliefs, that is very important in America. It is believed by tens of millions of our fellow citizens. If any of those can be reached, it is an important view to try to sway them from; for the rest of us, it is an important view to understand.

But Clark has himself addressed a few times (with some perhaps-understandable self-consciousness) why he's taking the time to do this. So I'll let Clark say why this matters:

...the "end times" mania and wretched theology of the Left Behind series is dangerous for everyone, within and without the Christian community. Swap around a few of the words in [a previously quoted passage] and you've got a standard piece of al-Qaeda fundamentalist propaganda. Same world view -- different religions. Actually, that's not true. Kill-the-irredeemable-infidel fundamentalism is always the same religion, no matter what faith it masquerades as a form of.

Elsewhere, he says:

Why expose myself and the readers of this blog to the potentially toxic foolishness of Left Behind? Because LB is more than simply a wretched novel. It is a wretched novel with serious consequences. It is, among other things, an assault on the central beliefs of the Christian faith... But please don't think of all this as a simple for-Christians-only intramural struggle affecting only the church and those within it. L&J present a political perspective that is every bit as corrosive as their theological views. And that political perspective is being read and absorbed by millions of Americans. The political impact of L&J's brand of dispensationalism is difficult to measure and difficult to overstate. It affects people's attitudes toward religious pluralism, multilateral and international institutions, diplomacy and peacemaking... At a very basic level, this worldview opposes and undermines any long-term thinking, any sustained effort to make the world a better place -- replacing the hope of redemption with a perverse longing for apocalypse. As such, L&J ultimately are like any given set of villains from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They want to open the Hellmouth and bring about the end of the world. Stopping them, as always, begins with research. So let's send Xander out for donuts and get back to hitting the books.

These are, I submit, convincing reasons to make the attempt. Clark's wonderful writing and analysis are convincing reasons to read it. So I therefore present the sixth official Attempts Best of the Blogosphere™ award to Slacktivist's Left Behind Series. Go read it: you'll enjoy it -- and profit from it.

...Except that, as I've mentioned, it's, well, er, long. As in, over 100,000 words. A reasonable-sized book. I mean, in one of my previous entries to this series, I gave the award to two essays, each serialized, totaling 22 blog posts in all. But they were also available as two pdfs -- and they were, in the end, two essays. This is a book. And still growing.

Now, the whole thing is worth reading, really. (The link above will take you to an archive of the series -- an archive, somewhat irritatingly, organized in normal blog style, that is, with the oldest posts at the bottom. The problem, therefore, is that to read it in order you need to start at the bottom, scroll up a bit until you get to the top of the first post, read it, then scroll up a bit more, and so forth. Not the best UI in the world for this sort of thing, frankly.) But I figure that my Noble Readers might like to have a place to start. So here are a few entries in the series that stick in my memory, that are good ones to start with. (In following my one-year-old minimum for this series, I've picked ones that are at least a year old; but the series is ongoing.)

L.B.: The Evil of Banality
L.B.: Holy Spirits
L.B.: Explicit Content
L.B.: No Change of Power
L.B.: Funny You Should Ask
L.B.: Other People

As I said, those are just a few I personally liked. Other people will click with other entries (sometimes people will leave comments on entries that strike me as comparatively weak saying 'that's one of the best of the series). But if you haven't read the series yet, you can start with those. And if you like them, do read the series. It's a funny look at an important subject.

Best of the Blogosphere, Part 5: John Scalzi on Being Poor

(Fifth in an occasional and entirely whimsical series. Other entries here.)

When I began this series, I made it a rule that I wouldn't include any post which was less than a year old. The idea was to prevent this from turning into a hey-I-read-a-great-post-this-week series, and instead make it a series of old posts -- old by internet time, granted, but that's the relevant time here -- that I genuinely remembered and thought worth rereading. And so far I've stuck to that. Well, I will in this entry too -- by the letter, but not the spirit. For this entry is precisely a year old today. And I've known since I began this series that it would one day be an entry, and that that day would likely be today. Needless to say, saving up a post until it crosses the year-old finish line isn't in the spirit of picking only year-old posts.

But I don't care. Someone -- Robert Frost? -- once said that we knew a poem was a classic not because we never forgot it but because we knew at a glance that we would never forget it. I don't know if this is always true; but it unquestionably sometimes is. And it was for this post. It's just astonishingly wonderful. (I wondered earlier how it could have failed to win -- hell, even be nominated for -- a Koufax award. I'm still wondering.)

The post in question is by John Scalzi, who just won the John W. Campbell Award for best new SF writer. It's called Being Poor. He wrote it in the wake of Katrina, obviously, and the utter obliviousness of so much of what was said directly afterwards. It begins as follows:

Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs.

Being poor is getting angry at your kids for asking for all the crap they see on TV.

Being poor is having to keep buying $800 cars because they're what you can afford, and then having the cars break down on you, because there's not an $800 car in America that's worth a damn.

Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away.

-- and it goes on from there. It simply, merely, and utterly powerfully lists some of the small experiences, some of the components, of what it is to be poor.

It's an astonishing and moving piece of writing, and one that I wish everyone in the country would read. And certainly one worth rereading. And so the fifth official Attempts Best of the Blogosphere™ award goes to John Scalzi's incredible post Being Poor.

But don't just read the post, incredible as that is. Because the commentators pick it up, and add to it. And that, after all, is part of what makes the blogosphere so incredible: the comments, where, sure, people can say stupid things, but it also allows for rich discussion of many varieties -- including, as in this case, genuine extensions of the already brilliant piece of writing. So scroll past the deservedly-long list of trackbacks (which will include this post if I can get it to work), and read the comments. It's a long thread; some of it is taken up with trolls of the 'oh-they-deserve-it' sort, which you can skip. But read the additions to Scalzi's list. In fact, if you want to read all of them, you'll need to go read this post too, since at some point the comment section got so long that he continued it on a new post. But don't skip them: they are part of the whole, and part of what makes the whole as good as it is.

Katrina's anniversary has, indeed, faded too quickly from our national conversation, a mirror of the way in which the original event itself was too quickly forgotten. We did not learn the lessons we so desperately needed to learn, the lessons it so powerfully taught those who listened, about the state of our society and our government. One of the reasons that we didn't -- one of the reasons it happened in the first place -- is that too few people in this country who are not themselves poor know what it means to be poor -- above all, too few who run this country know it. Too few understand it in the genuine way that would prevent them from ever, ever asking "why didn't they leave"? But we need to understand it. We are morally obligated to understand it. Reading John Scalzi's Being Poor is a way to begin.

Best of the Blogosphere, Part 4: David Neiwert on Pseudo-Fascism

(Fourth in an occasional and entirely whimsical series. . Other entries here.)

And now for something completely serious.

David Neiwert is a journalist who has covered, among other topics, the far-right militia movement in the 1990's (the people who brought you the second worst terrorist attack in American history). For the last several years, he's been running a blog named Orcinus. One of his key topics has been the increasing rise of something he calls pseudo-fascism: something that is -- to be clear -- not yet fascism, but something that is also clearly on its way. He's written many posts about this, including ones which document the rise of what he terms "eliminationist" rhetoric -- and its increasing use on the mainstream right in this country.

Neiwert's work is important because of its care and rigor as well as its forcefulness. Neiwert isn't just some grumpy lefty throwing around the term "fascism" -- indeed, he opposes such careless usage because it makes authentic fascism harder to see and warn about (for all the obvious boy-who-cried-wolf reasons). So he goes out of his way to note with care precise definitions of fascism from people like Robert Paxton, and to evaluate the ways in which the right wing in this country has and has not adopted fascist forms of rhetoric, thinking and action.

Neiwert's work is a call to action. Fascism, he notes, is almost impossible to stop once it gains control of a country; so it is important to recognize fascist thinking as it develops. And on those grounds, we have a lot to worry about in this country.

If you're worried about what the right has become in this country -- if you, too, wonder what happened to those boring-but-unthreatening Republicans you used to know -- you owe it to yourself, and your country,* to read this series.

Neiwert has written a lot of important posts on this topic, but none has been more important than two of his multi-part series, "Rush, Newspeak and Fascism" and "The Rise of Pseudo Fascism" . My only hesitation in linking to it, honestly, is that they are well celebrated in the blogosphere, winning the left-blogosphere's highest award, the Koufax Award**, in 2003 and 2004, respectively. Heck, even I've linked to them before, in my own post on pseudo-fascism. But I think that a few people read my blog who don't read other blogs regularly -- and, hell, it's my award. So I hereby declare that the fourth official Attempts Best of the Blogosphere™ award goes, in a tie, to David Neiwert's two most important series.

Indeed, so well-recognized are these series that you can actually read them in multiple formats and places. First, they are available as their original, plain-old blog posts. The first post of each is here: Rush, Newspeak and Fascism and The Rise of Pseudo Fascism; the last post of each (which contain handy links to the entire set) are here: Rush, and Pseudo Fascism.
Second, each post has been reformatted as a pdfs, although for those downloading the pdfs, Neiwert requests a five dollar donation (information at his blog.) You can get the pdf versions here: Rush, Newspeak and Fascism and The Rise of Pseudo Fascism. Finally, for the first of these only (and the more complicated one, since it is in fifteen (!) parts instead of only (!!) seven), you can read it at Cursor, reformatted and with added art: Rush, Newspeak and Fascism -- that's probably the easiest way to read that first series.

These are not only two of the best pieces the blogosphere has produced to date; they are two of the most important political essays for understanding the last decade.

If you haven't read them, go read! And even if you have, read them again: they're worth rereading. And then, in whatever way seems best to you, join the struggle against the forces that, in Neiwert's words, "could very well devastate the world."
___________________
* This is true even for any non-American readers, since your country -- whichever country it is -- would be terribly threatened if the pseudo-fascist right continues to metastasize in this country.

** Why "Koufax"? Because Sandy Koufax was one of the best left-handed pitchers of all time.

Best of the Blogosphere, Part 3: Kung Fu Monkey Misses Republicans

(Third in an occasional and entirely whimsical series. Other entries here.)

I know that so far this "best of the blogosphere" series has been "best of the funny blogosphere", and that this is, which makes three in a row, which by Talmudic principles means that they all will be -- but really, they won't, and I promise that the fourth entry in this series, whenever it happens, will be Something Serious.

Probably.

But in the meantime, I want to introduce you to Kung Fu Monkey. It's written by a stand-up comedian/physicist/screenwriter/comics writer named John Rogers, and he writes a lot about writing, which is smart but probably limited in its audience, and he rants about politics, in a way that is not only hilarious, but also (as the best comedy is (as KFM himself has pointed out)) smart, telling us things we need to hear.

He's written a lot of great posts, but the one that I'm here to talk about today is "I Miss Republicans". It's a particularly good post because it puts into words what a lot of us have been feeling for many years (how many depends on who you are, but there are a lot of us). KFM puts it this way:

No, seriously. Remember Republicans? Sober men in suits, pipes, who'd nod thoughtfully over their latest tract on market-driven fiscal conservatism while grinding out the numbers on rocket science. Remember those serious-looking 1950's-1960's science guys in the movies -- Republican to a one.

They were the grown-ups. They were the realists. Sure they were a bummer, maaaaan, but on the way to La Revolution you need somebody to remember where you parked the car. I was never one (nor a Democrat, really, more an agnostic libertarian big on the social contract, but we don't have a party ...), but I genuinely liked them.

How did they become the party of fairy dust and make believe? How did they become the anti-science guys? The anti-fact guys? The anti-logic guys?...

-- Of course the sub-text behind this is not only missing Republicans, but being frustrated as all !@#$% with those Republicans who don't see what has become of their party.

The rest of the post is wonderful, too -- funnier, if mostly on one specific example of this phenomenon (mostly, because he ties it back together at the end.)

KFM's politics are not mine -- for one thing, he lists John McCain as one of his exceptions, which is clearly wrong. (I wonder if he'd say the same thing now?) And... well, other things, too. But that's not the point. The basic point, the key point -- that Republicans Are Missed, with the all-crucial implication that this is because They Aren't Here Any More -- is right.

So it is well worth a read -- and, if you came across it before, it is well worth a reread; hence (for that is the key criteria) I hereby declare that the third official Attempts Best of the Blogosphere™ post is Kung Fu Monkey's I Miss Republicans. Go read it; you won't be sorry.

And if you like it, there are a lot more where that comes from. Some I would recommend in particular are Lunch Discussions #145: The Crazification Factor; Bar Talk (previously linked in my Dershowitz round-up); and Learn To Say 'Ain't', but really, there are a lot of good ones. Still, I Miss Republicans is a great place to start. Check it out.

Best of the Blogosphere, Part 2: the Medium Lobster on the Power of the Glow

(Second in an occasional and entirely whimsical series. Other entries here.)

Fafblog has been, for years, one of the funniest sites on the web -- one of the funniest political sites, sure, but also just one of the funniest, period. The political undercurrent just gives it a nice bite, like food spicy enough to get your mouth tingling.

Recently, alas, they have been on hiatus -- and many people across the web have been suffering serious Fafblog withdrawal. But, hip-hip-hurray, they're back. To celebrate, I thought I'd mention one of their old posts, a personal favorite from the deep well of Fafbloggy goodness. So the second official Attempts Best of the Blogosphere™ post is The Power of the Glow.

When I gave the first of these awards, I was able to give a general sense of the post by saying what it was about -- a blogger reading and interpreting, humorously, a political book. Fafblog is not so easily summarized. Suffice to say that this post gets at -- really, really gets at, in the way that sometimes only brilliant satire can get at something -- the essential Republican reason that they think that Bush (particularly) and other Republicans (generally) are better on terrorism than Democrats. Oh, it's not what they'd say if you asked them. Rather, if you boil down their argument, taking all the calorie-less water out of it, it's what you'd be left with.

It's not that they make us safer in any practical way -- they manifestly don't: aggressive wars, torture, the basic failure to secure ports and chemical plants, and so on and so forth, make it abundantly clear that actual, tangible security is not the standard here -- or, rather, that actual tangible changes that might improve security aren't. Rather, they think security comes not from, y'know, looking carefully for bombs or not making people hate you, but from... the Power of the Glow.

And for that, you'll have to go read the Medium Lobster at the now-happily-back-on-line Fafblog. Or reread it, if you read it then. For, like the best humor, it's not only funny: it's right, telling you something true and important about the world.

Best of the Blogosphere, Part 1: John Holbo reads David Frum

(First in an occasional and entirely whimsical series. (Update: Later entries here.))

Bloggers, I am convinced, have done some damn fine writing in the past few years. The nature of the medium being what it is, however, the products of the past are too often swallowed up in the same void that devours day-old newspapers and month-old magazines. On the other hand, the nature of the medium also means that the rescue is easy: the material is there. One just has to link to it.

So, from time to time -- and I really have no idea how often, I might not do another for year, I might do another tomorrow -- I want to link to an old post that is worth reading -- indeed, worth rereading if one has already read it. To make sure that instant acclaim is not the standard, I will limit myself to posts at least a year old. (I know, I know: a pretty short time to ensure classic status. This is the internet, people. Way of the digital world.)

And, thanks to the most recent post by Michael Bérubé (most recent as of this writing), we have our first contender. Dr. Bérubé links to an old post by John Holbo which I really liked when I first read it. I just reread it: it really holds up. So, the first official Attempts Best of the Blogosphere™ post is: John Holbo reads David Frum in "Dead Right".

The basic set-up is this. Thanks to a recommendation by Josh Marshall (the link from Holbo's post is broken; use that if you want to read Marshall, although it's really just a passing comment) John Holbo went and read David Frum's Dead Right. Holbo then discusses Frum's philosophy, filled with ample and not-terribly-clearly-formatted quotations (the latter is my only gripe about the post really). Holbo decides that Frum hasn't really thought his underlying political philosophy through very well, and thus he

...attribute[s] rather outrageous views to Frum, not because I actually think he holds them but because I think he does NOT. These outrageous views are the views he WOULD hold if, perchance, he upheld and investigated only the most immediate ramifications of the bits and snippets of philosophy he espouses.

Hilarity ensues. But the insightful sort of hilarity that really good, biting comedy gives you. -- Really. Go read it.

The post exemplifies a few of the literary quirks of the nascent blogosphere, and I thought I might mention them briefly. First and foremost, it features a lot of very long quotations -- clearly in a copyright-allowable-way (being criticism, and only a snippet of the entire book), but in a way that in a traditional formal essay would seem excessive. But this isn't done because Holbo has nothing to contribute. On the contrary: he has a lot to say, but wants to A) be fair (in a fashion) to Frum, and B) let Frum hang himself by his own words.* (The Donner Party comes up. 'Nuff said.) This is a style of reading which, when done in its entirety to a short piece is referred to in the blogosphere as fisking. This isn't that -- he's only doing a tiny bit of a full-length book. But it is done with all the snark a good fisking entails... but having a dead serious intellectual point behind it (as, indeed, the best snark does).

I really wonder if David Frum ever read it. Part of me is inclined to doubt it, since he hasn't given up being a pundit and devoted the rest of his life to standing on corners and cleaning car windshields for spare change, which would be a reasonable response to this essay, I think. Nor does a quick google bring up any indication that he did -- just other people praising Holbo's post. But part of me thinks he must have read it. It was too widely passed around at the time for him not to have caught wind of it. So what did he think? What could he possibly have thought?

Goodness knows. But you can find out what you think: read the post!

Much Later Update: I just recently found out (via this thread) that John Holbo actually wrote a follow-up post to the one I highlighted here. Like many sequels, it's not as good as the original, but still, if you liked the first, it's worth taking a look at.

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* Although at various points he quotes a full paragraph from other writers too. The idea here, I take it, is quite simply that the point has been made well, so why not simply quote it? This isn't written for money or tenure or anything like that, but just to convey ideas. So there's no reason not to simply rely on the words of others if they do the job well.

Freedom, Property and Capitalism

Recommendation time. Elizabeth Anderson is a philosopher at the University of Michigan, a former student of John Rawls -- and a blogger, on the site Left2Right. Since January she has been doing a series of posts on the relationship of property and freedom which are simply magnificent -- the very best that the blogosphere has to offer. They are in a very philosophic vein, and assume a familiarity with the basic ideas of, e.g., Locke; but they're clear and well written and unless you're absolutely allergic to that sort of thing, I recommend them as strongly as I can. They are all really one series, but so far they have run under two titles; first, a series called How Not to Complain About Taxes parts One, Two, Three and Four, and then So You Want to Live in a Free Society, parts One, Two, Three, Four and Five. She's written a lot of other good posts on other (sometimes related) topics too (e.g. this one), but this series is magisterial.

As befits a student of Rawls, the series is clearing going to end up being a defense of the redistributionist welfare state -- but a defense based not on justice per se but rather on the value of (ultimately) freedom and of private property as an essential part of that. Anderson is doing some intellectual work that is part of a project which is, I think, absolutely crucial to rebuilding a sane politics in this country, namely, reclaiming the mantle of pro-capitalism and pro-private property from the rather simplistic libertarian philosophy that currently claims it as its own in public debate. Private property is essential to freedom -- but not absolutely unrestricted use of private property, nor is it a matter of natural right or individual desert, all of which Anderson argues for eloquently. Libertarianism is a very appealing stance in American political debate, but one which is not only simplistic, but is, I think, ultimately dishonest at any number of levels (in its honest versions, which certainly exist, it isn't really appealing to very many people). Separating the argument for property-based-freedom from libertarian assumptions is crucial intellectual work -- and Anderson is doing it. (Along the way, she is demonstrating rigorously something which many people (including me) have long thought, namely, that so-called libertarians don't care so much about liberty as about property. Property is necessary for liberty -- but so are other things, so the two can conflict; and in the conflict libertarians pick property over liberty just about every time. (Again, there are exceptions.) Anderson hasn't gone into the issue of libertarianism explicitly yet -- she's building up slowly -- but the implications of her arguments are already quite clear, I think.) Anderson is an enthusiast for private property (as she's said a few times, she wants everyone to have access to it!) and is in particular an enthusiast for capitalism, and the expansion of opportunities -- liberty, really -- that it provides. But she is a liberal capitalist, in a way that strengthens both liberalism and capitalism.

The most recent post segues into a contemporary political topic, making a powerful argument for why pharmacists should not be able to refuse service to customers based on their religious convictions (e.g. against premarital sex), as is currently being pushed politically. Her argument here rests on her earlier work, although I think one can summarize it by saying that she sees it as analogous to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the reasons that storekeepers can't, and oughtn't be able to, refuse to serve someone because of their race. But this simply shows the good ground work she's doing, making arguments which can then be put to powerful intellectual and political use.

I have some ideas of my own on these issues -- influenced and inspired by hers in large part -- ideas which are probably closer to the realm of pure political argument than the sort of philosophy that Anderson is doing. But I don't know if/when I'll write them, so in the meantime, go read Anderson. She's terrific.

My biggest beef with the series, really, is that what she's saying is too important to be left in such academic, philosophically-sophisticated terms. Her basic ideas (e.g. for property as a basis of freedom, but not on the grounds of natural right nor of desert; the issue of the two notions of freedom, the necessity of both but the primacy of freedom-as-opportunity) could be phrased in much more popular ways -- ways in which they might begin to do some healing on the deeply sick political discourse in this country. Her work on this topic is too important to be left to the philosophers. Which is one more reason I strongly encourage everyone to read it -- the more people who do, the better chance of these ideas spreading further and deeper into the culture then they can from these essays alone.