new (for me) blogs

I've decided to, well, not to take a break from Juan Cole and Greenwald and C & L and digby, but to start exploring the blogosphere a little more. The "mainstream" blogs--like those I just mentioned--are totally indispensable in their way, but they are also limited by their quantity and also by a certain moderateness. It's incredible, actually, that they're portrayed as crazy left-wingers by anyone at all, they're generally solid liberals who happen to be caught in a time when the discourse has shifted so far to the right that anyone left of center must be a bra-burning Hamas-loving baby-killing commie. They're not pushing the boundaries, really, they're just pushing back against media and governmental repression, inaction and incompetence. All this by way of saying, there is really interesting stuff in some of the more personal blogs, people just writing down what they feel as it comes. Kind of like me, but heavier on the commentary and lighter on the "this is what I did today". Two good ones that I just found are Unsane and Safe and The Quaker Agitator. So anyhow, I'll be adding those to my "places you should go because i like them" as I come across them. I put up Chile from Within and The Latin Americanist a couple of days ago.

On a related note, I've been having a bit of a debate with my friend Lindsay about the value of blogs. She is a centrist through and through--a huge Bloomberg supporter--who has not, as I and many others have, lost her faith in the media. We disagree on a lot of things, which is fine, life would be insufferably boring if everyone with a shred of intelligence agreed about everything. But blogs are a point where I think she's really wrong. One of these days I'll write down my thoughts about the worth of blogs, but for now I'll leave it by pointing out that our little debate (Lindsay's and mine) is interesting because when we talk to each other about blogs, we're really talking about the mainstream ones--the aforementioned plus many others on the left, and then Politico and Michelle Malkin (crazy psycho), et al. on the right--not about the thousands of small-time bloggers whose contributions, however small, to our intellectual discourse, are collectively a breath of fresh air. I live in one of the smoggiest cities in the world; believe me, I know the value of breaths of fresh air. So if you've got a couple of minutes, check 'em out.