Tuesday, June 9, 2009

An oasis of reason

Among the right, only Daniel Larison really seems to have a grip on the reaction to the Sotomayor nomination:
We are reminded again and again of the hope that everyone will be judged by character and not by race. That sounds reasonable. So why is it that Sotomayor’s critics seem to be going out of their way to ignore her merits and her achievements and have been fixating on questions of identity and identity politics to the exclusion of almost everything else? Perhaps deep within the cocoon, articles that earnestly claim that Limbaugh and Martin Luther King are fighting the same fight seem credible, but what everyone else sees is little more than a collective panic that an Hispanic has been appointed to the Supreme Court.

This is also the trademark wingnut nonversation--they ignore all counterarguments and just keep saying the same things over and over again. See also: waterboarding.

The Man, The Myth, The Bio

East Bay, California, United States
Problem: I have lots of opinions on politics and culture that I need to vent. If I do not do this I will wind up muttering to myself, and that's only like one or two steps away from being a hobo. Solution: I write two blogs. A political blog that has some evident sympathies (pro-Obama, mostly liberal though I dissent on some issues, like guns and trade) and a culture blog that does, well, cultural essays in a more long-form manner. My particular thing is taking overrated things (movies, mostly, but other things too) down a peg and putting underrated things up a peg. I'm sort of the court of last resort, and I tend to focus on more obscure cultural phenomena.