Elayne Riggs' Journal (for Leah)

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Linky Dumpy

Must-reads, must-reads! Bloggers not overly quoting other bloggers or New York Times columnists but actually stating their own thoughts, or pointing out stuff that not every other single blogger is saying! Yummy!

Rana at Frogs and Ravens has written two absolutely marvelous posts in the past week. The first, Us and Them, was in response to a well-known liberal blogger's efforts to put party above policy the way most Republicans seem to nowadays, and speaks to the idea of coalition rather than negatively labelling anyone who doesn't put party uber alles as "single issue." The second, In The Triangle?, is a follow-up of sorts that uses as its starting point a pseudo-self-congratulatory article in Salon about how influential political bloggers are in real-world politics and media. Like me, Rana is frustrated that blogs which aren't monotopical are somehow deemed less worthy of consideration, rather than more indicative of a well-rounded writer with varying interests. [I've been feeling the same about things said in the cultural arena as well; apparently even though I read hundreds of comics a month and my husband makes a living drawing them and I've been blogging for over three years which is far longer than most other comics folks, I don't mention comics often enough here to be considered a member of the comics blogosphere.]

Terry at I See Invisible People reminds us that today is the UN International Day of Peace. And speaking of that august body in which most sensible people still believe, Samhita at feministing revealed last week that Condoleeza Rice skipped out on attending a dinner date with other female foreign ministers to discuss women's rights. Speaking of the UN summit, Natalie Bennett points us to the picture that appeared in the Guardian with all the world's leaders, noting that "There are - count 'em - seven women out of the 159 total."

Today is also Lurker Day. If you're a Pen-Elayne lurker, thank you!, and feel free to introduce yourself in the comments if you so choose! Although that's, um, rather defeating the purpose of lurking...

Kathryn Cramer, who's been doing an amazing job with hurricane-related maps and other Katrina-aftermath resources, passes along the news of an Italian computer programmer using Google Maps to reveal the site of an ancient Roman villa.

Lastly, Randy Paul has a lovely personal reminiscence of the late Simon Wiesenthal. I was fascinated when he said, "The one thing that I always remembered about him and had the single greatest impression on me was his statement that 11 million people died in the Holocaust, not 6 million. It was always important to him that the horrific experience that he had the good fortune to survive was not perpetrated solely against the Jews, but against all decent people and against all humanity, hence the term crimes against humanity." I didn't realize until the moment I read that today that all the Wiesenthal stuff that was pushed on me in yeshiva which actually got me to more or less ignore the man after awhile was actually filtered through religious Jewish eyes (and rabbinic tongues) to mean exactly the opposite - that the Holocaust was somehow "special" to Jews alone and that's why we should Never Forget.

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