Blogs

Nothing good can come from a post that starts like this:

Andrew Sullivan links to a Ross Douthat-Julian Sanchez exchange (that started as a Douthat-Saletan exchange, and concerning which Karl Smith and Noah Millman get words in edgewise, if you care to follow up the links.)

In a related question, a) who still reads Sullivan and b) what have you done in a previous life that you’d voluntarily read Douthat or Sanchez? Also, why take any of them seriously enough to blog about them? They’re all hacks who I wouldn’t trust me to tell the sky is blue if I weren’t in a position to check it. Why give people who basically act like polite trolls the intellectual credit by responding to their latest inane “discussions”?

So, Martin’s first rule of blogging: don’t take proven trolls seriously, never respond to hacks.

You may have noticed nothing much has happened at this blog in the last year or so. Yhose of you who also read my other blog may have guessed why this is: Sandra’s longterm illness and sadly, her death earlier this month. What you may not know is that Sandra was not just my wife, but also my blogging partner Palau, pretty much the person who kept this blog going for the last four-five years or so, as it evolved away from being a repository of the best of leftwing blogs to something more personal yet still political. Though she was always modest about her talents, when she was on she was incredible, with a nose for interesting but under reported news, a knack for writing naturally and wittily and a keen interest in, well, everything. She loved writing about politics, could incredibly outraged, but was interested in more than just politics. One of her strengths was her lawyer background, she had a respect for the law and the British constitution that is sometimes lacking in socialist bloggers, who do tend to view the law as just another instrument for the rich to oppress the working classes, which is true as far as it goes, but she knew it was more than this and it annoyed the hell out of her to see the cavalier attitude with which New Labour especially treated it.

But it wasn’t all serious with her. She was tickled pink finding that Pimp My Crab kit a few years back for example. And she was into gardening and nature and kittens and squid. Especially squid, but other cephalopods as well. She was incredibly productive posting when she could, but her illness did rob her of a lot of energy and time to post and in the end she had to give it up long before she had to give up on life itself. She had hoped to come back to the blog, but unfortunately she couldn’t.