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bigotry, Blogs, US politics
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The Sideshow on anti-semitism and anti-zionism:

The religious aspects of the situation can be terrifying, but let’s not pretend that it’s only the Islamic world that’s being horrible and bigoted about it. The Pentecostal Christians who “support” Israel with such fervor are possibly even more nasty and dangerous than Israel’s overt enemies. Virtually all of them are extremely anti-semitic, and the outcome of their planned “defense” of Israel is even worse for Israelis than merely dissolving the state. We’re talking about people who aspire to seeing virtually everyone in the Middle-east, Muslims and Jews alike, wiped out.



So let’s be clear: You can not distinguish anti-semitism merely on the basis of support for Israel – and I’m not just talking about the particular policies of this or that Israeli government: I mean any degree of Zionism or anti-zionism at all. There are plenty of Zionists who are anti-semitic, and there are even anti-zionism who would be perfectly happy to have their daughter marry a Jew just as long as Israel itself no longer existed.


Body and Soul:
Diary of a blogging hiatus:



Day 1: Life is better if you don’t read the New York Times.

Day 2: We are burdened by the obvious and nevertheless absurd idea that nonfiction is real and fiction is false. Newspapers are full of lies and there is nothing as honest as a Raymond Carver or Alice Munro story. I don’t think I ever want to bother reading nonfiction again.

Day 3: The New Yorker’s fiction isn’t as good as it used to be.

Day 4: I should at least look at the headlines. I mean, I’m still a citizen and all, right? I ought to have some notion of what’s going on in the world. It doesn’t require me to express an opinion or anything.

Day 5: I should save that article. I might want to write about it if I start blogging again.


Counterspin:



A VOTE FOR JEB IS A VOTE FOR MORE DEAD KIDS: The Miami Herald has just published an explosive report on the appalling state of Florida’s Child Welfare system under Jeb Bush.

Why Blogs Matter

Blogs
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The interesting challenge for us in the progressive blogosphere is whether we can figure out a format to combine the best of our posts into a single structure that casual web browsers could access like a magazine. What would be needed is some kind of peer review to move the best posts from individual sites into a collective web effort, categorized by issue area, and posted in a user-friendly form. There are some collective blogs out there, but what is needed is a more serious editing function and user-friendly formatting to make it easy to access. If we could even do with progressive blog posting what Google News has done with mainstream papers, it would make web writing far more accessible.

And however much we might trash mainstream media, they spend a lot of time figuring out how to get the product into the hands of consumers. That is not a skill to be looked down upon.



The above was written by Nathan Newman. This new weblog is a first attempt at realising his vision, though somewhat differently from what he intended (for now). What I intend to do
and will invite others to join me in, is to create a daily “Best of the Progressive Blogosphere” linklist. Each entry will consist of a single paragraph from the story linked to and a link to the story. That’s all. There won’t be any commentary, no expounding on what’s happening in the world, no big thesises. Just links to the progressive blogposts you need to read today.