Some Things I Like

So here comes the round-up after all. I imagine most folks here have already read most/all of these. Maybe I’m more just finding shiny things that look good in my mental nest.

1. So it’s Jimi Hendrix’s birthday. b. medusa at Mnemosyne has up videos of Machine Gun and Voodoo Child.
2. This post and comments remind me of the “good old days” (of six months ago), when I first found some political blogs that I could actually read without having an Embolism. Nice stuff imo.
3. Vox taps right on a key issue, I think, and one not limited to feminism. Check out Feminist blogosphere, Love it or leave it. This is another puzzle piece of why I couldn’t tolerate … well, a lot of what turns out to be called the white progressive blogosphere. For one thing, it’s so hierarchical! Holy Jeebus, people, don’t you get enough org charts at work?EDIT: So I like Vox’s take on a general issue. A cultural thing that I think I’ve seen much more broadly than those two bloguments. I’m not really reacting to those specific discussions here.
4. Oh, but, here, Kai has reacted, and rounded up some reactions, to one of those discussions!
5. I’m a few years late, but I finally read What’s the Matter with Kansas by Thomas Frank. He talks about the phenomenon of a populist movement supporting the far right.
   

   American conservatism depends for its continued dominance and even for its very existence on people never making certain mental connections about the world, connections that until recently were treated as obvious or self-evident everywhere on the planet. For example, the connection between mass culture, most of which conservatives hate, and laissez-faire capitalism, which they adore without reservation. Or between the small towns they profess to love and the market forces that are slowly grinding those small towns back into the red-state dust — which forces they praise in the most exalted terms.

I’m probably going to keep adding to this. Here’s a better metaphor. Think of me like a kid putting stickers of rock bands I like all over my three-ring notebook.