Trying to get another perspective

[jchrisobrien]

If someone can point me to a conservative website or online paper that doesn't sound shrill, imperialistic, or like the world is about to drown in a sea of liberal debauchery unless we go out and conquer the whole damn world, please let me know.

I'm serious. I don't see myself as a tree hugger or anything, but it's hard to read some of these websites w/out wanting to throttle the writer.

Comments

[atalanta.livejournal.com]

that's one reason I like the sites that are collections of the writings of many people - you can pick & choose.

but part of it is just the tone of discourse these days - read liberal writers and you get a lot of wrist-to-forehead, eye-rolling commentary about conservatives' religious and monetary selfishness, read conservative writers and get a lot of apoplectic sputtering about hell-in-a-handbasket liberals.

andrew sullivan has good links and often makes good comments, but he makes no attempt to keep his tone level a lot of the time.

if you want calmer writers, try thomas sowell, george will, walter williams.

avoid david horowitz, john derbyshire, phyllis schlafly.

jonah goldberg gets silly without taking himself seriously (he's the one that wrote the "cool! orcs!" article about LOTR.)

national review corner (http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/corner.asp) is their blog which has comments from all the columnists - that means it'll usually both interest and irritate me every time I read it. But it's just small news snippets of all kinds of stuff, with links to other places, so it can be a good place if you want to skim.

This is super-pro-Israeli, so keep that in mind (it won't be hard), but it has things you won't see much of elsewhere:
http://www.littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/
It also has links to a million other news sites. On the right side of the page there is a list of links to other blogs (under "anti-idiotarians") and some of them are extremely level. Others, of course, are not.

for fun:
http://www.lonedissenter.com/
a great blog by a conservative kid in high school in the Bay Area

from the WSJ editorial page:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/

[mr-sarcasm.livejournal.com]

"The death of right and wrong" by Tammy Bruce is an interesting look at conservatism as well. Ms Bruce is a feminist lesbian activist who is also conservative. Her take on the "cult of victimization" on the Left is very interesting so far although her views are more grounded in common sense based on certain events then "data interpretation" like Anne Coulture or other pundits.

Very interesting read at the very least.

-sarcy

[silas7.livejournal.com]

Should i avoid www.townhall.com? It wasn't as much some of the columns that I read (iraq reporting, the moral force of bush's foreign policy, and the caucasian clubs) as the ads for books and other sites that set my teeth grinding (like shut up and sing).

Thanks for all the links. I really am interested in at least hearing the other sides of the arguments. What I'm quickly learning is that it's not as simple as having two sides to the arguments. Each side attacks the issue from a different angle, and the two angles aren't necessarily the opposite of each other.

[atalanta.livejournal.com]

I do like townhall but I guess I'm used to tuning out the ads, because I barely notice them. I guess I just think of it as a gateway. Same as frontpagemag.com .. that's Horowitz's site. He's got a lot of good links, but you have to wade through SEE EVIDENCE OF THE LEFT-WING CONSPIRACY AGAINST FREEDOM! everywhere. Even when I agree with his content, his style is too irritating to deal with.

Yeah, definitely more complicated than 2 sides. That's what's nice about discussions/columns that don't get so explicit about announcing their partisan politics ... much more interesting to pay attention to the actual ideas, rather than the labels.

I really like Thomas Sowell .. his books are worth checking out.

[cris.livejournal.com]

I generally disagree with the points that David Brooks makes, but I respect the way that he makes them. The columns that he writes for The Weekly Standard have more of a 'preaching to the choir' cockiness to them, but his pieces in The Atlantic are more reasonable.

Thomas Friedman has his moments, but his perspective is too narrow, too often. He spends most of his time as a New York Times correspondent hobnobbing with heads of state and big people in high places, and frequently ignores the street level reality.

Tacitus is a Republican blogger who isn't blinded by dogma. He isn't nearly as annoying as big hitters like Instapundit, James Lileks or Andrew Sullivan, but then that's probably why he isn't as popular.