Reason Writers Around Town

Writing in The New York Post, Nick Gillespie reviews the new decentralist manifesto from Il Capo di Tutti Bloggers, Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds.

Comments

[grylliade]

You know, I really should join the libertarian group here at Tennessee; Glenn Reynolds is the sponsor. But . . . college libertarians . . . *shudder*

[Eric the .5b]

You aren't a college libertarian, grylliade? 😉

[spurs]

I don't plan to read the book and have never been to instapundit, but I do see the guy quoted all the time or referenced and have a couple of questions -- his subtitle:

How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government and Other Goliaths.

Is a law professor at a major university really your average joe or an ordinary person? Is there any weblogger out there of any significance that has some drab manual labor type job, average IQ that blogs about politics and philosophy and what not?

Also the Big Government thing -- he supports a war that has massively expanded the size and scope of government for probably the next decade at least -- so is he talking about himself or just bloggers in general have the power to fight big government, cause he sure isn't doing it.

I know a marketing guy at a publishing house probably came up with the subtitle but still...

[theCoach]

spur,
Because he touches on some favorite buzzwords, he generally gets a pass around here, but Reynolds is incoherent, living in a fantasy land where the MSM's negative reporting of the war is the only reason the war could be going badly, but that it really isn't going that badly, it is just that the MSM heep saying that.

See this John Quiggin post for some of Reynolds unintentionally funny comments on Sadr (there are links if you go to the original post, the server would probably think I was spam if I put them all in):

Update I couldn't find much blogospheric reaction to Sadr's rise, so I thought I'd check at Warblogger Central. I couldn't see anything recent, but Instapundit has followed Sadr's career, which apparently follows an uninterrupted trajectory of decline (he notes, in this respect, the incisive analysis of the Belmont Club). Some samples

The murders are the first sign of organised Iraqi opposition to Sadr's presence a [Apr 29, 04]

those who thought Sadr represented a mass movement among Iraqis were seriously mistaken. [May 5, 04]

ANOTHER BAD DAY for the increasingly irrelevant Sadr. [May 26, 04]

SADR'S DECLINE CONTINUES [Jun 17, 04]

Demonstrators shouted chants denouncing al-Sadr, including one that equated him with deposed dictator Saddam Hussein. [Sep 3, 04]

Bush has successfully mitigated the perils of having to grapple with two insurgencies simultaneously'through a nuanced combination of sophisticated counter-insurgency efforts and attendant political machinations contra Moktada al-Sadr. [Nov 1, 04]

Sadr seems to drop of the Instaradar screen after that, at least as far as my Google skills can detect, and maybe he was quietly rehabilitated in the course of 2005. Oceania has, after all, always been at war with Eastasia.

Also follow the link if you had not realized that Sadr has been increasing his power in Iraq to the point where he is now one of the most powerful men in the country.