Resisting the pull of cynicism since 1969.

Monday, January 29, 2007

That echo chamber challenge again

I quit reading him back when his blog became All Gomery Bitterness All the Time, but apparently Warren Kinsella made a list of "the top ten bloggers", adding as part of the intro that "WE NEED MORE SMART FEMALE BLOGGERS NOW!" In response, then, complaints promptly rang out across the Liberalsphere that he just wasn't looking hard enough.

Big ol' smooches to all the Liberals who crossed party lines to mention me. But speaking of that, while I agree wholeheartedly with the objection--especially since Mr. Kinsella seems to have implied that the existing female bloggers aren't really all that smart--I'd be even more inclined to take note of the fact that almost all of the "top ten bloggers" according to Mr. Kinsella are Liberals. We really haven't even made a dent in that echo chamber, have we? How disappointing.

So assuming that we're not all actually interested in hearing our own opinions repeated back to us tenfold, here's the new, revamped challenge: If your blogroll contains only fellow partisans of your own personal stripe, find someone with different opinions and see if you can't at least find something in their writing to respect. If your blogroll contains only fellow Canadians, try picking up a British or Australian or American blog and look at the world from another direction. If your blogroll contains only (or even mostly) men, have a look at the above posts, or page through BlogHer, and see if you can't find a woman or two to add to it.

Come on, it'd be good for you. (And not just in that lima bean sort of way, either.
)

5 comments:

JG said...

Cherniak? In the top ten? Barf.

Anonymous said...

Psst! It's http://blogher.org/

Idealistic Pragmatist said...

Kuri,

Whoops! Fixed. And thanks.

catnip said...

Good extension of the challenge. I wrote about the political divide back in December and how difficult it can be to overcome.

Your blog has received a number of mentions in response to my challenge. I do expect that my list will cross partisan divides. 'Smart" isn't relative to one's political persuasion.

Anonymous said...

But I like lima beans.

Top ten lists are like that -- someone is always gonna turn up who likes lima beans. Your challenge is more the way I think of these things, although I think it's great that catnip is building such a good collection over at her place. Promote 'em all, and then some.