Though I suppose "wreckful" might be more apt than "reckless" here

John Hinderaker of Powerline exemplifies much of what I can't stand about a lot of politics-type blogs, not just because he's a neocon of the most tedious and brainless sort, but because you know exactly what he's going to say, all the time, and yet he insists on saying it over and over again every single time something remotely newsworthy happens, apparently without realizing that wanking in public hasn't been novel since Diogenes did it a few millenia ago. At the moment, he's predictably angry at Obama about the BP oil spill catastrophe. This post, however, is noteworthy for one absolutely beautiful ideological tangle, brought on by Hinderaker's fury with Obama's description of BP's conduct as "reckless":

Second, while human error no doubt played a role in the disaster, there is no evidence that BP was "reckless." As I noted yesterday, BP's market capitalization has declined by around 50 percent--$100 billion--as a result of the spill. By any rational measure, BP has been harmed more by the spill than anyone else, even Barack Obama. It serves no purpose to launch unsupported accusations of recklessness. One might say, on the contrary, that it is reckless to do so.

So, to be clear:
*BP is a big company run by good capitalists who act in terms of their corporate rational self-interest.
*The spill harmed BP more than anyone else, even Barack Obama, or that unfortunate oil-covered pelican. (Oilican?)
*Therefore, BP's careful attention to their rational self-interest would require them to avoid major oil spills.
*Therefore, thanks to BP's rationality and total lack of recklessness, there was no major oil spi... wait a second.
*Oh, who cares, the REAL reckless one here is Barack Obama! Ha!

Seriously, if BP had such a major incentive to avoid the spill - which, clearly, they did - how could it have happened if they weren't somehow reckless? Does Hinderaker actually think about what he writes? Is it all just setup for the I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I potshot at Obama at the very end? But there's not much reason to expect anything different, I guess; Hinderaker provides a service, and that service is churning out post after post of conservative boilerplate, regardless of whether any given paragraph actually makes sense.

Let me please introduce myself

I've always been a little suspicious of blogs. My experience with them in middle and high school consisted of sloshing my boring teenage angst all over the internet in as exhibitionist a fashion as possible, while congratulating myself on my subtlety (if being subtle had really been the point, of course, I wouldn't have bothered to write anything in the first place); my opinion of them since I first came into contact with Serious Blogs for Serious People has, in some ways, not much improved. Certainly there are good blogs out there, run by people who do a fine job of writing legitimately insightful, creative, clever, or funny analysis -- the blogroll to the side features a few of them. But a lot of the blogs out there seem to me to have fallen prey to the same weakness that marks the newsprint pundits that they supposedly made obsolete: the tendency to turn thought entirely into product, and to comment obsessively on absolutely everything that happens (I like to call this "opinion-shitting"). The sight of so many bloggers ravenously leaping upon each news article that makes its way onto the internet, as if they were worried it might drift away if they didn't hold it down with the sheer mass of their word count, hardly fills me with confidence.

But there's a level on which that's bullshit -- after all, there'll always be commentary, and what right do I have to criticize without making a real attempt to do it myself? So here I go. There's a passage at the end of the first book of Gogol's Dead Souls where he describes Russia as a troika, racing along the road through miles of flat countryside towards the tantalizing horizon of the possible and the unknown. He's not talking about the "real" Russia as such, which, by the 1840s, had a history and culture and society of its own, of a rather firmer nature than misty romantic paeans to the infinite variety of the future; he's concerned with his writing above all else, talking about Russia's literary identity, still mostly unformed and waiting to take shape on his pages. I have no task of comparable magnitude ahead of me. But I am about to go to Russia for the first time. So I may as well celebrate by foraying into the blogosphere -- not to blog about Russia (well, maybe slightly), but to get a hold on a place which, like Gogol's Russia, would exist just fine without me, to traverse its twists and turns and maybe add a few of my own.

What'll I blog about? Cultural criticism of no particular category. Politics. Leftism. Music. Words. Russia (sorry). But, most importantly, I want to write things that'll make you think and that you'll like reading, and that's less a function of what I write about than of how well I write (and think) in the first place. Onward!