Not on topic, quite, but a group political blog that was looking for more female representation would do a good job to sign up Katherine R formerly of Obsidian Wings.
(Not unfogged, I'm thinking of another group political blog. One of the people around here posts to another group political blog, I think.)
Avedon Carol, at the Sideshow, is good, and has extra value in that as well as a content-generator, she's a heavy linker in the Atrios/Instapundit style, and her links include more women. She writes a very good first-stop blog in the morning.
It's a group blog with only one woman, but hilzoy of Obsidian Wings is also excellent. The liberal/conservative split in the bloggers, and the rules about civility on the site, mean that she's often not as irate as she might profitably be, but she's a hell of a writer.
And Teresa Neilsen Hayden of Making Light. Maddeningly infrequent, and only directly political maybe half the time, but a wonderful writer and moderates herself a darn good comment thread.
Those are all on my blogroll, by the way. Give me a few days to get out from under the grading/kid duties/etc., and I'll come up with some others, if I remember...
And (obvious sign of stress & overwork: mutiple commenting), check out the links in my own post on the subject, to Clancy, Trish, et al--they've done a much better job than I ever will of bothering to go out and *collect* links to answer this question.
Huh. Didn't see the argument in question, but she never struck me as humorless.
(Um, and not that I, personally, feel this way in this instance because I didn't see the argument, but in the context of any discussion of sexism, the word "humorless" applied to a woman has strong overtones of "I'm just trying to piss you off now." But you knew that.)
I've created a new folder on my sidebar, and the femme blogs now seem to equal in number my other bookmarked blogs. (the sidebar's a new thing, if you're inclined to think "well, why weren't they there earlier?")
Your lives all have been given meaning now in affecting mine. Thank me later.
1. As someone who has spent a lot of time wading around on Galt's site, I feel a certain obligation to defend her. She certainly has her faults, and her politics are crap and getting worse, but for a long time her site was a/the congenial place to go make a meal of an issue, and the congeniality had a lot to do with her and Mindles's efforts. It's worth noting that her readership has changed a great deal since she subbed for Insty, and not to the blog's benefit, IMO.
2. She is, IIRC, gigantic (on the order 6'+), and for some reason I believe that PG is a wee (said respectfully) woman. If FL has a crush on Galt, the whole PG thing is a lost cause. In which case you should push the Weiner-Wolfson storyline.
While I stand by my assessment of Galt's writing, she is personally very pleasant. I've had occasion to disagree with her on a couple of posts recently, and she's emailed to discuss my comments in a very civil and reasonable fashion. If she had a less irritating crowd of commenters, I can see how she might run an entertaining blog -- wrong about most things, but a good place to discuss issues. With the commenters she has now, though, it doesn't really work.
Thanks Matt. I can't though, not until I finish my consarned third year paper at any rate. I'm the worst procrastinator ever--that "do you have a blogging problem" fit all too well.
Hilzoy is awesome. I suggested her as my replacement. Huzzah for the sisterhood.
Laura Rozen is super, there are too few journalist-bloggers. Belle Waring, obviously. And can someone force Rivka of Respectful of Otters to start blogging again?
One Good Thing (implicitly, not explicitly political--and the best writing in blogland, bar none, imho)
I gotta agree with bitch on this. I sometimes read a long post there and think, this doesn't belong on a weblog, it's too good. I remember one about growing up as a girl in south carolina that just sang. Plus, she has funny stories about her kids and her sex shop. I'm a sucker for those (b's got great kid stories lately too). She is more political in a deep sense rather than in the 'what's happening with ss privatization today?' sense. At the moment, that's the only way I feel ready to approach politics.
JG is, in my experience very civil and reasonable and intelligent. When I read her site (never for long) I found some interesting information I hadn't known about (mostly about libertarianism/Austrian economics).
The main problem I have with her is that she's extremely unreliable on the facts, and that it's impossible to tell when she's making shit up and when she knows what she's talking about, because she sounds perfectly reasonable and detailed no matter what. I mentioned this comment before--it tells a quite plausible story in a calm way, which you couldn't believe if you knew the first thing about redistricting.
This makes reading JG dangerous. You're likely to come out less well informed than you did when you started, unless you check all her assertions.
This is a bit of a personal hobbyhorse, because I wrote my dissertation on the epistemology of testimony, and one of the key points is: You shouldn't believe someone who's always been wrong in the past. A lesson that doesn't seem to have been absorbed into our political sphere, and I'm not thinking of bloggers.
Bingo -- precisely what bothers me about her writing. She's a pleasant, polite, reasonable person who lives on a planet where the facts support her political positions much more closely than they do here on Earth, and relying on her facts as if they were from our reality will only lead to confusion.
Oh, and she won't stop using the "my liberal Democratic friends all agree" line, even after Ted Barlow made it into a lightbulb joke.
To be constructive, Virginia Postrel is a libertarian blogger who doesn't have that factual problem, I don't think. She should probably be on the list.
Matt, can you give some more examplse of Galt's errors of fact? I have found her treatment of issues where I have personal expertise (biotechnology, pharmaceuticals) to be basically accurate.
Click on the links in his post for one. Talk about burying the lede, halfway down this page, is another example -- when the estimate of next year's deficit came out, she was terribly impressed that it was so low, and took the NYT to task for not making its lowness the focus of coverage. In fact, the low estimate was an artifact of the fact that Iraq expenditures weren't included -- recognizing that fact, and that the deficit was actually in line with and somewhat greater than last year's, the NYT had not made the small size of the estimate a focus of discussion. Galt was corrected in comments, and did update, but that sort of thing (a total misconstruction of the relevant facts) does seem to happen more often on her blog than I'm used to generally.
To be fair, baa asked for "more." Her discussion of voter registration fraud in the 2002 SD Senate election was what really stopped me reading her blog--she kept insisting that, statistically, the new voters on Indian reservations had to be fraudulent; it eventually turned out that the only fraud in that election was GOP operatives filing false affidavits accusing the Democrats of fraud. I don't have the link, sorry.
And this is egregious. Getting John McWhorter's name wrong isn't a big deal. Posting confidently on the academic hiring process when she clearly doesn't know the first thing about it, in general or in McWhorter's case, is.
Did you know that McWhorter moved to his current job after having held another position? Did you know that that position was at his alma mater, where they were presumably able to make an accurate judgment of his work? Did you know that most schools--including McWhorter's current employer--don't supply information about race to the hiring committee (and of course it's obvious when you get to the interview stage, but that's the hardest part)? Did you know that the only black astrophysicist I've met took a job in industry because he didn't expect to be able to get an academic job? Did you know that a whole lot of humanities departments don't have any black members, which would seem to give the lie to the idea that there's a racial set-aside? If you knew any of those things, you wouldn't have been able to write Galt's post.
(Also, she's not claiming knowledge here, but this cracked me up: Unless he's the next [oh, I don't know -- insert the name of some famous linguistics guy that isn't J.R.R. Tolkien here]. The name she's looking for is "Noam Chomsky.")
This is a little late but I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Garance Franke-Ruta from TAPPED she surely counts as a significant female political blogger.
and also my brilliant co-blogggers Claudia Muir and Mrs Tilton at A Fistful of Euros (and respewctively Halfway Down the Danube and The 6th International.
Where does Carrie McLaren blog? She and I were djs together at the UNC student radio station back in the early 90s. Haven't heard anything about her in years.
after someone exposed him, he jst went on with the charade like nothing happened. and he's a semi-popular rightwing blog that pulls in blagads money and gets links from other blohggers, etc...
TalkLeft
Posted by Scott | Link to this comment | 02-22-05 6:12 PM
Sisyphus Shrugged
Suburban Guerilla
Fantasy Life
Semi-political:
Ann Althouse
A View From A Broad
Posted by Mithras | Link to this comment | 02-22-05 6:18 PM
Not on topic, quite, but a group political blog that was looking for more female representation would do a good job to sign up Katherine R formerly of Obsidian Wings.
(Not unfogged, I'm thinking of another group political blog. One of the people around here posts to another group political blog, I think.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-22-05 6:22 PM
I'm already in negotiations with Katherine R.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 02-22-05 6:26 PM
No, wait. Actually, I had never heard of her before Mr. Weiner's post.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 02-22-05 6:26 PM
Respectful of Otters seems to be on hiatus.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 02-22-05 6:51 PM
Avedon Carol, at the Sideshow, is good, and has extra value in that as well as a content-generator, she's a heavy linker in the Atrios/Instapundit style, and her links include more women. She writes a very good first-stop blog in the morning.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 02-22-05 6:59 PM
SueandnotU!
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 02-22-05 7:08 PM
Mimi Smartypants is political?
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 02-22-05 7:09 PM
It's a group blog with only one woman, but hilzoy of Obsidian Wings is also excellent. The liberal/conservative split in the bloggers, and the rules about civility on the site, mean that she's often not as irate as she might profitably be, but she's a hell of a writer.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 02-22-05 7:11 PM
And Teresa Neilsen Hayden of Making Light. Maddeningly infrequent, and only directly political maybe half the time, but a wonderful writer and moderates herself a darn good comment thread.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 02-22-05 7:13 PM
much less than half the time, i'd say.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 02-22-05 7:30 PM
i didn't knew (or have forgotten) that hilzoy was a woman.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 02-22-05 7:31 PM
Sorry, links:
Sideshow
Obsidian Wings, featuring hilzoy
TNH
Ooo, and
TalkLeft. Can't remember the blogger's name, but I'm pretty sure she's female. Unsurpassed on criminal justice news, anyway.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 02-22-05 7:32 PM
Mouse Words
One Good Thing (implicitly, not explicitly political--and the best writing in blogland, bar none, imho)
Screed (a little blog that, like mine, combines personal & political)
La Di Da (little, pithy, on a break right at the moment)
Sappho's Breathing (infrequent but excellent posts)
Feministe
Feministing
The Well-Timed Period (a favorite)
Trish Wilson
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-22-05 7:50 PM
A very bad, but popular, blog written by a woman is Asymmetrical Information. Galt's a useless hack, but she seems to have a lot of readers.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 02-22-05 7:50 PM
Those are all on my blogroll, by the way. Give me a few days to get out from under the grading/kid duties/etc., and I'll come up with some others, if I remember...
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-22-05 7:53 PM
And (obvious sign of stress & overwork: mutiple commenting), check out the links in my own post on the subject, to Clancy, Trish, et al--they've done a much better job than I ever will of bothering to go out and *collect* links to answer this question.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-22-05 7:54 PM
Echidne. Good on all sorts of political issues -- heavy on gender, but by no means exclusively devoted to one issue.
I have a heck of a time listing people by sex. I keep on thinking of people, and realizing, "Hey, she's a woman too!"
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 02-22-05 7:56 PM
Echidne? The most humorless blogger ever? Didn't we have it out with her over women's volleyball?
You're right about Jane Galt though; the blog's next project: quitting Fontana of his silly crush on her.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 02-22-05 7:59 PM
She has a post referencing Kevin Drum's latest musings on the number of women in blogtopia.
kbonline.typepad.com
Posted by Sellario | Link to this comment | 02-22-05 8:04 PM
Huh. Didn't see the argument in question, but she never struck me as humorless.
(Um, and not that I, personally, feel this way in this instance because I didn't see the argument, but in the context of any discussion of sexism, the word "humorless" applied to a woman has strong overtones of "I'm just trying to piss you off now." But you knew that.)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 02-22-05 8:09 PM
I've created a new folder on my sidebar, and the femme blogs now seem to equal in number my other bookmarked blogs. (the sidebar's a new thing, if you're inclined to think "well, why weren't they there earlier?")
Your lives all have been given meaning now in affecting mine. Thank me later.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 02-22-05 8:13 PM
I saw the echidne = humorless thread, and stayed the hell out of it. Humorless = not pandering. Sometimes, at least.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-22-05 8:14 PM
1. As someone who has spent a lot of time wading around on Galt's site, I feel a certain obligation to defend her. She certainly has her faults, and her politics are crap and getting worse, but for a long time her site was a/the congenial place to go make a meal of an issue, and the congeniality had a lot to do with her and Mindles's efforts. It's worth noting that her readership has changed a great deal since she subbed for Insty, and not to the blog's benefit, IMO.
2. She is, IIRC, gigantic (on the order 6'+), and for some reason I believe that PG is a wee (said respectfully) woman. If FL has a crush on Galt, the whole PG thing is a lost cause. In which case you should push the Weiner-Wolfson storyline.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 02-22-05 8:28 PM
Crap. That was me.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-22-05 8:29 PM
While I stand by my assessment of Galt's writing, she is personally very pleasant. I've had occasion to disagree with her on a couple of posts recently, and she's emailed to discuss my comments in a very civil and reasonable fashion. If she had a less irritating crowd of commenters, I can see how she might run an entertaining blog -- wrong about most things, but a good place to discuss issues. With the commenters she has now, though, it doesn't really work.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 02-22-05 8:41 PM
What, men can't like women who physically differ from each other? Puhleeze.
Not that I'm encouraging a FL/pgrrrrl fantasy, mind. Just being bitchy.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-22-05 8:47 PM
[redacted]
Posted by [redacted] | Link to this comment | 02-22-05 9:51 PM
Thanks Matt. I can't though, not until I finish my consarned third year paper at any rate. I'm the worst procrastinator ever--that "do you have a blogging problem" fit all too well.
Hilzoy is awesome. I suggested her as my replacement. Huzzah for the sisterhood.
Laura Rozen is super, there are too few journalist-bloggers. Belle Waring, obviously. And can someone force Rivka of Respectful of Otters to start blogging again?
Posted by Katherine | Link to this comment | 02-22-05 11:36 PM
One Good Thing (implicitly, not explicitly political--and the best writing in blogland, bar none, imho)
I gotta agree with bitch on this. I sometimes read a long post there and think, this doesn't belong on a weblog, it's too good. I remember one about growing up as a girl in south carolina that just sang. Plus, she has funny stories about her kids and her sex shop. I'm a sucker for those (b's got great kid stories lately too). She is more political in a deep sense rather than in the 'what's happening with ss privatization today?' sense. At the moment, that's the only way I feel ready to approach politics.
Posted by cw | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 5:20 AM
if I use a tag...
The post inserts an empty open and close tag at the end. Is that a hack to make sure tags don't get left open by accident? Cool.
Posted by cw | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 5:22 AM
JG is, in my experience very civil and reasonable and intelligent. When I read her site (never for long) I found some interesting information I hadn't known about (mostly about libertarianism/Austrian economics).
The main problem I have with her is that she's extremely unreliable on the facts, and that it's impossible to tell when she's making shit up and when she knows what she's talking about, because she sounds perfectly reasonable and detailed no matter what. I mentioned this comment before--it tells a quite plausible story in a calm way, which you couldn't believe if you knew the first thing about redistricting.
This makes reading JG dangerous. You're likely to come out less well informed than you did when you started, unless you check all her assertions.
This is a bit of a personal hobbyhorse, because I wrote my dissertation on the epistemology of testimony, and one of the key points is: You shouldn't believe someone who's always been wrong in the past. A lesson that doesn't seem to have been absorbed into our political sphere, and I'm not thinking of bloggers.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 7:13 AM
Bingo -- precisely what bothers me about her writing. She's a pleasant, polite, reasonable person who lives on a planet where the facts support her political positions much more closely than they do here on Earth, and relying on her facts as if they were from our reality will only lead to confusion.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 7:28 AM
Oh, and she won't stop using the "my liberal Democratic friends all agree" line, even after Ted Barlow made it into a lightbulb joke.
To be constructive, Virginia Postrel is a libertarian blogger who doesn't have that factual problem, I don't think. She should probably be on the list.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 7:41 AM
Matt, can you give some more examplse of Galt's errors of fact? I have found her treatment of issues where I have personal expertise (biotechnology, pharmaceuticals) to be basically accurate.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 8:23 AM
Click on the links in his post for one. Talk about burying the lede, halfway down this page, is another example -- when the estimate of next year's deficit came out, she was terribly impressed that it was so low, and took the NYT to task for not making its lowness the focus of coverage. In fact, the low estimate was an artifact of the fact that Iraq expenditures weren't included -- recognizing that fact, and that the deficit was actually in line with and somewhat greater than last year's, the NYT had not made the small size of the estimate a focus of discussion. Galt was corrected in comments, and did update, but that sort of thing (a total misconstruction of the relevant facts) does seem to happen more often on her blog than I'm used to generally.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 8:47 AM
To be fair, baa asked for "more." Her discussion of voter registration fraud in the 2002 SD Senate election was what really stopped me reading her blog--she kept insisting that, statistically, the new voters on Indian reservations had to be fraudulent; it eventually turned out that the only fraud in that election was GOP operatives filing false affidavits accusing the Democrats of fraud. I don't have the link, sorry.
And this is egregious. Getting John McWhorter's name wrong isn't a big deal. Posting confidently on the academic hiring process when she clearly doesn't know the first thing about it, in general or in McWhorter's case, is.
Did you know that McWhorter moved to his current job after having held another position? Did you know that that position was at his alma mater, where they were presumably able to make an accurate judgment of his work? Did you know that most schools--including McWhorter's current employer--don't supply information about race to the hiring committee (and of course it's obvious when you get to the interview stage, but that's the hardest part)? Did you know that the only black astrophysicist I've met took a job in industry because he didn't expect to be able to get an academic job? Did you know that a whole lot of humanities departments don't have any black members, which would seem to give the lie to the idea that there's a racial set-aside? If you knew any of those things, you wouldn't have been able to write Galt's post.
(Also, she's not claiming knowledge here, but this cracked me up: Unless he's the next [oh, I don't know -- insert the name of some famous linguistics guy that isn't J.R.R. Tolkien here]. The name she's looking for is "Noam Chomsky.")
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 9:13 AM
Hey, I'm still relatively new at this, but come on by and see if any of my writing counts as "political."
Posted by Emma Goldman | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 9:31 AM
I have yet to see media girl or jenniebee plugged here, but both are fem, both are lib, both are (I think) pretty smart, and both are political.
Posted by jenniebee | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 12:43 PM
Uh, did jenniebee write comment #40, in which jenniebee is praised?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 12:54 PM
Indeed. Odd that.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 1:55 PM
This is a little late but I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Garance Franke-Ruta from TAPPED she surely counts as a significant female political blogger.
Posted by NickS | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 2:21 PM
At the rate things are going, comment #40 was probably written by abc123--but no problem w/self-promo, right?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 2:28 PM
No problem with self-promotion, but saying that you think your own blog is pretty smart, without acknowledging that it's yours is a bit weird.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 2:31 PM
Ben H is my favorite female political blogger.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 2:57 PM
Discovered these just this week.
Carrie McLaren
Rox Populi
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 3:59 PM
wtf?
i was going to mention garance. also ayelish, maria farrell at CT, Nadezhda at chez Nadezhda.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 4:06 PM
and also my brilliant co-blogggers Claudia Muir and Mrs Tilton at A Fistful of Euros (and respewctively Halfway Down the Danube and The 6th International.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 4:09 PM
Not Amanda Doherty though. You know why?
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 4:10 PM
You ok there, Dave? You want to be alone?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 4:22 PM
Where does Carrie McLaren blog? She and I were djs together at the UNC student radio station back in the early 90s. Haven't heard anything about her in years.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 4:29 PM
could be a whole different carrie, but it would somehow make sense...
http://stayfree.typepad.com/stayfree/2005/02/advertise_on_my.html
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 5:22 PM
huh, yes, i'm perfectly fine. what kind of goofy question is that?
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 5:24 PM
You had a kind of monologue thing going, ogged maybe thought you wanted to take it to the next level and soliloquize.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 5:26 PM
Wolfson, always the good reader.
Apostropher, sure seems like the same Carrie: follow the about link, go to her website, here's her CV (scroll to bottom).
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 5:28 PM
you should stop asking me silly questions you silly person, and instead ask me "Why not Amanda Doerty, David?"
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 5:31 PM
I was trying not to indulge you, but now that you're begging...whyever not Amanda Doerty, David? Hmm?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 5:32 PM
hm, that would read better if it followed directly from 54. maybe i should post all in one go.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 5:33 PM
Because she's a dude, that's why!
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 5:33 PM
Ok, now, who the hell is Amada Doerty?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 5:34 PM
and do you know the difference between amanda doerty and libertarian girl?
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 5:35 PM
Ok, I'm really not playing this game.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 5:35 PM
after someone exposed him, he jst went on with the charade like nothing happened. and he's a semi-popular rightwing blog that pulls in blagads money and gets links from other blohggers, etc...
trippy!
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 5:37 PM
i'm typing as fast as I can...
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 5:39 PM
"hot abercrombie chick"
http://amandadoerty.blogspot.com
rightwinger, libertarian i think, not high on affermative action...
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 5:41 PM
meh.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 02-23-05 5:57 PM