Ogged says:
Best blog posts ever seems like a strange enterprise. I note, in passing, that male political bloggers seem to favor political and didactic posts (and not, say, any of dooce's extraordinary letters to her daughter) but more to the point, many of the "best" blog posts are written as moments in a conversation, and any standard of best that excludes, for example, those posts that Yglesias seems to write at least once a week that neatly crystallize or demolish an argument that's making it's way through the discourse, or ignores the power of repetition and mockery of something like Atrios's "very serious people," seems like a wrong and distorting standard to apply. So take this opportunity not to nominate your own favorites, but to say horrible things about these bloggers, who are oppressing us all.
I'm actually more interested in what people would select for their own best blog posts. Who do they think they are, at their best? So tempted, in fact, that I'm like, this close to tagging five bloggers . . . except that I'm afraid they wouldn't do it, and then I'd be like that kid who nobody comes to his birthday party. So if you're a blogger, and you think I might have tagged you, you should do this to prove me wrong.
Meanwhile, I'm thinking about what my own favorite five posts were. Daniel Drezner's nomination from his own list might get the nod . . . or perhaps this one . . . or this.
Surely I must have said something serious, once. Pour encourager les autres, I shall try to get to this later in the week. Reader nominations encouraged.
If, despite your status as an A-list blogger, you are actually worried about tagging other bloggers and having them ignore you, there is an easy strategy: identify five bloggers much lower in the blogger status hierarchy and tag them.
There are many bloggers who would so delight in getting a link from Megan McArdle that they would name their first born son "Megan" for the privilege. Not me, of course. I am above that.
However, I did identify my five favorite blog posts of all time. By your command, O Mighty Megan.
As I understand, more that 3 links will cause the spam-catcher to eat this, so, 3 it is.
My top picks:
The Jane Galt Tax Plan:
http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/001510.html
A really, really, really long post about gay marriage that does not, in the end, support one side or the other:
http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/005244.html
And the Healthcare parts I-IV (scroll down):
http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/cat_health_care_regulation.html
The post advocating deadly physical assault on your ideological opponents, namely, striking people in the head with a two by four.
Never has a blogger so eloquently revealed her true self.
I'll second Withnail's nomination of the really long post on gay marriage. It was magnificent.
The following paragraph from got me interested in reading blogs:
"And in so doing, I came to realize that the true revolutionaries were not people marching to the barricades, or theorizing about social philosophies in Ann Arbor or Berkely or Paris cafes, or even the small subset of such people who actually somehow came to political power. The true revolutionaries were the technologists--those who solved societal needs not by attempting to forcibly rearrange society, but rather by giving individuals new tools that allowed them to reorder their own lives."
-- Rand Simberg
link: http://www.transterrestrial.com/archives/000317.html
You may not agree with the entirety of the post but that idea stirs something in me. Before you ask- yes, I am an engineer. (":
ReaderNomEnc wrote: The post advocating deadly physical assault on your ideological opponents, namely, striking people in the head with a two by four. Never has a blogger so eloquently revealed her true self.
Entertainingly -- at least, entertaining for those of us who enjoy the cruel irony -- once a link that post hit some of the mainstream liberal blogs, it was followed up by a torrent of extraordinarily spiteful and evil email from 50,000 members of the party of Superior Human Enlightenment.
It revealed something, alright.
Anony-mouse has access to the contents of McArdle's e-mail.
Guess she's not anonymous after all.