Watchers Council Results – Incoherent Hustlers

Each week, in a contest for the week’s best post, each member of the Watchers Council nominates one of their own posts and a second from outside the Council for consideration by other council members. Usually I get around to posting them some time before the next week’s submissions go live, but last week the site was undergoing some changes, I was functionally offline, etc etc. So before I get too far behind: all the submissions are below and the full voting breakdown is here. Top of the list: the winning Council post from Wolf Howling on the historical incoherence of the reparations movement:

And of then there are the world’s most prolific slavers of history – the Arabs. Indeed,the Arabs in Saudi Arabia still teach today that it is permissible to make slaves of non-Muslims. Under the Gates theory, we should all be getting reparation checks from Ridyah. The bottom line, if slavery is, as Gates posits, an original sin that passes not only through the generations, but also among entire races, then it hangs around the necks of most people in the world… But even if we refocus the Gates’s theory to do away with collective responsibility and aim to hold culpable just those who actually took part in slavery between 1607 and 1861 in America, it still falls apart.

The non-Council runner up post from Doug Ross was also about the logical ironies built into contemporary racial politics. Champions of identity like La Raza and MEChA will insist that race be taken into account everywhere all the time, except in those cases when the legitimate deliberative organs of a state have passed a law with which those groups – and their unbelievably dishonest, hysterically screeching media enablers – disagree.

The runner up Council post – a refreshingly nonpolitical look at Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood – came from American Digest. And just to round things out, the non-Council winner was a PJM take on the pathetic decline of legacy journalism. To think – after two generations of J-School professors teaching that “balance” means marginalizing grassroots conservatives, Democrats take the media for granted:

Mike Allen’s account of the grievance meeting between the White House Press Corps and Secretary Robert Gibbs feels like watching a once famous profession in a sad state of decline. At a 75 minute meeting the White House Correspondents Association begged for crumbs. They complained the administration was going direct to the Internet on everything; as in staff photographers posting Presidential pictures while the Press Corps was denied photo opportunities; of news releases being posted after the business day was closed (“full lid”); of cutbacks in travel pools on Air Force One at a time when news organizations couldn’t afford to charter their own planes. The most pathetic demand of all was for Internet access in situations when they had to file. How important could they be if the pool reporting wasn’t worth a couple of dozen megabytes of uploads? That’s less than a few minute’s action on World of Warcraft.

Now that you’re done with those, here are the rest of last week’s nominees. As always the litany of news is kind of depressing, so to offset that here’s a video of a baby otter playing with stuffed animals. Apparently his name is Sidney.