Malcolm unreservedly admires ...

... many of the blogs he reads. Though not necessarily all of their content.

He is an admirer, for example, of Zach's Misanthropy Abroad. Zach is a busy lad, and he's recently married, so postings are infrequent. When they do come along, they are pointed and frequently poignant. Under no circumstances should one mess with Zach on US labor history or Texas singer-songwriters. He also seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the wilder frontiers of Irish nationalism. Malcolm awards Zach precedence here because he is one of the few to have been positively critical and critically positive. Here's to you, Our American Cousin!

That leads Malcolm (depicted above, in full blog-mode) to the megaliths of Irish national cyberculture.

Slugger O'Toole has to be the main portal for all things to do with Norn Iron, with sporting and other excursions further afield. The heat-death of the rest of the blogosphere is supposedly when the thread degenerates into accusations of Nazism or a point-by-point rebuttal of the death of Diana at the hands of aliens. Slugger threads not infrequently degenerate to the "durdy Prod"/"feckin Fenian" level. It's fun getting to that point, though. All credit to Mick Fealty and his team keeping the show on the road.

From Slugger, it's a simple click of the link to the other sources on Ireland:

• El Blogador for the social democrat point-of-view, a sane voice of quiet authority across the minefield;
• Chris Gaskin's Balrog for the Shinner take on life, but well on the safe side of the Mental Health Act; and
• the eclectic Johnny Guitar befriending all and sundry from the North.

Nor can Malcolm pass over

• the Unrepentant Kerry Communist, not just because he purveys sense, but anyone with instant links to Christy Moore and Edith Piaf must deserve a seat among the elect.

Somehow that left out the cerebral world-view of

• Cedar Lounge.

Back in the UKSR (if only ...), Malcolm avoids critiquing lefty sites (so many do it so consistently better than he). He tends to work through the daily Bloggers4Labour list of postings, where it is usual to find worthwhile efforts from the likes of:

• Grimmer Up North;
• Bob Piper;
• Kerron Cross.

Malcolm believes it is necessary to keep an eye on the voices of unreason, in particular:

• Iain Dale for his diary, and the confirmations that the inner workings of the Tory Party are as unpleasant as can be expected. Dale is a remarkably house-trained modern Tory, with a touch of wry humour,
  

especially compared to

• the wild and wasteful Conservativehome, where Malcolm (under various thin disguises) trolls and takes his sport therein. It reminds Malcolm how easy it is to detest a Tory, and that frothing bloody-mindedness prevails among the oiks of the Ultra-Vile-Bent end of the political spectrum as much as among the Trots.

Malco-psychologists will have already detected the man's LibDemphobia. Malcolm attributes that to the sheer pretentiousness of too many individual LibDems, their unremitting self-promotion. This developed rapidly from exposure to the puffery of the Lynne Featherstone tabloids stuffed through his door in the last Parliament. On one occasion he calculated that the name "Lynne Featherstone" appeared substantially more often in the four pages of one issue of this vanity sheet than the name "Jesus Christ" appeared in the whole of the Four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles combined.

However, there are a couple of LibDem sites worth the effort:

• Jonathan Calder's Liberal England has the strap-headline: An amusingly eclectic mix of culture and politics. Malcolm is occasionally amused and approves the light touch on literature and landscape: so it's not just because Calder has cited Malcolm -- twice.
• Nicholas Starling's Norfolk Blogger gets Malcolm's nod of approval because of two place-names: Norfolk and Fakenham. They almost take Malcolm to his birth-place.

All of these sites have one thing in common: they look far better than Malcolm Redfellow revivus.

Now, from time to time, Malcolm makes the effort; but he is always thwarted by his cack-handedness with the code. He also suspects that there is a degree of prejudice against Macusers .... but that's another disgruntlement. Sphere: Related Content