The blogosphere sucks
I mean, is there anything to really disagree with in this post? Money quote:
Stop and consider this in detail: someone afraid to even use their real name asks for an analysis of an extremely complex situation, decades in development, merely because Yglesias spent a few days in the west — and in airy Aspen, at that.
RoboticGhost doesn’t ask any journalist in the southwest who covers the water beat 40 hours a week, or any of a half-dozen writers who have written detailed and thoughtful books about the west and its water, or a thousand administrators whose job it is to ensure as smooth a water flow in the sw as possible. He asks a casual traveler.
And this casual traveler, who has spent his entire life living in apartments on the eastern seaboard, actually thinks he has something valuable to say, because a year ago he spent a few days in a Best Western somewhere in the southwestern US.
With no evident local knowledge whatsoever — even admitting as much — Yglesias nevertheless offers a solution to this enormous, complex problem, a solution based purely on some political theory he read in a magazine somewhere last year and which has absolutely no naunced understanding of the complexity of the true situation on the group or its many years worth of layered complexity or what privatizing water supplies would mean for hundreds of thousands of southwestern ranchers or the million living there facing ever rising water bills.
This is why I stick to things I know: movies, sports, politics, and DC’s annoying bikers/drivers/pedestrians. If I start pontificating on every topic imaginable–or have the arrogance to assume that I have a valuable contribution to make on every topic imaginable–I lose what little credibility I have. It’s a lesson every blogger needs to learn: No one should give a damn what you think about western water policies if you’re an East Coast urbanite who has never really engaged the issue. If you feel forced to comment on the topic (because, let’s just say, you started an idiotic policy of having open posts where you take suggestions on what to write about), just link to the Brookings study and be done with it. “I don’t really know what the solution is,” you could write, “but here’s someone who does.” And let it rest at that.