welcome to a new feature, "DDB" (Discuss Den Beste). Since the closure of Steven's own website forum last year, I've often been frustrated at the inability to discuss some of Steven's essays with other intelligent people (and trolls). The old Clueless Comments site was cumbersome and heavily populated by yes-men - I ended up being banned, and that action by Steven is really what motivated me to ultimately add comments to UNMEDIA (so thank or blame SDB for that :)
I found the "shorter Den Beste" posts by Daniel Davies immature - they sought to deliberately distort Steven's posts and didn;t seem to have much purpose other than lampoonery. Matthew Yglesias did a better job, trying to make a factual condensation of the content, but in doing so, lost much of the texture that makes Steven's site one of my daily reads. I confess to a great admiration for SDB, and his writing, and over the past two years I've been stimulated by his essays to write and learn about a great many things. I even actually agree with him once in a blue moon.
Granted, I am engaging in some egotistic leeching here - but the bottom line is that if I am going to continue to link approvingly to an SDB post as discussion-worthy anyway, I might as well be explicit about where the inspiration came from.
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