Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Steven Den Beste just changed the contents of his blogroll, performing an "out with the old and in with the new" kind of operation. I didn't make the cut, which doesn't surprise me as I rarely write about the types of things that he writes about and when I do it's not from his side of the political aisle. But I did find something potentially nifty in exploring his new set of links.

The site in question is Rachel Lucas. This is a site I've read a few times before, usually briefly and in passing, because she's a gung-ho conservative one of whose main inspirations is "hating Al Gore". I don't have a problem with that (aside from disagreeing with it), but given that it's not my particular point-of-view, I would not have ever become more than a sporadic reader of hers. I'm glad I checked her site out today, though, because she has announced a new focus for her blog: she intends to visit with elderly people in nursing homes and such, and transcribe for posterity as many of their stories as she can. (She writes about her intentions and her background for this interest more eloquently.)

This also illustrates the problem I have with The Rittenhouse Review's recent decision to impose meta-restrictions on sites hoping to make the blogroll there: the "turning inward", in the sense of association only with that with which we already agree. When we refuse to engage other people because we know their politics stand in opposition to ours, we inevitably miss out on other things they may be doing that could be more important.