Say it out loud. Sounds like a ratings system for gay porn.

Actually, it’s William Selatan’s gauge for how close we are to dropping bombs on Baghdad. Right now, it stands at 58%.

I had the pleasure of meeting Selatan at Cato University this month. Stand-up guy. He gave one of the best-received speeches of the weekend. Very smart, very laid-back, very insightful. He’s got a built-in bullshit detector that’s fine-tuned and quite precise.

After the speech, I had a beer or two with him in the resort bar. His politics are actually fairly close to mine — at least that’s the impression I walked away with — though I’m still puzzled as to why he’d vote for Kathleen Kennedy Townshend, particuarly after the Parris Glendening debacle.

He struck me as a journalist who’s very skeptical of government, and of bureauacracy. He says he favors war with Iraq, though he for none of the reasons the Bushies give, whom he doesn’t trust (he says he fears that if Saddam gets nukes, he’ll get to have his way with his neighbors).

Generally, I enjoy the crew at Slate as a whole. Seems to me the goal over there is to debunk conventional wisdom. Yeah, most of the contributors’ politics leave much to be desired, but that’s true with most any publication these days. Best to hold out for smart, incisive, fair writing that is at least intellectually honest, if nothing else. Slate generally meets those standards.

Not to mention that they have a running feature that analyzes The Sopranos.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 19th, 2002 at 6:20 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.