I know I haven't been blogging as much as late, but I hope that this post does show why I continue to bother from time to time. Regardless of your point of view on whatever the issue of the moment is, blogs represent a new way to learn and debate. And it is a means that I find superior to being spoon-fed someone else’s opinion on the evening news.
A week or so ago, there was a post at Redstate that tried to give some perspective to the military deaths that have occurred in Iraq. Coming from a blog with such a conservative bias, I think you can imagine what direction the perspective took the raw numbers. To their credit, the post is open to comments and some of the comments offer a severe criticism of the analysis.
The post was picked up by Instapundit. Originally the post was nothing but a short link to the Redstate post. But given the readership levels of Instapundit, Glenn was soon bombarded with different points of view and updates to his original post were made.
A counter-analysis was given at the Winds of Change blog. This counter was itself countered at Belmont Club and Elements of Power.
And the above just represents where I stopped digging into this issue. Certainly the analysis is not complete. I still have open questions, specifically concerning the validity of these numbers that people are tossing around as verified fact. But one thing is perfectly clear to me. The above set of links has made me think more about this issue than hearing soldier number X died today in Iraq on the evening news.
