For those of you that haven’t picked up the Daily Stun and checked out the Red Letter Daze section, I would normally say that you’re finally coming around to the Good Side (is the opposite of the Dark Side actually called the ‘Light Side’?). But today is the one exception, as your very own Insider bloggers received a shout-out in Munier Salem’s article on Cornell blogs. Stunning, indeed!
Dennis Shiraev ’12 and Oliver Renick ’12 run the Cornell Insider, a blog related to the Cornell Review…The pair is well balanced, as conservatives go. Shiraev is of a Libertarian bent, with a reverence for the free market and a self-described agnostic take on global warming. He is not religious.
If you placed Oliver’s stats on an index card, [he] might look like a stereotype of conservatism. But, as we spoke in the window of Stella’s one Saturday morning, it was a polite-mannered, thoughtful academic, cupping a coffee mug in his hands and staring thoughtfully out the window that I met.
My engineering TAs may be somewhat dubious at the notion of my being a ‘thoughtful academic,‘ but hey I’ll let it slide. I must say, when Salem isn’t chastising Christians for finding meaning outside science, he writes a darn good article (see: Frat Boys, Fences, and Progress). Of course, he is still having some trouble losing the absurd idea that ‘a stereotype of conservatism’ is somehow contradictory to being a ‘polite-mannered, thoughtful academic.’
In the article, Salem also explores the inspiration behind other Cornell blogs, including Stuck in the Fast Lane, OneCornell, and Ithacating in Cornell Heights, all of which can be accessed through our favorites roll to the right. I found it interesting that while we at the Insider remain generally apathetic towards Slope Media, apparently their presence can be bothersome to our fellow Cornell bloggers.
And, oddly enough, most share a common hatred of Slope Media, which I could describe (with a dangerous level of editorializing) as a far more massive endeavor with much less actual reporting to show for itself. They also never returned my e-mail.“I hate them — no offense to Slope Media,” said Bilmes. “Complete waste of time.”
“I do not take Slope Media seriously,” said the author of Ithacating.
“Slope Media has the multimedia and everything,” said Feldman. “But their reporting …”
Can’t we all just get along? On a final note, while I’m sure Salem’s intolerance for Christians won’t be hard to replace in a Stun editorial, I will miss reading his other articles, even if it’s just an opportunity to launch a counter-point. Best of luck achieving your critical mass (misuse of a physics term?) in the professional or graduate world, Munier.
