Last updated | 04-07-08

The Scribo Ergo Sum Editorial team like to spend a lot of time on the internet. Here is our list of websites to watch. This is contributed to over time, and is permanently linked to the front page in place of a traditional blogroll.

The neutral, unaligned, tools and/or fence-sitters

Politics Home | Political web hub. Highly useful. Review here.

Martin Bright | Not bad output for a one-man blog.

Political Betting | Better polling analysis than any newspaper, and more comments per post than you can shake a stick at.

Beau Bo D’Or | Easily the best cartoons and virals on the web.

Bad Science | Ben Goldacre’s wonderful, wonderful world…

The Left, in its many multicoloured varieties

Pushing the Boundary | From the ever-wonderful Mr Stop Boris, this new blog is all about everything but Boris Johnson.

The F-Word | The most established feminist blog out there.

Liberal Conspiracy | An interesting idea, and increasingly getting off the ground. Coverage of the abortion debate was excellent.

The Daily (Maybe) | Green, socialist and entertainingly good at bashing the fascists.

Penny Red | The future of feminism, we thinks.

Philobiblon | Natalie Bennett on green politics, feminism, history, science and books.

Pickled Politics | Sunny Hundal’s earlier venture into group blogging.

America

Britain and America | ConservativeHome’s sycophantic love-in with the Republican party has its drawbacks. Otherwise, it’s a great resource for seeing what’s going on in America. The 2008 election coverage has been excellent. [Closed down for rejig; archive still up.  Changes recently announced - coming soon.]

Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Dish | HIV-positive, homosexual hack Andrew Sullivan is the world’s most prominent queer conservative, making Iain Dale’s claim to the throne look as convincing as Respect Renewal’s plans to become a viable alternative to Labour. He edited the New Republic for half a decade in the 90s and was amongst the first mainstream, traditional journalist to complete the transition from writer for dead tree pulp salesmen to continuous, if not professional, blogger. His philosophy is one of conservatism verging upon libertarianism, to the extent that he is considered by much of the notoriously noxious American Right as a hysterical leftie, with a bizarre aversion to theocracy and inexplicable squeamishness towards torture as a tool for information extraction from the untried. Truly useful for those wishing to keep abreast with American politics. Not infallible, by any means, but capable of picking up on things waved aside by traditional journalists long before their surging, overwhelming relevance (see: Barack Obama) and often a provider of interesting links to non-political matters that have reached him virally.

My Fellow Americans | In their own words. [On hiatus, as the authors have returned to the UK. The archive is well worth reading.]

London

The Scribo Ergo Sum editorial team live in London, and write a lot about London politics. Anyone now fortunate enough to live outside of Boris’ private kingdom may find this tedious. We apologise; but we do live there…

The Tory Troll | Glorious hatchet jobs against the Tories.

London: Mayor & More | Excellent blog covering the London Mayoral elections by Guardian journalist Dave Hill.

Stop Boris | Really, speaks for itself. [Now finished, but preserved as a monument to the epic efforts of Mr. and Mrs. Stop Boris]

MayorWatch | Scrutiny, one might say…

Boris Watch | The .co.uk version, which actually scrutinises Boris. Fenby writes here too.

Useful News Sites

The BBC | One of the most objective news-sources around, despite the claims of the right-wing dissenters who refuse to recognise basic reporting without trying to read bias into it.

The Guardian | Ignore the editorial line, and it’s well worth reading.

The Times | Ditto. Increasingly less so, though - soon, ignoring it all may be the best course. Murdoch. Grrr.

The Telegraph | Disturbingly right-wing, but worth glancing at once in a while.

New Statesman| The website of one of the UK’s most prominent left-wing magazine, offering a broad range of liberal-left and socialist commentary.

The Independent | Only really worth reading for Hari, as it’s weak and impotent in the most part. The Sunday edition once referred to the editor in passing as a “bewildered eco-blogger”…

The Guardian G24 | PDFs of headline news for easy printing. <3

Newspaper Blogs

Charles Bremner | French politics are interesting on at least two fronts: first, in their contrast with British politics, and second in the fact that, frequently, more happens more vigorously in them. However, they can be difficult to keep up with for the non-francophone. This blog helps break the language barrier, serving at the very least as a very decent starting point for those wishing to learn more about politics across the pond.

Nick Robinson’s Newsblog | Political Editor at the BBC, Nick Robinson has won more than a little praise for his blog.

Nick Bryant on Australia | As you may have noticed, we like to keep up with world politics on SES. Blogs which explain circumstances and link to more detailed reports, as this one does for Australia, are thus welcomed…

Journalists

Johann Hari | Chief shin-nipper and agent provocateur of The Indie maintains this site with everything he writes for them and the Evening Standard in addition to free-lance odds and ends. This site is not a true blog but has two things going for it: firstly watching his writings across the entire Mainstream Media allows you to groan when he recycles facts and secondly reading it makes the purchase of the The Independent effectively redundant.

George Monbiot | The archive of the Monbiot’s Guardian Columns. Entertainingly angry , if occasionally frighteningly authoritarian in his approach to the environment.

Nick Cohen | The archive of Cohen’s articles. A columnist and author controversial for his support of the Iraq War, Cohen is perhaps the most prominent face of the pro-war “left” and the now defunct Euston Group. Don’t bother. Trust me.

Pressure Groups

The Taxpayers’ Alliance | Quite loathsome in many ways, but they campaign very well indeed.

They Work For You | Keeps track of MPs’ official records.

Reactionary Swine (also known as Tories)

ConservativeHome | ConHome is one of the most professional and useful blogs in the UK, and is a must-read for anyone interested in the Tories’ long road to “election success”. One must learn to live with their premature, but not misplaced, smug crowing. Oh, and ignore the love-in with Mad Nad Dorries. And the Tories, of course.

Iain Dale’s Diary | If ConHome is too business-like, then Iain Dale is the self-styled leading independent blogger in the UK.  If the tedium overwhelms you then come back here, we at SES welcome all refugees.

Spectator Coffee House | The only print media organisation to do a decent blog (so far). Beware: here be Melanie Phillips.

Libertarian Loons

Guido Fawkes | An egomaniac twat, Guido is convinced he has wit and influence. Written from a bastardised libertarian viewpoint, the blog exists solely to irritate ministers and civil servants. If any of them actually bother to read it…

Devil’s Kitchen | Angry, angry, angry swearblogger who compares favourable with the aforementioned Guido insomuch as he’s a proper individualist libertarian. (And consequently swine, but there we go…)

Samizdata | Randroids, Serfdom-Roaders, ultra-capitalists, etc, etc. And consequently frightening in their madness. The site itself, however, looks the business. You may find yourself idly day-dreaming of running away with its coding to some obscure URL and gestating lots of gorgeous bio-HTML babies for weeks after visiting.

Far leftists, Marxists, Swoppos, and other unsavoury revolutionary types who probably won’t appreciate being lumped together like this as only they know the true path to socialism.

Lenin’s Tomb | A sound resource for socialist viewpoint of recent events. Or rather, one socialist view, since that philosophy is notoriously divergent in its strains. This fellow seems to be of the unreconstructed form, admiring the second Russian Revolution immensely and reliable for attacking the establishment as filthy dogs and their foreign policy as foul imperialism. At times his invective is truly potent and momentous while at others the description of Iraqi terrorism that kills civilians as “Resistance” against the US and the unflinching devotion towards all Palestinian “Freedom fighters” shown by the various acolytes who post there is tiresome. A mixed bag, all in all, but frequently updated and rarely anything other than entertaining. If in doubt of his sincerity just re-read his URL.

Socialist Unity | Watering hole for various factions; Respect (Galloway faction?), Green Left, others. Beware: if you find comments threads reaching into the mid-hundreds difficult to suggest this site should be avoided. Socialists squabble even more than liberals.

Splintered Sunrise | The best far-left blog out there? Just don’t ask Lenin…

Fascists, and their splits

Enough Is Enough | Despite what it might wish the BNP’s struggle with the “Real BNP” is far from over. Keeping abreast with this schism has been much, much easier than with Respect’s little collapse since not even Lenin was covering that properly, while with the BNP the ringleaders of the split are actually publishing their every experience on this thing.

It is as if the Mensheviks kept a web-blog.

The updates are surprisingly fast, vast and thorough, with the most scathing comments towards the BNP’s leadership I have ever witnessed coming quickly and caustically and all hatred of niggers, kykes and pakis apparently abandoned to leave the focus on their “fellow” white nationalists. In terms of material they have somehow managed to all be entirely excluded from everything yet still provide the most juicy gossip imaginable, served with an extra lashing of contempt.

All while being called an eclectic mish-mash of mutually contradictory insults, ranging from neo-nazi scum to far-left traitors and sinister establishment collaborators, by the orthodox BNP. They are clearly so overwhelmed with panic that Griffin’s New Years message was astoundingly not set to the standard smug hubris one has come to expect from him. This has managed to muster a paltry 37 comments thus far. If this is any guide a glance over this page will let you know exactly how much trouble the BNP is in.

Both parties appear to be engaged in hurling the claim of Nazism at the other and are aiming all of their biggest guns inwards, devoting every resource available to supremacy over the rival faction. In the process they both try to present themselves as as friendly towards Jews as they possibly can, waving tokens triumphantly as political “Get out of jail free” cards, and attempt to distance themselves from the racist pasts that they almost invariably share. Each says that they are modern and each attacks extremism.

All in all it’s a set-up which Searchlight must have dreamt of long before it came a reality.

Scientology

Given our stance of the Church Cult of Scientology, we’ve decided to include some revelant sites. Thus:

Operation Clambake | Also referred to by its domain name of xenu.net, Clambake is one of the longest-running websites critical of scientology. The website which published OTIII materials, it’s been going since 1996 in its attempts to, “undress scientology.” A veritable mine on the darker side of the Cult.

Xenu TV | A site dedicated to all those videos the Co$ just didn’t want you to see. Since the Church got his YouTube channel shut down this is your best bet.

Enturbulation | Very good, very detailed information site on Scientology and Dianetics. Less strident in tone than xenu.net, it defines also itself as against the Church of Scientology, rather than scientology itself. Their main purpose, though, is best seen in their own words: “Our main goal however is to concentrate on activism - that is, supplying guidelines to picketing, how to approach & plan your picketing, what to expect from The Scientologists if they decide to confront & how to react, and so on and so forth. The guidelines are only that, guidlines; not rules. We do not intend or attempt to portray ourselves as the be all and end all of Scientology activism, but rather hope to serve as what we think has being practiced successfully in the past and should perhaps be continued for the best result in getting awareness into the public eye.”

Project Chanology Wiki | A co-ordination centre for Anonymous’ insurgency against the C0$. Look here first for details of local activism.

Wirah An “Anti-social networking site” designed with the intention of publicising Chanology events in London (and now other cities) but now also used for non-Chanology related Anonymous activities as well. Perhaps the prettiest and most efficient organising site for such matters about.

Irreligion, and its discontents

Richard Dawkins | A website dedicated to salivation over Richard Dawkins, containing an archive of his articles.

Sam Harris if you prefer your religious critiques from a neuroscientist instead of a geneticist then Harris is your man. Writing in a firm and intellectually vigorous fashion Harris is possibly the finest anti-theist writer around.