Jonathan Dee wrote a good piece on right-wing blogger Charles Johnson (of the warblog LGF) in last Sunday's NYT Magazine. Read the whole thing for a capsule history of the recent conservative flame war. I'm most interested in the following quote:

Whatever you think of him, Johnson is a smart man, a gifted synthesizer of information gathered by other people. But just as for anyone in his position, there is an inevitable limit to what he can learn about places, people, political organizations, etc., without actually encountering them. Instead of causes and effects, motivations and consequences, observation and behavior, his means of intellectual synthesis is, instead, the link: the indiscriminate connection established via search engine.

This is the blog author's way of looking at the world. Bloggers are great summarizers of what others have learned and  written about online. But it seems as if a thing cannot be the case without a link some where or and entry in a search engine. Once that link is established, however, the thing is the case forever. The piece is worth reading and saving, both for what it says about conservative politics and about online writing in general.