A run down of the larger Claremont blogosphere is necessary to understand why a blog of Claremontlibre's perspectives is truly necessary. Claremont, needless to say, is a conservative place, stifled by its suburban, moneyed, Southern California setting. Conformity abounds here in lala land, from the resort style living to the excrutiatingly mediocre thought processes. As such, the large percentage of publications in Calremont come out of the members of this confused faction.
That isn't to say that there aren't diamonds in the rough; keep reading here and you'll be sure to lead a bejeweled life. However, it is worth keeping your eye on the other local blogs, if only to reassure yourself of just how worthy diverse thought is in Claremont.
The Claremont Port Side deems itself a "progressive newsmagazine," amongst many other lofty descriptions, but my favorites are the "rockin' the boat" mantra on every issue and the campusprogress.org advertisements on the inside of every cover. Even though it's published out of Claremont McKenna College, they do a decent job covering interesting articles, and now have a blog up and running.
The Claremont Independent is "unabashedly conservative and libertarian" and recieves no funding from the 5c's, so enjoy they slew of corporate ads that pollute their site. As far as I can tell, they're purely an online publication, as opposed to the PortSide's monthly issues, and an ongoing ethnographic study of CMC stereotypes.
The CMC Forum is a less politcal and more informal site than those above, but often does news articles of some substance. Again coming out of CMC, it's mostly the infighting spill-over from around the blogosphere.
In essence all these on-campus publications and their contributors try hard to immitate the big name newsmagazines in which I'm sure they hope to one day tell all the friends that an article of thiers has been published. Beyond the explicitly local, you can find most of these articles in the New York Times. Of course they're astronomically better in the times.
Finally, the Claremont Insider is useful every now and then for detailed and thoroughly followed-up on articles about all the crazy townie shit you hear about going on in Claremont. Nonetheless, the blog reeks of suburbanites and droll, predictable interests.
Spend ten minutes cruising these sites and you'll see why, so desperately, this place needs a firm, swift kick in the pants.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
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