Comments on: TechCentralStation exposed

By: Peter Seebach

Peter Seebach — Wed, 07 Jan 2004 23:16:09 +0000

I’ve had to write about these people some. They’re spammers. They refuse to respond to queries about their list management, and they haven’t yet explained how they added my name to their list. They appear to be, in every measurable way, spamming scum. There is no feedback, no response; they don’t care. It’s about pushing their message out to anyone they can, with or without any kind of permission. That’s spammers for you.

By: Tongue Boy

Tongue Boy — Fri, 21 Nov 2003 13:49:15 +0000

I wonder if any of them will regret their choice in the light of Confessore’s exposure of TCS as being little more than a corporate lobbying operation? So far, the answer appears to be “no”. A lot of words expended on a non-issue.

By: Armed Liberal

Armed Liberal — Fri, 21 Nov 2003 05:50:58 +0000

There’s an interesting link between this post and Ted Barlow’s post suggesting that liberal hawks such as me indirectly trim our sails so that we’re picked up by the bigger conservative blogs. It’s not a pleasant one, and it suggests that somehow the meta-argument about “why” trumps the messy arguments on the ground. I blog to help me figure out my politics so i can try and live them in my life. I get to have correspondance with a lot of different people, of different opinions, and I’ve learned quite a lot. One of the things I’ve learned is to distinguish between an honest argument – which means to advance understanding, and comes about when the parties treat each other with a measure of respect – and a dishonest one, which means to diminish one’s opponent, by whatever means are at hand. This blog, for example, is linked to from an official Democratic Party site; does that induce you to trim your arguments on their behalf? While I won’t weigh into the ‘academic politics’ morass, it certainly seems to me that most of the political philosophy/theory folks that I’ve come to know in the last 20 years that I’ve been following the discipline are leftish, and that had I chosen to take my acceptance and go on to a Ph.D, my own liberal politics would have been an asset to my career. So does the fact that many of you are academics, and so materially rewarded by a liberal peer group devalue your arguments? Chris, you and Ted were among the first theory bloggers that I encountered as I entered blogging, and I’ve had nothing but admiration for both of you – up until this. It’s beneath you both, and it’s a bad form of argument that is sadly, contagious. A.L.

By: Richard Vagge

Richard Vagge — Thu, 20 Nov 2003 17:13:43 +0000

Markus, Many things are beyond me but this is not one of them. I think there is a simple illustration of this. We have the blogger Atrios. I don’t agree with much of Atrios writes but he can be interesting to read some time. If I were to find out at some future date that Atrios was a Democratic Party official, I would not say oh, why have wasted all my time reading his obviously “sponsored” blog. This seems to be the standard some of the Crooked Timber people use. A desire for purity of this sort is kind of silly to my mind. As David Hickey wrote, “Authenticity is something you back in to when trying to look at something that’s really interesting.” What we are trying to look at is interesting ideas. We have the facility to address the rightness of ideas that does not involve knowing who paid for them. There it is Markus, right in front of both of us.

By: Keith M Ellis

Keith M Ellis — Thu, 20 Nov 2003 16:08:29 +0000

Tom, I think our whole law enforcement and judicial system is even more socialist than the educational system. I can’t think of a single city in the US that has a privately run police force. I fear we lost the battle against socialism a long time ago.

By: Tom Grey

Tom Grey — Thu, 20 Nov 2003 15:17:50 +0000

Biases, and who pays, can be extremely important, but are much less so when there are alternatives. Exactly why a free press is important, and blogging helps, like Riverbend of Baghdad’s Burning. The biggest world view bias in the West today is in gov’t paid for schools, with virtually all teachers and professors implicitly aware of the gov’t / socialistic / non-market oriented processes of the education industry; and most explicitly supporting anti-market thinking. ALL the presumed worst characteristics of biased journalists exist, today, in most schools. The likely alternative, eg with vouchers, allows alternate ideologies more equal time. Still, professional unbiased truth seekers will likely be underbid by “true believers” of one sort or another, willing to accept less money in order to teach their biased version of the truth.

By: Jason McCullough

Jason McCullough — Thu, 20 Nov 2003 05:56:33 +0000

The conservative/libertarian “why, I don’t see the problem here!” stuff is amazing. What, you wouldn’t see anything noteworthy about it if Tapped was published by Bob Shrum, but pretended (until yesterday) that it wasn’t?

By: Matt Weiner

Matt Weiner — Thu, 20 Nov 2003 01:32:28 +0000

Oh, Michael Moore. I will grant you that he has got to be reasonably well-known and well-off, though I’m not sure what his “method” is—some of his stuff is intentionally funny, unlike Dow 36,000, but I don’t know of Glassman could pull that off. On the other hand, we don’t know about “far more money,” do we? Does Glassman disclose his tax returns? As for Chomsky, really, as someone who does philosophy I think of him as the most influential linguist of the post-WWII period. There’s a talk in my department this week on “Chomsky on learning a language.” I doubt his political views would be as well known if he weren’t so prominent in linguistics. Pilger is someone I’ve only heard of because he gets attacked in blogs.

By: Nasi Lemak

Nasi Lemak — Thu, 20 Nov 2003 01:07:42 +0000

The Linux point is apt – I remember reading a piece on TCS a couple of months ago about Open Source that was just dumb – the sort of thing you might have got from, say, a Microsoft marketroid rather than a serious technolibertarian of whatever views. I thought it was odd at the time – I think I wrote something about it – but it all seems a lot clearer now.

By: Vinteuil

Vinteuil — Thu, 20 Nov 2003 00:46:34 +0000

What a lot of nothing. TCS has ads for its sponsors splashed all over every page on the site. The “About TCS” page offers those sponsors grateful acknowledgement. The idea that anybody’s covering up anything of interest here is absurd. If only one could count on academic researchers to be as blatant about who’s buttering their bread, and on which side.

By: Jack

Jack — Thu, 20 Nov 2003 00:13:23 +0000

The fact that it is run by a general purpose lobby group is more of a problem than ADM in some ways because it is harder to understand what axes it may have to grind. It is possible for the editor to exercise bias by choosing who writes about what without changing what they write, especially if they can easily tell what they are going to get. I hypothesise that a blog is both a good way of telling what someone thinks and a good training in consistency. In any case if it is a ploy it will be more successful if it has a body of good articles to establish the credibility of the ones that might be there for lobbying purposes. From the readers point of view the issue is that you can never know when the piece is appearing for lobbying reasons rather than some reasons more in line with your own interests and expectations. I think Arnold Kling’s point would carry more weight if he were tackling the issue the way he suggests himself and there weren’t so many links to his sites and, say, Jane Galt/Megan McCardle on blogs not far from here. On the other hand he may not have made as much as he could out of the ADM example. So much of the media is driven by advertising that it is hard to be sure of any of it. Even films suffer from product placement so no longer can we see what things the person who imagined a certain character thinks they would actually use but instead what somebody will pay to show them using. Entire sections of newspapers exist entirely to sell advertising. Whether this is any better than TCS I’m not sure but perhaps I’ll be careful reading what it has to say about Linux for example. Maybe I should start buying my own news.

By: markus

markus — Wed, 19 Nov 2003 23:45:53 +0000

mr vagge, it may be beyond you, but not reporting on one’s own associates is one possible way of avoiding a conflict of interest, the other is revealing who your associates/sponsors are. News Hour does both, TCS did neither. disclosing your finances is another indicator of honesty, but it doesn’t prove honesty. The question was about arguments for basing one’s decision on, remember? And you are aware of the differences between sponsorship and ownership, aren’t you?

By: Richard Vagge

Richard Vagge — Wed, 19 Nov 2003 23:35:50 +0000

JP, 1. It’s clearly disclosed. I don’t think the show really ever does disclose that ADM “subsists on government pork”. Maybe I missed that episode 2. They rarely cover issues pertaining to ADM. Why don’t they cover issues pertaining to ADM? ADM sponsors a show that covers the news and it’s rarely mentioned? Hmmmm. 3. They have to disclose all their finances. So did Enron. That’s just a snarky point but is it really to be believed that a company that discloses all its dealing makes it a more honest sponsor of ideas. Maybe or maybe not. 4. They don’t share office space with ADM. Just imagine the morning conversations. “Have you advanced the right wing agenda today. Yes, have you”. Come on, is that a big deal. If they were located across the street, would it be ok? This is not even a tempest in a teapot.

By: chun the unavoidable

chun the unavoidable — Wed, 19 Nov 2003 23:29:00 +0000

Actually, the Newshour ignored the hell out of the ADM price-fixing scandal in 1995, when it was all over the network news.

By: JP

JP — Wed, 19 Nov 2003 23:11:58 +0000

Would you refuse to appear on the Jim Lehrer News Hour because it is a “front” for ADM? No, because: 1. It’s clearly disclosed. 2. They rarely cover issues pertaining to ADM. 3. They have to disclose all their finances. 4. They don’t share office space with ADM. Nice try, though.