Comments on: Ecce Holbo

By: Jimmy Doyle

Jimmy Doyle — Wed, 25 Feb 2004 21:24:32 +0000

Reynolds and Lileks are now officially beyond the pale. Reynolds: “The Palestinians don’t deserve a state.” Hey Glenn: the God of the Old Testament called. He wants his sense of collective responsibility back. Just goes to show: Law professorship no barrier to moral imbecility. And Lileks’ denunciation of Salam Pax was a disgrace.

By: W. Kiernan

W. Kiernan — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 23:15:07 +0000

Just wondering, why in Heaven's name did you take a "sharp right turn" after the 9-11 attack? Surely you were aware of the decade's effort the ultra-right-wing had put into arming those kill-crazy Wahhabi fundamentalists in Afghanistan. I remember seeing that second plane smash into the WTC on the TV in my office, and the very first thing that ran through my mind was, Those fucking right-wingers! This is all their fault! And now, by God, they'll pay! As a matter of record, I was blathering online about it the very next day. Seriously. I thought all those mad old cold-warriors were about to get lynched, and I was eager to buy the rope. Of course, not only did those bastards manage not to pay for the disaster they caused, but they even turned the mass-murder by their fellow fundamentalists and old business partners to their poltical advantage. There's no justice in this awful world, not a bit.

By: Jacob T. Levy

Jacob T. Levy — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 23:01:57 +0000

I’m not angling for a nomination. I don’t think I deserve one. Well, I think you do. Eventually, I suppose, so many new people will stream into blogging, and old people will stream out, that there won’t be this funny linkage between blogging and 9/11—but there certainly is for me, too. I read Kaus before that; I read Usenet groups, which have something in common with (though a lot of differences from) blogging; and I’d been a fan of Jonah Goldberg’s chatty, comics-and-Star-Trek-and-Simpsons-heavy, online political columns since ‘way back when, before it turned into pure schtick. Jonah sounded, if not like I talk by myself, then like some of my conversations with my college buddies sound—struck me kind of the way Lileks struck you. But post-9/11, Postrel, Sullivan, and Reynolds became really major parts of my day, and I started reading the other blogs that Postrel and Reynolds linked to regularly. And—not independently, but the causation runs both ways—I had my own political shift crystalize. For the first time I supported a war; and libertarians with whom I’d always thought I had everything in common now started to strike me the way much of the vocal left struck Michael Walzer in “Can There Be a Decent Left?” Once my natural group-blog home would’ve been with Liberty & Power, not with the Conspiracy. That was changing before 9/11, a little, but it changed a lot, and more consciously and coherently, at that point.

By: harry

harry — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 22:29:23 +0000

do the very opposite of pandering to our audience: we suddenly start teaching a seminar on some arcane subject, concerning which there is no legitimate presumption that another soul in the universe is interested What you’re saying, really, is that academic bloggers are the last remaining heirs of Lord Reith. I wouldn’t dare assume that mantle myself, but for the best I think that’s right, and I can think of no finer compliment.

By: Walt Pohl

Walt Pohl — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 20:47:16 +0000

It’s not just that academic blogs that are good get assimilated by CT. It’s that the academic blogs I read that get assimilated. For example, I check John & Belle Have A Blog every day. I predict your next target for assimilation will be Mark Kleiman.

By: Joseph Yaroch

Joseph Yaroch — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 15:02:25 +0000

My first day at the University of Michigan, I walked into the grad library and was struck by an almost mystical reverence for the mass of information, right there, at my figertips. It was a wonderful experience. The blogsphere now gives us all a chance to have a little bit of that wonder every day of our lives. I remember getting a book through interlibrary loan, a book published in 1926 that had one of those little library cards in the back. It had never been checked out before, and that was in 1979. Yet, it came with a notice stamped in big red letters “MUST BE RETURNED IN THREE DAYS.” Blogs never have to be returned.

By: John Isbell

John Isbell — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 14:45:29 +0000

I bore easily, and I read pretty much that entire post. It’s the longest blog post I’ve read in months, so there’s a feather for your cap. Welcome noch einmal.

By: PZ Myers

PZ Myers — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 14:21:42 +0000

I seem to have gotten into the blogging business a year or so after you guys did (I admit it, I’m way behind the curve). I find your take on Lileks and Instapundit interesting—when I first stumbled onto them, because EVERYONE was linking to them, I was completely baffled. There was nothing of interest there. Lileks is completely batshit and I had the feeling Instapundit was squeezing leaden drops of prose out of his sphincter. Maybe you need to be in a certain state of mind to appreciate them, or maybe they’ve changed. I also like your take on academic blogs. I think they are an opportunity to break away from the careful sterility of the mythical ivory tower and have a little fun. Picture Charlie stalking through the flaming hallway shouting, “I’ll show you the life of the mind!”—that’s a weblog. Only it’s not usually flaming chaos, but cat pictures and recipes and little slices of life and the odd angry rant about politics or television, interspersed with peculiar comments about our professional infatuations.

By: harry

harry — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 14:08:24 +0000

I, too, was struck by your comment about turning right after 9/11. I supported the Afghan intervention (not a little influenced by Chris, whom I met for the first time on 9/12, wierdly enough), but didn’t experience that at all as a turn to the right. I was insulated by being a) in England where there was much more support on the left for that war than in the US, and b) by being buried in work and dealing with a new baby. It just seemed to me, though, that while there could be reasonable disagreement on the left about what to do in Afghanistan, support for the US action was one completely natural and left response. But, like them, I supported some previous interventions. Not only in the Balkans, but also in Haiti: I was instrumental in blocking my own small (and uninfluential) socialist group from taking a position on the Haiti intervention in fact, as far back as 1992. Anyway, my point is that, because I didn’t experience it as a turn to the right, I cut the Bush/Blair axis no slack at all, which I’m glad about in the light of the way things have gone since. But I wonder whether this is a general problem on the left—when someone takes an unfamiliar position on one thing they feel driven from the fold, and this affects their judgment about other things? Great to have you both on board.

By: Russell Arben Fox

Russell Arben Fox — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 12:44:40 +0000

John, if I may say: posts like this one are why you get invited to gigs like this one. Superb. I like your point about how in reading academic blogs one may suddenly find oneself lured into a wonderful mini-seminar on a subject heretofore unexplored. That certainly explains my addiction to certain blogs. I suppose I used to write more of those before Alison came along and we entered colic hell. (Get them out of your system before the baby arrives, John.) Did 9/11 make me turn right? Well, I’ve always had at least one foot in that camp, for social and religious reasons. And like John Q., I’d always been an interventionist of sorts. What 9/11 actually did was make me specifically sympathetic to Bush; as you did, I ended up cutting him a lot of slack. It’s taken me a year or more to properly understand and, thankfully, work that sympathy out of my system.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 09:38:06 +0000

Welcome. I wonder if guestblogging will turn out for you, as it did for me. As I think Walt Pohl observed, if an academic blog is any good, it will be swallowed by CT. I don’t think I changed much on 9/11, as I was then pretty much in line with Hitchens, having been impatient for intervention in the Balkans and shocked at the failure to prevent the Rwanda catastrophe. It was the stuffup of the peace in Afghanistan and the obvious lies in the leadup to war with Iraq that shifted my position. In relation to Hitchens and Iraq, I’d quote Chris ” the idiocies spouted by those I’d hitherto admired made me re-examine all the other beliefs I held in common with them”.

By: Chris Bertram

Chris Bertram — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 07:57:21 +0000

Good to have you both on board. What you say about a sharp right turn after 9/11 is so close to my own experience. In the aftermath of that I started reading Instapundit, started blogging at Junius and was in a state where the idiocies spouted by those I’d hitherto admired made me re-examine all the other beliefs I held in common with them. I’ve been rowing back leftwards ever since, slowly.

By: Belle Waring

Belle Waring — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 06:32:49 +0000

I still say we’re called “Timberteers.”