March 11, 2005

The US trade deficit makes the front page

Posted by John Quiggin

In my first-ever blog post (apart from a Hello World! announcement), I commented on the fact that, whereas trade and current account deficits were big news in Australia, US papers buried them in the back pages. At least in the online edition of the New York Times, this is no longer the case. The latest US Trade deficit ($58.3 billion in January) is front-page news.

Despite this catch-up, it’s still true that anyone wanting coverage of economic issues in the US would do far better to read blogs than to follow either the NY Times or the WSJ, and no other mainstream media even come close. It isn’t even true, as it is in other cases, that bloggers need the established media to get the facts on which they can then comment. The NY Times story linked above is basically a rewrite of the Bureau of Economic Analysis press release which you can get by automatic email if you want.

The competition is much tougher in Australia. Media coverage of economic issues is better, the number of economist-bloggers is smaller and quite a few of us play both sides of the street anyway.

March 01, 2005

Election law and blogs

Posted by Henry

While doing some research a couple of weeks ago for a course I’m teaching, I came across this interesting Brookings Institution book chapter of how US election law affects political activities on the Internet. Reading between the lines, it appears to me that the Federal Election Commission has been strenuously trying to avoid getting sucked into the quagmire of regulating political conduct on the Internet - but that it is, sooner or later, going to have to start engaging in rulemaking. Trevor Potter and Kirk L. Jowers, the authors of the chapter don’t really discuss how, or whether, election law should apply to blogs. There are some fascinating questions here for future regulation and lawmaking. Should there be disclosure requirements for blogs (like the two blogs authored by paid advisers to the Thune senatorial campaign in South Dakota) that are intimately linked to a political campaign? Should blogging that is expressly aimed at supporting the election of a particular candidate be treated as a political contribution, or as volunteer activity? Should the kinds of restriction that apply to coordination between 527s and political campaigns be extended to prominent political blogs?

I note that I’m not an expert in electoral law. Still, I feel fairly confident in making two predictions. First: that these activities will be regulated. As political blogs become a more established part of the political landscape, they will increasingly be treated as another means of political expression, advocacy and fundraising - and the current regulatory regime will, one way or another, be extended to cover them. The only question is how the balance between free political speech and the need to regulate organized political activities is struck. Second, that whatever regulations are promulgated will prove awkward and uncomfortable for bloggers on both sides of the ideological spectrum. Bloggers have gotten used to operating in a relatively freewheeling environment - as they get absorbed into the existing political system, this is going to change.

Update: Luis Villa points in comments to this very interesting take on how the FEC should evolve from Howard Dean’s former election coordinator, Zephyr Teachout.

February 24, 2005

Gresham's Law and Blogging

Posted by Henry

Two slightly worrying posts that suggest to me that the linked economy of the blogosphere might be more fragile than we would like. First, Brad DeLong gives us an economist’s take on Technorati’s recent difficulties.

For an economist, this is absolutely fascinating. There is an underlying resource here: the decision of a human being that such-and-such a webpage was worth linking to is a valuable and useful piece of information. There are businesses (Google and Technorati) that grow up to harvest, repackage, and make money off this information. And then there are the people—comment spammers, link spammers, trackback spammers, link-farm creators, et cetera—who see an economic edge from setting up internet robots to pollute the underlying web-structure information stream.

The standard economist’s way of dealing with all problems is to advise (i) setting up a system of property rights so that (ii) someone controls each resource of value and make sure that (iii) that someone has the incentives to properly husband the resource and ensure it finds its way to its most valuable use. But when the valuable commodity is the indicator of human attention that is the underlying structure of the web, it is not at all clear how this is to be accomplished.

Second, Stephen Berlin Johnson tells us that Jason Kottke is effectively selling links from his blog.

I just noticed that Jason is including a list of donors to his site, including HTML links to their websites if they choose. (See my previous post for background.) It occurs to me that Jason’s put entirely the wrong spin on this whole pledge drive thing. He’s not asking for donations. He’s selling PageRank! A link from Kottke.org has got to have enough cred with Google to make any blogger want to shell out $30 bucks for a Kottke link to his or her front door. Now — that’s a real “A-List blogger” business….

The juxtaposition of these is both interesting and worrying. As Brad says, the informational economy of the blogosphere is very poorly understood. But I still think that we know enough to be able to put forward some initial hypotheses as to why the blogosphere works as well as it does. First, as Brad says, the underlying value of the blogosphere is that it is a system that more or less efficiently conveys the decisions of readers that a web page is worth viewing. It does so through links. As Rebecca Blood observed a couple of years ago, the best way for a blog to get attention or readership is to get links from other blogs - especially well known ones. Links are the currency of the blogosphere - and they’re valuable because they have real informational content - they tell us about the blogs, or posts, that another blogger considers to be worth reading.

This has led to the creation of a sort of informal economy of link exchange, with norms regarding due credit, reciprocity and so on. It’s by no means perfect, but it does a pretty good job in ensuring that good posts and good blogs get attention. Not a perfect job - network effects, path dependence, link cartels and so on all have a distorting impact - but, as stated, a pretty good job. Both ‘big bloggers’ and services like Technorati then serve as information filters that lead blog-readers to interesting posts.

The problem is that the political economy of link exchange on which this rests may have some inherent fragilities. Links are valuable currency because they refer to the ‘interestingness’ (an ugly word that should nicely annoy Mark Kleiman) of a specific post or blog. Interestingness is a subjective concept, of course, but the more people (especially people who share your tastes), that find a post or blog interesting, the more likely it is that you yourself will find it interesting. If the relationship between links and underlying interestingness is broken, than many of the advantages of the blogosphere as a means of sifting through views and highlighting the interesting ones will evaporate. There isn’t any other obvious metric that I could see that would replace inbound links as a means of establishing which posts or bloggers are more interesting than others.

DeLong and Johnson’s posts point to two phenomena, both of which could weaken the relationship between links and subjective level of interest. First, link farms and other attempts to game the system could seriously hurt the ability of Technorati and other services to provide an overall snapshot of the blogosphere, the most interesting blogs, the hot topics and so on. However, the kind of entrepreneurial approach to linkage that Johnson identifies could do some damage too. If top bloggers were to go a couple of steps further than Kottke has, and to start flogging off links in their blogroll (flogroll) to the highest bidder, again this would damage the relationship between links and interestingness, and weaken the blogosphere as a whole. Links would become an indicator of how much money a blogger has; not whether she has anything interesting to say (a problem that of course applies to pay-to-play search engines today). Both linkfarms and flogrolls would create a sort of Gresham’s Law effect, driving out (or at least greatly weakening the informational value of) links, and thus hampering the efficiency of the blogosphere as an aggregator of interesting opinions.

Of course, the lesson here isn’t that the blogosphere is doomed - like Brad, I reckon that the actors with encompassing interests (Google etc) have an interest in coming up with technical solutions to the former problem, while the latter is largely a hypothetical. But what both of these suggest to me is that the informational economy of the blogosphere isn’t as self-stabilizing as people often assume. It depends on a set of initial conditions - most particularly, the relationship between links and interestingness, and a set of norms and practices about the exchange of links. If either of these were seriously to be damaged, there’s a strong likelihood that the ability of the blogosphere to serve as an aggregator of interesting facts and opinions would be damaged too.

February 18, 2005

Best wishes

Posted by Ted

One of the nice thing about being an amateur blogger is that, as soon as I’m five feet away from the computer, none of it matters anymore. Would that all troubles were this simple.

I’m sure that I speak for everyone at Crooked Timber in extending our best wishes to Glenn Reynolds and his wife. May her recovery be speedy, and may they spend many more happy years together.

February 15, 2005

Your Opportunity to Prove Daniel Davies Wrong

Posted by Henry

I’ve just seen that we’re through to the final stages of the “Best Group Blog” category of the Koufax awards. As Dan observed at an earlier stage of this process, CT has a sorry enough history in these awards.

Oh god, it’s the same every year. We get nominated as “Best Group Blog”, which means “Maybe about Ninth Or Tenth Best Blog On A Good Day, But There’s A Group Blog Category So We’ll Nominate Them In That”. And then we lose.

If you want to show Dan that he’s talking smack for once, exercise your democratic rights, and head over there and vote for us (while you’re at it, consider giving the nod to Belle’s classic and a pony , which is up for the best humorous post). If any further reason is needed, we’ve already gotten endorsements from Fafnir and the Medium Lobster (although Giblets has apparently decided in a fit of pique to vote for Obsidian Wings instead).

Update: Looks like the awards site is down (I suspect due to bandwidth limits) - will update this again when it reappears.

Update 2: Site back up.

February 12, 2005

Henry on NPR

Posted by Kieran

Our own Henry Farrell was on NPR this morning talking with Scott Simon about blogs and their role in propagating rumors.

February 11, 2005

Since the beginning of time, liberals have yearned to destroy the sun

Posted by Ted

The eminently reasonable Jack O’Toole has been driven to despair by this one-two punch.

This newly ever-growing Western left, not only in Europe, but in Latin America and even in the US itself, has a clear goal: the destruction of the country and society that vanquished its dreams fifteen years ago. But it does not have, as in the old days of the Soviet Union, the hard power to accomplish this by itself. Thanks to this, all our leftist friends’ bets are now on radical Islam. (emphasis added) What can they do to help it? Answer: tie down America’s superior strength with a million Liliputian ropes: legal ones, political ones, with propaganda and disinformation etc. Anything and everything will do.

“Sigh. I wish he were wrong,” comments Glenn Reynolds. Nelson Ascher is directly stating that “all our leftist friends” are actively supporting terrorists, by any means possible, in order to achieve our dream of the destruction of the United States. The mechanisms by which terrorists could destroy the United States are left unstated. (I’m reminded of Eddie Izzard’s recounting of Imperial Japan’s strategy in WWII: “First, we’ll bomb one of their bases, and then… we’ll win.”) And Reynolds is shaking his head in rueful agreement, more in sorrow than anger.

I’m embarassed to admit that this washed over me as so much typical right-wing boilerplate until I saw Jack O’Toole’s reaction. Much like Thomas Sowell’s charming column titled “Fourth Estate or Fifth Column?” Or Jonah Goldberg’s taunt, after proposing a bet with Juan Cole, that “He can give it to the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade or whatever his favorite charity is.” Too many mainstream conservatives have adopted accusations of treason into their regular toolbox, and I guess I’m sort of getting used to it.

But it isn’t OK. Not to mince words, this is insanity. This is mistaking the left for the Red Skull. If Ascher or Reynolds know of left-wingers who are actively helping terrorists attack the United States, they should be telling the FBI and Interpol, not their blog audiences. If they merely wish to stigmatize the opposition as objectively pro-terrorism, then they should be ashamed of themselves.

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds responds, insisting that he wasn’t talking about American liberals or Democrats as a group. I’m going to punt on a few opportunities for shameless point-scoring and just accept that. Could I suggest that… maybe… Ward Churchill isn’t our authentic face, then?

However, Reynolds still insists that the characterization of liberals as “terrorist collaborators trying to destroy the United States” is an accurate depiction of the European left. I’m afraid that I don’t see how this position can stand up to scrutiny. More on this later, maybe.

Drinking as Religion

Posted by Brian

Like Ted, I sometimes worry about whether the blogging medium is being used to its full potential. Then I stumble across uses for the medium that reaffirm my faith in it. 1000 Bars is, as the name suggests, the story of one drinker’s quest to drink at 1000 different bars in 12 months. He is well on the way, with 189 in the first 41 days of the year. I’ll be following his progress, and the pithy summaries of the decor, crowd and ambience of various fine drinking establishments. When taken in large quantities the bar reports all start to sound the same, and they have a pleasing relaxing effect, which is a marked contrast to some political blogs I used to know.

February 08, 2005

Stray Bits

Posted by John Holbo

Per my Amazon Associates fundraising efforts, I was going to send another check for about $150 to the Singapore Red Cross. But they've maxed out their fundraising. In general, tsunami relief seem to be doing OK. So who should I give to, do you think? Oxfam general fund?

Moving along. My post below in response to Scott McLemee's column has been misunderstood due to the fact that I didn't bother to say what I meant. I can't help but feel somewhat responsible. Nor, however, can I be bothered to rewrite the thing. A bit of a dilemma.

Let me leave it at that and make amends to Scott for mangling his kettlechop by saying his tale of youthful exposure to Victorian pornography is amusing. His Mao poster sounds nice. I'm sorry he was too lazy to type in the Sontag passage because I'm too lazy to go down to the library and check it out. (Read the stuff today because it's all too-old-to-die, too-young-for-permalinks at Cogito, Ergo Zoom.)

One last stray thought, then to bed. I was browsing through the Truth Laid Bear ecosystem and noticing how loosely the traffic rankings and link rankings seem to be correlated. John & Belle Have A Blog, for example, is 399 by traffic, 1124 by links. Fellow CTer Brian's TAR - which has almost the same traffic as J&B, turns out - is 410 by traffic, 2416 in terms of links. There seems to be better convergence near the top of the rankings. I don't find overall looseness of correlation surprising, mind you. I can think of explanations and I'm pretty sure some of them are true. Starting with the incompleteness of the ecosystem. (Technorati knows more links. Not everyone publicizes traffic.) But I do wonder whether any whuffieologist has made any interesting study of this aspect of the reputation economy. To what degree do link numbers track traffic numbers? To whatever degree not, why not?

Instead of a muffin with your coffee this morning...

Posted by Kieran

Try Juan Cole’s critique of Jonah Goldberg and his ilk. Fewer calories and more satisfying.

February 05, 2005

Joe Gordon update

Posted by Chris

Blogger Joe Gordon, sacked by British bookselling chain Waterstone’s (see an earlier post ) seems to have been offered a better job by some nicer people . Splendid!

We're Back

Posted by Kieran

Crooked Timber has been out of commission for the past day or so. Our hosting provider had a hardware problem on one of its file servers, and fixing it took longer than they thought. The upshot was that this site was accessible the whole time, but everything was read-only: any attempt to post a comment, or write a post explaining what was wrong, or do anything that involved creating any file on the server, would get an error. Sorry about this: we didn’t have any control over it. But now here we are again, I hope.

February 01, 2005

Die Spammers Die

Posted by Kieran

We’re dealing with a flood of trackback spam this morning. Sorry for even more inconvenience than usual. We will get around to upgrading eventually, even though my past self wisely tells me not to.

Internet Liberal Bloggers

Posted by Henry

Crooked Timber aren’t the only lefties to be attacked for failing to celebrate the Iraqi elections before the sun hit the yardarm yesterday morning. Intrepid sleuth-columnist, Justin Darr, of Renew America, is on the case. He outs Stephen Bainbridge, that notorious radical and bête-noir of the Republican establishment, and Stephen Green, the saturnine Svengali behind Bolshevik agitprop collective Vodkapundit, as undercover members of the “Let’s Pretend It Didn’t Happen Faction” of the allied Internet Liberal Bloggers of America.

a group who broke with the traditional liberal habit of talking endlessly about anything so long as it can be twisted into a childish penis reference about Vice President Cheney, and said nothing.

Still, Mr. Darr is more charitable than Ms. Malkin - he acknowledges that there may be an innocent explanation for the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy’s failure to blog on Iraq by lunchtime.

Perhaps it was unfair of me to look into their sites on Sunday afternoon when so many liberals are just beginning emerge from the drug induced haze of their traditional weekend medicinal marijuana benders.

Listening to the Silence

Posted by Kieran

I suppose I should have expected the likes of Michelle Malkin to treat the Iraqi elections as an opportunity to take a pot shot at “the Left.” As you know, we on The LeftTM are all for for more death and suffering in Iraq because it improves our case for universal health care and better prescription drug coverage. Like an excited kid on Christmas morning, Malkin wasn’t able to wait all day. She restrained herself till lunchtime (U.S. east coast time) on Sunday before indicting us along with a few other blogs: “Left goes into Hibernation”, “Crooked Timber is Silent on the Iraqi Elections”. Silent, silent, silent. You can practically hear the wind whistling through the trees around here. An excerpt from our non-existent commentary on the election appears on the Op-Ed page of Tuesday’s Dallas Morning News1, presumably as a big ole chunk of white space. I suppose we were hibernating, really, as long as you think “Hibernation” means “Doing some other things on Sunday (in our own time zones) before catching up on the news.”

1 Irritatingly detailed registration required. Try bugmenot.

January 28, 2005

Match Wits With Inspector PowerLine!

Posted by Ted

8:05 AM, Milwaukee

This is bad,” said Mayor Barnett. “I don’t know what went wrong in this election, but something did. There were more than 1200 votes cast from invalid addresses. We’ve got 300 people listed as voting twice from the same address. The papers are eating us alive; they’re reporting an 8000-ballot gap between the number of ballots cast and the number of recorded voters. We’ve got to check this out; this can’t happen again.”

“Listen, we’ve got a lot of resources we can throw at this,” said Milwuakee District Attorney E. Michael McCann. “I’ve got a commitment from Steve Biskupic, the US Attorney, Chief Hegerty, and the local FBI. There’s a million and six pieces of paper to review, but we’ll have a lot of manpower to draw from.”

“That’s good. But we don’t want this to look partisan. You’re a Democrat, right?”

“That’s right,” said McCann. “But Biskupic is a Republican. In any case, we don’t know yet if the erroneous votes skewed one way or another. The heads of the election commission are blaming glitches and honest errors, as you might imagine. Their systems have awfully weak safeguards. At first glance, it seems to have a lot in common with the problems in Ohio.”

“Hmmm. Just in case, I’ve called a representative from the PowerLine Detective Agency to join us. McCann, have you met Inspector Hindraker?” A well-groomed man stepped out from the side of the room, inconspicuously fanning himself with an old copy of Time Magazine.

McCann shook hands with Inspector Hindraker. “Can I confirm something with you?” asked Hindraker. “Milwaukee went for John Kerry in the last election, didn’t it?”

“That’s correct, Inspector Hindraker. Kerry won Milwaukee by 123,000 votes. We’ve got a hell of a job ahead of us-“

“Gentlemen, please,” sighed Inspector Hindraker. “It’s perfectly clear what went on here. This is a case of massive Democratic Party fraud!

(How did Inspector Hinderaker know to blame this on Democratic fraud? Turn to page 154 to find out!)

January 21, 2005

Pundits all the way down

Posted by Henry

Mark Dery on the political blogosphere:

But bloggers who want to remedy what ails the corporate McMedia monopoly should grab a clue from Chris Allbritton and haul their larval, jack-studded flesh up out of their Matrix-like pods and do some goddamn reporting instead of just getting all meta about Instapundit’s post about The Daily Kos’s post about Little Green Footballs’s post about the vast left-wing media conspiracy’s latest act of high treason. It’s the Yertle the Turtle syndrome: Pundits stacked on top of pundits on top of pundits, all the way down, and, at the very bottom of the heap, the lowly hack who kicked off the whole frenzy of intertextuality: the reporter who dared venture out of the media airlock to collect some samples of Actual, Reported Fact.

January 20, 2005

Gary

Posted by Ted

Gary Farber of Amygdala could probably use some help.

January 19, 2005

Linkage

Posted by Henry

A few quick links from around the blogosphere as I gear up to start teaching again …

Scott McLemee in TAP on teenage crushes and Susan Sontag.

Kevin Drum professes puzzlement about why Bush has been flogging the dead horse of social security; Mark Schmitt provides a plausible reason why.

Brad DeLong on the “Salvador Option”:

To claim that American officers calling for a “Salvador option” are unaware that they are calling for Death Squads is as incredible as claiming that Plantagenets calling for a “Canterbury option” are unaware of murder in the cathedral.

Finally, the BlogPAC sets up its There Is No Crisis website (via Matt Yglesias). And a good thing too. A few weeks ago, Matt, Mark Schmitt and I had a good conversation about the need to build some sort of organization around the intellectual energy of the left blogosphere’s discussion of Social Security. This is a great start.

January 13, 2005

Brass crescent awards

Posted by Chris

Via the Head Heeb , I see that alt.muslim is hosting the Brass Crescent Awards for the best blogs by Muslims. There are also awards for the most insightful post and for blogs by non-Muslims that engage respecfully with Islam. Juan Cole , Jonathan Edelstein , Scott Martens and Gary Farber [previously accidentally omitted] all get nominated in various categories. An opportunity for us to explore the diversity of the Islamic blogosphere.

January 10, 2005

"What if Satan were a high school cheerleader?"

Posted by Ted

We can all stop blogging now (and not a moment too soon). “Query Letters I Love” has found the ultimate use for the medium: posting and mocking real Hollywood script queries from wannabe screenwriters. Just a sample:

“The protagonist’s challenges throughout the story are:

1) A seagull attack gave him Seagull Herpes, an incurable disease that will soon kill him.

2) The seagull attack also tore a bone within his calf in two. His best medicines are herbs and acupuncture, so the bone never fully heals, and it causes internal bleeding for him to walk. The story involves him running a lot…”

I’m in love.

Why we get no respect, part XXVI

Posted by Ted

Regarding this Instapost:

CHUCK SIMMINS NOTES that George Soros appears to be missing in action on tsunami relief. So are some others you’d expect to be giving. (Via Bill Hobbs). On the other hand, it’s worth pointing out that Soros’ foundation did a lot of good work regarding the Ukrainian elections.

Hack. There must be some set of values under which it’s entirely appropriate to criticize the mainstream media for bias in the morning, for sloppiness in the afternoon, and then pump out this bilge in the evening. Somewhere, deep in The Way Things Ought to Be, Google is the only tool you need to make this sort of accusation. It’s clearly inconceivable that a multi-billion dollar philanthropist would donate to a horrible tragedy without advertising it on a blimp, at an absolute minimum.

A real journalist who wanted to follow this angle wouldn’t do so without contacting Soros. A journalist who published a piece sneering at a private citizen’s lack of charity, based entirely on his lack of self-promoting press releases, would face some harsh words. For the world’s foremost political blogger, it’s just another day at the keyboard. We’re not going to be overtaking the MSM any day soon.

“But he said ‘appears’!” I’m sorry, that’s no kind of standard. I could spend all friggin’ day commenting on the apparent grevious failures of people that I don’t especially like. (Did you know that Sammy Hagar appears to have never denounced NAMBLA? Makes you think, dunnit?)

One of the more unpleasant chapters of 2004 was the demonization of George Soros. The distinction between “enemy of the Party” and “enemy of all humanity” seemed too subtle for some to grasp (famously including our august Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert.) For the record:

In 1993, (Soros) created the Open Society Institute, a New York-based foundation that has supported intellectual freedom, human rights, and civil liberties in oppressive regimes around the world. Soros’s philanthropy is animated by a central idea: that the free expression of critical thought, such as he has practiced in his financial career, is the wellspring of democracy, or an “open society.” Soros has financed every kind of project imaginable in promoting this goal, from supporting dissidents such as Václav Havel, of the Czech Republic, to providing water-filtration systems for city residents during the siege of Sarajevo. Since he began his philanthropic efforts, Soros has given away more than four billion dollars—an amount that places him in the ranks of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

GO BACK TO RUSSIA, FREEDOM-HATER!

Comment Spammers Unite

Posted by Ted

A marvellously generous blogger named Michele Agnew will donate $1 to Oxfam’s tsunami relief for every comment to this post (until she closes it; I think that she’s already gone well above and beyond her original plan of keeping it open for 24 hours.) I’m getting to this very late in the day, but don’t hesitate to try.

UPDATE: Her comment thread is now closed after 500 comments. Many thanks to Michele, and many thanks to everyone who had a chance to participate.

January 09, 2005

Election

Posted by John Holbo

Hey, I'm nominated for a Koufax for Best Writing! Since I'm competing against, among others, Crooked Timber, this is a little awkward. But keep in mind that when people say Size Matters, what they mostly mean is that Grotesque Length matters. (How much post you've got tucked under the fold. I hope I don't have to draw you a map.) Vote Holbo.

I'm too much like that Chris Klein character to vote for myself, however. I think I'm voting for Yglesias. I think I learn more from him on a regular basis than from any other blogger. Of course, his posts are drafty and full of typos, so it depends what you mean by 'best writing'. I figure James Wolcott is going to trounce us all anyway.

January 08, 2005

Ignatz is Back!

Posted by Kieran

Sam Heldman seems to have returned to blogging, after more than a year away. I think that’s great. If you remember his old blog, you’ll probably think it’s great, too.

Koufax Awards

Posted by Kieran

Voting is underway for the 2004 Koufax Awards. If you have a mind to, vote for CT in the Best Group Blog and Best Overall Blog categories.

Update: Also Best Writing.

December 30, 2004

The blogging two-step

Posted by Henry

The perennial issue of mainstream media bias and the superiority of blogs is undergoing a minor revival in the right wing blogosphere at the moment, much of it centered on a column by Nick Coleman of the Star-Tribune, which has the temerity to take on PowerLine. Coleman’s effort to “fact-check” the factcheckers is rather weak, but his main point is hard to refute - it’s a bit rich for slavering right wing hacks to accuse the mainstream media of ideological bias and expect to get taken seriously. On which, see further Matt Welch’s entertaining takedown of Hugh Hewitt. There’s a curious sort of doublethink going on here, which culminates in a sort of dodge-the-responsibility two-step. On the one hand, bloggers like Glenn Reynolds respond to their critics by saying that they can’t cover everything, and that they’re not providing a news service, only opinions. On the other hand, they seem to believe that blogs should radically change or replace the mainstream media. Either of these statements is reasonable enough on its own,1 but taken in conjunction, they’re pretty jarring. If you think that blogs should replace the mainstream media, then you should be prepared yourself to live up to some minimal standards of scrupulosity, intellectual honesty, and willingness to deal fairly with facts that are uncomfortable for your own ideological position. You should be prepared to live up yourself to the standards that you demand of others. Exercising the “shucks, I’m just a little old blogger” get-out clause is rank hypocrisy when you want the blogosphere to devour the New York Times whole. Funny that Reynolds et al. don’t see it that way.

Update: Glenn Reynolds responds to my post in a characteristically evasive fashion. He weirdly mischaracterizes my argument by saying that I conflate “InstaPundit with the blogosphere as a whole, by suggesting that my statement that InstaPundit is not a news service somehow means that the blogosphere isn’t up to news-gathering.” I don’t know where he gets that, but it allows him to duck the main point - whether bloggers like Reynolds are being hypocritical in criticizing other media for bias. Let me explain it again in plain, simple, English. Glenn Reynolds complains regularly about liberal bias in the media. He says that he doesn’t believe that blogs should replace big media, but that they should pressure big media to do a better job; I’ll accept his characterization of his own views, although he’s certainly given a different impression in the past. But even on this more limited definition, bloggers like Reynolds are being hypocritical - they don’t and won’t practice what they preach. If I understand his argument correctly (it’s somewhat unclear to me exactly what he’s saying), he seems to think that this is OK because the blogosphere is a big place, and that stories are going to come out no matter what (no blogger can block them). This is an abdication of responsibility, pure and simple, and it’s also factually incorrect. Blogs like Instapundit on the right and Atrios on the left, serve an important function as filters of news, both for other bloggers (who read the big bloggers disproportionately) and for outside readers (who tend to gravitate towards the big blogs that everyone has heard about). In a very important way, these blogs shape both the political blogosphere’s perception of itself, and outsiders’ perceptions of it (the blogs on the ‘long tail’ usually only come to prominence when one of the bigger blogs picks up on their story). Saying (if that’s what he’s saying) that he doesn’t have any responsibility for what he does or doesn’t post on, because others are going to pick up on important stories anyway, simply doesn’t cut it as an excuse.

Update 2: I come back from my New Years vacation to discover that Glenn Reynolds has responded again, in a further update which is not only evasive but dishonest. He attacks my credibility as a scholar, saying that “it really is going to make it hard for me to take Henry seriously as a scholar of the blogosphere, now that he’s written off half of it so unpleasantly.” That’s a very serious accusation to make - especially when it’s based on the entirely false claim that I’ve written off half (presumably the right half) of the blogosphere. If Reynolds had bothered to check, he’d have found that I’ve been similarly harsh when left wingers have engaged in hackishness. My objection is not to right wing views, or to right wing criticism of the media; it’s to criticism of the media from people like Reynolds who are partisan hacks, whether they come from the right or the left. Mark Kleiman has documented over time Reynolds’ resort to bizarre conspiracy theories, vicious slurs without evidence and unwarranted attacks on the patriotism of those who disagree with him (on this last I’m reminded of Dr. Johnson’s dictum that patriotism is the “last refuge of a scoundrel”). Kleiman concludes with regard to the Kerik scandal, that Reynolds “has no standing whatever to complain about anyone else’s journalistic ethics in this regard”: - I’d broaden that to say that he doesn’t have standing to complain about anyone else’s journalistic standards, period. Or, as Kleiman remarks even more pungently.

Glenn thinks the “liberal media” are employing a “double standard.” Would someone send him a mirror for his birthday, please?

Again, Reynolds ducks the question of whether bloggers should have standards by repeating his hackneyed claim that the media don’t live up to theirs. All this criticism aside, Mr. Reynolds can rest assured that I will continue to take him very seriously as a sociological phenomenon.

In other news, Hugh Hewitt, blogger and author of “If It’s Not Close, They Can’t Cheat: Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends on It ,” suggests that I should have admitted that I’d overwritten when I described certain partisan blogs as “slavering rightwing hacks.”

Finally, Jay Rosen makes some criticisms that I take a lot more seriously - I’m willing to accept that there’s a difference that I’ve elided between believing that blogs are ‘winning’ and the mainstream media are ‘losing,’ and the claim that blogs are going to take over the mainstream media (although I still contend that much of the rhetoric suggests the latter rather than the former).

1 Indeed, I wholeheartedly agree with the first of these statements - but then I neither want nor expect blogs to replace mainstream news outlets; bloggers would make for lousy reporters.

December 29, 2004

Partisan football

Posted by Henry

I’ve just discovered a quite disgusting exercise in partisan pointscoring by Wizbang via our Technorati links, suggesting that because we (and other left blogs) haven’t had several posts each about the tsunami and its aftermath, liberals don’t care as much as conservatives about their fellow human beings. I’m not going to return the favour by claiming that this post shows us this or that about conservatives, because it doesn’t tell us anything whatsoever about conservatives as a collectivity. It does, however, speak volumes about the person who wrote this sorry excuse for a post.

NB - further attempts to play partisan football in the comments section will be deleted.

December 17, 2004

Gender and Blogging

Posted by Kieran

With one pretty bad tempered thread going strong and evidence of another one tipping over into trolldom, it may not be worth worth adding to the already extensive body of commentary about the gender gap in blogging. But fools skate without paddles on thin ice near the edge of volcanoes, etc. I hope we can keep things civil.

Is there a gender gap at CT?

Well, of course there is. Just look at the roster to your left. Of the sixteen contributors, thirteen of them are men. One of them has been dead for some time, though, so really we have fifteen people. Of those, perhaps four contributors don’t post that often — two or three times a month, or even much less. Of the people you’re most likely to see posting on CT, 10 are male and 2 are female. So that’s a gap.

Is CT unusual in this respect?

No. Take the population of academic blogs in the list to the right. Here’s Henry’s count of them:

Anyone who qualifies under the guidelines and comes to our attention somehow (or nominates themselves) gets into the blogroll - we don’t pick and choose - while there may be biases in the data, they’re not conscious ones on our part. I did a rough-and-ready count of the numbers of male and female academics, discounting group blogs, pseudonymous blogs, and others where I couldn’t figure out the gender. My quick-and-ready total (which could probably do with re-checking) was that there were 302 single authored academic blogs in total, of which 258 were authored by men, and 42 were authored by women. In other words, about 14.5% of the single authored academic blogs that we know about seem to be authored by women. I didn’t count representation in group blogs, but my hazy impression is that the ratio isn’t too different. If this is right, it would seem to suggest that there’s a general problem out there. You can argue about whether CT has a specific responsibility to address that problem or not - but it isn’t a problem that is particular to CT as best as I can tell. It’s an imbalance in the academic blogosphere as a whole.

While there may not be fewer female bloggers in general, there do seem to be fewer female academic bloggers, in particular.

Why does this imbalance exist?

The fact that there are fewer academic women with blogs shouldn’t be that much of a surprise, given everything else we know about gender issues in academia or elsewhere. The mechanism generating this outcome is harder to pin down. What might it (or they) be? I fear that not very much in the next few paragraphs is going to be original.

Within the blogosphere1 homophily may explain a lot. The tendency for like to associate with like, or for “similarity to breed connection” is a very general social process. Similarity on various dimensions might predict who you read and link to on your blog. With respect to gender, it might be that men are more likely to link to men and women to women, if only because (to begin with) you’re more likely to be acquainted with someone of the same sex as you. The blogs you’re likely to discover will be influenced by this process. The composition of the blogosphere will look very different to people in different parts of it as a result. (This is likely to lead to shouting matches of the “Well I haven’t seen anything like that” variety.)

This process of association affects content, too. which in turn affects the probability of reading and linking. It may be that explicitly political blogs are more male-oriented because of the confluence of male concerns and linking patterns. For example, earlier this year Matt Yglesias was wondering why women weren’t interested in politics. There’s a time-demands answer to this, which I’ll get to in a minute, but it’s also the case that many of the political concerns of women are not well-addressed in mainstream political commentary, or are simply not thought to be political issues at all (e.g., “work/family choices”).

Given the size and network-structure of the blogosphere, the upshot is that there will be many, many blogs with different perspectives from yours that you don’t ever read or link to, even though you’re probably only one or two degrees of separation removed from them via blogrolls. For instance, we don’t link to feministe and she doesn’t link to us, though we share a tie through Respectful of Otters and probably other blogs, too. Nobody chose not to link to her, of course. It’s just that, insofar as you make your reading and linking choices on homophily criteria, you contribute to this kind of segregation.

The degree to which this kind of homophily-driven segregation is offset by the ease with which you can read about and link to people different from you is the subject of a debate started by Cass Sunstein in his book Republic.com. Sunstein was pessimistic, but wrote his essay before blogging became really popular, and many people have been more optimistic than him as a result. My feeling is that, perversely, linking and exchange of views across the political divide (polarized as it’s supposed to be) is more likely than a decent gender balance.

A related, but separate, mechanism that would push things in the same direction is the tendency of women not to demand attention or rewards for their efforts. By not promoting themselves enough, female bloggers might shortchange themselves. I have no evidence that this actually happens, by the way, it’s just a plausible extension of a recognized phenomenon elsewhere.

Outside the blogosphere, there’s the question of the material conditions of blog production (so to speak). In the case of academia, it seems clear that women thinking of starting a blog would have more reservations about it than men — and with good reason. Unequal family responsibilities, second shift problems and many other smaller issues (e.g., familiarity with the technology) probably also play a role.

What about CT?

The homophily explanation works well for CT’s formation and growth. I imagine the same is true of most group blogs: there’s a reason that nearly all the members of the Volokh conspiracy (15 contributors, 1 woman, 2 pseudonyms) have a personal connection to Eugene Volokh, are lawyers, and share a broadly right-libertarian political outlook. Similarly, the recently-formed Left2Right (26 contributors, 6 women) are all philosophers of one description or another. That’s how these groups form. I’d say that CT has fewer pre-existing personal ties between its members than is typical for group blogs (one marriage notwithstanding).2 Our original membership was formed when one person emailed six or seven of his regular reads (all male) with the idea of forming a group blog. Guest bloggers who later became regular members were recruited partly through personal networks and partly through self-nomination. Interestingly, I don’t think we ever had a woman ask whether she could write for us, whereas at least four men have.

I think that the population-level is where we should be most concerned about issues of equity. The conversations sustained across blogs should be representative at least of the composition of bloggers. People who think this isn’t important should recall the complaints that get made when journalists write stories about blogging: it usually turns out that the bloggers that get the most attention — e.g., Mickey Kaus, Glenn Reynolds, Josh Marshall — are often people with strong ties to mainstream media outlets, or are in fact full-time journalists. Homophily again. Worrying about the composition of specific blogs seems less productive. CT is not a formal organization, doesn’t provide a service people pay for, and comes with no warranty express or implied about the content or quality of its contributions. There are a myriad of other choices available should you not be satisfied, and I don’t think anyone is actually forced to read us. Even so, I do think that if we’d been a little more on the ball earlier on — before we maxed-out the roster, discovered that this was going to be a relatively popular enterprise, or realized we might need to plan for growth, or anything else — we might have a somewhat different group today.

Update: David Adesnik at OxBlog responds in part to this post, though I don’t find a lot of it all that satisfactory. Some quick responses. First, David says, “Surprisingly, one issue Kieran doesn’t raise is whether the gender gap in academic blogging reflects the gender gap in academia as whole.” This is odd, because the first sentence in the “Why Does This Imbalance Exist?” section above says, “The fact that there are fewer academic women with blogs shouldn’t be that much of a surprise, given everything else we know about gender issues in academia or elsewhere.” I didn’t rehearse that stuff, but it’s not true to say I didn’t bring it up. Second, and a bit more substantively, David says

The most interesting idea that Kieran throws out there is that women have a general tendency to be less assertive than men when it comes to demanding attention and rewards for their achievement. … This identification of significant behavior differences between the sexes opens up a whole Pandora’s Box of hypotheses about the gender gap that might sound cliche and sexist if a conservative without a Ph.D. in sociology decided to elaborate them.

This isn’t right, either. Let me reiterate (again) that I don’t know whether this phenomenon matters to blogging, or what its importance is relative to other mechanisms. It’s just one possibility. However, believing it entails no commitment at all to “cliche[d] and sexist” views. Not asking for things or not promoting yourself can just be a learned behavior whose rudiments are acquired very early in life and which can be reinforced in all sorts of ways later on in the workplace or seminar room. In other words, this sort of gendered practice might be explanatory in particular contexts, but is also itself an outcome, rather than some immutable fact about men and women.

And if any female bloggers who’ve thought about this more than I have want to ping this thread, feel free.

Notes

1 Can we have a better word for that, please?

2 Though my own argument suggests there are plenty of group blogs out there that might be counterexamples, but I’m unaware of their existence.

Honorary Ladettes R Us

Posted by Belle Waring

OMG! It’s recently been brought to my attention that I’ve only written one post for CT this whole month! That’s, like, totally weak! Under our new posting rules, I’m going to be bringing my A game, every single day. “No Scrubs” is going to be playing in my cubicle 24-7. And if I slack off, dsquared is going to subject me to ferocious Welsh discipline, of the sort handed out at the gloomy Welsh “public” school he attended starting at age 3. (I can’t go into it here, but it involves leeks. And that white jack thingy from bowls.) Let’s see…um…there must be something out there on the interweb. Here we go, something funny a straight white guy said!:

I’m glad the press is having a dance party with this, because God knows the Democrats are frozen at the steering wheel. I just saw a segment on MSNBC (which has been all over the Kerik story today, bless Rick Kaplan’s cyborg heart) pitting a Republican strategist against a Democratic one, and the Democratic spokesman—who goes by the name of Michael Brown—seemed to have washed down his weeny pills with warm Ovaltine. Instead of kicking Kerik and Giuliana between the uprights for three points, Brown fretted that vetting process for cabinet candidates was “going to far,” and that we were in danger of discouraging people from public service. Oh no, we wouldn’t want to discourage philandering, pocket-lining, deadbeat no-show bully-boys like Bernard Kerik from having the opportunity to muck around with our civil liberties in the name of “national security” and hold bigshot press conferences. I mean, if that sort of thing were to continue happening, people might start mistaking the Democrats for an opposition party and thinking that the press has an adversarial role to play, and we don’t want that to happen, it might actually lead to signs of life in that mausoleum we call the nation’s capital. This Michael Brown wouldn’t even criticize Alberto Gonzalez for botching the background check and vetting of Kerik. I don’t understand the self-emasculation of so many Democratic strategists, what they’re afraid of, why they concede so much in advance. Give them an opening, and they close it like a silk kimono, ever so demure. What are they in politics for, the professional grooming tips?

You know, James Wolcott could be totally gay. I’m agnostic on this front. I know, I’ll ask one of my male co-bloggers! They know so much stuff, it’s awesome. Guys? Oh, and, does anyone want a coffee?

The Wisdom of Crowds who don't check facts

Posted by Daniel
Let’s try and step on this canard before it grows wings … Oliver Kamm is quoting some writer at Fortune saying something that ain’t true about election betting markets.
The reputation of exit polls was perceptibly if unfairly damaged by the US presidential election. But, as a writer in Fortune magazine points out, another predictor was unambiguously accurate. This was the electronic predictions market: the various websites allowing punters to place bets on the electoral outcome.
As anyone who was watching the CT Election Night Special will know, this just isn’t true. The election markets, on the big day, were more or less exactly as bad at providing us with predictive information as were the exit polls. I think that we may have been the only place recording the intraday fluctuations on the prediction markets (which were massive), so maybe it’s important to summarise the facts.

The IEM was predicting a Kerry victory on the morning of the election; Tradesports wasn’t in the morning but started to do so during the day. When the exit poll data was published on Slate at 1600ET, both Tradesports and IEM reacted to it imediately; the price of the Bush contracts collapsed (about half an hour later, so did the Tradesports and IEM websites, under the load). As late as 1830ET, the markets had squarely plumped for Kerry, prompting me to write the following comment on our trader-talk thread:

Bush now down to 17+5 mid price on IEM. Surely to God he’s got more of a chance than that? Tradesports has him at 29 bid. For what it’s worth, Newsnight just suggested that Kerry’s lead in the early exit polls was attenuating as more information came in …

The Bush contracts recovered during the evening as it became clearer and clearer that the exit polls were wrong (by 2109ET, I was writing “Bush back up to 40% on Tradesports; anyone know anything we don’t?”, but there is simply no support in the intraday record for the contention that the markets had any information marginal to that contained in the exit polls.

The IEM and Tradesports contracts certainly did get it right by saying for most of the contract life that Bush would win, but so did the polls. Bush was ahead in the polls throughout the race, both nationally and in a preponderance of swing states; predictions of a Kerry victory like Ruy Teixeira’s were entirely based on a belief that don’t knows would break against the incumbent, that high turnout favoured Kerry, or various other ways of rationalising away the evidence in front of one’s eyes (a tendency we warned about). The best election predictions, as far as I can tell, came from Stuart “Dr Pollkatz” Thiel’s state-level poll correlation approach. As far as the question of “Collective Wisdom” is concerned, I stand by my assessment posted at 2:38am UK time (2138 ET), at which point I seem to remember that I was rather drunk:

“Bush keeps nudging up you know; more like 45% now. This election was 50/50 and remains 50/50, and we shouldn’t have got carried away by the “Wisdom” of fucking “Crowds of Halfwits Who Read Slate”. I still think that in a 50/50 jump ball, Bush wins by 20 electoral votes. Dark pessimism etc.”

December 16, 2004

Blogs by students

Posted by Eszter

I am teaching an undergraduate class this Winter called “Internet and Society”. [1] I am going to require each student to maintain his/her own blog. This poses some challenges from keeping up with the amount of written material to assuring a certain level of privacy for students (as per related federal laws). I still have a few weeks to think about the specifics and thought would see what experiences and wisdom others may have accumulated in this realm.

The course is a social science course (half the students will be Communication Studies majors, half of them Sociology majors) with a focus on exploring the social, political, economic and cultural aspects of the Internet. I do plan to teach students some technical skills, but that won’t be the focal point of the course. I will provide basic installation of Wordpress and then will work with students to tweak the layout and style to their liking. Those who are especially interested in this aspect will have the opportunity to personalize the blog considerably, but that will not be a requirement.

The closest analogy to requiring blogs seems to be classes where students are required to keep journals. I have only seen this done once so I am curious to hear about additional experiences (or, of course, any experiences people may have with blogs by students in particular). The idea is to ask students to comment on their readings and class discussions on their blogs. They would be required to write a certain number of entries (I am not yet sure how many). They would also be required to comment on other students’ blogs (I am not yet sure how often).

One challenge of this method is that it creates a lot of material for the instructor to follow (there will be around 30-40 students enrolled in this class). In fact, it is probably not realistic to expect the instructor to follow all this writing, or even to ask a teaching assistant to read all the blogs constantly. One way I thought to evaluate this amount of material is to ask students at the end of the quarter to submit their best X number of posts for evaluation and perhaps the best Y number of comments they made on other people’s blogs. Nonetheless, I would like to keep up with the material as the quarter progresses so thoughts students express on blogs can be incorporated into class lectures and discussions.

As to why require blogs in the first place, here are some reasons. First, I like the idea of asking student to keep journals. It is hard to get students to do class readings, but requiring constant reaction to the readings and discussions should help. Second, I think asking students to maintain blogs will help convey some points to them about the potential of the Web to help people reach wide audiences. Of course the particular point there is that simply having a Web site in no way guarantees that someone suddenly has a wide-reaching public voice. But I think this will be easier to convey if students experience it first hand. On the other hand, the blogs will be public and it may be that people not associated with the class find them, read them and comment on them, which could be an interesting experience for students. (I have specific plans in mind to encourage such outside involvement.) Finally, knowing that one’s peers are reading one’s writing seems to encourage more serious reflection on the part of students than simply handing in assignments to an instructor so the overall quality of writing should be higher. That’s more of a hunch than a claim I can back up by any systematic evidence.

Due to federal laws about students’ privacy, there is the additional concern of keeping students’ identities private on their blogs. Information about what classes students are taking is not supposed to be made public. My thinking on this right now is to recommend to everyone that they blog under a pseudonym, but if they decide on their own to make public their identities that is up to them. What I have not yet decided is whether I should suggest that everybody stay anonymous to each other. Commenting on course material anonymously may allow certain people to open up more than they would otherwise or express opinions they may not want to if their identities were known. But it may make the incorporation of blog material into in-person class discussions somewhat tedious.

Fn1. The syllabus is not yet available, but you can view a brief class description here.

Free speech and hate speech

Posted by Chris

I’ve been wanting to post some observations on the British government’s proposal to criminalize incitement to religious hatred. The issue may be now be moot, thanks to the departure of David Blunkett, but there were assumptions made in the standard blog critique (SBC) that I wasn’t happy with. There were also considerations omitted that I thought should have been given some weight. Let me stress that I don’t think that this bill should have passed. Nevertheless the arguments in the SBC were seriously defective and/or incomplete.

So what was wrong with the SBC?

(1) The SBC thinks of free speech on libertarian lines: there’s the little blogger (or journalist, or man in the pub) who wants to say something, and the nasty government which wants to stop them. Even though, the SBC sometimes concedes, what is said may provoke hatred against Muslims (for example), it would be very very dangerous to leave governments with discretion over what does or does not constitute hate speech. But I don’t accept that we should start by thinking about free speech on the model of individual rights versus nasty government. Rather, in a just state, we should assure people both of certain basic political freedoms and of the fair value of those freedoms. And that assurance of fair value means that we-the-people have to do some regulation in order to give everyone a fair opportunity to have their voice heard in the public forum.

What does this require? Well, most obviously it requires some regulation of media ownership, access to the airwaves and so on. States and societies where broadcasting is dominated by a few conglomerates or where the money people make film-makers tone down the anti-religious content of their films , are seriously defective from a free-speech point of view. It isn’t the intervention of the state that’s a problem here, it is its silence. (And cue suitable extension of the argument to money-in-politics generally).

But second, and most pertinent in this discussion, securing a fair opportunity of access to all may mean we have to get some people to shut up! Most obviously this restriction of speech for the sake of speech has a place in formal debates: people speak through the chair, they can’t exceed their allotted time, mustn’t interrupt others, etc. But beyond that special formal setting, it cannot be excluded (and certainly not a priori ) that restrictions are sometimes justified. One of the purposes of hate speech — and other forms of intimidation, such as private employers threatening to sack people — is to cow its targets (and their defenders) into submission, and to create a climate where only the very bravest are willing to express themselves. In my view, securing a fair opportunity for all to express reasoned argument in the public forum ought to trump any unrestricted right to “free expression”.

Note that this cuts all ways. The right of apostates to express their apostasy, of gay Muslims to express their views etc, is plausibly threatened by hate speech directed at them by the ultra-religious. I’m not suggesting “offensiveness” as a test, but fair access for all. And I’d like to enter a caveat: those putting the SBC are right about the untrustworthiness of the state in the real world, so I’m pragmatically averse to state-imposed speech restrictions. I’m just saying that guaranteeing a fair opportunity to put a point of view in a way that acknowledges the right of others also to put their point of view is fundamental, rather than individual right of free expression.

(2) Many advocates of the SBC write about religion being a matter of choice, or religion consisting of a body of doctrine which ought to be open to critique etc. I basically agree, though I think people sometimes overstate the chosenness of religion. But their insistence on these points amounts to an almost wilful neglect of another, namely that even if religion is a matter of choice, religious identity may not be. There are societies where “Are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?” is a sensible question, and I think it reasonable to suppose that strictly doctrinal differences play a limited role in the opinions of Glasgow Rangers supporters about Catholics, just as the “nationalist” skinheads who beat up a gay Muslim for being, among other things, a Muslim, are not that interesting in debating the finer points of Islamic jurisprudence. The lack of actual religious beliefs among many Bosnian Muslims, does not seem to have lessened the animosity of their Serb or Croat persecutors.

SBCers have asked why religion should get special protection. Well it shouldn’t. In particular circumstances the group whose members may be being denied a fair opportunity to participate in public life by hate speech may be those with a particular religious identity, gays, women, racial or ethnic groups, etc. If is is true that there is such exclusion, then there’s a prima facie justification for laws that address that, and a law that’s appropriate for postwar Bosnia, say, may not be appropriate for Illinois. And there’s the questions of whether such laws will do more harm than good, whether they will be effective, and so on.

Is it in fact true that Islamophobic hate speech is denying Muslims in the UK a fair opportunity to play their role as citizens of a democracy? No, I don’t think it is. (And, certainly, and pretty obviously, much of the speech that Muslims are offended by, such as The Satanic Verses has no such exclusionary effect.) But if Muslims were, actually, being denied fair access to the public realm by hate speech, that would, in principle, provide grounds for the limitation of such speech.

December 14, 2004

Excessive Snarkiness

Posted by Henry

A couple of days ago, I got into a bit of a back-and-forth with Stephen Bainbridge about his interpretation of a Jonathan Chait piece. While I still think that he should have been more generous in his interpretation of Chait, I was less generous still in my response, and believe on reflection that I owe Prof. Bainbridge an apology. God knows, a bit of snarkiness here and there enlivens discussion in the blogosphere, but it also tends to drive out proper argument in favour of the venting of spleen on both sides. I think we could have had a proper argument here. My bad.

December 13, 2004

Ents and Trolls

Posted by Henry

Apropos of Dan’s post below, it’s interesting how unconcerned Jim Lindgren and many other critics of European anti-semitism appear to be when it’s European Muslims who are at the receiving end of the jackboot. Lindgren links approvingly to a ‘fascinating’ (read: bizarre and very possibly deranged) article by Victor Davis Hanson at the National Review Online about the ‘Ents’ of Europe. Apparently, Europeans, like Ents, have slumbered through the threat from Islamofascism. Hanson hopes that the Dutch Ents at least are waking up to the dangers that they face from the Islamists in their midst, and finishes by calling for a European Demosthenes who will ‘soberly but firmly’ demand an end to multiculturalism and the internal threat from radical Islam. It’s quite unfair to note in this context that the leader of the racist Belgian Vlaams Blok party has just called for the European far right to join forces to combat the ‘Islamization of Europe.’ But it’s not at all unfair to see something disturbing and even disgusting in the way that Hanson glides over the mosque-burnings and racist and religious violence that have happened over the last several weeks as a consequence of the ‘waking up’ of the Netherlands. As I’ve mentioned before, I much prefer it when the more ignorant members of the American right-wing commentariat limit themselves to attacks on European anti-semitism, even if they grossly exaggerate its extent and effects. It’s much more disturbing when they praise Europe than when they damn it - they invariably latch onto the nastiest and most atavistic aspects of European politics and policy.

Koufax Award Nominations

Posted by Kieran

Nominations are now open for the 2004 Koufax Awards. If you think we deserve it, head over and nominate CT for any or all of Best Blog, Best Group Blog, Best Writing, Best Post and Best Looking. I think that last one is a category.

December 07, 2004

Left2Right

Posted by Brian

There’s been a lot of hubbub, both here and elsewhere in the blogworld, about the Becker-Posner blog. But if it’s intellectual firepower in a group blog you’re after, you should be reading Left2Right. Here’s its mission statement, which should be good for setting off a round of debates.

In the aftermath of the 2004 Presidential election, many of us have come to believe that the Left must learn how to speak more effectively to ears attuned to the Right. How can we better express our values? Can we learn from conservative critiques of those values? Are there conservative values that we should be more forthright about sharing? “Left2Right” will be a discussion of these and related questions.

Although we have chosen the subtitle “How can the Left get through to the Right?”, our view is that the way to get through to people is to listen to them and be willing to learn from them. Many of us identify ourselves with the Left, but others are moderates or independents. What we share is an interest in exploring how American political discourse can get beyond the usual talking points.

The contributors so far include Elizabeth Anderson, Kwame Appiah, Josh Cohen, Stephen Darwall, Gerald Dworkin, David Estlund, Don Herzog, Jeff McMahan, Seana Shiffrin, and David Velleman. Wowsa. And many other names you may have heard of, from Peter Railton to Richard Rorty, are listed as being part of the team. This should be worth following.

December 06, 2004

Posner and Becker Comedy Gold

Posted by Kieran

As Eszter notes, the Becker/Posner Blog has solved whatever collective action problems it was having earlier in the week and now the first two substantive posts are up, both on the topic of preventive war, one from Becker and one from Posner. Right now, my working theory is that the blog is an elaborate hoax. How else to explain stuff like this:

Should imminence be an absolute condition of going to war, and preventive war thus be deemed always and everywhere wrong? Analytically, the answer is no. A rational decision to go to war should be based on a comparison of the costs and benefits (in the largest sense of these terms) to the nation. … Suppose there is a probability of .5 that the adversary will attack at some future time, when he has completed a military build up, that the attack will, if resisted with only the victim’s current strength, inflict a cost on the victim of 100, so that the expected cost of the attack is 50 (100 x .5), but that the expected cost can be reduced to 20 if the victim incurs additional defense costs of 15. Suppose further that at an additional cost of only 5, the victim can by a preventive strike today eliminate all possibility of the future attack. Since 5 is less than 35 (the sum of injury and defensive costs if the future enemy attack is not prevented), the preventive war is cost-justified. A historical example that illustrates this analysis is the Nazi reoccupation of the Rhineland area of Germany in 1936 …

The real Richard Posner is one of the preeminent legal minds of our time, so he can hardly be responsible for this. For one thing, parody of this quality is pretty difficult to write and I don’t think he has the time to devote to the task. Notice how the eminently reasonable introduction by “Posner” (as we shall call him) leads the reader to expect some sort of informed analysis — “a comparison of costs and benefits (in the largest sense of these terms).” But once this hook has been swallowed, within a paragraph we are in a fantasy world — “the expected cost of the attack is 50 (100 x .5), … can be reduced to 20 if the victim incurs additional defense costs of 15. Suppose further …” Suppose further! Quite brilliant stuff. The sudden non-sequitur about the Nazi occupation of the Rhine caps the piece with Godwinesque cheek. After the lead-in sentence, “Posner” is careful not to mention again the war being prosecuted in Iraq. This is a nice move, reminiscent of the best UseNet trolls. When angry bloggers complain that neither the cost-benefit thing nor the analogy to Hitler make any contact with present reality whatsoever, or suggest that the post sounds like it was written in the Autumn of 2002 — or maybe the Winter of 1990 — they’ll have unwittingly set themselves up for a fall: after all, “Posner” was only considering the justifiability of preventive war sub specie aeternitas, not the actual costs and benefits of any particular war the U.S. might or might not be engaged in at present.

Speaking of which, “Posner’s” strategy neatly avoids the sticky business of having to work out a real cost-benefit calculation using available numbers — ones like, e.g., the cost of war to date in real dollars, N Combat Fatalities to date, skill-adjusted dollar value of Generic U.S. service person, QALY adjustment for each of N Injuries sustained by U.S. service people, Expected Number of Fatalities in an Iraqi-sponsored WMD attack on the U.S. Mainland, productivity losses to an Iraqi WMD attack, probability that Saddam Hussein had WMDs of any sort, likelihood that they could have been delivered to the U.S., etc, etc. Those last two quantities are now known with a high degree of confidence to approximately equal zero, by the way. This might make it easier to calculate the right-hand side of the equation after the fact. (If you worry that having this calculation before the fact would have been more useful, but think it would have been extremely difficult to do in any precise but still sensible way, congratulations on your perspicuity.)

Elsewhere on the blog, the absurd suck-up comments from law students are a further indication that the reader is being gamed. Take this one from “Charles”, for instance:

Dear Justice Posner, I am a 2L at DePaul and I just wanted to say that I think all of your legal decisions are brilliant. I think that you and Dr. Thomas Sowell are the most insightful economic minds in the world today.

Part letter to Santa, part backhanded swipe at Gary Becker — guess you’re the second string econ guy, Gary! — I’m surprised he didn’t mention he’d been a good boy all year and go on to ask for a Train Set and a copy of Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline. But that might have been painting the lily. All in all, I look forward to future entries, which may provide further clues as to who the deadpan genius behind this blog really is. The Medium Lobster perhaps? The PoorMan maybe? I await further developments with interest.

Update: Sentence edited for clarity about probabilities.

December 05, 2004

Wordpress

Posted by Eszter

I’ve been meaning to post about the blogging software Wordpress and a recent announcement from our hosting service Dreamhost now gives me even more reason to do so. Wordpress is a great free blogging software that I decided to use for my own blog back in the summer when I was upgrading various parts of my site. It is free both in the sense that you don’t have to pay for a copy and in the sense that you have the freedom to modify its code. It is filled with wonderful features such as no rebuilding when making changes to your template and efficient ways of dealing with comment spam. Wordpress is committed to offering cool features of other programs such as MT’s Trackback. It also offers importers for Movable Type, Greymatter, Blogger, b2, and Textpattern with others forthcoming (Nucleus and pMachine). Moreover, it is quite easy to install, definitely much more straight forward than some other programs such as Movable Type. When they say it takes five minutes they aren’t kidding (granted, some more general prior technical knowledge can be very helpful).

But wait! If you don’t have five minutes to spare (and perhaps you’re lacking some of those technical basics) then Dreamhost is the way to go. A few days ago they announced automatic installation of Wordpress on Dreamhost accounts. We at CT use Dreamhost for our hosting service as do I for my own sites. I highly recommend them. Their prices are extremely reasonable and the services just keep getting better.1

Once you are done with the installation, all sorts of styles are available to alter the default one. For those just a tiny bit more ambitious but without the necessary prior knowledge, it’s possible to pick up the requisite PHP and CSS know-how within an afternoon (okay, based on prior HTML skills and a certain amount of geek determination) to make additional changes to the designs. All-in-all, I’ve been very happy with Wordpress having used it for about three months now. And the Dreamhost install option is awesome.2

1 Full disclosure: if you sign up for their services through the above link, CT will get a referral fee.

2 I will be setting up blogs for about thirty students in a month so I welcome any feature that assists the process.

November 29, 2004

Legitimation effects

Posted by Henry

Eugene Volokh points us to a new blog (no entries yet), which will be co-written by Gary Becker and Richard Posner. This provides a nice opportunity for casual empiricism in the cause of predictive social science. As perusors of the academic blogroll may notice, there are huge disparities between different disciplines (some of this is surely sampling error, but only some). There are lots and lots of philosophy blogs and law blogs, but many other academic disciplines, including economics, seem surprisingly under-represented in the blogosphere. I suspect that one of the important causal factors is legitimation. Junior academics may be unwilling to get involved in blogging. Not only is it a time-suck, but it may seem faintly disreputable - senior scholars in many fields of the social sciences take a dim view of ‘popularizing.’ However if there is a well known senior scholar in a discipline who blogs, it’s much easier for junior people in that discipline to dip their toes in the water without worrying that it’ll hurt their tenure chances. I suspect that this helps explain the explosion of philosophy blogs - the fact that Brian Leiter (who is responsible for a hugely influential ranking of philosophy programs) blogs lowered the entry costs for other philosophers; so too with law and the Volokhs. If I’m right, we should see an explosion in economics blogs over the next twelve months, now that Brad DeLong and other blogging economists have been joined by Becker, who’s as close to a household name as you can be in the dismal science.

November 26, 2004

Post or perish ?

Posted by John Quiggin

There’s been a fair bit of discussion among academic bloggers about whether blogs count for the purposes of vitas and if so how. The maximalist position (so far not put forward seriously by anyone as far as I know) is that each blog post is a separate publication. The minimal claim is that blogs are a form of community service, like talking to school groups and similar. A good place to start, with plenty of links to earlier contributions, is this post by Eszter.

Rather than engaging directly with the arguments that have been put up so far, I want to claim that the question will ultimately be settled by the way in which blogs are used and referred to. In this context, I have a couple of observations.

First, I’ve had one reader tell me that he’s cited one of my posts in an academic work, and I think this is not unique. Clearly, the more this happens, the more conventions for referring to blog posts will be developed, and the more easily they can be incorporated in vitas and so on.

Second, I had an interesting recent communication from the Senior Secondary Assessment Board of South Australia, which sets school examinations. They used this post in an exam paper for Year 12 politics. They wrote asking for copyright permission to print it in their set of past papers1.

The blog post was a response to an opinion piece by Gerard Henderson, and I guess this is about where I see blogs fitting at present. Posts are like short versions of opinion pieces or contributions to magazines like The New Republic or, in Australia, Quadrant and Eureka Street. As was noted by some earlier commentators, blogs have pretty much captured the territory occupied by these magazines, to the extent that quite a few have responded by establishing their own blogs. I list all my opinion pieces in my CV (which is in moderate need of updating, I see), but I’ve not yet done the same with the blog.

1 Interestingly, the board has the right to use material in exam papers without telling anyone, even the author, so as to preserve secrecy. It’s only when they want to reprint that they need copyright permission.

November 18, 2004

The academic contributions of blogging?

Posted by Eszter

I realize this topic has been discussed here (e.g here, here, here, here, here, here) and elsewhere (e.g. Brian Leiter, but also in the mainstream media: e.g. The Guardian, Chicago Tribune) numerous times already. I am bringing it up because I have been asked to speak to a campus-wide audience about academia in a digital world and I have picked as my topic: “Can blogs revive academic debate?” I only have about fifteen minutes to talk and I want to touch upon several points. What better way to prepare for such a talk than to try out some of the ideas on a blog? There are two main points I want to address and thought I’d discuss here a bit. I welcome your feedback. First, I want to talk about blogs as a great medium for debate of all sorts that does not always seem possible in one’s immediate physical surroundings. Second, I would like to consider how the material posted and discussed on blogs relates to published material and whether there is any potential for such contributions to count toward one’s academic achievements and service. I elaborate on the second point below. There seems to be some amount of disagreement in the blogosphere on this issue and I wanted to bring it up for some more discussion.

One emerging theme seems to be that there are definite benefits to blogging for many academics, but these are often not very tangible. In addition to the general intellectual exchange many of us likely find of value (or hopefully we would not be spending so much time on it) is the feedback we receive on specific research related posts that has the potential to influence our thinking and writing. This has certainly happened to me and I consider it a somewhat tangible benefit although one that only shows up indirectly on my CV. (That is, I may have publications that benefitted from valuable feedback on blog posts.)

A potentially important aspect of blogging by academics concerns whether blogging activity can count in any way toward getting a job or promotion and tenure. Another approach has been to ask whether it may work against those goals. Daniel Drezner, Brian Leiter and Brian Weatherson have specifically dismissed the idea that blogging should be counted as rigorous scholarship although they seem supportive of the idea that it could be considered under one’s academic service. Here, I would like to challenge the position of dismissing blogging as relevant scholarship altogether.

I would like to do this by comparing blog writing to journal publishing, undoubtedly one of the most wide-spread and accepted measures of academic achievement. There are posts on blogs that are certainly much more original and careful in their arguments (and more clearly written) than many articles that get published in academic journals. I think people’s reluctance to consider blog writing as comparable to journal publishing comes from thinking about journals in a somewhat romanticized and unrealistic manner. Sure, the most prestigious journals may not be the best comparison group (although even they publish articles one wonders about), but plenty of work gets published in peer-reviewed journals that would make most people either yawn or hurl the journal straight out the window. So why be so incredibly critical of blog writing when many don’t seem to be nearly as critical of journal publications.

I am not suggesting that blog posts as they exist would likely be published in journals. The format of the medium is too different for that. (After all, you’d have to have the requisite literature review instead of linking to a few relevant pieces, or give much more details about methods and analyses where data are concerned - just to name a few obvious differences.) But one extremely important component of the journal publishing process is very much present on blogs (or can be): the peer review process (this claim is in direct contrast with Brian Leiter’s assertion a while back). Blogs that allow comments make it possible for others to discuss the posted material. In many ways this is much more conducive to intellectual exchange and the advancement of knowledge than publishing articles in journals that no one will ever read. Not only is the original post available to all subsequent readers but so are the reactions of others. Sure, there are all sorts of limitations present. It may be that the most appropriate people are not reading the post and so those who would be able to offer the most helpful and relevant critique are not present in the discussion. But this is often likely true in the journal refereeing process as well. After all, how absurd that one’s chances of a job or promotion and tenure are so gravely dependent on the whimsy of no more than two or three people out there? (This is not an exaggeration. The likelihood of a new candidate on the market getting a good (or any) job in a field like sociology is tremendously increased by a publication in a top sociology journal.)

Again, I am not suggesting that blogs be considered a replacement for journal publications. I am just suggesting that dismissing them completely in the area of academic contributions seems like a mistake. If the journal publishing process was less flawed then perhaps there would be less need to look for alternatives. But since the traditional measures by which we evaluate academic contributions have serious limitations, it may be worth considering the potential role other venues may play in the process. I don’t have the answers. I have no specific recommendations as to how this could be achieved in a tangible manner. But I think it is a discussion worth having.

Just one more point on all this. It may well be that a better comparison and more relevant discussion to have here is whether contributing to public discourse - through articles published in the mainstream media (possibly a better comparison to blog writing than journal publishing) - should have any input in hiring and promotion decisions. It is not clear whether this matters in current practices (or whether it might actually hinder people’s prospects) and that’s another important point to consider in this discussion.

November 17, 2004

Requests to the lazyweb

Posted by Henry

A request aimed at those out there with halfway decent coding skills - somebody, somewhere, should write an MT-Disemvowel plugin for Movable Type. For those not familiar with the concept, disemvowelling, pioneered by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, is the most effective troll-repellent yet invented. You leave the troll’s comment up, but remove all the vowels from it. It can still be read by anyone who has a bit of patience, but makes the troll look rather ridiculous. So far, on the very few occasions I’ve had to use it, it’s worked absolutely perfectly. The only problem is that it’s a bit of a nuisance - it takes a couple of minutes to remove the vowels manually from the longer harangues. Seems like something that a not-very-complicated .cgi script could accomplish in a flash - anyone out there up to the task?

Update: gratitude and kudos to Novalis, who within eight minutes of the request reheated some previously existing code to create the Dsmvwllr.

November 13, 2004

Did Blogs Tip election 2004: Update

Posted by Henry

For anyone planning to come along to the debate, there has been a venue change - the details are below. For anyone wanting to know what I’m going to say in response to the question, the short answer is ‘no, they didn’t.’

WHEN:
Thursday, November 18
7:30-9:00 pm

WHERE (note new location!):
Porter’s Dining Saloon
1207 19th St. NW (19th and M Street)
Washington, DC

November 08, 2004

Blog crackdown in Iran

Posted by Henry

One of the problems of writing about current affairs is that your claims are often overtaken by events. So it goes for the article that Dan Drezner and I have in the current issue of Foreign Policy. We said (accurately at the time of writing) that blogs in Iran have provided a partial substitute for reformist newspapers that have been shut down, and that “government efforts to [censor the Internet] have been sporadic and only partially successful.” The Iranian blogosphere is one of the very few inarguable cases of how the Internet can sometimes create more pressure towards democratization. However, almost immediately after our article went to press, hardliners in Iran began to crack down on reformist websites and blogs. Now that the anti-reformist elements in the government have decided to take action, I suspect that the outlook for political blogs in Iran isn’t very good, although outside protests and negative publicity may help limit the extent of the backlash (it’s worked, at least in part, in the past).

November 05, 2004

Friday crying-on-the-inside thread

Posted by Ted

After a bitter, polarizing election, the gift of entertainment can be such a comfort. This weekend, Americans of all persuasions are sure to come together at a special film event. I’m talking, of course, about Alfie. Bush’s base can clearly identify with a priapic European in New York, wearing designer clothing and bedding everything in a skirt. And as a temporarily despondent liberal, nothing can lift my spirits like watching the handsome and suave Jude Law pad around for ninety minutes like a fucking gigolo tomcat. Let the healing begin.

Sigh.

Here’s the thread: post a link that makes you laugh. I’ve got a few under the break.

The Greatest Picture Ever

Lord of the Rings IV Information Center

Furniture Porn

Literary giants (and also Camille Paglia) woo Britney Spears.

Jay Pinkerton’s Superman sequels

Progressive Boink takes on photo caption contests.

Finally,

A horse walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Hey, buddy, why the long face?” And the horse says, “Because I’m sad.”

November 04, 2004

It's called gratitude

Posted by Ted

Many thanks to guest poster Bill Gardner for his on-the-ground posts about the scene in Columbus. If the bug hits him and he decides to start blogging on his own, we’d be glad to give it some attention.

November 01, 2004

Did Blogs Tip Election 2004?

Posted by Henry

For CT readers and others in the DC area …

DID BLOGS TIP ELECTION 2004?
IHS and Reason magazine present Ana Marie Cox, Daniel Drezner, Henry Farrell, and Michael Tomasky debating the role of blogs in the election on November 18.

WHAT:
A free-for-all discussion on the role of blogs and politics featuring Wonkette’s Ana Marie Cox, blogger and University of Chicago political scientist Daniel Drezner, blogger and George Washington University political scientist Henry Farrell, The American Prospect’s Michael Tomasky, moderated by Reason’s Nick Gillespie.

Drinks and hors d’oeuvres to follow remarks and Q&A.

WHEN:
Thursday, November 18
7:30-9:00 pm

WHERE:
Topaz Bar
1733 N Street NW, Washington, DC
Washington Post

Space is limited, so please reserve a place by RSVPing to Alina Stefanescu
at astefane@gmu.edu. Free drink tickets will be given to the first 50
respondents!

Where blogosphere triumphalism meets the Dolchstosslegende

Posted by Henry

Glenn Reynolds and Roger L. Simon tell us that if Kerry wins, it will be the fault of the mainstream media, and that the blogosphere will have its revenge. Simon’s post is especially creepy.

If the Kerry does win, the mainstream media will have gotten him elected with their biased coverage and they will pay for it more than they could imagine. And it will be the blogosphere and you, our supporters, who will make them pay. Our strength will grow incremently [sic] with a Kerry victory in terms of influence and even economic power. And both will be at the expense of the mainstream media. Yes, we too have “plans.”

This is surely the blossoming of blogosphere triumphalism into a fully-fledged pathology. A self-sustaining narrative about the perfidy of Big Media is allowing certain bloggers to “explain” why their preferred candidate might be defeated, without any uncomfortable re-examination of prior beliefs that have turned out to be wrong. As a bonus, this provides them with a sort of tinpot revanchist mythology. If Kerry does indeed win, I’ve no doubt that Reynolds, Simon and company would be able to maintain a Regnery Publications-style alternative narrative about how they were robbed, how the invasion of Iraq really would have been a success if it weren’t for those perfidious newspapers’ insistence on ignoring adorable little kitten stories etc etc. But given that warbloggers, like the rest of us, aren’t great shakes at going out there and digging up actual new information, the best they can realistically hope for is to become a distributed version of what the Drudge Report was during the Clinton years, dishing out dirt, conspiracy theories and the odd bit of useful information, but fundamentally parasitic on the mainstream media that they claim to despise.

Update: see here for the unmissable Giblets remix.

Talking rubbish about epidemiology

Posted by Daniel

As Chris said, with respect to the Lancet study on excess Iraqi deaths, “I can predict with certainty that there will be numerous posts on weblogs supporting the war attacking the study”. Score several Cassandra points for Chris, they weren’t slow in coming. You can have the know-nothing rightwing flack variety or the handwringing liberal variety. And to be honest, the standard of critique is enough to make you weep.

Taking the complaints that seem to have been raised about this study:

“That is, a one in twenty chance that the effect simply does not exist” (from Tech Central Station). The author of the TCS piece appears to believe that because the Lancet study published a 95% confidence interval, there is a 5% chance that there was no effect. The problem with this critique is that it is not true.

“a relative risk ratio of anything less than three is regarded as statistically insignificant”. This is also from TCS, and also, simply, not true. Interesting to note that TCS appear to have upped the ante on this piece of bogus epidemiology; historically when they have been talking about passive smoking, the threshold for relative risk ratios has been two. Which is also bollocks. The TCS author appears to have a very shaky grasp of the statistical concepts he is using.

“This isn’t an estimate. It’s a dart board”. The critique here, from Slate, is that the 95% confidence interval for the estimate of excess deaths (8,000 to 200,000) is so wide that it’s meaningless. It’s wrong. Although there are a lot of numbers between 8,000 and 200,000, one of the ones that isn’t is a little number called zero. That’s quite startling. One might have hoped that there was at least some chance that the Iraq war might have had a positive effect on death rates in Iraq. But the confidence interval from this piece of work suggests that there would be only a 2.5% chance of getting this sort of result from the sample if the true effect of the invasion had been favourable. A curious basis for a humanitarian intervention; “we must invade, because Saddam is killing thousands of his citizens every year, and we will kill only 8,000 more”.

The estimate of prewar mortality is too low. The idea here is that the sample chosen for the survey had a mortality rate of about 5 per 1000 in the two years before the invasion. And, because the death rate for the period 1985-90 was 6.8 per 1000 according to UN figures, this in some way suggests that the estimates are at fault.

This critique is more interesting, but hardly devastating. For one thing, the contention that the Iraqi death rate did not fall from 6.8 to around 5 during the 1990s is based on “it must have done” rather than on hard numbers. Since the 6.8 number includes (as far as I can tell) atrocities committed by Saddam during the period which were not repeated in 2000-03, I am less convinced than the Slate author that the discrepancy strikes such a huge blow to the study’s credibility. In any case, since the study compares own-averages of the clusters before and after the invasion, anyone wanting to make this critique needs to come up with a convincing explanation of why it is that the study had a lower death-rate than the national average before the invasion and not after the invasion.

“various bog standard methodological quibbles are really really devastating”. This line of attack is usually associated with Steven Milloy, so I will nickname it the “devastating critique”. The example I found was here. The modus operandi is to take a decent piece of statistical research carried out by someone who got his hands dirty with the data, point out a few areas in which it differs from the Platonic Form of the Epidemiological Study (if you’re dealing with a really good study, it does your work for you here by alerting you to the specific difficulties), and then say something like “sheeeesh, how did this ever get published?!?!”. I’ve done it myself a few times, but that’s hardly a recommendation.

The Chicago Boyz blog post is an excellent example of the “Devastating Critique”. Surprise surprise, estimating civilian casualties is a difficult business. That’s why the confidence interval is so wide. They don’t actually raise any principled reasons why the confidence interval ought to be wider than the one published, and therefore they aren’t raising any questions which would make us think that this confidence interval should include zero.

It gives a different number from Iraq Body Count. so it must be wrong. This critique is also fairly stupid. The IBC numbers are compiled from well-sourced English language press reports. They therefore represent a lower bound on any credible estimate of casualties, not a definitive number. Thousands of people die in the UK every day; how many of them make it into the papers? How may into the Arabic language press?

One can score extra points for intellectual dishonesty on this count by citing Oxblog to try to imply that IBC is in some way an overestimate (and therefore, of course, to push that confidence interval in the direction of zero). As the link I’ve provided shows, the Oxblog critique (which I don’t agree with) refers in the main to whether documented casualties can be blamed on the Americans; there is no well-founded challenge to suggest that the people IBC lists as dead are in fact consuming oxygen.

There is something intrinsically suspect about accelerated peer review. As John pointed out not so long ago, the time taken for peer review is determined by academic procrastination above all other factors. Every academic paper could complete its peer review very quickly if the reviewers got their finger out because they thought it was important. The suggestion that people are trying to make here is that reviewers for the Lancet usually spend six months humming and hawing over the data, to the exclusion of all other activity, and that this process was short-circuited by politically motivated editors wanting to rush something into print without anyone having a proper look at it. No such six month scrutiny ever takes place, and this objection is also Simply Not True.

The 100,000 figure should not have been headlined. Another staple critique of epidemiological studies one doesn’t like. It is true of more or less any study you hear of, since you never hear of studies that don’t have interesting headlines. In all honesty, I don’t like these extrapolated numbers, never have and never will. I don’t like linear models and I don’t like extrapolation. However, it’s a venial sin rather than a mortal one, and I have never, ever, at all, heard of anyone criticising it in a study that they otherwise liked. (Simple thought experiment; if the results of the study had been talking about 100,000 fewer deaths, would this critique have been made by the same people? Like hell).

The important thing as far as I’m concerned is the position of zero in the confidence interval; it seems very unlikely indeed that the process described could have given this sample if it was not the case that the invasion had made the death rate in Iraq worse rather than better. And this conclusion of the study is basically unchallenged. In fact, it’s in a better position than “unchallenged”; it’s been challenged so weakly and on such spurious grounds that my Bayesian assessment has been updated in its favour, on the basis that if those who disliked the study’s conclusion had any real ammunition against it, the published critiques would not have been so weak.

October 29, 2004

Hello, world

Posted by BillG

Let me intoduce myself. I am Bill Gardner and I live in Columbus, Ohio. I asked the Crooked Timber folks if I could guest blog on the election. I am a new Ohio voter, having just moved to the Ohio State University faculty last year. It’s possible that Ohio could prove to be the Gettysburg of the 2004 vote. If so, Columbus would be Cemetery Ridge. I’ll try to tell you what it looks like from here.

I don’t have any qualifications for this, other than being fascinated by this place and time. I’m a quantitative psychologist doing medical research in the OSU Pediatrics Department. I don’t know anything about philosophy, economics, or political theory (or cold temperature physics, or…). I’m such a dork that when I had the chance as a college freshman to take a class on The theory of justice from Rawls his own self, I passed because I thought his voice would put me to sleep. If only that was the worst educational choice I ever made.

October 27, 2004

Blogging and Blog Ads

Posted by Kieran

Somehow I missed this, but Jason Kottke made an interesting observation about popular blogs a few days ago:

Out of Technorati’s top 100 most-linked weblogs**, only 16 don’t feature advertising or are otherwise noncommercial:

Scripting News / Doc Searls / kottke.org / Jeffrey Zeldman / The Volokh Conspiracy / Scobleizer / Lileks / Joel on Software / Rather Good / Joi Ito’s Web / RonOnline / USS Clueless / BuzzMachine / Vodkapundit / Baghdad Burning / Crooked Timber

Lots of interesting observations to be made about the commercialization of weblogs…the quick uptake of advertising on blogs, the increasingly false perception of blogs as inherently unbiased by commercial interests (and therefore preferable to “big media”), the continuing shift from blogging as a hobby to blogging for a variety of reasons, the number of weblogs launching lately that have ads from day one, the demographic difference between the typical circa-2002 blogger and the blogger of today, etc.

There’s more discussion about this at his site. I’d also note that of the Top 100, and particularly those in the Top 50, there’s a lot of heterogeneity. Some are run by single individuals (like Kottke.org), some are group blogs (Volokh, Crooked Timber), some large communities (Metafilter) or social movements (Common Dreams), while others are commercial enterprises (Wonkette and the other Nick Denton Mini-Empire1 sites), and so on. Beyond that, the mix of technology, culture and politics would be worth a closer look, too. I also wonder whether Technorati have changed their criteria a bit: I remember the last time I looked closely at the Top 100 list (a few months ago) the top sites were all from the Suicide Girls porn outfit, but they seem to have largely disappeared from the listing. The presence of sites written in languages other than English, like this one and this one, seems like a new development as well.

To forestall pointless arguments, I should say that I don’t think taking advertising means your content automatically suffers or your character is corrupted by money or whatnot.2 But there’s a story here about viable organizational models for blogging. I sometimes think CT is just under a daily-visitor threshold that would change the character of the site. It’s not so much bandwidth costs as our relationship to commenters and so on. The software runs at a just-about-acceptable pace, and the comments threads are generally very good. But more visitors would put extra pressure on all of that. We’re still growing, so maybe we’ll see these changes whether we want to or not. Look out for our crossover deal with Burger King. I’m thinking Whoppers flame-grilled on crooked timbers, with Kids’ Meals containing small plastic effigies of Isaiah Berlin and copies of ‘What is Enlightenment?’

1 World’s smallest empire?

2 Though I do think your layout does: most of the drop-in advertising methods I’ve seen look like crap.

October 22, 2004

Not Me

Posted by Ted

Dan at Contrapositive has written up a very cool hour-by-hour guide to election night- what to expect, when not to panic, and what each Presidential candidate needs, as the night passes, to stay viable.

And McSweeney’s has a very funny little piece on history’s notable films:

The Terminator

According to The Terminator, in the future, time travel will be perfected, but it will only work on humans or flesh-covered appliances; fabric is out of the question. As interesting as the Terminators are, I would almost prefer to see a movie about the invention of this time-travel device, because I imagine it would feature a lot of lines like, “Well, the good news is, the flesh-covered toaster made it. The bad news is, the khakis didn’t.”

Signs

If I understand things correctly, Mel Gibson is a cleric who regains his faith in God after he realizes that his wife, in her dying moments, gave him a message that was too cryptic and oblique to save the lives of millions of people during an alien attack, but was just specific enough to save his son. This may be the most narrow definition of a miracle, ever.

October 07, 2004

Long after the New Economy

Posted by John Quiggin

Back in January, about a decade ago in Internet time, Kieran announced
This week at Crooked Timber, at the suggestion of Daniel, some of us will be discussing Doug Henwood’s new book, After the New Economy.
Henry followed up and Daniel gave us a series of Real Soon Now posts, which I suppose constitutes as good a representation of the New Economy as any.

At the time, I had a pretty good excuse for not joining in - the book hadn’t gone on sale in Australia. Brad de Long kindly sent me a copy, and, a mere eight months later, my review is done, at least in draft form. Comments much appreciated.

I’m not going to say a lot about Henwood’s chapter’s on work and income, but they alone represent enough reason for buying and reading the book. They represent a tightly argued demolition of claims that the New Economy provided prosperity for all, a humanisation of work and so on. Henwood is excellent on technical issues such as hedonic pricing and multifactor productivity as well as on the broader social implications of increasing working hours and work intensity

In the chapter on income, he documents the growth in inequality in the United States, while taking note of countervailing trends such as the gradual reduction in the gender gap in wages. On income mobility, he demolishes the assumption, almost universal on the political right, that greater income inequality in the US, compared to other developed countries, is offset by greater income mobility. In fact the reverse is true. Henwood gives a devastating critique of the slipshod but surprisingly popular, book Myths of Rich and Poor by Cox and Alm.

A general problem with debunking arguments is that, in the absence of a clear alternative model, critics of an orthodoxy tend to employ different arguments at different points, often producing internal inconsistency.

In reading Henwood, I could find only one, partial, example of such inconsistency. In criticising US productivity growth, Henwood correctly observes that output per hour is lower in the US than in several European countries. By contrast, in the discussion of international inequality, he observes that the gap between European and US income per person has not been reduced in the past decade or so.

But this point, which reflects reductions in European working hours, is a minor one in the context of the broader argument. Overall, Henwood presents a clear case for the interpretation of the New Economy labour market in the familiar terms of supply, demand and class conflict.

The chapter on globalisation is similarly strong. Although silly claims about globalisation and the New Economy have been refuted before, in broadly similar terms, Henwood rightly notes the need to ‘kick the thing while it’s down, to make sure it won’t get up again. Globalisation wss one, in the 1990s of those ‘vogue’ words that suddenly become ubiquitous. They seem to promise understanding of the ills and hopes of the day, and yet no one seems to know precisely what they mean. Henwood has some innocent fun with the hopelessly tangled definitions offered by sociologists and international relations analysts for ‘globalisation’ and its idealised opposite ‘place’, but doesn’t offer an alternative, except for replacing globalising by internationalising

Henwood observes that from the first, capitalism has been an international and internationalising system. The period from World War I to the breakdown of the Bretton Woods agreement, during which capital flows were tightly controlled was the exception rather than the rule. In a sense, as Henwood hints, 2003 is 1913 plus fibre optics.

Henwood criticises the kind of naïve enthusiasm for globalisation typified by Thomas Friedman. However, his primary ire is reserved for localist and nationalist leftwing critics of globalisation, such as Ralph Nader. As he says, these critics implicitly idolise a golden age of capitalism that never existed. Moreover, they tend to focus more on the moral evil of excess consumption than on real responses to exploitation. Faced with the dilemmas associated with low wages and poor working conditions in Third World factories, their solution is to boycott Nike, reducing its workers from low wages to no wages at all.

This point seems to have carried the day on the left. Those who once protested against globalisation now call themselves anti-capitalists. And on the moderate left, the issue now is not ‘for or against globalisation’ but ‘what kind of globalisation’.

The really interesting arguments in the book are found in the first chapter on the novelty or otherwise of the new economy and in the last on finance. Henwood begins with the observation that, in most respects the 1990s boom was a common-or-garden speculative bubble; the term ‘New Economy’ and even the ‘web’ metaphor for communications have been used many times before. And the boom was well underway before the spectacular Netscape IPO in 1995 focused attention on the Internet sector. In this discussion, Henwood draws heavily on the work of Robert Shiller, whose term ‘irrational exuberance’ came to characterise the entire dotcom mania.

More original and interesting is Henwood’s discussion of the body of rhetoric centred on the trope of ‘weightlessness’. This term is used to encompass a range of real and illusory trends, from the growth in the service sector to corporate restructuring designed, in large measure, to replace unionised workers with subcontractors.

The most striking point identified by Henwood is the way information and capital are conflated as exemplars of weightlessness. Improvements in information and communications technology have greatly reduced the cost of shifting information around the world, and, among other things have facilitated international financial transactions of larger volume and shorter timescale than previously feasible. Theorists of the new economy often treat this as a qualitative rather than a quantative transformation, apparently unaware that global financial markets have been linked by instantaneous communications since 1866, when the first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid. The resurgence of global capital flows owes more to the deregulation of the 1970s than to technological change.

Henwood again criticises leftists (like Manuel Castells and Jean Baudrillard) along with rightists like George Gilder for their naïve boosterism. The weightless corporation, epitomised by Enron, turns out to be one more example of a string of Ponzi schemes that rest on stripping assets while leaving someone else stuck with unrepayable debts.

As Henwood shows in the finance sector, faster communications have done nothing to improve the performance of capital markets in allocating resources. The repeated financial crises of the late 1990s have undermined the ‘Washington consensus’ in which financial markets were viewed as stern but fair guides to errant national governments.

After all this battering, not much of the New Economy edifice is left standing. But in important respects, Henwood falls victim to the same fallacy he criticises, that of identifying information and capital. Information technology and the Internet may not have changed the nature of capital or of financial markets, but that does not mean they are not sources of profound change.

The economy is the wrong place to start looking for these changes. Although it has important economic effects, and requires substantial economic inputs, the Internet is, in its essentials, a non-economic phenomenon. The important technologies that have been derived from the Internet and used to increase the productivity of businesses and governments have arisen, not from the pursuit of economic goals, but as a by-product of social interactions.

Throughout the history of the Internet, most of the innovation has come as a by-product of efforts to facilitate communication within social groups of various kinds (academics, bloggers, peer-to-peer file sharing), rather than as the result of profit-oriented investment. Rather than taking the lead, the business and government sectors have adopted innovations developed in Internet communities, and realised significant productivity gains as a result.

An economy in which innovation is, to a significant extent, a by-product of activities associated with the creation of social capital will have very different properties from those traditionally considered by economists. In part, the New Economy theorists were right about this. To make profits in this kind of economy, it’s necessary to follow the model pioneered by Netscape, of producing a valuable free good in the hope of making profits from associated private goods. Unfortunately, as the Netscape example shows, there is no guarantee that this strategy will work.

In general, the rise of the Internet as the dominant source of innovation will have results opposite to those assumed by the advocates of the New Economy. In particular, capital markets will become less important, not more, as the relationship between innovation and profitability is eroded.

In turn, a decline in the importance of capital markets will create room for a wider range of political choices than those admitted by the theorists of globalisation, and symbolised by Friedman’s Golden Straightjacket. It remains to be seen whether we can take advantage of those choices to produce a fairer and more open society.

Blogs and comments

Posted by John Quiggin

The discussion on this post was still going on as it slipped off the page, so I’ve picked up some thoughts from the comments thread, and from earlier CT posts on this topic. I’ll begin with Eszter’s observation that comments are the democratic component of blogging . For me, comments are an essential part of blogs, and I rarely read blogs that don’t allow them.

It’s true, of course, that there were blogs before there were comments. But the eagerness with which bloggers latched on to the first rather half-baked add-ons that permitted commenting is evidence that this was a need waiting to be met.

My second observation is that, beyond a certain size (roughly 100 comments) comments threads become unmanageable, degenerating into flame wars, pointscoring cascades and all the other pathologies of Usenet. That in turn means that, once the number of readers at a site becomes very large, either the comments become unmanageable or people who would like to comment must be discouraged in some way (a point raised in Eszter’s post, is that, even though the option is there, the great majority of blogreaders never comment).

Putting these points together, there are some implications for the size distribution of blogs, running against the “rich get richer” observation cited by Henry and Dan Drezner. Once a blog gets big enough, comments become problematic. The first movers who mostly occupy the top spots in the blogging hierarchy started up in the days before comments were standard and have, in most cases, not added them. I think some bloggers have removed comments due to overload as they became more popular, but I can’t immediately verify this; a lot of removals were due to problems like comment spam that can be overcome with improved filtering.

Still, I think that there is a real countervailing effect to concentration here. If blogs are valued as forums for discussion, more focused than Usenet but still open to all, then the number of blogs has to grow broadly in line with the number of participants in the discussion.

October 05, 2004

What not to blog

Posted by Eszter

For a while now I’ve been wondering about whether it’s a good idea to blog about one’s travels ahead of time. There are clear advantages (the opportunity to meet up with people one otherwise would not contact), but there are potential downsides as well. Ever since my parents’ place was badly burglarized a few years ago, I have been more sensitive about the issue. And now I see Allison wondering whether a blogged trip lead to a break-in at her home. Of course, the chances are pretty small that potential thieves are reading our blogs and they also would not know in most cases whether and to what extent others sharing the household, housesitters or security systems would stand in their way (thieves take note: in my case it is usually two out of three:). Nonetheless, I have been wondering whether it is best to be less open about some of our travel plans. This would be one of those issues with which anonymous bloggers likely don’t have to deal.

So don’t expect up-to-the-minute travel info from me, but I thought I would mention where I am headed in the next month or so in case paths cross with people I did not think to contact (I have a hard time keeping track of who is where). I’ll be giving a talk at Penn soon followed by a quick visit to Princeton and one night in New York City; I’ll be attending a workshop in the Bay area and giving a talk at Yahoo!; I’m going to a conference in Atlanta; and I’ll be giving a talk at my alma mater Smith College. I’ll likely stay put for a while thereafter, which will be necessary to gather energy for an even crazier Spring travel schedule.

Hard work

Posted by Ted

Simple genius over at The Poor Man. I can feel my heart growing three sizes this day.

October 03, 2004

Blog awareness

Posted by John Quiggin

While I was thinking about the role of blogs, I came across an observation (which I can’t locate again), that many Internet users may read blogs from time to time but don’t distinguish them from other kinds of websites. This was certainly true for me - it was only after I started blogging that I realised that kausfiles and Brad DeLong’s Semi Daily Journal, which I had visited quite a few times, were blogs and (at least in Brad’s case) part of a much larger blogosphere.

The experience of reading these sites is different for me as a result. I wonder if others have had similar experiences? And I’d be interested to hear about the relationship, if any, between the way in which people find their way around the Internet and the way that they use and interpret the sites they visit. For example, does a site reached through a portal appear different from the same site found through Google? I imagine Eszter will have something to say about this.

This leads me on to a question that has been examined here a few times, that of blogs versus courseware systems such as Blackboard and Web CT. At the moment, courseware systems are more widely used in teaching than blogs, but I’m going to predict that, as general awareness of blogs grows, they will displace special-purpose proprietary courseware, in part because there will be less need to introduce students and academics to the set of social conventions and understandings associated with blogs, while the costs of learning to use courseware must be met be each new cohort of students.

Moreover, blogs automatically facilitate cross-linking and collaboration, which people generally want. By contrast, a lot of courseware is closed by design. Even where courseware is intended to be open, it doesn’t benefit from the collective experience of blogs in making links of all kinds (615 million links tracked by Technorati as of today). Ideally, an open courseware system could be attached to a blog in some way - again this is the kind of area where progress is likely to come mostly from the blogging side, finding clever ways to manage links, rather than from modfiications to courseware.

I’d be interested in thoughts on this, and ideas about other kinds of special-purpose groupware that might be challenged or improved by blogs and similar systems. The general idea I’m reaching for here is that because information is a public good1, it is more effectively disseminated as a by-product of activities like blogging that build various forms of social capital, and therefore favor open access, than in the context of attempts to create intellectual property.

1 The statement ‘information wants to be free’, is a half-truth but the half that is true (once information is created, there is no social benefit in restricting access to it) is probably more important than the half that is omitted (information is costly to create).

October 02, 2004

How big is the blogosphere ?

Posted by John Quiggin

And why should we care? I’ll leave this question for later and take a look at some numbers

There have been quite a few attempts to measure the growth of blogging. As this site devoted to the topic notes, Technorati passed its 4 millionth blog a week ago. Both Blogger and Livejournal claim over 1.5 million users, and a broadly similar estimate can be obtained if we take this Pew Study from 2003 and make the reasonable assumption that numbers are doubling annually.

But these are almost certainly overestimates.

There are heaps of dead blogs out there (thanks to changes in technology, hosting problems and so on, I’m already on my fourth). I prefer to start with another Technorati estimate, that there are about 275,000 posts daily. If you suppose (fairly arbitrarily, but consistent with the Pew data) that the average active blog has one post every three days, that would make around 800 000 blogs.

Another way of looking at things is to consider the labour input going into blogs. If you suppose that the average blog post takes an hour to prepare (this includes overheads like research, if any, site maintenance, responses to comments and so on), 275,000 posts per day amounts to about 100 million hours per year, equivalent to the work of around 50 000 full-time, full year workers. As a comparison, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that news analysts, reporters, and correspondents held about 66,000 jobs in 2002.

There’s not much direct financial return to all this effort. There are a handful of bloggers who’ve been employed as journalists, and vice versa. Add in all the tip jars, Amazon referrals, blogads and so on, and there might be enough money to pay wages for a hundred people, spread across many thousands of tiny payments. Turning to blogging software, I don’t know how many people are employed by Blogger, Six Apart and so on, but it can’t be very many1.

I suspect though, that the economic impact of activities like blogging is significant and growing. Throughout the history of the Internet, most of the innovation has come as a by-product of efforts to facilitate communication within social groups of various kinds (academics, bloggers, peer-to-peer file sharing), rather than as the result of profit-oriented investment. Rather than taking the lead, the business and government sectors have adopted innovations developed in Internet communities, and realised significant productivity gains as a result.

An economy in which innovation is, to a significant extent, a by-product of activities associated with the creation of social capital will have very different properties from those traditionally considered by economists. Some of these issues have been discussed in terms of notions like “gift exchange” but, for reasons I hope to develop in later posts, I don’t think this provides an adequate account of what’s going on here.

1. To get a complete analysis, it would be necessary to look at web hosting services, ISPs and so on, but imputing a share of this sector to blogs would be an impossible task.

September 29, 2004

Around and about

Posted by Chris

Various things have caught my eye around the blogosphere. First up, Chris Brooke ran with a suggestion of mine concerning our latter-day Widmerpool (and splendid work he has done too). Chris also reacts to Melanie Phillips’s response to the Blair speech. Marc Mulholland comments on the latest degenerate hackery from Christopher Hitchens. Brian Leiter posts moral philosopher Jeff McMahan’s essay on the the injustice of the Iraq war (rtf). Finally, Damian Counsell has disturbing news on the racism in the campaign around a change to Switzerland’s nationality law.

September 28, 2004

Mmm, Astrolube and Commentary

Posted by Belle Waring

You should read the crucial interview with Roy Edroso of alicublog which was somehow cut from the final version of the NYT bloggerama. Here’s how it begins:

I knocked several times on the green steel door of Edroso’s Williamsburg apartment before a loud, phlegmy voice bade me enter. I found the author of “alicublog” — a little-read website devoted to politics, the arts, and bitter denunciations of the buy-back policies of local bars and clubs — in his tiny bedroom, nestled between a closet and a bookshelf stuffed with volumes of 19th-century literature and old issues of Black Tail, and pounding furiously on an ash-smeared keyboard. “Oh, it’s you,” he said, not taking his eyes off the screen. He jerked a thumb toward his bed. I pushed aside empty bottles of vodka and Astrolube, and a copy of Commentary, and took a seat.

Go read the rest.

September 24, 2004

Quote of the Day

Posted by Henry

From The Poor Man

Relying on Free Republic losers to “fact-check” the media is like relying on the proverbial roomful of typing monkeys, except with somewhat more feral howling and feces-flinging.

September 23, 2004

Academic blogging

Posted by Chris

Today’s Guardian Online has a piece by Jim McClellan about academic blogging . I get quoted quite a bit and accurately too. But, as always, I’m not sure that what comes across is exactly what I meant to say. So I guess I wanted to make two points: (1) that blogs can be used as an interactive teaching tool but that rival courseware technologies which lock out “outsiders” pose a threat to that expansion of the medium (a point that Eszter makes more eloquently here ); and (2) that concerns over intellectual property and corporate liability on the part of universities are in tension with academics increasing use of the blog medium. Those points get rather run together in the piece (that’s probably my fault, not Jim’s). As for my own experiment to use a blog in teaching — it wasn’t a great success, as the article says. But others have done better, and I’ll have another go this year.

September 22, 2004

The Widmerpool Award

Posted by Chris

Over at his blog, Stephen Pollard reproduces his own article from the Times . A few paragraphs:

The Anthony Powell Society is to give its annual Widmerpool award this year to the journalist Sir Max Hastings. The award is in honour of Kenneth Widmerpool, one of the 20th century’s great fictional characters, a recurring presence in Powell’s series of novels, A Dance to the Music of Time.

According to the society: “Widmerpool is variously pompous; self-obsessed and self-important; obsequious to those in authority and a bully to those below him. He is ambitious and pushy; ruthless; humourless; blind to the feelings of others; and has a complete lack of self-knowledge.”

The description is redolent of so many characters in public life that more must be made of it.

Indeed, Stephen, indeed ….

September 18, 2004

Spinning the blogosphere

Posted by Henry

The Washington Post hints as strongly as it can that the blogosphere’s counterattack against the Killian memos began at the White House.

In another development, the Los Angeles Times reported that an Atlanta lawyer with conservative Republican connections posted the first Web log entry questioning the authenticity of the CBS documents less than four hours after the initial broadcast on “60 Minutes.” The paper identified Harry W. MacDougald as the “Buckhead,” who became a hero of conservative Web sites after pointing out technical problems with the documents, such as fonts and proportionate spacing.

MacDougald declined to say how he learned about the problems with the documents so early. In addition to being released by CBS, copies of the documents were e-mailed by the White House to reporters as “60 Minutes” went on the air.

It’s unlikely that we’ll ever know quite what happened, but it seems highly plausible to me that the White House is communicating with bloggers to spin the news. We already know that the White House’s Internet Director thinks that blogs are pretty important. Equally, I’d be very surprised if people in the Democratic party aren’t communicating with some bloggers in order to try to get their spin across (if they aren’t, they’re bad at their job). As Kieran said a couple of days ago, there is a mythology of the blogger that sees him (or more rarely, her) as a lone hero speaking truth to power (or the “New York Times” as the best local approximation). The reality is murkier. To the extent that blogs help set the agenda for the media, pols have an incentive to spin the blogs, just as they have good reason to spin reporters. Blogs aren’t critiquing the system from outside - they’re increasingly part of the system. Expect more of this over time, not less.

September 15, 2004

Fragments

Posted by Henry

Following up on my review of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell last week, there’s a very nice piece on the book at N+1, which has a lot more to say about the book’s “levelling streak” than I could fit in a blogpost.

I know about N+1 thanks to a conversation with Scott McLemee, who does a very interesting article on ‘big processes’ sociologist Michael Mann for the Chronicle. There’s a short critical quote from David Laitin, a Stanford political scientist - this reflects a long standing argument (Laitin is no great fan of the kinds of research that Mann and others like him are interested in).

Finally, Cosma Shalizi makes it into Physical Review Letters, which I understand from my colleagues in the hard sciences is a pretty big deal. Congratulations.

September 14, 2004

Takedown

Posted by Ted

Those of us who enjoy a good InstaFactCheck will delight in Scott Lemieux, on Reynolds’ attempt to eliminate the gap between Kerry and Bush on gay unions. I wish that Lemieux had an instructional videotape or something.

Whipped cream and nuts

Posted by Chris

OK, so this may be the first and last time I quote anything by Steven Den Beste with approval, but this observation about blogging (and comments) struck me as right on the money.

I’ve learned something interesting: if you give away ice cream, eventually a lot of people will complain about the flavors, and others will complain that you aren’t also giving away syrup and whipped cream and nuts.

(via Dan Drezner ).

September 13, 2004

My ears

Posted by Ted

I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend. This campaign mudmeter is especially interesting. (I know it’s true because it’s on the internet.)

Public Health Press

Posted by Ted

Ross Silverman, formerly known as the Bloviator, has moved his excellent medical policy blog to a new site, the Public Health Press. And he has managed to choke me up with only seventeen syllables.

On the subject of public health, and while I have Ross’s attention, there was some brief discussion here the other day about the scope of the role of the federal government (specifically, the National Institutes of Health) in pharmaceutical research.

I’ve done enough work with pharmaceuticals to know how much I don’t know. It’s a complicated subject, and difficult to summarize. But Derek Lowe makes a genuine contribution here. He’s a research scientist at a pharmaceutical company, and he shares his perspective on what the NIH does and doesn’t do.

For a competing persepective, see Marcia Angell in the New York Review of Books. Upon rereading, I don’t think that her case is very strong.

I’m convinced that pharma companies are heavy marketers, and I know that most of the new drugs released are non-innovative “me-too” drugs. I know that pharma companies bend the spirit of the law, and sometimes the letter (starting around page 16, warning: .pdf), in order to gain more time earning enormous profits under patent protection.

But are big pharma companies innovative? On the question of the proportion of credit for drug development owed to pharma companies vs. public money, I don’t know what to think. Angell writes:

As hard as it is to believe, only a handful of truly important drugs have been brought to market in recent years, and they were mostly based on taxpayer-funded research at academic institutions, small biotechnology companies, or the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

But then later, she writes:

Increasingly, (large pharmaceutical companies) rely on academia, small biotech startup companies, and the NIH for (discovering new drugs). At least a third of drugs marketed by the major drug companies are now licensed from universities or small biotech companies, and these tend to be the most innovative ones.

Well…

  • I don’t think it’s anyone’s fault that it’s hard to find innovative drugs that successfully make it through clinical trials. It’s not for a lack of trying.
  • 2/3 is pretty good.
  • I don’t think that it’s useful to lump together universities (implying public money) with small biotech firms (implying private money.)
  • I’m also not sure, if have adequate incencentives to innovate, what the problem is. If a thousand flowers are blooming in research, and the big pharma companies buy up the most promising developments and take on the expense and risk of clinical trials, that sounds like a pretty good way of encouraging innovation.

Comments, as always, are open.

Warbloggers and Fallujah

Posted by Henry

Atrios says today:

So, it’s pretty much the case that we went into Fallujah because some warbloggers got excited about the video of the desecration of the dead civilian contractors.

This seems to me to be either (a) paranoid nonsense, or (b) stupid trash-talk. If there’s a third possibility, I’d like to hear it. Either Atrios is seriously claiming that warbloggers set US military policy, or he’s casting a dumb slur. Claiming that the disaster of Fallujah proves that the warbloggers were badly, horribly, wrong, is fine; it’s probably even correct. Claiming without any evidence that they were the main people responsible for the policy disaster is either tinfoil hat stuff, or Glenn Reynolds calibre scuzzy innuendo.

September 07, 2004

The "Crooked Timber thesis"

Posted by Chris

Jonathan Derbyshire of The Philosophers’ Magazine, on his new blog :

here’s a view, call it the “Crooked Timber thesis”, according to which the truth of statements about a group or a set of beliefs ought to be weighed against the perlocutionary effect of uttering such statements on the group or the holders of the beliefs in question. In one recurrent variant of this view, true statements about what, for shorthand purposes, I’ll call “political Islamism” ought to be circumscribed, if not actually withheld, for fear of inciting “Islamophobia”. Now, I’ve conceded in the comments section of an earlier post the persuasiveness of the point about perlocutionary effect, though I did wonder whether one of its proponents hadn’t unhelpfully mixed it up with a much less congenial argument about meaning. And it seems to me obvious that the point applies in contexts different to the one in which it’s usually applied over at Crooked Timber.

I think that the most reasonable way to read Derbyshire’s statement here, which seems to have been picked up enthusiastically by CT-bashers whom I can’t be bothered to link to, is that it contains a claim about what has been argued here on Crooked Timber. That claim would be that people at Crooked Timber have argued repeatedly (“recurrent variant”, “usually applied”) that we shouldn’t tell the truth about political Islamism for fear of inciting “Islamophobia”. [1] Trawling through our posts, I can find some evidence for the claim that we have alleged that it is possible to utter true statements (about political Islamism or anything else for that matter) in a manner that demeans (or threatens, intimidates etc) either the person to whom the utterance is made or other hearers. That doesn’t seem to be a thesis to which Derbyshire objects, though. (Which is just as well, since it is a true thesis.) Note, by the way, the ambiguity in Derbyshire’s formulation. He could be saying that we have said that people should sometimes be careful about uttering true statements about political Islamism out of due regard for the perlocutionary effect of those utterances. But he expresses the thought in an unrestricted way, such that the effect on the reader is to mislead them into the false belief that people at CT have claimed that political Islamism just shouldn’t be criticized. Nobody here holds that view or anything remotely like it.

1 I can find just two instances of the word “Islamophobia” on CT. The first was in the title of a blog post by me, where the point of using the word was to point to someone else’s writings on the subject. The second is by Ophelia Benson (with others picking up on her use) in comments to another post.

September 04, 2004

Political blogger who is who dinner

Posted by Eszter

Thanks to Henry Farrell and Dan Drezner, those attending the American Political Science Association’s meetings in Chicago this weekend were in for quite a treat at yesterday afternoon’s session on The Power and Politics of Blogs. The session started out with two papers (one by Henry and Dan, the other by Laura McKenna formerly of Apt 11D and Antoinette Pole) followed by some interesting commentary from well-known political bloggers Mark Kleiman and Ana Marie Cox aka Wonkette and a final discussion with some good questions and thoughtful points by Cass Sunstein. The Q&A was interesting as well, congrats to Henry and Dan for putting together such a great panel! (As an additional treat, I finally got to meet (albeit way too briefly) another Timberite, Harry, so my CT number improved a bit again.)

Later in the evening, a bunch of us met up for drinks and dinner, which provided a nice oppportunity to chat with people whose blogs I’ve been reading for a while. I enjoyed discussing the topical versus ideological splits in the blogosphere with Cass Sunstein. I have a project that is attempting to test the latter (which I usually just refer to as the Sunstein thesis) empirically, and will certainly keep you posted. All-in-all, it was really fun to meet all these bloggers face-to-face and, again, thanks to Henry and Dan for organizing such a great blogger day!

August 31, 2004

Fistful of Euros on Pipes on Ramadan

Posted by Daniel

Scott Martens looks into some of Daniel Pipes’ sources for the article on Tariq Ramadan linked in Ted’s post below, and comes up with a pretty appalling picture of misrepresentation and intellectual dishonesty. As Scott says in comments below, how the hell did Pipes think he was going to get away with this?

August 27, 2004

Estimation

Posted by Chris

I managed a mere 39 per cent on Chris Lightfoot’s estimation quiz I’m sorry to say. Instructive and entertaining it is though. (Hat-tip Dave Weeden ).

August 26, 2004

Bristol blogger bash

Posted by Chris

severnshed.jpg

I spent a very pleasant evening with other bloggers who live somewhere close to Britain’s M4 corridor at Bristol’s Severnshed last night. Pictured from left to right are myself, Dave Weeden (Backword ), Josephine Crawley Quinn (The Virtual Tophet ) and Chris Brooke (The Virtual Stoa ). Topics discussed included Equatorial Guinea, leading Welsh politicians, the excavations at Herculaneum, and, naturally, other bloggers. It was great to meet Dave and Josephine for the first time and Chris once again. A fine time was had by all.

August 18, 2004

Around The Right-Wing Blogosphere in 80 Links!

Posted by Belle Waring

Be Amazed: as warblogger Bjorn Staerk comes to the stunning conclusion that some people might have gone a bit off the rails in wanting to ban Islam. People like, well, LGF commenters! And Bjorn Staerk commenters!

What has gone wrong when Norwegians, Americans and other Westerners who rever the enlightenment ideals of reason and freedom of thought more than anything, justify restrictions on thought with bad reasoning and paranoia? It’s not just LGF readers. You can read similar views (though fewer of them) at Free Republic, Dhimmi Watch, and Liberty Post - all in reply to the Kristiansand story.

Again, I’m not saying these views are shared by the owners of these websites, or the majority of their readers. But neither do I see many strong, principled objections. Phil says above that “the failure of good Muslims to object or organize and stop bad Muslims indicts the whole Islamic movement”, which doesn’t justify a ban on Islam, but is true in a sense. We all have a responsibility to speak up clearly against extremists in our own ranks, whether we are Muslims or peace activists or bloggers who criticize Islam and support the war on Islamist terror.

And so it’s time to stand up for the basic values of our democracies and confront those in our own ranks who want to abandon those values. Because if we don’t, outsiders will be justified in interpreting this as silent approval or apologism.

Something has gone rotten. We can’t blame it on the “left”, the “relativists”, the “PC crowd” or the “multiculturalists”, (and don’t anybody dare blame it on the Muslims). It’s gone rotten here, among people who on 9/11 woke up to the danger of Islamism. The ban Islam meme and all its relatives (Islam is Islamism, Islam is war) must be confronted here, now, before it spreads.

Wow, even people at Free Republic are saying stuff that’s crazy? The rot has spread. But, anyway right on Bjorn! Bjorn Staerk is absolutely, no irony intended, right. Something has gone rotten, and outsiders will be justified in interpreting this as silent approval or apologism.

Guffaw! as Staerk’s commenters dissent in increasingly strident tones!!

And here they go on record asking for Norway to abandon our equivalent of the first amendment, one of the basic rights of any democracy: Freedom of religion.

So?

Europe and “the world” have been making demands on Americans for a few decades now to give up pieces of our Constitution.

ICC - violates 3, 4 & 5, possibly 1, 9 and 12. They could have protected our rights to get us to join it, but they refused. Could have done the same w/Kyoto, bringing in the 2 majorpollution-causing countries which has 1/3 of the world’s population, but again, they refused.

UN wants world-wide gun control - there goes 2 which protects #1 - and trust me, all 3 branches have done TREMENDOUS damage to #1, we don’t need outside help, thank you very much.

After all, it’s an 18th century document suited to those times, not relevant in the 21st century, and we must put it aside for the greater good of “the world.”

Hell will freeze over before I give it up. I’m going down fighting.

All the muslims have to do is stop killing us and learn to get along. Where are the “moderate” muslims?

The AQ plans discovered will not help. They were going to bomb The Tube and drown people.

3 years and the crickets still drown out the “moderate” voices.

And the chatter has fallen off - it did before 9/11, too.

Vehicle passes to the Olypics have been stolen partially because the some of the idiots who had them in their cars DIDN’T LOCK THEIR DOORS. Security is going to be a joke.

Bjorn, I understand what you’re saying and why, but when someone tells you he intends to kill you, believe him. They’ve not only told you, they’ve done it.

Snicker! as the Instapundit links to this mad heterodoxy with the following caveat:

That said, it would be useful if those more moderate Muslims would take a more aggressive role. Some are — see, for example, the Free Muslim Coalition Against Terrorism — but we could use more of that, no doubt.

Sob Softly! As Eugene Volokh goes out on a limb:

As a result, it makes little sense to say, for instance, “Christianity is a religion of peace” or “Christianity is a religion of war,” unless one is speaking about theoretical aspirations about what the religion should be, rather than describing how Christians actually act, have acted, and are likely to act. It seems to me the same is true for Islam. I should stress that I think it’s perfectly proper for people to criticize religious beliefs and religious movements, just as it’s proper for people to criticize any ideology. But broad criticisms about how Islam is this or Christianity is that — again, with a very few exceptions — are almost always based on inaccurate overgeneralizations.

UPDATE: Gary Farber got here first. Also, you must all bow down before Giblets, NOOOOOOOOW

August 12, 2004

11D

Posted by Harry

Laura has moved and renamed her blog simply 11D. She now has comments, which presumably has the upside that she doesn’t have to have millions of mini-email conversations; on the other hand it means she won’t have as many nice email conversations. Since I link to her every other post, this affects me more than most: I’ll have to start thinking of things of my own to say. Most impressive is that she has, thus far, only one blog on her blogroll — guess which one? No, don’t guess — go and see.

August 06, 2004

I Am Become Matthew Yglesias, Destroyer of Worlds

Posted by Belle Waring

He is no longer merely “Big Media Matt”. He is become Giant Media Matt. Mentioned by name in a Krugman column, thank you very much. Who would have thought that mere editorship at the Harvard Crimson Independent would take a young man so far…Advantage: blogosphere. Sort of. Well, OK, advantage traditional old boys network. Still, Matthew kicks ass.

August 05, 2004

Cartier-Bresson

Posted by Chris

Most of the on-line obituaries for Henri Cartier-Bresson are photograph-free, which is a bit pointless. But the New York Times is an exception , and includes links beyond to Magnum and elsewhere.

UPDATE: Libération has a good set of links to HCB galleries on the web.

July 31, 2004

1-2, I Got a Crush on You

Posted by Belle Waring
Milbarge, blogging at Crescat Sententia, has a nice post up about blogcrushes.
I’ve been talking a lot about this with a friend of mine. My friend confesses to a blog crush here and there, too. But my friend’s position is that the crushes are on the blog, not the blogger. I think my friend believes that the image of bloggers we get via the blog aren’t “real,” and my friend would rather have a crush on the idea of a person, based on what one sees on the blog, rather than the reality.

Do you think blogs reveal a person’s true personality? Is the truth-shading, the omission of embarassing details, etc. one gets in a blog any worse than one would get from a conversation with the person? Or are people perhaps more exhibitionist in print than they would be otherwise? (This must be true for many shy bloggers. And, I think, none of you will be surprised to learn that I am not shy.) A friend who hasn’t seen me in a long while read John and Belle Have a Blog recently and said that it was just like talking to me—that the posts were perfectly Belle-ish. I think that’s true, although I try not to curse so much on the blog. (Then again, now that I have small children I don’t curse in front of them either.) Thoughts? Do any of you hasve blogcrushes? Are we seeing the real Kieran here? Can Little Green Footballs possibly represent the real Charles Johnson, who appears at one time to have been a mild-mannered web designer of some talent, not notably lizardoid in any respect?

July 28, 2004

Normblog is one

Posted by Chris

Congratulations to Norman Geras, who has now been blogging for a year .

July 27, 2004

Thanks to Ross Silverman

Posted by Ted

It’s been a great pleasure having Ross Silverman of The Bloviator as a guest poster this week. Ross is a genuine expert, and The Bloviator is an excellent addition to anyone’s blog diet. Many thanks to Ross.

July 21, 2004

Blog paper

Posted by Henry

The paper that Dan Drezner and I have been writing on political blogging is now fit, more or less, for human consumption - it’s available here. We’re going to present it at APSA where we’re organizing a panel on blogging. We’re grateful for comments, suggestions and criticisms - this is only a first draft.

The key arguments of our paper:

(1) Blogging is politically important in large part because it affects mainstream media, and helps set the terms of political debate (in political science jargon, it creates ‘focal points’ and ‘frames’). Note that we don’t provide an exhaustive account of blogs and politics - some aspects of blogging (fundraising for parties, effects on political values in the general public), we don’t have more than anecdotal data on. There’s plenty of room for other people to do interesting research on all of this.

(2) Incoming links in the political blogosphere are systematically skewed, but not according to a “power law” distribution, as Clay Shirky and others have argued of the blogosphere as a whole. Instead, they follow a lognormal distribution.1 We reckon that the most likely explanation for this is that offered by Pennock et al. - they argue that not only do the ‘rich get richer’ (i.e. sites that already have a lot of links tend to get more), but that link-poor sites stand a chance of becoming rich too. Late entrants into the political blogosphere can do well as long as they’re interesting and attract some attention - bad timing isn’t destiny.

(3) Because of the systematic skewedness of the political blogosphere, a few “focal point” sites can provide a rough index of what is going on in the blogosphere - interesting points of view on other sites will often percolate up to them as smaller blogs try to get big blogs to link to them, by informing them of interesting stories. Thus, we may expect that journalists and other media types who read blogs will tend to all gravitate towards a few ‘big name’ bloggers as their way of keeping up with what is going on in the blogosphere as a whole.

1 For which we’re grateful to Cosma Shalizi - when we realized that we weren’t dealing with a power law distribution (the log-log relationship looked dodgily curvilinear), he not only suggested alternative distributions and how to test fit, but actually volunteered to do the tests himself.

July 19, 2004

Welcome bloviations

Posted by Ted

We’re delighted to announce that Ross, the man behind the excellent blog The Bloviator, will be joining us on Crooked Timber as a guest poster. I’ve long been a fan and an admirer. At the Bloviator, Ross concentrates non-exclusively on public health policy and law. For a while, he was surely the only blogger with a recommendation in his masthead from both me and Bill Quick of Daily Pundit.

After taking a few months off of blogging, he’s tanned, tenured and ready to debate. It’s a great pleasure to have him join us this week.

Hansard report on political blogging

Posted by Chris

The Hansard Society have produced a report on political blogging

Political Blogs – Craze or Convention? [pdf] reports on the relatively new phenomena of political blogging and examines whether these blogs can offer an alternative to traditional channels of political communication in the UK . The research study focuses on eight political blogs as representative examples of how individuals and organisations are harnessing blogging as a tool to promote political engagement. The research monitored activity on these blogs and, in addition, a blogging “jury” of members of the public with little or no experience of blogging scrutinised the blogs to assess their relevance as channels of political thought and debate.

[via Harry’s Place ]

July 15, 2004

Quickly Around the Blogs

Posted by Brian
  • It wasn’t intended as a follow-up to our earlier discussion on private vs public health-care performance, but nevertheless in that context it was very helpful for Chris Shiel to link to this paper (PDF) on how well, or as it turns out badly, the US does on health-care outcomes.
  • I missed this when it was posted a week ago, but if you’re still interested in this stuff Geoff Nunberg has a very good dissection of that study by Groseclose and Milyo purporting to show liberal media bias.
  • And Ben Bradley wants reader input to help choose a murder victim. Purely for academic purposes.

July 14, 2004

Radio edit

Posted by Henry

We introduced an innovation a few weeks back and completely forgot to announce it. We’re a group blog which frequently has quite lengthy posts. Thus, when one of us does a post of more than a paragraph or two, it’s usually excerpted on the main page, so that the reader needs to click on “read more” in order to finish reading it. As far as we can tell, most readers prefer this ‘radio edit’ - it means that posts don’t disappear rapidly to the bottom of a very long page. However, some don’t. For the latter, we’ve created the Crooked Timber Extended Play Mix, which publishes each post in its entirety to the Crooked Timber main page (you still have to click for comments). If you prefer not to have to click through to read full posts, you should bookmark this version instead (it’s also available in the left sidebar as ‘full post version’).

July 11, 2004

Normal service will be resumed shortly

Posted by Henry

There appears to be some problem with our service - new comments are being registered - but are not appearing on the site. We’re trying to figure out what the problem is …

Update: Things seem to be working again.

July 09, 2004

Once around the blogosphere

Posted by Ted
  • Katherine of Obsidian Wings is hanging up her blogging spurs. I’ll miss her. She’s written a long, thoughtful swan song about why we should care about U.S. human rights abuses towards people we suspect of terrorism.
  • Tim Dunlop at The Road to Surfdom argues that right-wingers probably shouldn’t crow about this story. According to the Financial Times, a British governmental report is about to say that the British claim that Saddam was trying to buy uranium from Niger was “reasonable and consistent with the intelligence.”
The famous sixteen words in Bush’s State of the Union, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa”, are arguably technically correct. However, the use of the word “learned”, and the context (in the SOTU, as part of an argument for war on Iraq) strongly implies that the United States believes that the substance of the statement is true.

Tim points out, in great detail, that the best intelligence in American hands said otherwise. (It wasn’t just Joe Wilson.) He points out that the CIA had successfully removed the claim from previous speeches. He also points out that the Administration already apologized for using the claim when Ari Fleischer said “This information should not have risen to the level of a presidential speech.”

(Also, Tim reminds me to mark my calendar. July 14th is the one-year anniversary of the outing of Valerie Plame by two senior Administration officials. Congratulations to the lucky felons!)
Tommy Chong was arrested and indicted following a series of DEA raids in February 2003 as part of the Government’s “Operation Pipe Dreams” crackdown on illegal drug paraphernalia. The crackdown involved at least 1200 officials, including hundreds of DEA agents, and at least 103 US Marshals. The operation led to 60 arrests. It occurred during an Orange Alert against terrorist attacks.

Finally, at least two evangelical Christians have written about Focus on the Family’s decision to distribute Michael Moore’s home address to their email list.

  • Joe Carter at the Evangelical Outpost thinks that the concern is overblown. He thinks that the real issue is (surprise!) the hypocrisy of the left. I agree with him that politicially motivated outings of gays are shameful. However, I don’t understand how Carter can dismiss the right-wing invasion of privacy, condemn the left-wing invasion of privacy, and then feel secure enough in his own righteousness to condemn the left for selective outrage.
There ought to be a word for these kinds of arguments, in which one simultaneously displays and condemns hypocrisy. They happen a lot. I should note that Carter doesn’t seem to have much support in his comments. If you choose to comment, please be polite.

July 08, 2004

Allowing comments on blogs

Posted by Eszter

The recent discussion of blogs and their democratic characteristics (or lack thereof) prompted by Laura’s comments at Apt 11D in response to critiques of her blog study’s survey instrument has gotten me thinking about the comments option on blogs yet again. It is a question I have pondered numerous times already, probably ever since I started reading blogs and certainly since I decided to start my own.

For me, the question of whether a site that calls itself a blog has comments option turned on is actually quite directly related to what constitutes a blog in the first place. I realize this is a question that is probably impossible to answer in a way that would satisfy everybody, but it is one still worth asking especially if one is to do research on the topic (as I am doing now) where a definition would be helpful.

One of Laura’s concerns is that the blogosphere is not very democratic. That’s true (she mentions some reasons and others have discussed this point at length elsewhere as well). However, blogs can have a democratic component: Comments. Why is it that certain bloggers decide to go without comments? And what makes their Web site a blog in that case? (Clearly I am showing my bias here in that I believe comments are an essential part of a blog. That said, I do realize and accept blogs as blogs even when they do not have comments turned on.. but do so mostly because the community has decided to consider them blogs. You know which ones I mean.)

Laura herself does not have comments on her Web site. This makes her blog more undemocratic than many other blogs. The only way someone can comment on an entry posted on a non-commentable blog is by posting an entry on their own blog. This already excludes those numerous readers who do not have blogs of their own, but more importantly, it also leaves the original post untouched by critical response. And that makes blogs less interesting in my view. And certainly less democratic.

Of course, I understand some of the reasons why people may not allow for comments. It can be an extra burden on the blogger. If one doesn’t want certain types of material present on a site then one must constantly monitor comments. This can become tedious in the case of blogs that attract a lot of attention and response. But comments can add a very interesting and important component to blogs. Crooked Timber would be quite different without the insightful and witty (although in some cases very frustrating) contributions of our readers. I wouldn’t have it any other way (here I only speak for myself and not the entire CT crew, but I suspect many would agree). A reader can always decide to skip reading the comments (which, of course, underscores the fact that commentators do not have the same level of input as the posters), but those who are most engaged with and interested in a post likely do read the responses from other readers. (Perhaps that idea needs to be tested, but I think it’s a reasonable assumption.)

I certainly do not mean to glorify comments too much. There are excellent and very valuable blogs that do have comments turned on yet receive little response. That does not mean that they are not being read nor that people do not have reactions to what is said on the blog. It seems to take several thousand readers to produce a few dozen comments so only a few blogs will receive lots of comments. Nonetheless, the issue here is the option to comment.

So bloggers, why no comments? And readers, do you care? (I realize it’s a bit problematic to ask that question here, but this is just for discussion, it’s obviously not a scientific poll of any sort.)

One year old today

Posted by Chris

Someone has to make the announcement: Crooked Timber is one year old today!

July 07, 2004

Focus on the followup

Posted by Ted

Blogger Jonathan Ichikawa has gotten an email back from Focus on the Family about their distribution of Michael Moore’s home address. His comments are very good.

July 04, 2004

Blogocracy in America

Posted by John Holbo
Americans, of all ages, of all stations in life, and all types of dispositions are forever forming associations. They are not only commercial or industrial associations in which they all take part but others of a thousand different types - religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very minute … Nothing, in my view, deserves more attention that the intellectual and moral associations in America.
- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

I stumbled on that passage - appropriate unto the day, for what is declared independence if not a precondition for happier association? - while poking around regarding blogging and social networks and such, following up Henry’s interesting ‘blogosphere as 18th century coffee-house’ post, following up Laura at Apartment 11D’s ‘blogging polis’ post. (I’d tell you who posted that Tocqueville passage, but I’ve forgotten.)

One of the more interesting things I stumbled on was this post on “Weblogs and Authority” - and the associated full-length conference paper version (PDF) - on Cameron Marlow’s blog, Overstated. His conclusion is intuitive; anyway, it’s what I would have guessed. You could measure your authority in terms of the number of blogrolls you grace, or by the number of permalinks you garner; there is considerable divergence between the two measures. There’s folks that get blogrolled, but seldom linked, and vice versa. Which makes sense for a host of reasons that readily spring to mind. As Marlow points out, blogrolls naturally tend to lag behind the influence curve. They contain a lot of dead wood, basically. (Marlow is hereby attempting to chip away at Clay Shirky’s thesis that the blogging rich get richer, winner-take-all power law-wise.)

Bottom line: Marlow’s got some interesting data and charts, even if he is basically arguing something that seems intuitively right, hence unsurprising.

Here’s my question for the day: how many blogospheres are there? I mean: if you saw a stellar map of the blog universe it wouldn’t be one sphere. At a rough guess, we would gaze at two major galaxies - techblogging and US politics blogging. These would be loosely interpenetrating. Each galaxy would, uncoincidentally, be loosely centered on a core of A-list blogs. And there would be a huge number of systems and sub-systems and rings within the galaxies. For example, it would be interesting to see to what degree the right and left political blogospheres are mutually delinked. (And of course ‘right and left’ is far too simple.) There would obviously be a number of respectable formations gravitationally attracted neither to tech nor politics. And there would be the gargantuan quantity of dark matter that probably makes up 95% of total blogospheric mass: livejournals and dedicated catblogging, lunchblogging and all the truly personal, mostly unlinked stuff that probably even google can’t detect.

And then there is the question of historical development. The Big Bang - I guess it was 9/11 - and how it all exploded out from there.

Has any ambitious student of social networks attempted a comprehensive map of the bloggy heavens, plotting, say, the interlinks of the top 5,000 (from technorati or blogstreet or wherever seems best)? It would be monadology rather than astronomy: everything what and where it is in virtue of the collective perceptions/appetitions of everything else. As such, it would probably have to be rendered in more than three dimensions to do justice. What I would be most curious about would be the degree to which these social networks constitute subject indexs; or indexes of distinct perspectives.

Well, that’s a vague notion, but just suppose you have map in hand. You have ‘hotspots’, i.e. especially link-rich nodes. Popular single blogs or clusters of closely interlinked blogs that, added together, amount to something. What do such clusters mean? Obviously there is sociology to be done regarding a social network of blogs, as with any social network. But studying the relations between law blogs and philosophy blogs and lit blogs and web design blogs and libertarian blogs, etc., has an axis of potential interest plausibly missing from most social networks. The blogosphere really is an idea space AND a social space. The links mean personal ties - alliances and enmities - but also argumentative ties, or at least connections between ideas or subjects. It would be interesting to study relationships right on the line between relationships between social structures and idea clusters. Strange elective affinities might come to light. Do law profs blog about comic books more or less than philosophy profs, as measured by some index of proximity between the subsystems of philosophy and law blogs and the subsystem of comic book blogs? Idly inquiring minds would like to know, in an idle sort of holiday inquiring way.

And this question is just an example. I realize it’s not exactly burning, but it gets at the sorts of odd juxtapositions and connections I think might come to light, simply from an extremely ingenious and laborious study of link structures.

I gotta go eat two hamburgers and drink three beers. Happy 4th of July!

July 02, 2004

Who are the bloggers in your neighborhood?

Posted by Henry

Laura at Apartment 11d posts on the blogosphere as a space for debate:

is the blogosphere a public space, like the New England townhall meeting? Is it a place where individuals can debate ideas and policy proposals and have some impact on political officials?

Perhaps it should be neither. The most attractive ideal for the blogosphere that I’ve come across is in sociologist Richard Sennett’s brilliant, frustrating shaggy-dog of a book, The Fall of Public Man. Sennett is writing about the eighteenth century coffee-house as a place where people could escape from their private lives, reinventing themselves, and engaging in good conversation with others, regardless of their background or their everyday selves. They could assume new identities, try out novel arguments usw. This kind of polity doesn’t so much conduct towards a shared consensus, as allow the kinds of diversity and plurality that Iris Marion Young (who’s heavily influenced by Sennett) talks about in Justice and the Politics of Difference.

I’m quite sure that eighteenth century coffee houses weren’t actually like that (unless you were bourgeois and male) - but Sennett’s arguments are still helpful in understanding how the blogosphere differs from a New England townhall. Like Sennett’s patronizers of coffee shops, bloggers don’t usually know each other before they start blogging, so that it’s quite easy for them to reinvent themselves if they like, and indeed to invent a pseudonym, or pseudonyms to disguise their real identity completely. This has its downside - some bloggers take it as license for offensive behaviour - but in general, if you don’t like a blog, you can simply stop reading it, or linking to it. The blogosphere seems less to me like a close-knit community (there isn’t much in the way of shared values, and only a bare minimum of shared norms), and more like a city neighborhood. An active, vibrant neighborhood when things are working; one with dog-turds littering the pavement when they’re not.

June 30, 2004

Jacob speak, you listen

Posted by Ted

Jacob Levy is doing an admirable job (here, too) of trying to answer the question: Did the Administration veto plans to attack the terrorist Zarqawi, or his base in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, prior to the beginning of Gulf War II, because the presence of a genuine terrorist in Iraq was too useful for their case to give up?

It seemed too dark to believe at the time. If there’s any reason not to believe it, I’m sure that Levy will get to it. So far, he hasn’t.

June 23, 2004

Cass Sunstein at Volokh

Posted by Chris

Distinguished legal scholar Cass Sunstein is guest-blogging over at the Volokh Conspiracy (and starts with some useful reflections on the legacy of FDR). What a coup for the Volokhs and what an improvement in the class of their guest-bloggers!

June 21, 2004

Crooked Timber's Greatest Hits

Posted by Kieran

In the course of the recent great database fiasco, I took a look at the history of traffic to this site. The AWStats program gave me a the number of unique visitors for every day from our launch last July through to June 16th this year. I was interested in which posts had made the biggest splashes. Now, if I just looked at the posts that got the greatest number of visitors, there would be a bias towards posts from later in the year, because we get far more visitors these days than six or ten months ago. How can we get a fair estimate?

It’s possible to statistically decompose a time series into three components. First, there’s the seasonal component: in this case, it’s the regular ups and downs caused by what day of the week it is. Generally, traffic will dip every weekend, regardless of how many visitors we’re getting on average. The average number of visitors from week to week net of the seasonal ups and downs is the second, trend component. This has grown consistently over the year. And finally there’s the remainder or “irregular” component, which is whatever spikes and dips are left over once seasonal fluctuations and the underlying trend are accounted for.

The nice picture above shows CT’s unique daily visitor series decomposed in this way, with the raw data at the top and the three components underneath. (You can also get this figure as a higher quality PDF file [only 34k].) As you can see, the trend is one of healthy growth. These days we typically get about seven to nine thousand unique visitors a day. But what about those spikes in the lowest panel? Which posts brought in the crowds? Read on for the Top 10 list. The punchline is that, even though we’re known for being a bunch of pointy-headed academics, the out-of-the-ballpark hitters on our roster are not the ones with Ph.Ds.


Before counting down through the list, I should make an Honorable Mention of two posts that are just outside the top 10 and have nothing to choose between them in terms of impact. Stories, by Ted, took on the controversy about MeCHA and Cruz Bustamente (remember him?). And Bats Aren’t Bugs, by John Holbo, showed that despite his self-conception as an empirically-driven pragmatist, Steven Den Beste is in fact the Hegel of the blogosphere.

Crooked Timber’s Greatest Hits

10. Grrr, by Ted. Ted reproduces an essay about the meaning of the September 11th attacks that itself might have a further CT connection.

9. DC 5/11: Day of Inconvenience, by Ted. Speculating about what the President’s testimony (“I only plan to talk for an hour, that’s all you’re getting”) before the September 11th commission would be like.

8. Books I Did Not Read This Year, by Kieran. A Top 10 list makes the Top 10 list. Probably got in because it got a relatively large number of hits during the relatively quiet week before Christmas.

7. Left-Wing Conspirators, by Kieran. The bizarre bedfellows in David Horowitz’s database of Left Wingers.

6. Air MILES!!!!, by Daniel. Dsquared satisfies all your Friedman BS-detection and debunking needs. One day Daniel really is going to run into Tom in a frequent flyer lounge somewhere. I hope they are both drunk when it happens.

5. Bright is as Bright Does, by Kieran. Brights are the MENSA dweebs of the new century. This makes the list because it was the first CT post to get a lot of coverage after we launched.

4. Why I don’t like Mickey Kaus, by Ted. Why Ted doesn’t like Mickey Kaus. It’s a good reason, too.

3. All Gone to Look for America, by Daniel. “There used to be a shining city on a hill … what the hell happened to it?” Indeed. As someone might say.

2. Punk the National Review, by Ted. The NRO’s practice of publishing anonymous letters is killed. Dead. By Ted. You thought it was impossible to force Jonah Goldberg to raise his standards, but all that’s really impossible is getting him to admit that you did.

1. Tomorrow’s Kerry-bashing Today, by Ted. Looking into future misdirection and smears about the Kerry campaign. Coming soon to pundits everywhere, seen here first.

So the pattern is pretty clear: On this measure, Ted and Dsquared bring in the punters. Daniel mobilizes the foreign policy crowd and Ted has a terrific knack of capturing the left zeitgeist in U.S. politics. If I were a Democratic party strategist I would consider hiring Ted. (As a consultant only, please: we want to keep him.)

Of course, the method I used isn’t the only way to make a list like this. Some posts are slow burners, attracting sustained attention over a longer time period. If we look at the number of visitors posts get once they are up, the posts in the top-10 list still dominate but some of the slow-burners also come to the fore. These include:

I still like the time-series decomposition, though, in part because I get to produce a nice graph but mostly because it gives me an extra reason to like CT: Crooked Timber has a bunch of literate academics from all over the world who do high-quality research in the social sciences and humanities and who write lots of interesting stuff — but the great thing is, they aren’t even our most popular draws.

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

Posted by Henry

I’ve spent the last few hours doing something that I’ve meant to do for months; going through the academic blogroll to see what updates and changes need to be made. I’ve marked blogs which haven’t been updated in several months as ‘moribund.’ Those which I’m not sure about, I’ve added a question mark to. Some, which seem to have disappeared entirely, I’ve removed from the blogroll. These include “Chun the Unavoidable,” who I’m sort of sorry to see go - the Invisible Adjunct once remarked that he took trolling to a higher level, and I reckon that’s about right. On the other hand, it’s nice to see that Jeff Cooper is back - and with what appears to be good news.

I’m sure that there are still some inaccuracies in the blogroll - feel free to let me know, either by comments or by email. Also, I know that I’ve missed out on some new academics in the blogosphere during my month of travelling; if you want to be in the academic blogroll, and meet the criteria send me an email.

June 20, 2004

Litany of Database Recovery

Posted by Kieran

Queen of SQL statements. Pray for us.
Empress of Emacs. Pray for us.
Sacred Heart of Search and Replace. Pray for us.
Defender of Write Permissions. Pray for us.
Patron of Manually Edited Dump Files. Pray for us.
Savior of unexpectedly small Disk Quotas. Pray for us.
Shepherd of Lost Posts. Pray for us.
Protector of Hapless Administrators. Pray for us.
Scourge of Wholly Inadequate Import/Export Formats. Pray for us.
Mother of all the Bloggers. Pray for us.

I think we’re back. Fresh — or at least unrotted — permalinks and all. Thank you, thank you to everyone who commented in the now-destroyed post where I wailed about the problem. The solution was to get an SQL dump of the database from the old server and read it in to the new database. Not as easy as it might have been, because the old server had old blogs, with old hard-linked archive sources and all the rest of it. But I think it worked.

My sincere apologies to fellow-posters and commenters whose recent contributions got deleted in the course of the database restoration. I guess I revealed myself to be a utilitarian at root: five or six posts and their comments were sacrificed on behalf of about two thousand posts and their permalinks. Moral: Do not put me in charge of interrogating suspected terrorists.1

So, as predicted in my Don’t Upgrade post, I’ve just spent an unconscionable amount of time (I am about to start paying off large debts to my wife and daughter) getting us back to where we were last week. But now we are where we were last week, but on new servers. To switch religions momentarily, Oy.

1 Alternative moral for high-ranking Pentagon officials: By all means put me in charge of interrogating suspected terrorists, because I will lose them.

June 18, 2004

Crooked Timber Has Moved

Posted by Kieran

But don’t panic! This is a sub-etha move. A behind-the-scenes move. A the-audience-noticed-nothing move. In other words, a New Host Provider move. So from your point of view, gentle readers, we are where we’ve always been. Very soon entering http://www.crookedtimber.org in your browser will bring you to our new server. In a day or two it’ll be like nothing happened, but you may have some difficulty connecting to our new server while the Domain Name transfer is happening. To get your new-server CT fix in the short term, follow this link. But as I say, in the next 12-24 hours the url http://www.crookedtimber.org will begin pointing to the new site, and everything will be as it was, only spiffier in an ineffable, new host provider sort of way.

CT is Moving

Posted by Kieran

Steadfastly ignoring our own good advice, Crooked Timber is moving to a new host provider, with all the potential headaches that entails. I’m doing the transfer now, so comments posted here from now on will not be imported to the new server. Please hold yer thoughts for a few hours.

Once the move is done, we’ll transfer the Doman Name registration to our new hosts, and http://www.crookedtimber.org will point to the new servers. The process of “DNS propagation”, where the big internet servers tell the little ones about the new location, may take a little while. Thanks for bearing with us.

June 11, 2004

It's my party and I'll φ if I want to

Posted by Kieran

Seeing as Brian is off gallivanting somewhere, let me point you towards Desert Landscapes, a new blog brought to you by some of the faculty and graduate students of the Philosophy Department at the University of Arizona. You can see them all there, inside the Social Sciences building in the right foreground of this live view of the campus.1 They live on the ground floor philosophically underlaboring for the Political Science people department in the middle and the Sociology department, appropriately located on the top floor.

1 Unless it’s the night time, obviously, in which case you can look here instead.

June 10, 2004

Randy takes on

Posted by Ted

Two good links from Randy Paul at Beautiful Horizons:

Q&A about the torture memo

There was recently an intelligent bit debate about Amnesty International between Chris (also here), Jacob Levy at the Volokh Conspiracy, and Eve Garard at Normblog. Randy confronts some other anti-Amnesty points that aren’t quite up to snuff.

May 28, 2004

Fourteen dogs from Ohio, you're no Jack Kennedy

Posted by Ted

While I prepare my pro-McSweeney’s vicious battle raps, I leave you with:

The Making of the Autobiography with George W. Bush (An Excerpt) (via Radney Balko)

Pros and Cons of John Kerry’s Top Twenty Vice-Presidential Candidates (via Reason)

Daily Reasons to Dispatch Bush

My goodness, how I love the internet.

May 27, 2004

Not in our name

Posted by Ted

Left-of-center bloggers, could I have a quick word with you, before this becomes a problem?

(huddle)

Barbara and Jenna Bush are going to join their father’s campaign. There’s going to be a fair number of stories about them. They’re out of college, and many are going to consider attacks on them to be fair game. We shouldn’t.

When Rush Limbaugh referred to Chelsea Clinton as the “White House dog”… when John Derbyshire wrote his famous “I hate Chelsea Clinton” column… when Mickey Kaus attacked Kerry’s daughter for the dress she wore… those arguments were heavily quoted and promoted, not by conservatives, but by liberals. They make right wingers* look like cruel, petty people who attack the loved ones of their political opponents. I don’t want us to be like that. These attacks barely work in terms of preaching to the choir, and alienate and insult everyone else.

So it will be with the Bush daughters. There will never be a post or story about Bush’s daughters that loses votes for George W. Bush. The Bush daughters are good-looking young women who are doing nothing wrong by supporting their father, whom they love. They could hardly be more sympathetic if they fell down a well. We should leave them alone.

* “But Kaus is a Democrat!” Yes, he’s a Democrat who wrote a mean, inaccurate hit piece on the Democratic nominee’s daughter. Duly noted.

Virtual ataraxia

Posted by Chris

Congratulations to Chris Brooke, whose funny, informative, enlightening (and splendid) Virtual Stoa is now three years old. In my experience the third birthday party is the one where hordes of children turn up, are abandoned by their parents for several hours, grind jelly and crisps into the carpet and play at sticking their heads through the cat-flap. So I’m imagining the Stoical attitude Chris is displaying to such mayhem at Magdalen Towers even now.

May 23, 2004

Pig pile

Posted by Ted

I keep getting emails asking for more posts with a long string of unconnected links, about which I have nothing intelligent to say. I live to serve:

BusinessWeek on government waste.

Kos on the Bush campaign’s crazy money burn rate

Katherine at Obsidian Wings has three reactions to the stories that Chalabi has been working for Iran: the initial reaction, the responsible reaction, and the snarky reaction.

Respectful of Otters asks why a crime prevention program with a remarkable history of success has to bow and scrap for funding.

TalkLeft reminds us, “Every few months, it’s worth remembering that your tax dollars are being spent to incarcerate Tommy Chong so that the Justice Department could send a message about pot pipes and bongs.”

The Poor Man goes all kung-fu on the idiotic claim that one (1) chemical weapons shell is “an arsenal”. He also writes a mean Dem Panic Watch.

Gary Farber on how to resurrect old New York Times stories.

Ogged at Unfogged refutes an untrue smear on Iranian Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi.

Jeanne D’Arc makes the new images from Abu Ghraib sting in a thoughtful post.

Finally. Something funny.

May 21, 2004

The Corner

Posted by Belle Waring

Some really inspiring poetry from the National Review Online. Sample:

We face scheming murderers with calm defiance.
They have soulless evil, we have self-reliance.
They butcher civilians, their cruelty shows.
Our steel, true steel, is tempered by blows.

Let them come and dare face us, or run, if they choose.
In battle or treachery, the wicked shall lose.
For the acts of their madness are in truth their death throes.
They’ll die on our steel that they’ve tempered, with blows.

Isn’t rhyme great? I think it’s clear that only soulless lefties could be moved by the blank free verse (thanks Rachel) so popular with all the modernist kids these last 80 years or so. Give me good, old-fashioned rhyme any day! And moral clarity! The author, one Rob S. Rice, is a classicist, and on behalf of classicists everywhere I’d like to offer a remorseful apology. Sorry about the whole Victor Davis Hanson thing, too. In fact, I’m going to step up to the plate and take full responsibility for both men (N.B. no actual consequences follow from this.)

In further NRO news a pleasantly deafening silence on the subject of one Ahmad Chalabi:

CHALABI [Jonah Goldberg] A few readers have written to ask what I think about the Chalabi stuff. The fact is I don’t know what to think. I’m not ducking the issue, I just haven’t gotten my neo-con talking points yet don’t know what to think about it. When I get further up to speed, I’ll let ya know.

OK, so, I modified that last part. Finally, in the K-Lo solves your moral dilemmas department,

A few people have asked me: Should I give to NRO or the starving kids in Ethiopia? Different levels there, but I’d give to both. I do. I’m not trying to put us on the same plane as a group that puts food in a child’s mouth but I would like to think that we have done a little something to advance some crucial, life-and-death issues.

I hope we’re all clear now. Get out there and give till it hurts!

May 20, 2004

Spare change?

Posted by Ted

I heard a rumor that if you’re the 1000th donor, he’ll tell you his name.*

*Rumor is not true.

Honest, it was like that when I got here!

Posted by Ted

Does law professor Glenn Reynolds need me to explain why this is a bad idea?

UPDATE: He’s responded to my email in a responsible way. Good show.

May 11, 2004

Matt Welch is a smart guy

Posted by Ted

In the comments to this spot-on post (“When Criticizing Prisoner-Abuse Becomes ‘Politically Correct’”), Matt Welch makes a point that I’d like to cast in bronze and put on every blogger’s desk.

I have the perhaps quaint belief that one can want to fix abuses in our prison system, and wish to prevent another Abu Ghraib from happening, and still have enough time to criticize malodorous dictators and root for Shaq to swat Tony Parker like a common French gnat. The game of you-can’t-be outraged-about-X-unless-you’re-outraged-to-my-satisfaction-about-Y can be used, without end, about every human outrage ever produced. It is about as interesting, and far less rewarding, than plucking one’s nose hairs.

UPDATE: Before anyone says it: I’ve heard about the beheading of Nick Berg by Muslim terrorists. I am absolutely outraged- I’m sick to my stomach about it. If you could seriously entertain the thought that I wasn’t, why are you here? (Other than to enjoy my co-bloggers, I mean.)

May 10, 2004

Blogiversary

Posted by Eszter

I started blogging two years ago as an extension of/complement to my mailing list, which had been running since December, 2001. It’s funny that in that first post I describe blogging as “an online forum usually with one main author/contributor” and now here I am on a group blog. I did not see the benefits of the latter until I joined CT, which has been a delight, so thanks!

I wish I knew who were the first few dozen readers of “Eszter’s Blog” so I could express my appreciation to them. (Perhaps they are still with me in which case saying thank you here should work.:-) Those visits encouraged me to keep going and make this exciting and interesting – albeit at times quite frustrating – activity part of my daily routine. Writing blog entries has definitely pushed me to think about certain issues and ideas in the sort of detail that an occasional random thought would not require of me. It has also helped me meet some wonderful people. Thank you!

They've lost Andrew Sullivan

Posted by Ted

It’s Dylan-goes-electric time over at AndrewSullivan.com:

The question I have asked myself in the wake of Abu Ghraib is simply the following: if I knew before the war what I know now, would I still have supported it? I cannot deny that the terrible mismanagement of the post-war - something that no reasonable person can now ignore - has, perhaps fatally, wrecked the mission. But does it make the case for war in retrospect invalid? My tentative answer - and this is a blog, written day by day and hour by hour, not a carefully collected summary of my views - is yes, I still would have supported the war. But only just. And whether the “just” turns into a “no” depends on how we deal with the huge challenge now in front of us….

The one anti-war argument that, in retrospect, I did not take seriously enough was a simple one. It was that this war was noble and defensible but that this administration was simply too incompetent and arrogant to carry it out effectively. I dismissed this as facile Bush-bashing at the time. I was wrong.….

By refusing to hold anyone accountable, the president has also shown he is not really in control. We are at war; and our war leaders have given the enemy their biggest propaganda coup imaginable, while refusing to acknowledge their own palpable errors and misjudgments. They have, alas, scant credibility left and must be called to account. Shock has now led - and should lead - to anger. And those of us who support the war should, in many ways, be angrier than those who opposed it.

(emphasis added) He ends with a call to win, I should point out. Nonetheless, when this Administration has lost Sully, they’ve done very badly indeed. More to come.

May 05, 2004

Bristol

Posted by Kieran

So Bristol was great up to the point where the hotel phoned me at 7:30 this morning saying that my car had been broken into. Back window knocked out and crap everywhere. They didn’t steal the Ligeti CD.

May 04, 2004

Networking

Posted by Chris

Just back from a very pleasant evening drinking and chatting with Kieran in the Seven Stars , a Bristol pub where Thomas Clarkson stayed whilst investigating the slave trade in 1787. Meeting Kieran brings my person-to-person encounters with other CTers up to three. No doubt I’ll collect the full set eventually! In testimony to the power of the blogosphere I can reveal that when he picked me up this evening Kieran’s car CD player seemed to me to be defective, but he soon put me right: reading Michael Brooke had inspired him to buy a disc of music by Ligeti.

April 29, 2004

Why I don't like Mickey Kaus

Posted by Ted

Roger Ailes has found a particularly stunning Kaus moment.

(Don’t bother to keep reading if you’re making a noble attempt to avoid irrelevant trivia about the candidates; there’s nothing terribly important here.)

If you go to Kausfiles right now, you’ll see this headline:

Where Kerry Slept: Not on the Mall! Old issue resolved; Agnew was right.

Read down. Kaus unequivically states:

Where Kerry Slept: John Kerry didn’t throw his own medals over the wall in that 1971 antiwar protest and he didn’t sleep on the Mall with his Viet Vet buddies either. He snuck off and slept in a Georgetown townhouse.

He links to this piece by Kerry supporter Robert Sam Anson. Problem is, the piece doesn’t say Kerry slept in the townhouse. It says that he had a drink in the townhouse, and that he told his friend that he could sleep there.

Kaus goes on to accuse Kerry of lying and conning reporters, based on his own misreading.

In an update, we lear that Anson personally called Kaus and corrected him. He told Kaus that he has no idea where Kerry slept. (I’d imagine that Anson pointed out that the story doesn’t say what Kaus claims it says, but that’s sheer conjecture on my part.)

After this call, Kaus now has no source to back up his accusation that Kerry didn’t sleep on the Mall. And he has no grounds whatsoever on which to contest Kerry’s description of the charge as unsubstantiated. He’s got nothing.

Kaus, of course, apologized for smearing the Senator and promised that he will carefully read his source documents, rather than jump to conclusions. And to avoid misleading his readers, he’s carefully corrected the headline on Kausfiles to read… um…

Where Kerry Slept: Not on the Mall! Old issue resolved; Agnew was right.

OK, he didn’t actually apologize. Or even sort-of apologize. Instead, he argues that it was likely, in his own eyes, that Kerry slept there. On those grounds, he calls Kerry a liar and Agnew correct.

So, yeah. I don’t like Mickey Kaus.

April 25, 2004

Nielsen Hayden Isms

Posted by Kieran

In a bold commercial move, you Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden now have a Cafe Press Store where you can buy various Nielsen Hayden wit and wisdom on mugs, shirts and aprons. Weirdly, though, I remembered one of the reified sentiments — a superb phrase I will doubtless be using at a later date — backwards from the version for sale. The mugs and shirts say “Just because you’re on their side, doesn’t mean they’re on your side.” But my brain had transposed it to “Just because they’re on your side, doesn’t mean you’re on their side.” The first warns against the danger of giving support to people who will betray you in the end or turn out to be driven by interests very different from those you imagine. The second warns against the danger of accepting support from people you don’t know, whose views happen to overlap with yours one area but in fact are part of some bizarro ideology you want nothing to do with. Not so different, I suppose, but I clearly thought the second version was more compelling somehow.

Three points on this. First, it’s actually quite common for great quotations to be edited and rearranged in the process of becoming part of the culture. But I think we can safely say that this is a case of my wonky1 memory rather than some general push from the conscience collective. Second, I think I’m going to buy the “Nutbar Conspiracy Theorist” jersey once I get back to the U.S. And third, I think we need some CT merchandise. Perhaps a version of the full lineout. Or just our banner. Or some of the pearls of wit that flow like, um, honey from our, uh, wellsprings of, erm, knowledge. (Any nominations for favorite CT quotes?)

1 In the English rather than the American sense.

April 23, 2004

MT Posts and comments

Posted by Henry

We’ve been having some server problems which have disrupted the publication of both posts and comments. They should now be resolved - you should be able to comment again without receiving weird error messages. There will probably be further short term disruption in a few days, when we move to a new hosting provider - watch this space for further details.

Please Stand By

Posted by Kieran

We seem to be having some technical difficulties, possibly related to our SQL server. Rebuilds aren’t working properly and Movable Type is complaining it can’t find template modules that it should know perfectly well are there (because they are now and always have been).

April 20, 2004

Liliputian Lilith

Posted by Eszter

I really enjoy seeing friends take up blogging because I find it helps us keep connected and it usually means more interesting reading. (I guess one could see that as a bad thing, but I’m working on honing my time-management skills.) The latest arrival is Liliputian Lilith who is a friend from graduate school. She, like me, grew up in Hungary interspersed with years in the U.S. thanks to our academic parents who rarely stayed put for more than a few years. Related to other Timberites’ experience (and I suspect many readers’) are her thoughts about the choice some of us make to live in a country other than the one in which we grew up. She has only been blogging for a few days but already has interesting posts about “mother-books” and air travel, cities, Barbie and beauty queens, and the origin of the Hungarians (related to this post on CT earlier). Today she took on John Holbo’s recent comments about Academic blogging and literary studies. Welcome to blog writing, LL! (I know you’ve been a reader for a while.;)

Degrees of separation

Posted by John Quiggin

Following up the links on Eszter’s last post, I discovered that she shares with me an Erdos number of 3 (Eszter via Aronov and O’Rourke, mine via Fishburn and Wakker). This is pretty good for social science academics.

We thought this was worth a CT post, and came up with another issue. Although Movable Type and other systems encourage group blogging, they don’t, as far as I’m aware, allow for jointly authored posts. This is of particular interest since it’s at least arguable that a joint post would count as co-authorship for Erdos number purposes (this comes back to the question, frequently discussed on this blog, of whether and how blog contributions should be listed on vitas). But more generally, it would seem as if joint posts would be worthwhile for at least some purposes.

The Erdos number site asserts that numbers as high as 15 have been found, but that nearly everyone with a finite Erdos number is below 8. This seems about right, though mean, median and modal numbers must grow over time.

April 18, 2004

Academic blogging and literary studies

Posted by John Holbo

For the longest time I’ve been meaning to post something grand and insightful on the timely meta-theme of academic blogging. Since Brian and John got the ball rolling below, this will have to do.

I agree with Brian about the specific utility of blogging for academic philosophy. The form is manifestly efficient (nay, superlative) for batting around ideas in the development stage. As such, it is to be encouraged - as is drinking in bars with philosophers. Which is to say: you should, but maybe not put it on your CV. Just yet. But I would go further. I think Brian is too modest when he neglects to come right out and declare that academic blogging, such as is found at TAR and here at CT and many other fine places, is not infrequently higher quality than a lot of pretty high level seminar and conference talk, just because the latter is genuinely off-the-cuff. It really does make a huge difference that even off-the-cuff posts really aren’t off-the-cuff, despite typos. You read, reread, think - tweak, reword, rethink - then post. Yep, obvious. But seriously. Think what a difference it makes. I think we are sometimes overly modest about the virtues of blogging because we are leery of looking like cranks, foisting our hobby on bemused colleagues. Or maybe we are conscious of having used our blogs for distinctly non-academic purposes, and do not wish to appear as though we are ridiculously trying to get academic credit for that. That’s me. But we ought to just separate out any concerns about the propriety of mixing academic and non-academic productions.

Every class ought to have a blog. Every professor ought to have a convenient way to share brief thoughts about his/her work with colleagues and students, who might be interested in leaving comments, so forth. Not that it needs to be mandatory or anything - I’m not crazy - but it is hard to believe that if what I just said came true, it would be a bad thing. Blogging is like email. It’s a useful utility for intellectual work and we ought to just say so.

Think about the gap between a published paper and some verbal comment, tossed out in seminar. Both are useful, but the one is solid, the other gas. The gap between is so wide it would be crazy not to strive to plug it with something a bit more liquid - and not just at the bar: to wit, blogging.

What really interests and excites me personally is not academic philosophy blogging, however - although I am an academic philosopher blogger - but encouraging blogging about academic literary studies and cultural criticism. (Some handier handle is needed.) This is not just because I’m a compulsive, voracious consumer of literary and cultural criticism, in case you hadn’t noticed. It’s also because - you may say I’m a fool - I see the genuine prospect for making things much better in academic literary studies. A really big literary studies group blog that generated some interest and excitement - i.e. found ways to do so - would be a huge boon to the field. And isn’t it obvious such a thing is possible? And also that literary studies needs it more than maybe any other field right now? Needs to snap out of its shame-spiral of doubt and anxiety? (NO, not EVERYBODY, Chun. Not you. But lots of folks.) And there is a dire publishing crisis to boot. Yeah, that’s the humanities and social sciences all over. But the lit studies people really have got it bad, if I make no mistake. It seems to me quite unnecessary for things to be in this bad state. Seriously.

I’m pretty much going to leave it there tonight. I would like to hear from literary studies bloggers - everyone else, too - about what they think the role of blogging could be in making things better. And what they think about the state of literary studies generally. I’m also hereby resolving that this will be the first of several posts, in which I will actually make arguments and offer evidence and so forth, not just wave my hands in dramatic ‘j’accuse, but the internet will heal all wounds’ fashion. Since this is the first time I’ve raised the topic at CT, I thought it might be nice to start with an almost open-thread: blogging and academic literary studies and its/their discontents. So what about it?

The posts that I’m planning to follow this up are really follow ups to the likes of my ‘How bad is the PMLA?’ post. You can dig back from there, if interested. For example, my Just Being Difficult? post. Oh, and the safety valve knows the worst truth about the engine. And you can read my long mock-Platonic dialogue which I’m constantly flogging in public because it’s damn good and I crave attention - “The Advantages and Disadvantages of Theory For Life” (PDF). Hopefully coming out in Arion in a modified form in the not too distant future.

I’m promising to keep things positive and upbeat and constructive in future posts. Don’t smash more than two things for every one thing you build. That sort of thing.

Let me then conclude positively by acknowledging and helpfully advertising that there are, in fact, a wide variety of really great literary blogs for you to enjoy out there. Most of them are not written by academics - although many are: see CT blogroll - but it seems to me academic literary studies folks would be doing themselves a huge favor by meditating long and hard on the question: why are our journals not as exciting as these non-academic literary blogs, day after day. (Hint: the answer is NOT ‘because the journals are so much more rigorous and concerned with constructing sophisticated arguments and so forth.’ Because that answer wouldn’t be true.)

Well, here are a few of my favorites. If you have any interest in lit blogging these deserve your regular custom. And there have been mutterings lately in this crowd about where they want to take the whole thing next. So maybe they’ll humor me by offering up two-cents worth about academic literary studies.

First, my fave: pseudopodium. I’ve plugged Ray before. I just plugged him again. I know what he thinks about the academic stuff.

Clearly my notion of “real scholarship” is as one with my notion of good fannishness. Again, I think of the amateurish era of Joyce studies, when the bulk of a journal could be taken up by “Notes” - aperçus, speculations, elucidations, emendations, and jokes - and its later aridity, talking long and saying little. Grad school can’t alone be responsible for thinning that fannish energy. As proven by the tender verdancy of academic weblogs, the joy of shared discovery continues ready to burst out, given half an opportunity. There’s something herbicidal about professional academic publishing itself.

And he’s right. And that’s the sort of thing we need to discuss.

And Scott McLemee is great.

Maud Newton. She’s sort of queen bee of the bonnet. If you have any interest in this stuff, you know her already.

The Reading Experience. I have had a truly great time reading Daniel Green’s stuff for the last few weeks. Check out his open letter to Sven Birkerts. And then read the Book Forum piece by Birkerts he links to. Interesting thoughts on snark and the decline and fall of Partisan Review. And Dale Peck. And you should probably read the latest from Dale Peck on Birkerts for the full picture. Birkerts comes off smelling better. But he isn’t always right, lord knows. (Sometimes you start with “I am going to stick my neck out and just say it,” And then, at the end of paragraph one, you don’t have anything above your neck.)

That last link via the Old Hag. Who is funny.

The Mumpsimus. Sci-fi lit blog. Very good. His lead post right now is particularly good.

A few others:
Cup of Chica
The Elegant Variation
Golden Rule Jones

Lat but not least: The Literary Saloon.

That should do for now. There are lots of others. Good stuff out there.

April 17, 2004

Meta-Blogging

Posted by Brian

As if there’s any other kind.

There’s been a ton of blog commentary on this piece by Camille Paglia, which seems somewhat overrated to me, for much the reasons Mark Liberman gives. But, as Nicole Wyatt notes, it raises an interesting question about what we’re doing when we’re blogging.

Many more such questions are raised by Geoff Nunberg’s nice FreshAir piece on Blogging - The Global Lunchroom. Geoff notes how cliquey the language bloggers use can be.

The high, formal style of the newspaper op-ed page may be nobody’s native language, but at least it’s a neutral voice that doesn’t privilege the speech of any particular group or class. Whereas blogspeak is basically an adaptation of the table talk of the urban middle class — it isn’t a language that everybody in the cafeteria is equally adept at speaking.

Now Geoff’s piece isn’t perfect. I’d think any list of “A-list bloggers” that includes Matthew Yglesias should include us, or at least some lefty academic like Brad DeLong. (Only kidding Matt :)) And Wonkette is hardly the definition of anonymity. But I think his main threads are right.

Geoff worries that his style is more appropriate for op-eds or public radio pieces than for blogging, which requires a more informal style. But I’m not sure how much informality a blogpost needs, or even wants. If you just chat for any length of time, it can be rather hard to make sustained arguments, or even keep making sense. The problem, for those of us whose blogposts occasionally ramble on a bit, is that there’s no such thing as colloquial monologue style. If the archtype bloggers sound more informal, that’s probably because they are just throwing around links with a paragraph or two of commentary.

(By the way, I don’t think being digressive is necessarily key to this kind of blog writing. My blogposts are as digressive as a drunken storyteller, especially when there’s a Sox game about to start that I can implausibly segue into, but I don’t think it helps at all look like the style Geoff is looking for.)

But I think his point about bloggers’ language, and how cliquey it is, seems right. We often get complaints at CT about how inaccessible some of the stuff we write here is. (OK, that I write.) But it’s easy to forget how much everyone’s use of language is formed by their group, and not easy to read outside it. For that matter, it’s easy to forget how quickly blog hierachies formed, and how stable they’ve been over the (admittedly short) history of blogs. (On this, see Matthew Yglesias and Angry Bear.) Geoff’s analogy to the lunchtime chatter in a high-school cafeteria seems basically right. (Or at least I think it’s right - but we didn’t have lunchtables at school since lunchtime is meant to be spent outside so I’m going on TV stereotypes about what school lunchrooms are like.)

As I said, Paglia raises one interesting question about blogs.

The computer, with its multiplying forums for spontaneous free expression from e-mail to listservs and blogs, has increased facility and fluency of language but degraded sensitivity to the individual word and reduced respect for organized argument, the process of deductive reasoning.

Is this really correct? Given the inaccuracies elsewhere in Paglia’s piece, the inductive evidence is not stunning. Here’s Nicole Wyatt’s answer.

It strikes me that blogging about philosophy can be a technological variation of some old standbys in philosophy — sitting around the [department/bar/pool hall/colleague’s house] trying out positions and arguments, and getting drunk at conferences and trying to explain your [book/latest paper/PhD thesis] to an equally drunk colleague. That is, its a few steps before circulation of manuscripts and discussion in formal reading groups on the generation process. Of course, philosophy blogs may well be other things as well — social commentary, personal indulgencies (like this one), or a forum for real work more like manuscript circulation.

These points all sound correct. Blogs can be anything at all. One of my blogs just is forum for manuscript circulation. My personal blog is more like the barroom conversation. At CT I try and keep the quality up to at least the conversation in departmental lounge standard. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily higher quality than the barroom conversation - in fact the average quality is about the same - but the variance is pretty dramatically reduced.

But in none of these forums is respect for deductive argument reduced. The lower the standard of the discourse, the more likely I am to start pointing out things like conclusions not following strictly from premises. That’s just because in real life conclusions almost never follow strictly from premises. Real discourse is shot through with inductive and/or enthymemetic arguments. It’s basically impolite, not to mention counterproductive, to always be pointing these out. Which is why it’s the kind of thing I do when the conversational standards start to sag. (There’s an exception in cases where the hidden premises are probably false, then it’s not necessarily rude to point out the flaw, though of course the pointing out may be rude.)

If anything, blogs increase the respect for imagination and new ideas. If we (meaning in this case people with my interests and language) all share a departmental lounge, or barroom, then new ideas can be put into the public space so much more quickly now than they could before. You don’t need to a lit survey, for instance, before saying something to the public. That doesn’t indicate a disrespect for deduction, but it does increase the role for imagination and spontaneity at the cost, I guess, of some role for scholarship.

April 16, 2004

Comments Threads and Spam

Posted by Brian

A lot of people use fake, or altered, email addresses on comments threads, presumably because they want to avoid being flooded with spam. But it turns out that these are actually not that vulnerable to spammers harvesting.

Ever since Crooked Timber started I’ve been using my crookedtimber email address as my email address on all comments boards. And as far as I can tell I’ve never got a single piece of spam sent to that address. So just using a real address does not mean you’ll automatically get spammed.

To be sure, I also always leave a website address, usually Crooked Timber, so the email address doesn’t show up on default settings. And maybe if I didn’t do that I’d be getting spam because of it. So all I can say with any confidence is that leaving real email addresses on MT comments boards, plus leaving a web address, doesn’t seem to lead to spam.

April 15, 2004

Taking Hayek Seriously

Posted by Daniel

Big news for people who are interested in that sort of thing: the Hayek-L mailing list, the main online forum for discussion of Hayek, has gone over to weblog format. One health warning I’d make is that the new blog is run by the same guy who runs the PrestoPundit blog, which is in my mind an example of exactly the sort of kneejerk Republicanism-dressed-up libertarianism that I for one take Hayek much too seriously to have any patience with. But the new Hayek blog seems to have kicked off with a couple of good book reviews and Hayek-L was a good mailing list, so I wouldn’t be prejudiced agaisnt them on that ground alone. Good luck to them.

April 09, 2004

Philosophy Group Blogs

Posted by Brian

This is turning into a trend. In the past few weeks we’ve seen new group blogs started by philosophy graduate students at Syracuse (Orange Philosophy), Rochester (What is the Name of This Blog?) and now Brown (Fake Barn Country).

They all look very interesting, though I’d rather that the Syracuse and Rochester blogs didn’t use Blogger. Last week I did a workshop on blogging at Wesleyan (wonderful people and place, by the way) so I was looking into the possibilities for blog programs. And I was very impressed by Typepad. Obviously many readers will know how nice Typepad is, but I hadn’t realised just how user-friendly it is. I was stunned by how easy it is to customise your blog. Admittedly all typepad blogs look kinda alike unless you really get involved with the underlying HTML code, but you can at least make your blog a little distinctive without having to learn any HTML at all. And having integrated comments is obviously a huge advantage over Blogger.

To be sure Typepad is not free. But given the size of these group blogs, the cost of even the most expensive Typepad package will only be a dollar or two per month per blogger. If these blogs are meant to be long-term options, I’d think this is a very worthwhile investment.

April 08, 2004

LGF: Like Flypaper to Sociopaths [1]

Posted by Henry

Julian Sanchez notes that some of the outrage at Kos is a bit rich, considering it comes from the likes of the LGF crowd. Charles Johnson and friends seem never to have met an Arab they didn’t want to string up. Now Johnson seems to be on a rampage, egging his commenters on to spew filth at Kathryn Cramer’s and Nathan Newman’s blogs. Their tactics include posting Kathryn’s address and telephone number, making death threats, and threatening her children. This isn’t just trollishness - it’s an attempt to intimidate and to silence. Not a proud moment for the blogosphere. Via Rivka.

1 Title borrowed from one of Nathan’s commentators.

April 02, 2004

il n’ya pas de hors-blog

Posted by John Holbo

When a man writes a perfectly good Derrida parody about blogging - and when that man has but two comments to reward his clownish labors a week on - that is not justice. By the powers of Crooked Timber, I call on you to tell Adam he is a very funny fellow.

March 31, 2004

Bunnies vs bilbies

Posted by John Quiggin

Following up Belle’s post, In Australia, as Easter approaches, the big question is: Bunny or Bilby? To give as fair and balanced a presentation as possible of the main issues, the rabbit is a voracious alien pest1 marketed in chocolate form by greedy multinationals, while the bilby is an appealing, and endangered, native marsupial made available for Easter celebration by public spirited Australians, helping to raise both awareness and much-needed funds. We report, you decide.

1 Matched only by the fox

March 30, 2004

The Full Lineout

Posted by Kieran

ct-lineout Having John and Belle join us brings the CT roster to 15, which means we are now available for rugby matches against similarly-sized group blogs. Bring ‘em on, I say. As you can see to the right, our front row is easily amongst the best in the world. Hooker John Quiggin is complemented by English hard-man Bertram and Welsh terror Davies. Flankers Weatherson and new acquisition Holbo combine to ensure mobility amongst the forwards, while second-rows Farrell (H) and Barlow are big enough to catch anything thrown at them in the lineout. Number 8 “Man-Mountain Micah” Schwartzman anchors the forward line. Scrum-half Farrell (M) provides the crucial link between the heavy-hitting forwards and the nimbler back line. At out-half, Runnacles is equally well-able to run with the ball or kick for possession deep in opposition territory. Centers Hargittai and Waring are quick on the break while wingers Brighouse and Mandle create havoc with the slower defences of other blogs. Finally Healy at full back is perhaps the only question mark in an otherwise impeccable line-up.

And in case anyone’s wondering, rugby-team size seems to be optimal. Despite appearances to the contrary, and unlike the State or the Market (depending on your temperament), CT has no inbuilt tendency to expand indefinitely until it takes over every aspect of life.

Welcome to John and Belle

Posted by John Quiggin

I’m pleased to announce that John Holbo and Belle Waring have joined our group and will be posting regularly on Crooked Timber from now on. John and Belle are famous for the catchphrase “and a pony!”, but apart from that I’m not going to attempt to summarise them.

Like me, and some other members of the group, they’ll be maintaining their own excellent blog as well.

March 25, 2004

Bloggers incarnate

Posted by Kieran

Laurie and I had dinner last night with Kevin Drum and his wife Marian. Kevin’s as engaging as you’d expect from his blog, only taller. Thanks to this dinner, Kevin has now met as many Crooked Timberites (Timberoids? Timberteers?) as I have. I have this image of all the CT members finally gathered around a table for dinner somewhere someday, staring at their starters and sipping their drinks in awkward silence. I hope to increase my network score in the next few days by tracking down Brian, who like me is here for the Pacific APA, except he’s a real philosopher whereas I’m only married to one. As it happens, I did accidentally have a job interview at the Eastern APA a few years back, when I sat at the wrong table in one of the ballrooms. Sadly, I made the mistake of admitting that I wasn’t the guy they were looking for. I should have stuck it out and tried to get a campus visit out of it.

Chomksy Blog

Posted by Brian

I’d be more excited if he had started posting to Language Log, but even if we won’t be seeing flashes of linguistic brilliance, it’s still newsworthy that Noam Chomsky has started a blog. The introductory post is a little hard to decipher.

This blog will include brief comments on diverse topics of concern in our time. They will sometimes come from the ZNet sustainer forum system where Noam interacts through a forum of his own, sometimes from direct submissions, sometimes culled from mail and other outlets — always from Noam Chomsky.

Posted by Noam Chomsky

I wouldn’t have guessed that Noam Chomsky calls Noam Chomsky “Noam Chomsky”, but if it’s good enough for Rickey Henderson I guess it’s good enough for the Noam.

Hat tip: NicoPitney over at Kos.

March 23, 2004

Real losses

Posted by Henry

Invisible Adjunct has announced that she will be leaving academia and giving up her blog. It’s a very considerable loss - her blog has been wry, balanced, and very very smart. It’s become the core of a real community. She’s going to be missed.

March 18, 2004

Belle de Jour unmasked?

Posted by Chris

In case anyone has missed the news in today’s Times , Don Foster , the guy who used literary forensics to identify Joe Klein as the author of Primary Colors and who confirmed Ted Kaczynski as the Unabomber, claims to have outed the anonymous author of Belle de Jour as Sarah Champion, a minor author from Manchester. Belle, naturally, denies the claim .

March 17, 2004

Cue Drumrolls

Posted by Henry

Congratulations to Kevin Drum for having effectively taken over the Washington Monthly’s website with his rather excellent blog. I note for the record that I argued last month that hybridization with blogs was likely the way forward for magazines of opinion. Clearly the proprietors of the Washington Monthly agree. It’s a magazine that has been doing quite well the last year; I suspect that its links to the blogosphere (through Josh Marshall and Nick Confessore) have already been helping it get the word out to potential subscribers. More power to them.

March 16, 2004

Couple of Links

Posted by Brian

Chris Sheil has been making lots of excellent points in his running review of The Howard Years. I’m not sure how much interest this will have to our one or two non-Australian readers, but it’s been an excellent series so far and I hope Chris keeps it going. It’s a real pleasure to see someone prepared to use the freedoms of the blog format to spell out all the things they want to say rather than compress them into a soundbite length post.

Gabe Wildau, a (real-life) Brown philosophy grad, and Jai Singh have a smart-looking blog called Flexible Response. It’s early days, but so far they look like they’re doing a good job putting into practice the aggressive liberalism the Gadflyer is campaigning for.

Academics and blogging

Posted by Henry

I’ve always been curious about why some academics blog and some don’t. Indeed, I’ve been thinking of finding out more from CT readers ever since John Holbo’s first guest post, which talks at length about his start in the blogosphere. So, in a completely unscientific survey, I’d like to turn the mike over. If you’re an academic who blogs, what prompted you to start blogging? And what keeps you going? What do you try to do in your blog? Does your blog have any relationship to your scholarship? If you’re an academic who just reads blogs, do you intend to start your own blog sometime? If yes, what are the reasons that you haven’t done so at this point in time? If no, why not? Either way, what do you get from reading blogs? Answers to any or all of these questions (or other related questions that you think are more interesting) would be appreciated. Anonymity/pseudonymity is fine. Anecdotes are positively encouraged - as I say this is a completely unscientific inquiry.

March 12, 2004

A Natural Progression

Posted by Kieran

Brayden King is in Depression, Stage 4 of the Five Stages of Blogging. Characterized by morbid feelings that your blog may somehow get you into trouble, this stage follows Denial (“I don’t really have a blog, it’s just a webpage I update sometimes”), Anger (“Why the hell isn’t anyone reading my blog?”), and Bargaining (“I’ll only post once a day, I promise”). Fortunately it is usually followed in short order by Acceptance.

March 11, 2004

British university axes staff websites

Posted by Chris

In a disproportionate and heavy-handed response to a specific problem, the University of Birmingham (UK) has banned staff from hosting personal web pages (including blogs) on their systems. The Guardian has the story . And staff at Birmingham have a campaign to defend their right to host personal material.

Interesting stuff

Posted by Henry

Bill Tozier and Cosma Shalizi on the tough-love approach to academic peer review. Cosma opts for the frank and brutal - “This MS. is completely lacking in scientific interest and should be rejected.” I’ve never had the heart to do this myself, but I don’t know that my slightly more hesitant approach to stinkers (usually something along the lines of “this manuscript may have had some merit, but I couldn’t see it”) is any more pleasant or helpful for the author.

Also via Cosma, this admirable Michael Chabon piece on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series in the New York Review of Books. Chabon captures precisely the strengths of the first two volumes, and the weaknesses of the third. Nor does he worry about catching genre-cooties - he unapologetically situates the books in a wider fantasy/sf tradition dating back to Vance, Moorcock and others.

Ellen Fremedon on ‘grading with Gollum’ (via Chad Orzel).

And sometime blogger Scott McLemee savages William Vollmann’s multi-volume ‘treatise’ on violence in a review for the NYT. My favorite bit:

Vollmann’s prose has a distinctive way of cycling between two styles. In one, the sentences snake through dense thickets of figural language, wrapping themselves around elephant-size metaphors, which (jaws unhinged) they try to swallow. In his other voice, the tone is flat, narrating the scene in a detached and almost affectless way, like some cross between Alain Robbe-Grillet and Joe Friday on ”Dragnet.”

although

Appreciation of ”Rising Up and Rising Down” properly begins — and will, for most people, immediately end — with awe at its physical presence. Whatever the genre, it is a remarkable example of the book as furniture.

is rather well put too.

March 10, 2004

Irony alerts in the 14th and 21st centuries

Posted by John Quiggin
‘Truly this is the sweetest of theologies’, William said, with perfect humility, and I thought he was using that insidious figure of speech that rhetors call irony, which must always be prefaced by the pronunciato, representing its signal and its justification - something that William never did. For which reason the abbot, more inclined to the use of figures of speech, took William literally …
Umberto Eco The Name of the Rose

Having run afoul of irony in both directions lately (having my own ironic post on Lent taken literally, then taking literally an ironic comment by Chris), I’ve come to the conclusion that HTML needs its own version of the pronunciato.

Here’s my proposal: Text meant to be taken ironically would be surrounded by <irony > tags. Such text would render normally, but would have a hover property such that, when the mouse hovered over ironic text, it would flicker through a range of suitably ironic colors. Not perfect, but a lot more appealing than a smiley :-).

March 09, 2004

Voices of reason

Posted by Henry

Andrew Sullivan:

THANK GOD FOR KRAUTHAMMER: Charles Krauthammer has never written a dumb column, to my knowledge. Even on emotional subjects such as civil marriage, he brings to the debate a calm reasoning that wins the respect of his opponents as well as his supporters.

See here, here and here for a few recent examples of the calm reasoning that Krauthammer’s opponents value so much. And then file this one along with the crackpottery of the bloke who was trying to convince us all a few months ago that Steven Den Beste was the Nabokov of the blogosphere.

March 04, 2004

John and Belle

Posted by Chris

John Holbo and Belle Waring have now finished their week of guest blogging with us, so I think it appropriate to say how much fun it was to have them around. With reflections on Sesame Street, the English murder-mystery, Chinese-Italian (or should that be Italian-Chinese) cuisine from Belle and on the changing experience of blogging, the FMA and conservatives in academia from John — we at CT have certainly done well from having them on board. (You can check out those posts again by clicking on the little squiggly thing next to “Guest Bloggers” on the LH sidebar.) I hope we’ll be seeing them again some time soon, but in the meantime be sure to visit their blog regularly.

March 01, 2004

My second blogiversary

Posted by Chris

Today is the second anniversary of my first ever blog post, on my old blog, Junius . John Holbo reflected the other day on how things have changed in blogging since: my first few posts engaged with people like Lileks and Reynolds and, indeed, it was the discovery of Instapundit that set me off doing this stuff. It has been an interesting and rewarding couple of years, and I’ve met people, read people, gone places and done things that I would never have done but for blogging. Roll on another 12 months!

February 27, 2004

Silent majorities

Posted by Henry

More and more, when I come across academic blogs that I’ve never read before, they have links to Crooked Timber. This is all very nice and gratifying - but it also suggests that there are bloggers out there who are aware of CT, qualify for the academic blogroll, but aren’t there for the simple reason that I don’t know about them. If you meet the criteria email me, and I’ll put you up.

Technical Assistance Required

Posted by Kieran

Ah, crap. My Movable Type installation has decided to stop working, and refuses to accept my username or even recognise the existence of my blog. A more detailed description follows below. Suggestions gratefully received.

I’m running MT 2.661 (with a Berkeley DB) on a blog that’s been quite happy for a year. In the last two days, MT stopped recognizing my username and password. The symptoms are:

  • I can’t log on.
  • Choosing the ‘forgot your password?’ route gives “No such user”.
  • Clicking on comment or trackback links gives ‘Invalid Entry ID’ errors.
  • It seemed to start with MT complaining it couldn’t find its tmpl director (or error.tmpl), which hadn’t happened before.

Support forum posts suggested that there might be a database error. I have a recent backup of the whole site, but I’m not sure whether it was made before or after the problem happened.

  • I tried replacing the database folder with the backup, to no avail.
  • I upgraded the Berkeley DB files. Didn’t work.
  • I tried mt-medic, which showed the configuration was OK but — like MT — refused to recognise any Authors or Blogs (ie, none are listed on the relevant medic pages). It won’t create a new user, either, saying “Invalid author id ‘0’ at […]mt-medic.cgi line 746.”
  • I tried to use mt-db2mysql.cgi to get the data into an SQL database I created. The script reports that it ran successfully and the right tables are created in the database, but it’s not populated with any records.
  • I took a look at the Berkeley DB files using this guy’s helpful perl script. The entries seem fine. The data is all there. It doesn’t seem to be corrupt. The author files look fine.
  • I re-installed MT, recreated my username and blogs, then tried to use the new author and permission files with the old database files.

So now I’m at a loss. Does anyone have any suggestions about how to get access to my blog back, or at least get access to my entries so I can recreate the content? On the one hand it looks like something is wrong with the database; on the other I can’t see what it is, so maybe my host provider (Dreamhost) changed something I don’t know about and that triggered the problem. If I can get this fixed, I promise never to use the Berkeley DB again.

February 24, 2004

Ecce Holbo

Posted by John Holbo

Thanks, Henry. I am delighted to be here – and … and I’d just like to thank all the little people who made it possible, such as myself, and everyone else, and God.

I guess – since you’ve got a back button – I’ll say a few words about John & Belle’s place in the history of the blogosphere, the true meaning of blogging, etc.

Belle and I discovered blogs in February, 2002. A&L Daily linked to Lilek’s “Notes From the Olive Garden” screed. We thought it was highly amusing and became Bleat readers; Lileks linked to the Instapundit. That’s a gateway drug. So a year passed, and in January 2003 I gave our little family one of our own. We passed 100,000 visitors a couple days ago. So let me take this opportunity to thank the 60,000 or so of you John & Belle readers for your google searches for ‘porn + socks + shoes’, etc. Many paths up the mountain of wisdom. Hope you found what you were looking for. Or – so wise men have said: Buddha, Boole, others – maybe all along it wasn’t the answer you needed. Maybe you were really looking for a better question. I know, I know, but that’s the sort of guy I am. Everything I need to know I learned in graduate school.

In our year of blogging – culminating in this invitation to shimmer briefly as facets in one of the jewels in the blogospheric crown: thanks again, Henry! - we have gotten to know many fine folks, including several Timberjacks, or whatever they are. Henry and I have had really vast fun trading posts about sci-fi, Tolkien and such. (Perhaps a bit more of that later in the week.) Belle got Matthew Yglesias – yes, the Matthew Yglesias - to come to our X-Mas party, promising to dress one of the cats as Richard Perle, because Big Media Matt is still not big enough to get invited to the worst sort of party. And that led to me breaking the story about how Matt is tall in an email I sent him. And then he wrote about it. And everyone commented.

Looking back, the grand, blogospheric expanse has changed a lot in two years, and it has changed me a lot. No point pretending I’m above that kind of thing, like dear old Plato. Speaking just for myself, after 9/11 – after being a moderate lefty for as long as I’d been thinking about anything but what cartoon came on next – I sort of took a sharp right turn. I’d never been in favor of a war before, for example, but I sure thought it was a good idea to invade Afghanistan, and I became annoyed at those who didn’t see things that way. And, now that I look back, I see that my annoyance sort of slopped out over some other stuff that it didn’t belong all over. Did that happen to anyone else? And it was right to invade Afghanistan, make no mistake, but it turned my silly head. I did a Hitchens, basically. But I’m better now. Really, I feel fine. And it’s nice of all these socialist types here at Crooked Timber to like me enough to have me over. And when I think how much slack I’ve cut George Bush over the last two years; he’s spent that loan of good will like a drunken sailor; so much so his budget looks pennypinching by comparison … But I’m sort of sad about how writers I used to enjoy – like Lileks and the Instapundit – I really don’t enjoy any more. Oh, I still read them. But it’s for old time’s sake. I owe them a lot. If it isn’t obvious, I do a grade-B Lileks schtick most days. It’s nothing special, I know. It’s possible I missed my calling as a failed comedy writer. But I do talk this way. (I remember Brian Weatherson asking in some post way back: do you talk the way you write? Well, I do, when I blog.) When we first found Lileks, Belle said: he sounds like you. It’s true, except he’s better at it than I am, formally, and he’s a much bigger pain, politically. But he’s got a little girl he adores, and an iBook, and he messes with GoLive and Photoshop. (You know what he’s like.) Anyway, it had just never occurred to me that it was possible to write the way I talk, to sort of just let the mass of it bulge disproportionately and waddle with studied indirection – then SNARK! a kick below the belt! I’m not allowed in philosophy papers. On the other hand, I think if Lileks had gone to graduate school for a decade, he would have turned out better – more skeptical and tormented with doubt and wincing and scratching like a normal person. He keeps hitting the same note because he’s sure which one is right. It’s more interesting to hear different notes, if you are going to play every day.

And the Instapundit. Well again, it just never occurred to me that you could do this thing. It was so new and astonishing. I guess we’re all a bit jaded now, but – damn, it felt new and different and clean and unencrusted with cant at the start of 2002. It seemed like people from all across the political compass were really getting together and having surprisingly civil and intelligent conversations. And Glenn was sort of a host, and seemed so gracious. And now it seems to me – I don’t think it is just me - his jaw is set unpleasantly. No doubt he feels he only did that after half the guests started to behave badly. (It was really his refusal to acknowledge the seriousness of the whole Plame affair that permanently tore it for me, if you are curious.) Election year 2004 is not going to thaw these frigidities. Ah, well. No matter how bad it gets at least we can all agree – each and every one of us – that Eugene Volokh is really, really smart.

It sounds dumb to suggest there was a Golden Age of blogging. That’s a perfect example of a kind of thing that just couldn’t possibly be true, so go ahead and roast me. Maybe I’m misremembering. Maybe if I went and poked around I would conclude: nope, you just went funny in the head for a while.

Not that I think it’s bad now – but different, more fragmented, settling into itself. It’s interesting to me that these days I mostly read blogs by fellow academics. (As opposed to blogs by non-academics.) That’s not so surprising; so many academics blog. But it’s nice because it actually confirms me in my original suspicion – when I got to college – that I liked it there and wanted to stay, if only my little cubby hole could get a bit more fresh air and light.

Henry has a nice post below about blogging and ‘little magazines’, like Dissent. It is truly remarkable that a site like Crooked Timber has as many daily readers as this venerable minor organ has monthly subscribers. I think it entails that Crooked Timber is much more influential. (Is that a fallacy?)

It’s worth asking, I think, why so many of us find it so compulsively satisfying to begin our days by reading too many blogs. Because, of course, People Magazine has Crooked Timber and Dissent beat senseless. The fact that Crooked Timber is more popular than Dissent obviously does not mean it is superior. It could be that Crooked Timber - and John & Belle, in our small way - are winning the eternal struggle for eyeballs by cheap gouging, pandering to lower tastes for mordant clashes that will be forgotten in a week. We half-bake and half-bake again tomorrow and the silly stuff flies off the shelves. Schopenhauer has a funny line: “Journalism is the second hand on the clock of history.” I like that for the obviously double implication of: it’s never right, and it’s what you watch when you are bored out of your skull with nothing to do. Some people clearly think something of the sort about blogging; it is obviously sometimes true. Certainly anything superabundant is suspect. But it is also true that the ninth course doesn’t look as appealing after you have eaten the first eight. That’s not the ninth course’s fault, necessarily. It could be that, every day, there’s just more good stuff out there than you can read. (Of course, you also have to chew through the bad.) The effect would be the same either way: it would all start to look vaguely cheap and stomach-turning.

There are really two features of blogging – academic blogging, maybe – that seem to me truly superior, and worthy of celebration and acclaim and reinforcement. First, the willingness of some of us, at least some of the time, to 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; and if they aren’t – that’s why there’s back buttons. But the fannish enthusiasm for whatever twiddle it may be is so often infectious. Reading, you are sure this person cares. So you are infected. So you find something new and interesting. As simple as that. Magazines like Dissent have to play it straighter than that, but that means less infectious excitement. And academic articles – well, twiddles aplenty; but one frankly has no prima facie confidence the twiddle even interested its author originally. It’s a tenurable twiddle. That ‘s enough to explain its presence. Why postulate any less economical explanation of how this thing got in this journal? That’s too harsh, but you see the point. Blogging often has the courage to ignore the audience yet is seldom disrespectful to its audience, simply because it’s audience is highly idealized. It is the author’s own better nature.

Lionel Trilling has some nice things to say about this in a nice little essay in The Liberal Imagination, “The Function of the Little Magazine”:

From the democratic point of view, we must say that in a true democracy nothing should be done for the people. The writer who defines his audience by its limitations is indulging in the unforgivable arrogance. The writer must define his audience by its abilities, by its perfections, so far as he is gifted to conceive them. He does well, if he cannot see his right audience within immediate reach of his voice, to direct his words to his spiritual ancestors, or to posterity, or even, if need be, to a coterie. The writer serves his daemon and his subject. And the democracy that does not know that the daemon and the subject must be served is not, in any ideal sense of the word, a democracy at all.

I think good bloggers meet this requirement better than the editors of magazines like Dissent can – who must cleave to a format, which is a straitjacket, which presumes on the limitations of its audience not its strengths, if you think about it.

Anyway, a coterie of several thousand a day, no unforgivable arrogance indulged: a tidy profit to take to the bank of spirit. Not to mention the thought of the alternative. What if everyone could blog, but no one chose to? “We must take into account what would be our moral and political condition if the impulse which such a magazine represents did not exist, the impulse to make sure the daemon and the subject are served, the impulse to insist that the activity of politics be united with the imagination under the aspect of mind.” That’s pretty lofty stuff, but I like it. (A couple weeks ago I was exchanging emails with someone and I said I was sort of a follower of Trilling. And he said: ‘You’re a red baiter, eh?’ And I said: ‘Well, sometimes. But that’s not the point.’)

So I don’t think that, by blogging, we are just yammering for the sheer joy of hearing our voices in the echo chamber. Or at least some of us aren’t, on our good days.

Moving right alone, the next point concerns this ideal union of politics and imagination under the aspect of mind. The fact that blogging is so personal, so focused on present ephemera, so often motivated by desire to vent emotion that will evaporate by tomorrow anyway, if left to itself – all this seems like signs of sure weakness, obviously. Me, I like Montaigne’s excuse, in a nice essay, “Of Repentance” – which basically states the blogger’s code, as I understand it (why you shouldn’t go back and rewrite your archives, for example):

Others form man; I tell of him, and portray a particular one, very ill-formed, whom I should really make very different from what he is if I had to fashion him over again. But now it is done.

Now the lines of my painting do not go astray, though they change and vary. The world is but a perennial movement. All things in it are in constant motion – the earth, the rocks of the Caucasus, the pyramids of Egypt – both with the common motion and with their own. Stability itself is nothing but a more languid motion.

I cannot keep my subject still. It goes along befuddled and staggering, with a natural drunkenness. I take it in this condition, just as it is at the moment I give my attention to it. I do not portray being: I portray passing. Not the passing from one age to another, or, as the people say, from seven years to seven years, but from day to day, from minute to minute. My history needs to be adapted to the moment. I may presently change, not only by chance, but also by intention. This is a record of various and changeable occurrences, and of irresolute and, when it so befalls, contradictory ideas: whether I am different myself, or whether I take hold of my subjects in different circumstances and aspects. So, all in all, I may indeed contradict myself now and then; but truth, as Demades said, I do not contradict. If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial.

I set forth a humble and inglorious life; that does not matter. You can tie up all moral philosophy with a common and private life just as well as with a life of richer stuff. Each man bears the entire form of man’s estate.

The best snarks and attack-pieces and sheer displays of personality (I love the fact that Tim Burke compared himself to Black Bolt today) make their point while keeping this in sight, and clearly displaying it. This is what I like about Lileks, by the by. He’s better than a lot of other writers you might think are indistinguishable, because of the peculiar mix of rambling autobiography and criticism. Clubbing someone to death with a burlap sack of Simpson collectible figurines on the way to Target, as it were, is more interesting than just arguing them down. In the former case, you provoke the victim to prove he is not an idiot, that he can be defeated in this way - as Nietzsche said of Socrates. But Lileks is such a pill - a bolus of Bush support, these days - ah, well. ‘Bring it on!’ as the smart kids are all rightly saying. At any rate, if you can pull off the Montaignean mix of personality and philosophy, your bloggy narcissism – hanging your silly ass out in front of everyone, day in and out – has perhaps redeemed itself to some degree. The other way is to have a really, really big brain that fires on all cylinders every day. Lots of folks do.

I don’t think the blogosphere has thrown up nearly enough stylists of true distinction, incidentally. Do you? (I’m not angling for a nomination. I don’t think I deserve one.) I remember seeing someone a couple months back praising a pack of warbloggers as superlative stylists. The name Steven den Beste was dropped. I do not say the man has no brain, but he surely writes like an IBM manual. (Which is fine, for certain purposes – perhaps den Beste’s.) What do you eat for dinner, for preference: Amazon shipping packages? Surely not. That is not the purpose of these things. They convey things. Blogging would be even better if it were more artful. But it’s OK the way it is.

We are honored to blog for Crooked Timber for a week.

February 23, 2004

Guestblogger welcome

Posted by Henry

We’re going to have two new guestbloggers with us over the next week; John Holbo and Belle Waring from John and Belle Have a Blog. Most CT readers will know them well already; I reckon that JABHAB and the Volokhs are the two main contenders for the coveted blog-most-linked-to-by-Timberites award. John is a philosopher at the National University of Singapore; he also blogs about literature, politics and academia. Belle covers all of the above, as well as cooking (including tasty rat anecdotes) and popular culture. She’s ABD (or AWOL) at the Classics Department at Berkeley, and is currently writing a rather good detective novel with surreal elements. Enjoy …

February 21, 2004

A year of blogging

Posted by Micah

So I started blogging a year ago today. At first, it took me awhile to get a template together at my old blog. Then, after a couple days of toying around with links to other blogs, I recall receiving an email from a current member of this blog saying: “I’ve seen you show up in my referrer logs a couple of times now. Time for you to get blogging I’d say!” Well, he’d probably say the same thing today, but, at the time, it was great to have some encouragement. I don’t know about others, but my first ventures out into the blogosphere were certainly apprehensive. Did I really want to be putting my name on this half-baked stuff? Is anyone really going to read this? (Welcome to Sitemeter.) Then there was: note to self, this is rather addictive; and, from whence the pressure to post everyday?

I sometimes wonder why people start blogging (and, somewhat relatedly, why the legal blogging community in particular seems overwhelmingly male-dominated). I suppose there’s a wide diversity of reasons. For my own part, I began as a single issue blogger with an inaptly named blog. I took the title “politicaltheory.blogspot” because it was open, and because I’d just finished up a degree in political theory. Seemed like a good way to keep in touch with the field while I was studying law. But my first posts weren’t about political theory at all. They were about why the left doesn’t fund big ideas and the organizations (think-tanks, policy centers, etc.) that help produce and publicize them. I’d been pestering my friends to explain this to me, and, after hearing lots of lame excuses, I put together four posts corresponding to what I thought were four myths about the subject. I argued against the claims that: (i) the left doesn’t have the money (here); (ii) the left should spend its money helping people, not funding academics to think about ideas (here); (iii) the left has taken over elite American universities, so it doesn’t need think-tanks (here), a claim oddly aligned with some of the things Edward Feser has been saying; and, lastly, (iv) that big ideas are needed to get funding, not the other way around (here).

In the fall of last year, months after I’d written those posts, there was some talk (e.g., here and here) about the formation of a liberal think-tank to counterbalance the influence of AEI, the Heritage Foundation, Cato and the like. And, indeed, there is now a Center for American Progress (CAP) run by John Podesta, formerly Clinton’s Chief of Staff, though I’ve heard almost nothing about it. Maybe it’s still too early for them. Either way, I think what I said a year ago holds true. There’s still a long way to go.

This would probably be a good occasion for a more elaborate retrospective. But at the risk of sentimentalism, I’ll just say that I’m glad to have stumbled into the blogosphere and hope not to stumble out of it anytime soon.

February 20, 2004

By Any Other Name

Posted by Kieran

If current trends continue, ‘John Quiggin’ may begin to challenge ‘Kieran Healy’ as the most frequently misspelled name on Crooked Timber, with ‘Eszter Hargittai’ a surprisingly distant third. In terms of sheer variety, however, “Kieran Healy” looks set to retain its dominance, as virtually all Quiggin-related mistakes are accounted for by ‘Quiggan’, whereas both the first and last parts of “Kieran Healy” offer multiple opportunities for error. Transposing the “i” and “e” or moving the “e” after the “r” are universally popular choices1, while others show interesting cross-national variation. English readers find it hard to to resist converting “Healy” to “Healey,” while Americans love to change “Kieran” to “Kiernan.” This latter variant is linguistically interesting because Americans usually choose to misspell words by removing letters rather than by adding them. These errors are sometimes compounded with another common mistake. Beginning an email with the words

Dear Ms. Healey,

does not encourage a sympathetic reading of your comments, for instance.

A subsequent post will give some handy tips on more advanced CT-related topics, such as how to tell John from Jon, Henry from Harry and Ted from Tom.

1 Though their simultaneous use has yet to be observed in the field.

February 19, 2004

All men (nearly)

Posted by Chris

Inspired by Michael Brooke’s post on The Gender Genie , a site that analyses text and guesses whether the author is male or female, I’ve just run samples of the Crooked Timber team’s writings though the test. It turns out that Ted is probably a woman and that all the rest of us (including Eszter and Maria) are men! Harry, whom I had down as a caring-sharing type, turns out to have gallons of testosterone coursing through his sentences. Who’d uv thunk it?

February 13, 2004

Quiz Night at Crooked Timber

Posted by Kieran

It’s quiztime, courtesy of Mike Rappaport at The Right Coast, who does not like us. He turns his keen critical eye on four of our recent posts. The goal of the quiz is to match each of Mike’s devastating indictments to its target:

AccusationTarget
1. Attacked conservatives when they were down.A. John.
2. Failed to discuss something on our blog.B. Harry.
3. Relies on news sources other than Fox.C. Chris.
4. Knows about the history of socialism.D. Kieran.

Answers are at The Right Coast. The accuracy of these criticisms, and their effect on our credibility here at CT, will be the subject of a later quiz.

Anger

Posted by Ted

(UPDATE: Glenn has taken down the link to the post in question. We all make mistakes. Original post below the fold, edited somewhat.)

I really thought that I could get through the day without commenting on the accusations about John Kerry.

But good lord. There’s a blogger who’s pored through pictures of John Kerry’s interns. He’s found one who looks young, cute and blond, and listed her name and her (disconnected) phone number. (I’m not linking to it. I hope that he takes it down.)

This young woman isn’t running for office. She’s a real person, and there’s no excuse for invading her privacy. There’s absolutely no reason to believe that she’s involved with Kerry. I hope that she gets through these next few days with a sense of humor, because she’s going to need one.

You know why the blogosphere doesn’t get much respect from the traditional press? It’s not because we’re brave and iconoclastic and they resent our freedom. It’s because we pull jackass stunts like this, with no thoughts about the consequences.

Jesus.

February 09, 2004

Textile 2

Posted by Kieran

Gotta love Brad Choate and his Textile 2 plugin1, which makes it a breeze to write nicely formatted XHTML for your blog.2 Now we just need an automated content generator, and CT will run itself. (Some bloggers show evidence of such a system already.)

1 Even footnotes. So now even ephemera can be annotated. Brad developed Textile for Movable Type from Dean Allen’s original implementation.

2 The dangers of giving footnote functionality to a blog staffed mainly by academics should immediately be obvious.

February 08, 2004

The Decembrist

Posted by Kieran

Someone needs to explain to me why I haven’t been reading The Decembrist for the last six months.

February 04, 2004

M

Posted by Ted

I just noticed that John Quiggin’s post below was the thousandth post on Crooked Timber.

At this rate, we’ll catch up with Instapundit thirty years after he quits blogging. Go us.

January 29, 2004

Exam Question for Bonus Marks

Posted by Henry

Hell on Earth would be a World Government run by Crooked Timber

Do you agree with this proposition? Do you disagree? Discuss, with reference to the assigned readings.

January 28, 2004

Odds and ends

Posted by Ted

I’ve been heavily involved in work production related activities, but I should point to Daniel Drezner, who is blogging about a potentially huge story.

The Bush administration, deeply concerned about recent assassination attempts against Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf and a resurgence of Taliban forces in neighboring Afghanistan, is preparing a U.S. military offensive that would reach inside Pakistan with the goal of destroying Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network, military sources said.

U.S. Central Command is assembling a team of military intelligence officers that would be posted in Pakistan ahead of the operation, according to sources familiar with details of the plan and internal military communications. The sources spoke on the condition they not be identified.

Drezner says,

I’d offer some cogent analysis at this point, but I’m torn between two diametrically opposed viewpoints:
1) It’s about friggin’ time. If the biggest cluster of high-level Al Qaeda operatives are in the mountains of Pakistan, that’s where U.S. forces hands-down should be.

2) Musharraf clearly feels more secure in his domestic situation than the Western media.

I agree with Drezner’s read, I think. It’s surely one to watch. This story came from the Chicago Tribune. The NY Times and Washington Post have a much-discussed tendency to bury stories on which other papers scoop them. Let’s hope that this isn’t the case here.

  • I’d also like to say “hear hear” to Gary Farber. Gary encapsulates why I think that most blogging is less like a revolutionary new paradigm in journalism, and more like high school without the sexual tension.

Walking Trees

Posted by Henry

As part of our never-ending quest to increase shareholder value, I’ve munged up a stripped down version of Crooked Timber for people with mobile devices of one sort or another; it’s available at http://www.crookedtimber.org/mobile/ (there’s a link in our left sidebar too). Comments from people who actually live in the 21st century and have mobile devices with Internet access would be appreciated. Thanks to Dive Into Mark for the basic templates.

January 27, 2004

RSS for Blogger Blogs

Posted by Brian

Kaye Trammell and James Russell have noted that Blogger now has an inbuilt RSS feed - details here. Third-party RSS feeds for Blogger blogs have been pretty bad in the past, so hopefully this will be better. If you don’t know why RSS is good for you, read Kaye and Dave Winer. Let me add another reason - I (and I think many others) don’t read blogs without RSS feeds. Anyone who is running a Blogger blog should turn on this feature and display the feed link prominently.

Linkage

Posted by Henry

I’m running to catch a plane, so I’m taking the lazy blogger’s way out.

Read:

Steven Berlin Johnson and Jack Balkin (here and here) on whether the Internet is destroying democracy.

Ed Felten on why Republican Senate file-snoopers may have indeed broken the law.

Jessa Crispin and About Last Night on changes afoot in the NYT Book Review (I’m with both of ‘em - read the Washington Post’s Book World, and especially the incomparable Michael Dirda instead).

Belle Waring on wusscore, a rapidly expanding musical genre.

Amity Wilczek on slugporn.

January 26, 2004

Baker's Dozen

Posted by Kieran

I’m very happy to report that, after his stint as a guest blogger recently, John Quiggin will be joining us as a regular here at Crooked Timber. John is a distinguished Australian economist at the University of Queensland, and many readers will already know him from his own excellent blog. We’re delighted John’s agreed to join the gang, and his doing so brings our number to thirteen. I’m not sure who gets to be Judas. Or Jesus, for that matter.

January 25, 2004

Koufax Awards Update

Posted by Kieran

Head over to Wampum and vote for your favorite blog named “Crooked Timber.” We are nominated for Best Writing, Best Series, Best Group Blog and Best Design. Unfortunately, the “Best Group Blog” and “Best Blog” categories seem mutually exclusive.

I just saw a documentary yesterday about the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the organization behind the Golden Globes. Apparently it’s made up of people who need be neither foreign nor press, but who share a desperate desire to be photographed with celebrities. I will happily pose for a photo with anyone who votes for us in the Koufax Awards. Head and Shoulders shots only, though.

January 23, 2004

Welcome back

Posted by Ted

- Ana Marie Cox, formerly of The Antic Muse, formerly of Suck.com, formerly of a lot of things, has a new political gossip site: Wonkette.

Ana Marie is an outstanding, witty writer who makes most of us look like we’re blogging in crayon. Long live the Wonkette.

- Michael Pine, of Off the Pine, is back to semi-regular posting on a new site. I was fond of Off the Pine before he gave it up, and I can’t imagine that he’s gotten any dumber.

- The Mr. T Experience, aka MTX, has a new album out called Yesterday Rules. It’s very good, and you should buy it. Full review shortly.

January 22, 2004

1,000,000 visits

Posted by Henry

According to our log-analysis program, Crooked Timber received its 1,000,000th unique visit today; a nice milestone. I think it’s fair to say that none of us anticipated how well CT would do when we started it in July. Thank you all for reading us.

January 20, 2004

Best 'Best Weblog of 2003 Competition' Competition

Posted by Henry

The competition among Weblog competitions is heating up; in the last two months, we’ve had Wizbang’s Weblog Awards poll; the Warblogger awards, the Koufax awards at Wampum and now the Bloggies. It’s all very confusing: which competition should you be paying attention to? To help answer that question, I’m proposing the Best ‘Best Weblog of 2003 Competition’ Competition. I’m sure that y’all can come up with appropriate categories and nominees - in order to start the ball rolling …

Most egregious award decision
The winner by a mile: Wizbang’s “Best Overall Blog” award for Little Green Footballs. In fairness, this isn’t Wizbang’s fault; I imagine that thousands of slavering trolls from LGF’s comment section were clambering over each other in their frenzied efforts to cast their vote for the Dark Lord. Like a scene from the siege of Minas Tirith. If LGF were really the best overall blog on the Internet, I’d want to give up, right away.

Vote early, vote often award
A number of hot contenders for this one - lots of fishy business of one kind or another in various competitions. Dive into Mark at the very least deserves special mention for his script ensuring that anyone who clicked on the Wizbang awards from his site would find themselves willy-nilly voting for him.

Awards competition that is most likely to be any use
A tie between the Koufax awards, and the Warblogger awards, I reckon. Given the vast diversity of blogs, it makes much more sense to concentrate on a limited section of the blogging community than to try to cover the whole gamut. Readers are more likely to find new blogs that are of interest to them among the nominees, which is presumably the point of the exercise.

Most glaring omission
Why the hell has The Poor Man not gotten a nomination in any of the broader competitions?

Update: Andrew Northrup does a perfect blog-post on the State of the Union speech within moments of its ending, as if to prove my point …

Bits and pieces

Posted by Henry

Worth reading:

Michael Froomkin on a story that should be getting a lot more play; how a Florida Judicial Nominating Commission has been asking potential judges whether they’re “God-fearing.”

Brad DeLong on Seabiscuit versus Elmo the Banana Slug.

Mrs. Tilton on long-haired wastrels and the end of conscription in Germany.

Chris Brooke on British Conservative party deviationism.

Ken MacLeod on Marxist sectarianism. Ken namechecks the British and Irish Communist Organization, a defunct grouplet that I’ve always been fond of for their ability to argue themselves from one position to its radical opposite (viz. from a 32 county solution to the Northern Ireland problem, to advocating the region’s full integration into the UK).

January 16, 2004

Brad^2

Posted by Daniel

In an interview with Norman Geras, J Bradford DeLong makes the following odd statement:

If you had to change your first name, what would you change it to?

> Brad :)

So in an ideal world, he’d be called Bradford Bradford DeLong? Without wanting to cast aspersions, I have to say that if Prof DeLong had ever been to Bradford, he might not be so keen on having it in his name, twice.

January 12, 2004

Blogging and Academia

Posted by Brian

There’s been much hand-wringing over Chris’s post and related links about the role having a blog might have when it comes to getting an academic job. I think it’s all much ado about nothing, but since I’ve done very well professionally out of blogging I suppose I might think that.

Different types of job candidate might be differently affected by having a blog.

The good student at a weak school. If you’re applying for a job where there are 400 applicants, and a lot of them look a lot like you, you’re going to need a lot of luck to get the job. Having a glowing recommendation from Princeton or Oxford would help, but unless you’re at Princeton or Oxford those are hard to get. In this situation I think it’s really hard to overestimate how important name recognition is, especially when it comes to getting your name onto the first short list of 30-50. When you’ve got 400 applicants, there’s going to be some fairly arbitrary choices made at that first stage, and being known to the search committee will usually help pass that stage. Running a blog is, in the right circumstances, a way of being known. In the overall scheme of things having a blog is less important than having a well-maintained webpage with your best writing prominently displayed, but it can certainly help.

The bad student at the good school. Here you might be better off avoiding blogging. If your game plan for getting hired is to play off a fancy looking CV and get yourself into the comfy office before anyone finds out about your argumentative abilities, I’d recommend against blogging. I’d also recommend against academia, but I don’t suppose you’d listen.

The political deviant. This is where things get tricky. I think there is little or no political bias in philosophy hiring. (As we’ve discussed on CT previously, there is evidence of religious bias, which is much more disturbing. But let’s stick to politics here.) Here’s an argument for that conclusion I don’t think has been run much before. My impression is that philosophy grad students are, as a group, more left-wing than philosophy professors. If there was anti-right political bias in hiring of the sort that would make one worried about having a blog, one would expect that to not be the case I’d think. So unless one has really extreme political views (pro-Stalin or pro-slavery or something) I don’t think there’s much to fear here. Again, since I have political views that are (as far as I can tell) only marginally more centrist than the bulk of the profession, this is a lot easier for me to say than it might be for others.

So overall, I’d recommend having an internet presence, including blogging if it’s the style of writing you prefer, as a way to get a job. The main exception would be if you think knowing more about you, and in particular about your professional work, makes you a less attractive job candidate. But in that case I don’t know what advice I could give.

Brooke at a Fistful of Euros

Posted by Chris

I see that Chris Brooke is guest-blogging over at a Fistful of Euros. He’s sure to say much of interest at what is becoming one of the best blogs around. His first post there alerted me to something I’d missed, namely Scott Martens’s excellent exposition of Marx’s On The Jewish Question (in comments - you have to scroll down), which connects with some of the issues discussed in my post below about Clermont-Tonnerre and the 1789 debates about the rights of man in the French National Assembly.

January 10, 2004

Monopoly

Posted by Chris

I’m just back from the Oxford Political Thought Conference — and great fun it was too. One of the things I managed to do in Oxford was to meet up with Chris Brooke of the Virtual Stoa in his palatial college rooms. Just over a year ago Chris and about the board games: me about playing Monopoly in the old GDR and he about Bertell Ollman’s game Class Struggle . I was fortunate enough to find myself sitting next to Professor Ollman at lunch today and asked him about the game, and one of the things he told me was the Monopoly itself was originally conceived as an anti-capitalist game by a follower of Henry George. The story of the game’s invention and its subsequent appropriation by Parker Brothers is here (scroll down to list of articles) and here .

January 08, 2004

Lieberman is cool. And by cool, I mean totally sweet

Posted by Ted

I’m not a big fan of the Googlebomb, but Moe Lane at Obsidian Wings has one that I’d be proud to be a part of.

Ninja.

Koufax Awards

Posted by Kieran

The 2003 Koufax Awards, hosted by Wampum, are now at the voting stage. Four CT members are nominated in the Best Writing category. Best Group Blog nominees are still to be revealed, though I think we’ll be on the list. Head over there and cast your vote. Remember, as Churchill said, “Crooked Timber is the worst blog, except for the all the others that have been read from time to time.” Similarly, Isaiah Berlin once remarked to me at High Table that “The Instapundit knows one thing; Crooked Timber knows many big things.” Or words to that effect.

January 07, 2004

Live chat with Wesley Clark

Posted by Ted

Provided that I can figure out the technology, I’m going to be participating in an online chat with Wesley Clark and a dozen or so bloggers tomorrow (Wednesday) at 5:00 Eastern time.

Watch it here…

or log in.

Public IRC Server: irc://irc.forclark.com
Read-Only Channel: #wireside

UPDATE: I’ve never used IRC, and I couldn’t figure out how to get it going in time. CURSE YOU, TECHNOLOGY!

Here was my question:

I recently read an article in Inc. magazine about how the Democratic Presidential candidates are talking about international free trade issues in general, and NAFTA in particular. The article didn’t have a summary from you about your views. How would you describe your position on international trade?

December 31, 2003

CT, Left exposed again

Posted by Kieran

Here in Australia it has been 2004 for some time. My advice from the future is, buy IBM. Reading around this morning I see Glenn Reynolds going out on a high, high note for 2003, reminding us all why he dropped his tagline “The New York Times of bloggers” in favor of “If you’ve got a modem, I’m shouting in your ear!” Meanwhile Tacitus closes 2003 with a variant on one of the most popular themes of the year, viz, “I’ve noticed a disturbing tendency on the American left…” Yeah, me too. It barely exists. I hope you won’t stop reading Crooked Timber now that Tacitus has shown that “the American left” relies wholly on “murderous racism based on junk economic theory.” Another of our sins is noted by Steven Den Beste, who observes that we at CT think “white men don’t actually matter.” In case you haven’t twigged, CT policy is that white males are only good for use as the sexual playthings of rich and beautiful women. Email me for more details about this.

All of this rhetorical overkill reminds me of a line about the late rants of F.R. Leavis: “In his later books he libelled his literary opponents so scandalously that when he tried to condemn Stalin he had no harsh words left over.” Excitable bloggers take note.

Update: Checking back on this post reveals a comments thread swept up in a wave of huffiness, demands for apologies and assertions of lost credibility. Oh my. I guess I’ll have to work on spelling things out rather than letting the tone make the point. Tacitus says that the “American left” is either an unwitting apologist or a hopelessly naive water-carrier for what is really “murderous racism based on junk economic theory.” That’s why he accuses the “American left” of suffering from “battered wife syndrome” in their supposed denial, downplaying or defence of communist atrocities, and why he orders them to “cut the crap about communism.” If you think there’s nothing wrong with each step of his argument then you will not see the point of my original post, which was intended to show that this reflected reality about as well as the statement “Crooked Timber believes white men don’t actually matter.”

Tacitus’s post would have been a good deal less obtuse (though wrong for other reasons) if he had begun with a generalization he could support. The post refers in passing to identifiable entities (e.g., the Democratic party) that have a history of anti-communism but are still left-wing, and Tacitus probably thinks this immunises him against charges of illegitimate generalization. In fact, it just exposes the strawy nature of his imaginary target. What he really meant was something like “I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in some of the comments to this Calpundit thread,” which seems to have been the inspiration for his post. But I suppose saying a few bloggers got up your nose doesn’t give you the same buzz as indicting a notional “American left” tout court without a shred of evidence.

December 25, 2003

Happy Christmas to all our readers

Posted by Chris

A Happy Christmas to all our readers and fellow bloggers. I’ve been enjoying a traditional East Midlands Christmas here in England — and that means starting the day with a choice of ham or pork pie before moving on to the turkey (accompanied by a rather good Margaux from 1983) somewhat later. I’m sure that many of my fellow Timberites have also been enjoying themselves in their various climates and time-zones. See you all soon!

December 22, 2003

Getting it right

Posted by Henry

Yet another post in the “we right-wingers are smarter because we say we are” genre, this time from Alex Singleton at the Adam Smith Institute. Singleton puts forward the self-evidently preposterous argument that the blogosphere is dominated by the right wing because the blogosphere favours reasoned argument, leaving leftwingers (who are good at chanting slogans and spouting jargon, but lousy at reasoned thought) in the lurch. Weak stuff, which is barely worth jousting against. Indeed, the post effectively furnishes its own refutation; it advances a thesis which is based on

  • One unproven (and probably false) generalization - that the blogosphere is dominated by the right
  • One preposterous claim - that the most successful bloggers are those who are most adept at reasoned argument. The exceptions to this rule are too many and various to require explicit mention.
  • One tendentious and silly piece of polemic - that leftwingers, unlike rightwingers, have no real arguments.

If this is the sort of reasoned debate that the Adam Smith Institute thinks will help the right to prevail on the battlefield of ideas, then more power to them. But of course, it isn’t an argument as such. Rather, it’s a sort of intellectualized gut-rumbling, a tarted up set of prejudices without any factual basis. Just the sort of nonsense that you might expect from a jargon-spouting, sloganeering leftist in other words.

Thanks to John Quiggin

Posted by Kieran

Many thanks from everyone here at Crooked Timber to John Quiggin for being our guest for the week. You can read all of his CT posts on our newly-instituted Guest Blogger Archives, and of course be sure to make his own blog a regular read if it wasn’t already.

Incidentally, while setting up the guest archive I removed the calendar that used to live in the top left corner there. I did this on the sudden conviction that it served no useful purpose on a group blog that reliably has more than one post a day. But if the outcry from the calendar-loving public is strong enough I can of course restore it.

An enjoyable visit

Posted by John Quiggin

My week as inaugural guest blogger on Crooked Timber has come to an end. It was a lot of fun, with a (largely) new audience and a new way of blogging. I enjoyed the interplay with other members of the group, which is a kind of interaction subtly different from that of comments threads. I also started wondering about the unexplored territory between group blogs and online magazines like Salon and Slate, and whether there are technical improvements to blog software that would enable some of this territory to be colonized, but I didn’t get very far with this.

So thanks everyone for having me, and please come to visit.

December 18, 2003

Guardian UK Blog Awards

Posted by Maria

If you haven’t seen already, the Guardian has announced its blogging award winners. They reminded me of how limited my knowledge of other (especially non-political) bloggers is, and the amazingly wide range of things you can do with a blog. Bruce Sterling was one of the judges.

There are a couple of absolute crackers. Call Centre Confidential reminds you that The Office is funny because it is so horrifyingly accurate.

Belle de Jour has its doubters, but seems to be the diary of a sassy and articulate London call girl. Warning; best read at home.

Going Underground’s Blog is all about the London Underground and has loads of pictures of drunken santa clauses. It’s my favourite UK public transport blog after Transport Blog. Who says the British are a nation of trainspotters?

December 16, 2003

Rough trade

Posted by Ted

I had half-written a post about the latest adventures in dumpster-diving, but Gary Farber beat me to it.

I have to say that the ever-increasing recent trend of many political bloggers — some from both sides of the column as they perceive it, though I’m seeing more from the right guilty of this of late (but that might be sample error on my part) — to react to any news event they perceive as likely to be politically polarizing by going to a site known to be full of what H. L. Mencken called “the booboisie,” mouthing off with sub-simian mewlings admidst the mouth breathings, is not a pretty sight. It would seem to be a masochistic endeavor, but no! It has a purpose! Because then said blogger can pull up this eagerly sought handful of soiled straw and proclaim: this is what The Other Side believes! That Other Side! They’re so stupid! Ha ha ha, stupid other side! Me not stupid like them! Me smart. Stupid other side!

The world is full to the gills with stupid people who say awful things on the Internet. Pointing this out doesn’t constitute a political argument.

Philosoraptor has some related thoughts. Philosoraptor is also a really excellent, thoughtful website, and we should encourage him to keep blogging. I’m not pointing to any one post because it’s all good.

December 15, 2003

I think you think I think

Posted by Daniel

So, with reference to the weekend’s big news story, Norman of Normblog writes that a particular pleasure has been

“The sight of some people trying to say ‘hooray’ through gritted teeth.”

If I understand this correctly, Norm is expressing his pleasure in some other people’s displeasure in having to express their pleasure in yet a third group of people’s expression of their pleasure in a separate individual’s displeasure. I don’t know what to think about this at all. Which is just as well, I suppose because at least it means that the chain of meta-levels ends here. I tell, you, this is why expected utility theory will never catch on ….

December 14, 2003

Guestblogging

Posted by Henry

When we set up this blog, several of us were inspired by the Volokh Conspiracy, which has done a quite remarkable job in combining smart political and intellectual commentary. We’re now taking another leaf from the Volokhs’ book; from here on, we hope to invite the occasional guest-blogger to join us for a week or so. We’re all very grateful to John Quiggin, who has very decently agreed to be our inaugural guest-blogger. We hope that most of you are already reading his blog (if you aren’t, you ought to be) - he’s one of the smartest economic and political commentators out there. We’re pleased to have him on board.

December 13, 2003

Oh LazyWeb, I invoke thee

Posted by Kieran

Question: Is there a way to automatically close comments threads in Movable Type after a fixed period of time? I know this can be done when your MT installation runs an SQL backend, but ours doesn’t. I suppose we should have used SQL from the get-go, but what can I say?

December 12, 2003

I'm in Profile

Posted by Brian

It’s a law of nature that whenever normblog moves to a new platform the first profile has to be of a Timberite. So today’s profile is of me.

December 11, 2003

Everyone must have prizes

Posted by Ted

Dwight Meredeth and Mary Beth at Wampum are being kind enough to run the 2003 Koufax Awards to recognize the best in left-of-center blogs. I really enjoyed them last year, and I’m delighted that Dwight is volunteering his time again. They’re taking nominations now, so please feel free to contribute.

UPDATE: Because they’re not accepting nominations for their own posts, I wanted to take the opportunity to say that Dwight Meredeth’s post “Tell His Parents”, about Michael Savage’s cruelty about autism, is one of the very, very few blog posts that I’ve gone back and re-read months later.

Introducing a WSIS guest blogger

Posted by Maria from Geneva

Later on today, the magnificent Gus Hosein, will be logging in to CT and giving us his impressions of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).

Gus is a key figure in a global community of privacy activists - the people who say “huh? you mean what?!” to the proliferation of government initiatives that “seek to balance” the “dynamic equilibrium” between privacy and security in this post 9/11 world.

I know Gus from my time at LSE. Henry knows Gus from a book project in internet governance being organised by Ernest Wilson. I know Ernest Wilson from a conference organised by the 21st Century Trust. Eszter knows Gus too. How, we don’t know yet. Did somebody say something about networks?

Anyway, welcome to Gus. He’ll be blogging here over the next day or so with his thoughts on the WSIS.

December 10, 2003

Normblog moves

Posted by Chris

Norman Geras tells me that he has finally given up on blogger and moved his blog to typepad here . Please adjust your links.

Congratulations

Posted by Henry

to Russell Arben Fox , who has a new daughter.

December 09, 2003

Bunch O' Links

Posted by Brian

Various stuff I’ve seen so far tonight…

I’m not the most paternal chap in the world, but if I do have kids I want them to be like Brad DeLong’s.

Having spent most of the weekend reading reference letters and writing samples I wholeheartedly agree with Brian Leiter’s recommendation: comparisons to well-known philosophers count for much more in reference letters than the usual generic “X is a wonderful philosopher” letters. They are even more powerful than comparisons to your own students, which can easily be overdone. One prominent philosopher endorsed four of the candidates I was reviewing tonight - saying each was one of the best that (s)he’d seen in twenty-something years. You really don’t want to say that about too many people with names at similar points in the alphabet who will be applying for similar jobs.

The short answer to John Holbo’s question is that there is one super-maxim: Be uncooperative. The more precise maxims may take some work, but I think the reverse maxim of quantity - say the weakest thing you can get away with, will probably be on the list.

Between Emma’s letter to Aristotle and Matt’s note to Al Gore it’s becoming a week for snarky philosophers. I had some thoughts for a longer post in reaction to what Emma said, but maybe I’ll leave it for a night when I’m up at 4am for more recreational reasons.

Part of that longer post was going to include an “I can remember thinking that way when I was younger” story, but now that Emma has an I’m getting old post I might want to skip that part. Nostalgically remembering what it was like to be getting old is a bad state. I’m having to find more and more spectacular things to do so I can say I’m young for an X, where X is some category I actually fall into.

Ten Thousand Strong

Posted by Kieran

At some point in the last 24 hours or so, someone left the ten thousandth comment to have been posted in the discussion threads on Crooked Timber. We don’t keep direct links to individual comments so I don’t know who it was. But thanks to all our readers from everyone here at CT. Cheers.

December 08, 2003

I Am an Advertisement for Philosophy the Gingerbread Man

Posted by Brian

This is a little bit freaky. Right now if you do a Google search for Weatherson you get in the sidebar two ‘sponsored links’, one for Philosophy Body Care, and the other for Philosophy the Gingerbread Man. (No I’m not making this up. Not even I have that twisted an imagination.)

I thought this must be because there was a lot of instances of the word ‘philosophy’ in my pages and the companies in question pay to be displayed alongside for any such search. But I can’t find a single other philosopher such that searching for them brings up the ads in question. Searching for ‘philosophy’ does, but that’s the only search I found that works. There’s a disturbingly high probability (i.e. >0.001) that the companies in question actually paid to be displayed alongside a Google search for my name as such.

Thanks (I guess) to Benj Hellie for alerting me to my new role in life.

December 07, 2003

Predictable but unfortunate

Posted by Henry

Looks as though there’s a lot of cheating going on in the Blog Awards. Various methods used - Dive into Mark seems to have employed a particularly cunning trick. The polls link directly to the websites of the nominated blogs, in order to allow people to check out the blogs that they’re voting on,. Apparently, the eponymous Mark set up a script to trap anyone clicking on the link to his website into voting for his blog automatically. Scroll down through the comments to see his justification for doing this - it’s a minor masterpiece of chutzpah. Fortunately, CT readers don’t seem to have been up to any mischief, either because you don’t have the skillz, or because you’re nice and honest people. Naturally, I prefer the latter explanation. (Via Scripting News)

December 05, 2003

Answers solicited

Posted by Henry

How does one best describe someone who engages in a blatant exercise in Newspeak (viz. arguing that all opponents to the Iraq war were objectively ‘pro-fascist’), and then invokes Orwell’s blessing on his project? Me, I can’t find the words.

Update: goof (Newspeech for Newspeak) fixed.

Update 2: In the spirit of Mr. Simon’s interesting and helpful contribution to our public discourse, we might press for the relabelling of the “Best Liberal Blog” and “Best Conservative Blog” awards as the “Best Pro-Fascist Blog” and “Best Anti-Fascist Blog” respectively. Just to clarify matters.

It was Crooked Timber wot won it

Posted by Brian

Wizbang is running a Blog Awards competition. CT is nominated for best group blog and best liberal blog, though not, somehow, for best blog. So head over there, and vote early vote often. I voted for Calpundit, Fistful of Euros and Caoine. (At least, I voted for them in the categories they weren’t competing with CT!) Hat tip: Dave Winer, who would also like you to vote for him.

British political blogs

Posted by Chris

Harry Hatchet has a piece on the Guardian website on British political blogs. He’s kind enough to mention CT among others.

December 04, 2003

Get out of here

Posted by Ted

This is one of those list-of-links posts. But first:

- Bush’s trip to Iraq seems to have driven a few good people insane. It seems likely that just about any President who had committed a large number of troops overseas would visit them over the holidays. This shouldn’t be much more controversial than lighting the White House Christmas tree.

Now we find out that Bush had his picture taken with a prop turkey that wasn’t actually served. Wow. I also have a confession- my third grade pictures weren’t actually taken in front of a sun-dappled woodland. The nice lady at Sears used a big poster as a backdrop.

It feels good to have that off of my chest.

Now:

- What can you say about this?

According to Time, activities leading toward release of the 140 prisoners have accelerated since the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. It said U.S. officials had concluded some detainees were kidnapped for reward money offered for al Qaeda and Taliban fighters. […]

Slated for release were “the easiest 20 percent” of detainees, a military official told the magazine. It did not identify its source, who said the military was waiting for “a politically propitious time to release them.”

- Jeanne d’Arc writes:

Arnold Schwarzenegger tried out a symbol yesterday that showed the largest disconnect between image and reality I’ve ever seen:
Holding aloft a giant, fake, green-and-gold credit card that read “California,” the governor declared: “This is the state credit card.” And then, “This is what we do,” he said, as he folded it in half and discarded it.

What? Schwarzenegger’s plan is to balance the state’s budget by putting $15 billion on the state’s credit card. In what bizarre sense is he discarding the credit card?

- The Department of Labor had a rule that agricultral workers needed to have toilets within a quarter mile of where they were working. The Eighth Circuit court just knocked it down. Apparently, it’s OK for the courts to re-write laws if it allows for treating farm workers like dogs.

From Nathan Newman.

(UPDATE: Thomoas corrects me, “The 8th circuit struck down a citation issued pursuant to the rule, but the rule is still standing.” In addition, several commenters diasagree with my reading, and they might be right.)

- Greg Greene is not happy at the fact that the Wall Street Journal’s Robert L. Bartley has just been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Nation’s highest civil honor. Neither is Greg Beato.

- Arthur Silber is more than a little angry at Andrew Sullivan’s attempts to whitewash Reagan’s record on AIDS.

- The Picture of Everything, via Electrolite.

- Via Radney Balko, New York City’s smoking ban has led to the Department of Health conducting suprise inspections, and actually fining private companies for posessing ashtrays.

- It’s worth repeating that Michael Jackson might be innocent.

- Tbogg points to a Susan Estrich column about the “Hate Bush” conference among Hollywood Democrats.

Now, the term “Hate Bush” was not used by any of the event organizers. It was added by a man who recieved the invitation and forwarded it on to a friend.

Late yesterday, after Drudge forwarded me the smoking E-mail with the “Hate Bush” subject line, I sent an E-mail to the author, and a man phoned me to identify himself as the culprit.

“This is all very unfortunate,” the man told me, saying he lives somewhere in the Midwest but declining to reveal his name. “Laurie David should not be held responsible. I got an E-mail and forwarded it to a friend, and I thought I was being kind of amusing.”

Knowing that, does this column make a lick of sense?

Historians of the World, Unite

Posted by Kieran

A group of well-known history bloggers — including Timothy Burke, Robert ‘KC’ Johnson, and Ralph Luker — have banded together to form Cliopatria. Proof if proof were needed that group blogs are continuing their irresistable rise to global dominance. Or, as a historian would put it, proof if proof were needed that at least one, probably quite atypical, group of historians launched what we can loosely refer to as a group blog (with all the difficulties that amorphous term implies) in late 2003 or thereabouts, according to the best available sources (but see below for futher discussion on this point).

December 03, 2003

We're Ready for our Closeup

Posted by Kieran

I think the screenplay looks pretty good.

December 01, 2003

Worth Reading

Posted by Henry

Nasi Lemak on intellectual consistency, racism, and Zell Miller.

Chad Orzel on exam design.

Bruce Sterling on Brazilectronica (although he’d have been better advised to write about DJ Marky than Bebel Gilberto, if you ask me).

Chris Genovese on boosting and decentralized filtering.

November 27, 2003

Elsewhere

Posted by Chris

It looks like a quiet day today on Crooked Timber. But I’ve noticed a couple interesting links elsewhere. Tyler Cowen over at the Volokhs points to a new article in Nature about the origins of Indo-European languages (Anatolia is where they come from according to this study). And Brian Leiter finds something to like about Stanley Fish who has a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education about right-wing threats to academia (some of which sound not dissimilar to New Labour threats over here in the UK).

November 24, 2003

Tea With Lance

Posted by Kieran

Met Lance Knobel yesterday and had a cup of tea. I raise my hand and claim responsibility for the quote about Canberra in the first paragraph of his post this morning. Lance himself tries harder than I did to be charitable to Canberra, and comes up with “it bids fair to make it to the better category of invented capitals.” High praise indeed.

November 21, 2003

Gratuitous Links

Posted by Brian

David Beaver on Gricean maxims of blogging: “Occasionally say what you are certain is true. It adds credibility.” Funniest blog post I’ve read in months.

Geoff Pullum on corpus fetishism in reviews of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language: “A couple of the reviews published in Britain have been so stupid that the only thing a fair-minded man like me can wish upon the reviewers is that they should die in obscurity.” I love the smell of blog wars in the morning.

Geoff Nunberg on Bush in Britain: “But it’s certainly convenient that Bush fits the negative stereotype of Americans so neatly — he’s a self-made straw man.” If I’m a good blogger one day I’ll be able to write phrases like that.

John Holbo on The Issue Regarding TCS and Confessions of a Former Protein Sheath. As they say in the classics, read the whole things.

November 20, 2003

Testimony and Advertising

Posted by Brian

The response from various right-wing circles about the TCS brouhaha is either charmingly antique or extraordinarily naive. The position seems to be that we should ignore who’s paying the piper and just listen to the tune to see whether we like it. Arguments, they say, can be evaluated independently of the context they appear in. But this relies on views about the nature of testimony that don’t stand up to empirical or philosophical scrutiny. As Grice put it, communication requires cooperation, and since advertising masquerading as honest opinion is not particularly cooperative, it is unlikely to be communicative, but without successful communication there simply isn’t a presented argument to evaluate.

Let’s make that all a bit less abstract.

The role of language is not, much as you might believe from the antics around here, to facilitate debate. Just exactly what it is is a matter of some controversy, but it’s a reasonable guess that it’s something much more cooperative than debating. Maybe the primary role of language is the expansion of common beliefs. Maybe it’s the bringing about of shared plans. Maybe it’s the coordnation of those plans. It certainly isn’t adversarial. This is not to say it can’t be used in debating, because of course it can. Plenty of things can be used for other than their basic role. The role of tree branches is not to be instruments for hitting baseballs, but they can be well adopted to that role, as long as one is sufficiently careful. If one is not careful you’ll end up with weak groundouts and broken bats. And language can be well adopted to debating, as long again as one is careful. If care is not taken, all parties to the conversation can be harmed.

When people are engaged in cooperative behaviour, various assumptions can be safely made about their behaviour, assumptions that are not obviously entailed by their actions. If A and B are cooperating on repairing a car, and B walks away from the car for no apparent reason, A should assume that B has a good reason, relative to the shared project, for walking away. Maybe she needs to get a tool, maybe she needs to consult a manual, maybe she is thirsty and needs a drink before she can effectively continue, or whatever. As long as A and B are cooperating, A won’t, and shouldn’t, question B’s motives at every stage. The comparison with a case where A and B are not cooperating, where B is only there under some kind of duress, or for some ulteriour reason, is quite different. If B is a new employee at A’s shop, A might be justified, indeed required, to inquire why B is walking away from the car. The general point is that when we know that the situation is a cooperative one, we can safely make assumptions about the behaviour of other participants, and these assumptions can make our interactions more pleasant and efficient.

The same kind of principle is true of language, with the added twist that it seems to be hard-wired into us to treat conversations as if they were cooperative enterprises. I can’t find the citations immediately (and I’m not sure the evidence is that compelling, but it’s interesting) but there have been experiments suggesting that when a subject hears a sentence, her default behaviour is to treat it as true.

From memory, the important experiment invovled experimenters read a series of not very plausible sentences to subjects while having the subjects perform various distracting tasks. Subjects were more likely to believe the sentences read out than subjects not so distracted. One might have had a model for the mind where we hear sentences and then evaluate/decide whether to incorporate them as beliefs. One interpretation of this data is that’s just mistaken - we hear things as true, and, if and when possible, decide to remove them from our beliefs. Note that this is perfectly rational behaviour if language is basically a mechanism for cooperative action, which fundamentally it is.

This kind of hard-wired practice gets incorporated over time into social norms. There’s a norm of conversation that one should only say what one knows. And this has many consequences.

One, if there are good reasons against a belief you have, even if you think they are outweighed, these might defeat that belief’s claim to be knowledge, so you should not express the belief without mentioning the reasons pointing in the other direction.

Two, you should only speak on areas in which you have some (relative) expertise. In a cooperative enterprise, there is a mutual deference to the experts on the given task at hand. We assume the same is true of language, so anyone who speaks presents themselves as an expert on the topic, one who knows what the hearers do not know.

But now it’s clear how debating scenarios, and especially advertising scenarios, can distort these well-grounded norms. Advertisers do not (unless mandated) tell you about the countervailing considerations. They may present themselves as experts, but this is misleading.Debaters may or may not be as bad, depending on how much they value winning as compared to the growth of knowledge. (And obviously we all favour winning a bit.)

The fundamental purpose of labelling advertising as advertising then is to point out to readers in advance that this is not a cooperative framework. In a non-cooperative setting you don’t assume that the other party is acting to further shared interest. You don’t assume that what the other party is doing is well motivated. You don’t assume that what the other party is doing would not be undermined by more facts that are in that party’s possession. You don’t even assume that the other party has a particular expertise - just a desire to see the debate move in a certain direction. It’s no surprise that we socially evolved rules like labelling advertising as such to deal with the problem of people exploiting conversational norms for partisan, rather than shared, interests. The problem with TCS and its ilk is that it aims to undermine the rules we developed for this problem. But those are good rules, for it is a legitimate problem and the rules are an efficient solution, so it is wrong to undermine them.

Let’s get even less abstract, though the air will still be fairly thin.

Any argument, and it is agreed all around that TCS commentators are attempting to put forward arguments, has premises and inferences. Unless we are antique foundationalists, the premises will not present themselves with the divine light of reason, and unless we are particularly strident deductivists, the cogency of the arguments may not be obvious. If we want conversation to go anywhere, we have to take at least some of the premises someone gives us on trust, and to some extent we have to take the cogency of the argument on trust either.

Now we are normally smart enough to know not to do this with advertisers. We don’t trust either the premises or the reasoning. That’s why smart advertisers no longer try and persuade us, they mostly try to entertain and leave a positive impression. And it’s why even smarter advertisers try to appear not to be adverstiers so as to activate conventions of trust.

There’s several things that can go wrong when these conventions are broken.

  1. Some writers just make things up. Their premises are false, and they either know this or don’t care. They just hope they won’t get called on them.

  2. Other writers use arguments whose lack of cogency can be detected with some effort, but they hope we won’t make the effort, and that we’ll trust them that their premises support their conclusions.

  3. Other writers again use arguments that are clearly enough not cogent given all the data, but they hide the data that tells against their position, so their argument is apparently good. As long as we are using ampliative inference this is a live possibility.

All three of these things are very annoying to the reader, because they involve a breach of trust. In every case the reader may well prefer to have never had to bother removing the errant beliefs from her belief box. Another reason advertising is labelled as such is to warn the reader to be on the lookout for all of these types of writers, and to read no further if she does not care to have to check for these things.

For there are other kinds of writers out there. Writers who put forward arguments that do try and account for all the evidence, and who use arguments that really are cogent. In those cases it may well be worthwhile investing time and energy in reading their pieces, because the reader may learn something she could not learn without some effort. Even if the writer has a point of view, as long as she’s operating as part of a genuinely cooperative enterprise, the growth of knowledge enterprise at its broadest, then some degree of trust that the writer is not one of the three types alluded to above is in order.

Advertisers, or even people writing in publications that are little more than advertising, do not deserve that kind of trust. But without it there is little to argue about. I cannot evaluate their arguments, because for me it is an open possibility that they are suppressing evidence that tells strongly against their claims. So I’ll keep my reading to those places (unlike TCS) where I can engage with people with different views in good faith.

Living in China

Posted by Chris

A former student, himself living and working in China, emails to tell me about what looks like an interesting co-operative blog project: Living in China — definitely worth a look.

Addendum on TCS

Posted by Chris

There have been some fairly furious reactions out there to the various postings by me and others concerning TCS yesterday, most of which don’t merit a reply. I would, though, like to invite those who have suggested that I’m reluctant to read or to link to sites which disagree with my own political beliefs to peruse my postings on CT (or earlier, on Junius ). They’ll see that their suggestion is misplaced. But I do see that my rather brief explanation of my unwillingness to write for TCS — “too right-wing for me” — was misleading. After all, if the Daily Telegraph offers me a column, I’ll happily accept. TCS, though, isn’t just a broadly conservative media outlet but a site that relentlessly pushes a particularly narrow agenda — “where free markets meet technology” — in a style reminiscent of “infotainment” or those articles you sometimes start reading that look like the proper thing but have “paid advertisment” discreetly tucked-away somewhere. And I felt that I didn’t want either to lend respectability to such an outfit or, conversely, to have my own undermined by association with it. (I’m still puzzled by the Curmudgeonly Clerk, by the way, who opines that my deciding not write for TCS reflects an “unhealthy politicization of personal decisionmaking”. Is there something wrong with allowing one’s values to inform one’s personal decisions?)

November 19, 2003

TechCentralStation exposed

Posted by Chris

A few weeks back I posted on cruelty to animals and was surprised to receive an inquiry about whether I’d be willing to write on the subject for TechCentralStation . I declined (too right-wing for me). Reading Nicholas Confessore’s article on the site and its backer , I’m doubly glad I did. The bloggers who write for the site are mainly conservatives and libertarians, but not exclusively so (liberals such as Matthew Yglesias have featured there). 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? (via Brad DeLong ).

UPDATE: I should, of course, link to Andrew Northrup on this one.

November 16, 2003

Maps and territories

Posted by Chris

Maps and territories is an interesting new blog. Each entry features a map or a fragment of one and some commentary. Definitely worth a look (via Davos Newbies ).

November 12, 2003

Today in Instapunditry...

Posted by Ted

we learned that opponents of the Iraq war are unpatriotic ghouls who are glad when Americans die.

I actually got several variations on this theme, from antiwar types who always seem glad when people die in Iraq, so long as they’re Americans or our allies. They’re usually the same people who puff up if you “question their patriotism.”

I don’t question it. They’ve put its existence beyond question by wishing for America to lose.

Oh Brave New Media, that has such Pundits in it!

(via Matthew Yglesias)

P.S. Oh, and don’t try to excuse it by saying “he wasn’t talking about everyone who opposed the war.” Glenn Reynolds and Lt. Smash have taught me to see right past that kind of tricksiness.

Today's activities on the National Review cruise

Posted by Ted

8:00- 9:30 Breakfast (check ticket for meal time)

9:45: (Deck 2) Two Minute Sneer: Joseph Wilson, long-haired “Ambassador” (led by Jonah Goldberg)

10:00 (Lounge 1) Seminar:

Charges of Anti-Semitism = Real Ultimate Power!

Criticism of anti-Semitism isn’t just for criticizing anti-Semites anymore. The National Review has been a pioneer in aggressively pursuing charges of anti-Semitism, which can be an essential part of a conservative media strategy to get through the filter of the liberal media.

Many people feel uncomfortable accusing others of anti-Semitism without real evidence. We can help! Criticizing Israel, using the term “neo-conservatives”, opposing the war in Iraq, being French: Joel Mowbray and Donald Luskin will show you how these offenses (and many more) can be labeled “anti-Semitism” for a powerful rhetorical punch.

Donald Luskin also has a few tips on accusing a Jewish person of anti-Semitism without giggling.

(Note: Rod Dreher will fill in for Donald Luskin, after last night’s unpleasantness)

11:00 (Lounge 2) Talent Show:

“LIBERALS ARE ALL, LIKE,…

Can you do a great impression of a specific liberal, or of liberals in general? Bonus points will be awarded for funny costumes, banners and giant puppets. No bonus points will be awarded for originality.

Prizes include copies of Rich Lowry’s Legacy, and other copies of Rich Lowry’s Legacy.

11:45 Kathryn Jean Lopez (via remote) reads the correct time and temperature aloud

11:46 Polite applause

12:00- 1:30 Lunch. All potential eaters must show proof of purchase of Rich Lowry’s Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years. (Did you notice the scarlet A in “Legacy” on the cover? Did you get it? That was awesome.)

1:00 Casino opens

1:45 (Deck 2) Two Minute Sneer: Rap “Music” (led by John Derbyshire)

2:00- 6:00 Skeet shooting on Deck 1.

2:00 (Lounge 1) Tax seminar with H&R Block

(NOTE: Guests who are planning to establish legal residence in Jamaica during tomorrow’s “shore leave” should bring their most recent 1040 filing.)

3:00 (Lounge 2) Seminar

Dealing with Political Hate Speech, with Dr. Tom Jameson

Liberals aren’t content to control NPR, Ben and Jerry’s, and the Humanities departments of most colleges anymore. Their insane grasp for power has led to some of the most vicious rhetoric we have ever seen.

Sometimes it’s just too much. We’ve seen what has happened to two of the most prominent targets of liberal hate speech: Rush Limbaugh used prescription drugs to deal with the pain of being victimized by liberals, and Ann Coulter, 39, has gained a pound.

Dr. Tom Jameson is a caring nurturer. Come, gather together in a safe, non-judgmental place, and have a good cry about it.

(Unmarried ladies are asked to excuse themselves during group hugs.)

4:00 (Lounge 3) Seminar:

Dealing with Cognitive Dissonance: Economics

Lie down and relax, as the staff of the National Review explain, in soothing tones, how the massive growth in government spending, net loss of jobs, the steel tariff, and explosive deficit growth during the Bush presidency are all part of a clever, clever plan. So clever.

(Featuring ambient mix by Mobius Dick- Glenn Reynolds samples the first Orb album in its entirety and then adds, “Indeed” in a dreamy voice. CDs available.)

(Note: Dealing with Cognitive Dissonance: Iraq attracted more interest than anticipated. We will cover WMDs in a special session on Thursday)

5:45 Kathryn Jean Lopez (via remote) ironically pairs a number of words with “quagmire”

5:48 Polite applause

6:00- 7:30 Dinner, followed by sing-along of Have You Forgotten?

7:00- 8:00 The Simpsons

Homer joins a bowling team; Sideshow Bob stalks criticizes Bart

8:00 (Lounge 1): DC 9/11: Time of Crisis in widescreen

8:00 (Lounge 2): CAN I AX YOU A QUESTION:

The ethnic comedy of John Derbyshire

8:00 (Lounge 3): Jonah Goldberg and the Jonah Goldberg Players perform masculine highlights from the works of Gilbert & Sullivan. When we get to The Mikado, you’ll never guess who’s on his list! (Hint: Liberals….)

10:45 (Deck 2) Two Minute Sneer: Female “Athletes” (led by Kathryn Jean Lopez, via remote)

10:47 Polite applause

11:00 (Deck 1): Moonlight buffet

Moonlight toppling of butter statue of Saddam Hussein

11:15 Moonlight parade of butter Saddam head on post

11:30 Lights out

UPDATE: Don’t miss Andrew Northrup.

A rose by any other name

Posted by Maria

Daniel Davies lives in the south east of England and likes Brahms.

There, I’ve said it.

Now, how much could I be fined for breaking data protection law? If I also mention that, perhaps, one of Daniel’s legs is longer than the other, or that he’s a poor sleeper (invoking protections for sensitive medical data), I may be liable for a 450 euro fine.

Sounds crazy? Well, the European Court of Justice handed down last week a ruling about a Swedish parish council that should put the fear of god into bloggers who make comments about us Europeans and our hobbies.

In 1998, Mrs. Bodil Lindqvist of Alseda in Sweden put up a web page that included information about people in her parish. It included variously information about people’s jobs, hobbies, and in one case the fact that one person had injured her foot and was working part-time as a result. She was then fined 450 euro for failing to notify the data protection authority that she was processing personal data, and also for transferring said data to third countries by putting it on the world wide web. Mrs. Lindqvist’s appeal went all the way to the ECJ and a ruling was issued last week, partly upholding the original finding.

The law in question is the European general data protection Directive 95/46. The Directive defines ‘data processing’ very broadly to mean ‘anything anyone has ever thought to do to personal data, or ever might’, or words to that effect. So, putting people’s personal data on a web page would count as processing. But if the processing was done as a purely personal or domestic activity, it would not be captured by the Directive. The ECJ found that something Mrs. Lindqvist did clearly as a hobby, and with no commercial motive, did not count as being purely personal or domestic.*

This is extremely troubling. The implication of the ruling seems to be that if you refer in a published website to an EU citizen by name (or by using other data which reasonably infer who the person is), you should register as a ‘data controller’ and be prepared to have your data processing controls found wanting. While people who blog generally do so as a personal hobby, this seems to be no protection against being fully responsible for complying with data protection obligations. (the question of extra-territoriality is much contested and way beyond the scope of this post…)

Now, I think it’s fair to say that the original drafters back in 1995 did not mean to capture enthusiastic church members or bloggers who link to each other and discuss each others’ political beliefs (also ‘sensitive’ data). And one bright spot in the ECJ ruling was the observation that the Community legislature would not have intended to apply the expression ‘transfer of data to a third country’ to the publication of websites. The ECJ’s remit here, as I understand it (and pointers are welcome) was simply to make sure the Directive is properly implemented and enforced. But a first principles approach to Mrs. Lindqvist’s case might sensibly have asked, ‘what data protection goals or values can possibly be upheld by requiring online referers to individuals to register as data controllers?’ Surely, if people don’t like what is said about them, they have recourse to libel or slander laws. Or does data protection now mean that even mentioning someone online is to be a controlled activity?

The directive was up for its scheduled review this year, and many of the people and organisations who provided input asked that the directive be brought up to date to deal with the realities of the internet. Another criticism made by many was that notification requirements create administrative burdens while doing nothing to actually protect privacy. But the European Commission walked through the consultation process and did just as the Commission wanted - i.e. allowed for no amendments. In fact, the ‘for and against the amendment of the directive’ section of the Commission’s report is almost laughable in that it contains no reasons ‘for’ and a page and a half of ‘against’. So, no chance of any sensible changes there.

What’s needed now is for the Article 29 Working Party, a committee of all the European data protection authorities, to come out and clarify what people publishing websites are and are not required to do. But the chances of this are slim. WP 29 seem to exist on a separate plane from the rest of us and engage in closed, theological discussions that have little relevance to common sense and day to day life. I exoect it will be a long time before we see the white smoke rising on this issue.

  • In fairness, the ‘personal and domestic activity’ carve-out was put in place so that people in homes with two telephones wouldn’t find themselves charged with unlawful interception if they happened to pick up the second receiver while someone was already on the first.

November 11, 2003

Ayn's Old Prejudicial

Posted by Henry

Glenn Reynolds announces that Eric Raymond, self-proclaimed prophet of the open source age, has moved from blogspot. Nobody has ever described Mr. Raymond’s quite particular contribution to intellectual debate as precisely as NTK - unfortunately, their assessment seems to have vanished from their website. In honour of the special occasion, it seems only appropriate to reprint it.

One of the better pieces of invective that I’ve read in the last couple of years …

Neither did we - we think - give the gift of hubris to open source evangelist ERIC S RAYMOND, whose personal blog - “Armed And Dangerous” - uses logic and free thought to reach the same certainties that sixteen pints of “Ayn’s Old Prejudicial” and a roomful of cab drivers might manage in an evening. Previous heated debates in Eric’s head have included male homosexuality (they like little boys), the nature of Islam (“warlike and bloody”, the lot of ‘em), and dietary tips (meat and two veg: it’s evolution, mate). But only this week, Eric has invented a way that Al-Qaeda could cripple America, sworn himself and his conspirators to dread secrecy, then reassured the world that should bin Laden’s cronies try to torture him for his secrets, he will give them a “very short education in what the wrath of Allah is really like”. Next up: following a politically motivated cop-shooting in California, Eric asks when is it acceptable to gun down a police officer? When, he argues, they come to round up all the guns, pornography, computers, or Jewish people in your area. (We’re guessing that should they come for the homosexuals, Muslims, or non-Atkins dieters, get a second opinion before opening fire.) Oh, we’d like to think that it’s just one big troll, but there’s a real tone of desperate decline to it all. It’s like watching Larry Ellison channel Charlton Heston; it’s like Cliff from “Cheers” truly going postal; but most of all, it’s like finally realising you no longer have to defend Eric S Raymond to anyone any longer. And for that, thanks for a true gift from God.

November 10, 2003

Grr

Posted by Ted

If you saw the link to this Philosoraptor essay over at Atrios and skipped it, don’t. It’s the most satisfying takedown I’ve read since John Holbo read David Frum. (Digby had some related thoughts on a different subject.)

I’ve been starting a lot of posts recently and deleting them before I finish, because I judge them to be too bilious to stand behind. I’m sure that it will pass. I’ve been thinking about a bitter, prescient essay by John Montoya, written in October 2001 called “Why the Bombings Mean That We Must Support My Politics.” I’m reposting it here; I hope that he doesn’t mind.

(In cheerful news, I should mention that I saw School of Rock tonight, and it was just terrific. It washed the taste of the Matrix Revolutions right out.)

Why the Bombings Mean That We Must Support My Politics
by John Montoya

Of course the World Trade Center bombings are a uniquely tragic event, and it is vital that we never lose sight of the human tragedy involved. However, we must also consider if this is not also a lesson to us all; a lesson that my political views are correct. Although what is done can never be undone, the fact remains that if the world were organised according to my political views, this tragedy would never have happened.

Many people will use this terrible tragedy as an excuse to put through a political agenda other than my own. This tawdry abuse of human suffering for political gain sickens me to the core of my being. Those people who have different political views from me ought to be ashamed of themselves for thinking of cheap partisan point-scoring at a time like this. In any case, what this tragedy really shows us is that, so far from putting into practice political views other than my own, it is precisely my political agenda which ought to be advanced.

Not only are my political views vindicated by this terrible tragedy, but also the status of my profession. Furthermore, it is only in the context of a national and international tragedy like this that we are reminded of the very special status of my hobby, and its particular claim to legislative protection. My religious and spiritual views also have much to teach us about the appropriate reaction to these truly terrible events.

Countries which I like seem to never suffer such tragedies, while countries which, for one reason or another, I dislike, suffer them all the time. The one common factor which seems to explain this has to do with my political views, and it suggests that my political views should be implemented as a matter of urgency, even though they are, as a matter of fact, not implemented in the countries which I like.

Of course the World Trade Center attacks are a uniquely tragic event, and it is vital that we never lose sight of the human tragedy involved. But we must also not lose sight of the fact that I am right on every significant moral and political issue, and everybody ought to agree with me. Please, I ask you as fellow human beings, vote for the political party which I support, and ask your legislators to support policies endorsed by me, as a matter of urgency.

It would be a fitting memorial.

November 05, 2003

Linkage

Posted by Henry

Not much blogging for me at the moment; three courses to teach, together with sundry administrative and other responsibilities mean that I don’t have much free time. In the meantime, let me recommend:

Cosma Shalizi on “Our Geopolitical Situation, Dispassionately Assessed.”

Norman Geras on Emmylou Harris. I’m a Wrecking Ball man myself, which probably marks me out as a hopeless Emmylou lightweight.

And finally, Teresa Nielsen Hayden has suffered a catastrophic disk crash, and is contemplating the horrors and expenses of professional data recovery. She’s politely soliciting donations - sounds like a good cause to me.

November 04, 2003

Solid Gold

Posted by Ted

The return of America’s Greatest Living Writer has inspired me to collect just a few one-line snarks that still make me laugh.

Neal Pollack

If you watch television or read newspapers and magazines, you might get the wrong idea that we’re losing… But take it from my highly-reliable correspondents who file from anonymous email addresses.

Jesse from Pandagon:

Ann Coulter, Jr. will likely be making the rounds over the next couple of weeks for her new book, Pieholes Are For Pie. Or whatever it’s called.

Jim Henley

Blogwatch - Foreigners Are Mean! is dedicated to noting every cross word uttered about the United States by foreign leaders or journalists, plus a smattering of other topics.

And a lifetime achievement award to Roy Edroso. I can’t pick just one.

November 03, 2003

Yesterday's headlines today

Posted by Ted

The Blogosphere: Miss two days, and you miss a lot!

I’ve got three really basic points on defecting liberals like Michael Totten, Armed Liberal, and Roger L. Simon (commentary from Jack O’Toole, Greg Greene, Kevin Drum and Kevin Drum II, Matthew Yglesias, Armed Liberal and Armed Liberal II, Roger L. Simon and Roger L. Simon II, Michael Totten… it goes on and on. Big roundup here).

1. Inescapably, I think that they’re wrong, for reasons best expressed by Kevin Drum here. The Democratic Party and its leading presidential candidates have positions on terrorism that don’t sound a dang thing like ANSWER or whoever. Denouncing the anti-war movement for wanting to immediately withdraw from Iraq is fine. But you can’t really denounce the Democratic party with the same talking points. Kuchnich has said that he would withdraw from Iraq. No one else has. On the basis of their positions, these folks seem like they would have more common ground with Clark than Bush.

And yet we get comments like this, from “Captain Ed” on Roger Simon’s blog:

It’s difficult for me to understand why no Democrat except Lieberman understands what’s at stake. It’s as if they believe 9/11 was an aviation accident, the USS Cole blew up on its own, our embassies in Africa were attacked by right-wing militia groups, and Saddam Hussein was a popular autocrat whose peaceful benevolence was undermined by the US. In short, it seems like they live in Bizarro World.

I’d be willing to say that this comment is utterly divorced from reality. It’s about as true as saying “The Republicans want to convert all of Arizona to mole farming.” And yet it got a chorus of Amens. I do not get it.

2. Armed Liberal says, “It’s not a schtick, it’s a movement.” and Michael Totten says that Democrats are in a lot of trouble. Hmm. I strongly agree with the weak version of his point: Democrats have got to come across as strong and credible on national defense in order to attract Democratic-leaning independents and moderate Democrats. No problem there.

But the strong version- “The defection of the aforementioned bloggers is the tip of an iceberg that will really hurt the Democrats”- well, maybe.

Are the Democrats facing a more severe crisis than when Ronald Reagan turned right? Or Michael Kelly? Or Ben Nighthorse Campbell, or Richard Shelby? Or Glenn Reynolds? Or the neo-cons? Or my dad, or (probably) your dad? You get my point: people cross party lines all the time. For as long as I’m aware, people have moved from left to right, for any number of perfectly respectable reasons, more often than they seem to move from right to left.

If these good people decide that they need to leave the Democratic party, I’ll be sad about that. We could use their energy and intelligence. But it doesn’t mean that the sky is falling.

3. I am a participant in a strange, small internet subculture of political bloggers, which has a strong polarizing effect on most people. When I write something especially sharp against Bush or against a specific conservative, I get links, praise and traffic from people I respect. Furthermore, I’m at least as likely to get angry, insulting disagreement as I am to get reasonable counterarguments. It’s enough to convince you that people who agree with you are rational and polite, whereas people who disagree with you are rude, incoherent assholes. You occasionally see parenthetical notes to that effect (“The left sure is angry- you should see my email!”), especially on the more popular blogs.

Invest enough time and energy in blogging, and it’s hard not to respond to that.

I have no doubt that the “liberal defectors” in question are writing exactly what they believe. They all seem like honorable people. But they’re under the same pressure. When they write something critical of the Democrats, they get links and praise from the top-level blogs, a flood of comments, and even occasional paid writing gigs.

I very much doubt that the attention from Instapundit, the Wall Street Journal, Andrew Sullivan, Tech Central Station, etc. has ever made any of these folks say something that they didn’t believe, or write something that they didn’t want to write. But they’re only human, and I suspect that it’s had an effect on what they want to write about.

October 31, 2003

Dept of Fair and Balanced

Posted by Kieran

David Bernstein, who has been relentlessly flogging his book via his Volokh posts over the last few weeks, complains about NPR:

TYPICAL NPR ‘BALANCE’: I listened to part of the “Kojo Namdi Show” on WAMU, Washington, D.C. today. The promos said there would be three women Jerusalem residents on the phone, one Christian, one Moslem, and one Jew, talking about their daily lives. … [T]he Christian and Moslem [were] Palestinian spokespeople who had clearly undergone extensive media training … And the Jew? An extreme leftist who … seemed unwilling to defend Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish nation. … Kojo did try to note that none of the political movements represented in the current Palestinian government believe in non-violent resistance, but he backed down when the Palestinians objected. Disgusting.

Indeed. To coin a phrase. Decent people with a concern for standards in broadcasting ought to be appalled. Meanwhile, David says in his next post,

You can catch me on the Rush Limbaugh Show, guest host Walter Williams, tomorrow (Friday) at around 2:05.

Yeah, yeah I know what you’re going to say about the difference between NPR and Rush. And believe me, I fully agree. One has for years received the benefit of a modest public subsidy and so has an obligation to be objective and balanced in all aspects of its broadcasting mission, perhaps even its phone-in talk shows; whereas the other has for years been the platform of a drug-addled, draft-dodging, hypocritical old bigot who spews lies and hatred like a slurry spreader shifts pigshit. You’re right, you’re right. I’m sorry.

October 30, 2003

Stalkin' Don Brings It On

Posted by Ted

So I turned on my computer tonight to read the blogs. I’m afraid that I must have scared my poor fiancee half to death when the steam pouring out of my ears made a loud “toot” noise, as seen in Popeye cartoons.

Atrios posts under a pseudonym, although his real name is Ferdinand Strumpole. I have no business telling him how to run his life. Nonetheless, if I were king, I’d ask Atrios to write the following reply:

Dear Mr. Luskin,

I double-dog dare you to sue me. No, triple.

Sincerely,

Atrios

P.S. Can I still call you a striking failure as a mutual fund manager?

Atrios has all the links, but I’d like to send a shout out to:

  • Max Sawicky (“He’s doing for anti-semitism what Al Sharpton is doing for racism”)
  • Brad DeLong (“You, Mr. Donald L. Luskin, in your claim that Donald L. Luskin has committed the crime of stalking, have gone beyond mere expressions of opinion and made false and defamatory statements of alleged fact about my client Donald L. Luskin that cannot be justified.”)
  • Andrew Northrup (“This firm represents Gollum, formerly Smeagol of Middle Earth. You recently stole the precious. Such an action constitutes tricksyness in the first degree, and we hates you.”)
  • and Overlawyered (here)

October 28, 2003

Blogs for the Boys

Posted by Kieran

Jacob Levy asks an interesting question about group blogs staffed by academics:

For purposes of academic conflict-of-interest norms, what sort of relationship do co-bloggers have to one another?

He wonders whether people who post on the same blog should do things like review one another’s papers or write tenure letters and so on. I have a mental picture of a rapidly branching tree of hypothetical cases that needs to be pruned near the base. Things like tenure letters seem like an easy case: you’re supposed to disclose your relationship to the person you’re evaluating anyway. (“Prof. Healy’s ill-informed pot-shots have been a constant irritant in my comments threads for years, despite my numerous attempts to ban him.”) You’d just need to get over the hump of embarrassment about admitting you know someone through a blog.

Reviewing articles is a bit tricker, partly because conventions vary across disciplines. Sociology and Politics aspire to be a science, so journals do double-blind reviews. Economics knows it is a science, so journals only do single-blind reviews, where the reviewer knows the author’s name. (The reviewer can then treat the author’s name as a piece of information about the paper, and economize accordingly by not checking the math if it’s someone famous and only reading the abstract, and perhaps checking the bibliography for one’s own name, if it’s someone unknown. Of course, homo economicus would free-ride on the review process in the first place. Economists are well-aware of this, which is why their journals have longer turnaround times.) I believe Law journals review articles mainly by weight.

Judgments about the appropriateness of reviewing a co-blogger’s work will be conditioned on these practices. People often review papers written by people they know, and perhaps are friends with, even in cases where reviews are double-blind. This seems inevitable. The reverse also happens, with people getting papers to review written by their enemies, intellectual or otherwise. Authors can sometimes pre-empt this by suggesting to the editors that Prof. X has a bee in her bonnet about their work. There’s no equivalent for the friendship problem, as authors will not say “Here is a list of my friends. Do not send the paper to them.” I doubt that there’s some additional mechanism that would allow you to free the reviewing process from the social networks it’s embedded in. Editors rely on these networks to find competent reviewers in the first place, and paper-writing is an inescapably social process incorporating presentation of one’s work to others, solicitation of comments and all the rest of it.

Formal ties to others (co-author, colleague, relation, spouse) will often rule someone out of consideration as a reviewer. The less formal the tie, the less weight it carries. (Though of course it may be precisely these ties that grease the wheels of people’s careers. So it goes.) Being a co-blogger is not quite the same as being a co-author, and it’s not quite the same as being in the same department. But it seems closer to either than simply having been on the same conference panel. It’s more like, say, having been at grad school together. So my feeling is that an editor might legitimately weigh it against you when deciding whether to send you a paper, but it ought not to count as seriously as co-authorship or being a colleague, and reviewers shouldn’t have to fess up to it as a matter of course. As always in such cases, you have to rely on the practical judgment of the participants and their ability to apply the standards of the field (editors who know what’s happening, authors and reviewers who had the right scruples instilled in grad school). This is why it’s whole subfields and disciplines, rather than individuals, that tend to go rotten.

October 27, 2003

We're #1

Posted by Kieran

My agents inform me that Crooked Timber (NASDAQ: CRKD) is now the #1 result on Google Searches for “Crooked” and also “Timber,” further demonstrating our ability to deliver added value to our shareholders.

October 22, 2003

Krugman watch

Posted by Henry

Looks as though Dan’s prediction has come to pass; Glenn Reynolds claims grandly in Instabolded type that the “ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE is blasting Paul Krugman for anti-Semitism.” To put it as kindly as possible, this is a rather … overenthusiastic interpretation of the ADL’s letter to the New York Times, which merely suggests that Krugman “underestimates the significance of the anti-Semitic diatribe by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.” Of course, this isn’t the first time that Reynolds’ enthusiasm for a good slur has gotten in the way of the facts, but surely he can do better than this. Does he even read the stuff that he links to? I wonder.

October 17, 2003

Inside the blogger's studio

Posted by Ted

If you look up “self-indulgent blog post” in the dictionary, you’ll find the following. You’re all excused from reading it.

I was driving to work yesterday, listening to KRBE do their wacky news thing. Maria reads a short story about the NRA blacklist. She says that the NRA has made a list of organizations with anti-gun policies or views. The list includes Britney Spears, Oprah Winfrey, Hallmark Cards, Jerry Seinfeld, and the Kansas City Chiefs.

Sam the co-host didn’t believe it. “Kansas City Chiefs?” he kept asking. He was apparently sitting in front of a computer and went to the webpage listed in the story, www.nrablacklist.com. The webpage is very slick and very obviously not affiliated with the NRA. He called the story a hoax and said that “We need to do a better job of screening the news.”

Now, I knew that this story was true. I knew that you can find the list on the NRA-ILA page, and that the list also incudes the St. Louis Cardinals, Lenny Kravitz, Marilu Henner, Julia Child, Mary Lou Retton, Moon Zappa, and the Temptations. (The link is on top of the slick NRA blacklist page, but it’s not hard to miss.) It’s really weird, but it’s real.

As I thought about posting on this subject, two little creatures appeared, one on my left shoulder, and one on my right.

A little voice on my left said, “This is just great. The NRA blacklist isn’t the biggest story in the world, but it is, in fact, true. Tens of thousands of people just heard that it’s a crazy prank. It’s going to be that much harder to mention the NRA blacklist, or make a point about the NRA in general.”

On the right, it said, “Well, you’ve got to admit that it did sound strange. I mean, what do professional sports teams have to do with guns? You’re not in the habit of criticising broadcasters for fact-checking. Why start now?”

On the left, it said, “His scepticism might be warranted, but the fact is that he’s wrong. If he had clicked on the very first link on the page, he would have seen that he was wrong. Ted, you only listen to the show once every few weeks, but even at that rate you’ve heard them passing on false stories. This is the first time you’ve ever heard anyone expressing scepticism about one of them. They passed on the BS story about paintball games where hunters track down nude women, and they didn’t express any kind of scepticism.

Remember that this is the same pop station where a DJ read the essay about knocking down anti-war protestors until they got the idea on the air. Do you think that this is a coincidence?”

On the right, it said, “Look at it from their perspective. If they pass on a fib about Bambi hunters or about ourfirsttime.com, they’re not going to get two hundred angry calls. But if they had said this about the NRA, and it wasn’t true, they’d never hear the end of it.

Besides, let’s say that you’re completely right, and the KRBE morning show has a right-wing bias. So what? It’s a friggin’ drive-time morning radio show! Who gives a damn if Boomer and the Nudge lean right? Walton and Johnson run an openly right-wing morning radio show, and you don’t care. You just don’t listen to them.”

On the left, the voice said, “Lord, no. Those guys are the worst.”

On the right, it said, “Yes. Yes they are. But they’re just part of life.

You live in Texas. It’s a conservative state. If you can’t stand it, move, listen to CDs, or turn off the radio and have a teddybear picnic on the way to work.”

The creature on the left shook its fist and popped out of existence. The creature on the right did a little victory dance and followed it. The end.

October 15, 2003

Short cuts

Posted by Ted

- The cast of the Antic Muse can write circles around most of us. The best posts I’ll read today are Holly Martins’ hilarious take on David Brooks, while the second best is Ana Marie Cox on New York magazine’s discovery of dirty pictures on the internet.

- Daniel Drezner is hosting a debate on the truth or falsity of the statement: “It is a complete fabrication that the Bush administration argued in the runup to the war that there was an imminent threat from Iraq.” It’s being held at a pretty high level; no one has yet been compared to Hitler. So root, root, root for your side. Anonymous Blogger has much more on the question.

- Jim Henley has a concise take on the story about US soldiers allegedly bulldozing the crops of Iraqis to punish the farmers for not providing information about guerillas. I sincerely hope that this story isn’t true.

- Finally, my friend Irfan posted a picture of me last night at a farewell party. I can be pretty self-conscious about photos, but I think it turned out pretty well.

October 12, 2003

Comment Spamming

Posted by Henry

If you’ve been hit in the last couple of the days by pornspam in your comments, you’re not alone; Crooked Timber has been hit too, as have many other sites. If you’re a MT person, the IP address to block for this latest wave is 209.210.176. and make sure to include the period at the end. Thanks to Teresa Nielsen Hayden for the heads-up - and check her site for further updates and breaking news. MT Blacklist should be out tomorrow; if it works as advertised, it should help mitigate the problem.

October 10, 2003

The New Catechism of Cliche

Posted by Kieran

Though it can never replace the old one, in what way is a new one needed?

Sorely.

When it is published online what must we read?

The whole thing.

What value do such posts hold for reading?

Much worth.

What sort of insightful are they?

Characteristically.

If we cannot devote the time to the whole piece which paragraph should we read?

The nut graf.

What can be moral?

Clarity.

What else?

Equivalence.

And?

Authority.

What can be even?

The New Republic.

What else?

The New York Times.

And?

Moderate Republicans.

What may the media be?

Mainstream. Liberal. Old.

What may any of these be called?

So.

What are facts?

Plain. Simple. Known.

What is done to facts?

Checking.

What are we fact-checking?

Their asses.

What may blogs get?

Results.

What is this blog not?

Your father’s.

Where are they?

Over at.

Where did we migrate from?

Blogger.

Where did we go?

To hell. (And back.)

What are we on?

Hiatus.

What are we in?

Indeed.

October 09, 2003

Big Changes in California

Posted by Kieran

As you’ve probably seen on the news, Mark Kleiman’s blog has moved. Update your blogroll.

It just struck me that if all your information about America came from political blogs, you’d think the country was composed mainly of libertarians together with a bloc of right-wing populist-imperialists and a few liberals here and there. But if all your information about California came from political blogs, you’d think the state’s politics must be a model of thoughtful right- and left-leaning commentary, marked by a care for civility, a tendency to moderation and a close attention to detail.

Just goes to show.

October 02, 2003

Too hot for NZ

Posted by Kieran

Daniel will be pleased to note that his post discussing the Ambassador’s wife who must not be named was judged by the content filter on Canterbury airport’s coin-operated Internet terminal to contain material of an adult nature unsuitable for a public environment. If only Karl Rove had been using one of these things when he sold Wilson’s wife down the river.

September 30, 2003

A plea for higher standards in the blogosphere

Posted by Chris

Glenn Reynolds deplores :

the excessive gleefulness and point-scoring of the anti-Bush bloggers in general on this topic, [which] only serves to make this matter look more political, and less serious, than it perhaps is.

I’d just like to endorse that sentiment, and look forward to the bright future of Instapundit, freed from all that excessive gleefulness and point-scoring on serious matters.

More on teaching and blogs

Posted by Eszter

A couple of weeks ago Henry posted an entry about blogs and teaching, or perhaps more broadly about the (potential) role of blogs in academia.

In the meantime, I’ve been having discussions with people at Northwestern’s Academic Technologies about the use of blogs here on campus. During these discussions, an interesting point came up that has some implications for the use of blogs in teaching. Apparently, it is illegal for a university to disclose information about who is enrolled in a course. When I asked for the legal basis of this, I was pointed to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. Reading that document, I can’t say this becomes obvious. But if it is the case then it has implications for requiring students to participate in world-accessible blogs. If we require students to maintain a blog or post to a central blog then we are making their course enrollment public.

In light of this policy, it seems blogs that require students to post in the context of a course cannot be public. And if teaching blogs cannot be public then I think they lose much of what makes them more interesting than a discussion thread for the purposes of teaching. As someone noted, it is exciting and educational for students to learn that some of the authors they discuss are real-live people out there who may stumble upon their comments. Students may then take the material more seriously and pay more attention to how they comment about issues. However, if a blog cannot be public then this won’t happen. So at that point, what distinguishes a blog from the combination of a message thread and a course Web page?

September 29, 2003

Ethics Blogs

Posted by Brian

Jonathan Ichikawa, who has a shiny new blog, asked me an interesting question the other day. Why are there so few ethics blogs? One simple answer would be that there are lots of ethics blogs, they are just spread around between political theory and legal theory and other areas of normative philosophy. Sad to say, these bloggers seem to be just as interested in day-to-day affairs as in high points of theory. Where’s the fun in that? (Not that they don’t write excellent posts when they do turn their attention to more theoretical matters. If only the world was less pressing.) So if any aspiring (or established) ethicist wants to start up a blog on the finer points of Korsgaard’s or Blackburn’s or Smith’s views, there’s probably a market niche waiting to be filled.

By the way, it’s a sad day when the graduate students start seeming to be appallingly young. Sad day indeed.

September 26, 2003

Profile

Posted by Chris

I’m embarrassed pleased to report that I’m the first victim subject of a Normblog profile .

September 25, 2003

Gratuitous Cross-Promotion

Posted by Brian

Will Baude at Crescat Sententia has been running a series of online interviews with various bloggers. And the subject of the latest interview is me. Here’s the interview. If you want more blogger Q&As, previous blogger interviews (including Lawrence Solum, Matthew Yglesias and several permanent or temporary Conspirators) are prominently featured in the Crescat Sententia sidebar. I’d like to say that everything I say there about Crooked Timber is official CT party policy, but that would be, at the very least, a lie.

Say Hello to Eszter

Posted by Kieran

True to form, she’s jumped in already, but I wanted to welcome Eszter Hargittai as the latest member of the CT catnet. Eszter is a sociologist, is newly ensconced at Northwestern, was an office-mate of mine for a while in graduate school, has far too many publications for someone who just started their job last week, and has an Erdõs number of three.

September 24, 2003

Poor and stupid

Posted by Ted

I followed a link from tbogg today over to Donald “Poor and Stupid” Luskin’s website. In big letters on the left, it says:

“THE CONSPIRACY TO KEEP YOU POOR AND STUPID BY DONALD L. LUSKIN

THE WEBLOG OF THE BOOK: How Big Government, Big Business, Big Media, and Big Academia Block Your Road to Financial Freedom— and Tell You It’s For Your Own Good”

Underneath, it has a quote, which I reproduce in full:

“…straight contrary-to-fact statements embarassing, and damaging to their own credibility…”
— Brad DeLong

This doesn’t link to anything.

A casual reader might think that this quote came from a review of the book. He or she might wonder who this Brad DeLong is, and what he’s referring to. Big government? Big business? Big media? There’s no way to tell.

Significantly less casual readers might know that Brad DeLong is a Democratic economist, and in-no-way casual readers might know that DeLong is a fierce critic of Donald Luskin. If you look up this quote, you’ll see that it comes from a sharp attack on Luskin himself, and on his editors at the National Review for publishing him:

You have to have confidence that those who write on social and political issues for National Review will find these kinds of straight contrary-to-fact statements embarrassing, and damaging to their own credibility—their writings are published beneath the same masthead, after all—and will talk to the editors. (emphasis added)

Hmm. If there had been a link, or if the subject of the quote had been clear, I’d have called this a self-deprecating joke from Mr. “Truth Squad” Luskin. But there isn’t one.

Now I think very, very little of Luskin, so I don’t trust my own judgement. Maybe I’m just being humorless. But I’d be very interested in hearing comments about how others judge this on the cute-to-slimy scale.

UPDATE: Edited to correct spelling of “deprecating”

Request for help

Posted by Henry

Dan Drezner and I are co-writing an academic paper on blogging and politics - if you’re a journalist, columnist, commentator, producer, or editor for a newspaper, magazine, or television station, we’d appreciate your help. We’d be grateful if you could take two minutes to send an email to ddrezner@hotmail.com with answers to the following five questions:

1) How many blogs do you read a day?

2) Please name the three blogs you read most frequently. [What if you read less than three? Then just name the ones you do read.]

3) Why do you read the blogs you read? In other words, what makes those blogs worth checking out on a regular basis?

4) Have you ever read something on a blog that affected your decision-making on what to air/publish? If the answer is yes, can you give an example?

5) How much influence do you think blogs have on political discourse? A lot, a little, or none at all?

All answers will be kept confidential unless you give us explicit permission to do otherwise in your email. Dan has also posted our working definition of what a blog is - comments and suggestions gratefully appreciated.

Thanks!

September 23, 2003

Posted by Ted

Jim Henley has a good post about an excerpt from the new memoir of Mariane Pearl, widow of the murdered journalist Daniel Pearl. (The book can be purchased here.)

Jim Henley’s analysis of the kidnapper’s emails is very good, but the excerpt itself is extraordinary. Mariane Pearl writes in the present tense, giving it an immediacy that makes it hard to read.

Every little detail—the type of camera used, the make of the weapon threatening Danny, the way words are used—is analyzed, and everyone has a theory. I let everybody play out his or her line because I want to get hooked by one. But through it all, I know this is my husband.

In the chatter, I hear Randall ask, “Do you recognize the wedding ring?”

“Yes,” I say. “It’s loose on his finger. It’s always been loose.”

The room falls silent.

September 22, 2003

New Scholar-blogger

Posted by Henry

Anyone who’s at all interested in the relationship between law and the Internet has heard of Michael Froomkin; he’s done seminal work on ICANN and privacy regulation. He’s also run ICANNWatch for the last few years. And now he’s started a blog at www.discourse.net. Early posts include one on law in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games and a wonderful discursus on his grandmother and John Ashcroft. One for your blogrolls.

September 21, 2003

Poliblog Cuisine Continues to Evolve

Posted by Kieran

Josh Chafetz cooks from the Volokh Cookbook. (“All ingredients available from your market and don’t you forget it.”) Bam! Oxbloggers suddenly guests on Volokh. Coincidence? I think not. Expect Drezner [and his Ed! — Ed.] to show up soon with the cucumbers. Unsurprisingly, Crooked Timber’s smoked salmon socialism is ignored by this new right-wing Axis of Entrées, despite its manifestly higher quality in all respects. As the appetizers are served, Andrew Sullivan is denied entry and is seen outside the window yelling “Rhodes Scholars! Mega-losers! Curriculum-vitae fetishists!

September 17, 2003

Adam Smith Institute Blog

Posted by Maria

The UK Adam Smith Institute has started its own blog. It’s quite a good, snappy read, and the first few days cover many of the hoary old chestnuts you might expect; how vouchers are the panacea for under-performing public services, how Naomi Klein attacks branding, but actually is a brand herself (fair enough), and how, erm, left-wingers are too angry and put upon to be funny.

It’s worth keeping a look at to see how this blog develops. Though, as with other more ‘corporate’ blogs, the house style is a bit uniform. There seems to be a word limit on entries which has the effect of making the pieces sound a bit samey, and also rather superficial.

Funnily enough, on my way back from lunch today I was giving out (extremely superficially) that all the rich seem to do is distort markets by defending their privileges and/or monopoly rents. While the ASIs of this world seem to spend their time defending these guys (you know, ‘the rich’, i.e. suitably vague) - e.g. saying embezzlement and fraud should be dealt with by companies, not law enforcement - it seems to me that the really rich have no interest at all in truly competitive markets. Just ask Bill Gates, Halliburton, et al. And then the conversation turned to whether George Bush was a kleptocrat, plutocrat or just a plain old vanilla flavoured oligarch…

Maybe there’s a joke in there, but I was too down-trodden to see it.

September 15, 2003

The street finds its own use for things

Posted by Henry

Today I came across John Palfrey’s blog for a class that he’s teaching in Harvard Law School on the Internet and the global economy. Interesting stuff; all the more so for those of us who are beginning to take the first, wobbly steps towards using blogs in the classroom. Dan Drezner used Blogger to put together his syllabus last semester; John Holbo runs a couple of class blogs, and I’ve recently installed Movable Type on the university server so that I can do so myself. Palfrey is pushing his students to start their own blogs as part of the classroom experience - I haven’t had the courage to do this myself. But it seems to me that there are a variety of different ways that you can use blogs in the classroom, each with their own pros and cons. Discussing them in order of increasing ambition …

(1) Standard class web pages. This is the least exciting way of using blogging software, but also, for many purposes, the most practical. Most class web pages consist of a few static pieces of information - class times and rules, links to the syllabus etc - and a few dynamic - cancellation of office hours, announcements of essay topics and the like. It’s remarkably easy to put together a quick and dirty page using MT that fulfils these requirements (see here ), and that can be updated easily, from anywhere without having to fooster around with FTP, web authoring software etc, let alone dumbed down programs like Web-CT. And if you use MT or an equivalent, you can also try to make your students use the comments feature to ask everyday questions about tutorials, bibliographic styles and so on, rather than having to deal with the same issue over and over by email. It doesn’t only save you time, it saves the students time too - they can look up your previous answers in comments rather than having to email you and wait on a response.

(2) Professor-written blogs which cover interesting developments that relate to the theme of the course. A nice and easy way to make the issues that you cover in a course more topical, linking to stories that will show the real world implications, say, of file-sharing on the Internet, or the breakdown of talks at the WTO. Can easily be combined either with (1) or (3).

(3) Organization of in-class discussion. Another thing that I’ll be trying this year for a senior level undergraduate class that used to be a seminar, but now has 60 odd students. Set a discussion question every week, and have people debate it in comments. The conversation will probably be a little more stilted than in-class discussion, but likely to be on a slightly higher level - people can think before putting in their responses. This is also much easier to grade fairly than an in-class participation mark - you can go back and look at how students have participated and developed over the semester. I will see how it works over the semester, but I’m hopeful.

(4) Organization of intensive seminars where students have to provide weekly summaries of the readings. This is something that I’m thinking about for future graduate classes, where each student has to do - and circulate - a weekly discussion of a particular assigned reading. By making them authors of a group blog - and posting their summaries on the blog - it becomes much easier for the professor and students to access the readings for a particular week - and if you make sure that people are organized about how they do it, the summaries will effectively file themselves. Obviously, you have to give the students some training in using MT at the beginning, but it’s fairly self-explanatory, even to the technophobic.

(5) Requiring students to write their own blogs as part of their grade. I used to teach a class where I made students learn HTML, and then prepare their own web pages dealing with international relations topics that interested them. In future, I suspect that it would be a lot easier to point them towards Blogger Pro, and let them go at it, writing blogs that covered developments in a particular issue area over time. This would obviously involve a moderate chunk of technical assistance at the beginning - but would have a relatively quick and easy payoff for the students. And if undergrads can learn how to use frames, formatting tables and tags (and they can) blogging should be a cinch.

I’m sure that there are other ways to use blogs in classrooms - and it would be nice to get some discussion going. Anyone else have ideas, or even better, experiences to recount?

Update: Eszter Hargittai has an interesting response.

September 12, 2003

How true that is

Posted by Ted

One of the most common complaints about blogs is that we’re essentially parasites; without the mainstream media, we’d be talking about our pets. I generally agree.

But every once in a while, bloggers get to a story first. Just yesterday, for example, Andrew Sullivan revealed the surprising news that Howard Dean, presidential candidate and governor of Vermont, is fluent in Haitian creole.

To be fair, I’m reading between the lines a little. I have to assume that Howard Dean speaks Haitian creole. Because if he doesn’t, Andrew’s criticism of a song in Creole doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense. (I notice that respected economics professor Tyler Cowen loves Don Giovanni. To the Babelfish! Get ‘im!)

Jeez. Sullivan is not a stupid man, and I feel certain that he didn’t go to the Kennedy School of Government with the dream of dumbing down political discourse. And yet, here we are. As a wise man once said, “What a waste it is to lose one’s mind.”

Jack O’Toole has more.

UPDATE: Another scoop! The Bush administration and congressional investigators say that they don’t have sufficient evidence to connect Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks, but Andrew has found the proof.

(That’s enough Andrew - Ed)

September 08, 2003

Blogging and Writing

Posted by Brian

I just got the offprints for my most recently published article, as it happens a reply to the article mentioned by Brad DeLong last night in his theology post. It’s quite pretty too, since The Philosophical Quarterly put nice covers on their offprints.

This article was interesting from a blogging perspective for a few reasons. First, I got the idea for it from reading blogs. Second, I even cited the relatively well-known blog from which I got the idea. Third, the paper itself grew almost entirely out of some blog entries.

(If you want to see the original blog posts, and see how closely the final paper resembled them, they are here and here. Be warned though, these files are rather large, since I wasn’t using any blogging software at the time, just adding text to a poorly designed HTML file.)

Now as you might see by looking at our sidebar, there are a lot of academics who have blogs. I suspect their numbers will start exploding in the next year or two. Very soon I imagine keeping anything like a comprehensive list of them will be impractical.

But it’s not clear to me from skimming through the list just how many scholar-bloggers use their blogs to advance their scholarship. Very few have posts directly about their research, and fewer still it seems use their blog as a place to try out ideas, or paragraphs, for forthcoming papers.

This isn’t a universal principle. Some of the Conspirators have posts closely related to their research from time to time, as does Lawrence Solum. And the oldest philosophy blog I know of, Wo’s Weblog, is another notable exception. Plus, it’s not always easy for me to tell what is intended as passing commentary and what is intended for scholarly publication, so I might be underestimating how much blogging is intended for scholarly publication. But the general trend seems to not be to use the blogs as a forum for first (or zeroth) drafts of papers.

In a way this is understandable. Blog entries tend to be short and topical, academic papers tend to be long and concerned with more long-term affairs. So I can understand why people would be tempted to keep their two forms of writing separate. (And if you have a pseudonymous blog, keeping your academic work off it may be necessary in order to preserve the disguise.)

But to me that is a waste of a good audience. Not everyone who reads an academic’s blog will be interested in the technical details of his/her work. But some of the audience will be, and some of them may have interesting comments. I’ve learned quite a lot from my commentators about problems with proposals I’ve been making, about alternative solutions I should be considering, and sometimes even about reasons why the project should be abandoned. It’s a lot easier to learn about those two days into a project than it is after two months, or two years, into it.

The upshot of all this is that in my case blogging isn’t interfering with scholarly writing. If anything it is promoting it, which is useful for a pre-tenure academic.

I’d be interested to hear from anyone else who is using their blog this way. Or from anyone who’s made a particular decision to not do so. If I’m right there’s a large potential use for blogs that hasn’t really been tapped into yet.

UPDATE: Norman Geras has a very interersting series on Crimes Against Humanity on his blog, that should be turning into a paper shortly. There’s lots of good stuff there, and I highly recommend reading through it. (I don’t trust Blogger permalinks, so you’ll have to scroll down to find the series - head to the first post headed CAH n for some integer n and track back from there.)

Norman has taken a different approach to mine - he’s serialising a paper on his blog. This is a nice move, because it gives the blog readers a worked out series of ideas (in managable chunks). I’m more inclined to do a brain dump onto the blog and let the readers find their way across, if they care to. As you might have guessed, my way of doing this is less work.

September 05, 2003

Scholar bloggers

Posted by Henry

Via Larry Solum, two new scholar-blogs that are worth a special mention. As a supplement to his Conspiratorial machinations, Tyler Cowen has started a side-project with Alex Tabarrok, called Marginal Revolution. As the name suggests, it mostly focuses on economic theory and its applications. Second, Rodger Payne, an international relations scholar at University of Louisville, who’s written some interesting stuff on framing, has started blogging too. Nice to see another IR type in the blogosphere.

September 04, 2003

Oddworld

Posted by Ted

Every once in a while, you’ll see a story about some local government regulations that force an 11-year old girl to shut down her lemonade stand. Most readers (including me) come away with the feeling that the law that prevented the kid from opening a lemonade stand is ridiculous and should probably be eliminated.

But should they? Keep in mind that there are countless 11-year olds who have no intention of starting a lemonade stand. Some children who began lemonade stands would surely run them poorly. We can’t just go around lifting regulations willy-nilly until we can be sure that 11-year olds have reached a consensus. If we start lifting regulations and leaving the decision about whether to sell lemonade to individual choice, it will devalue the whole concept of commerce. What if some of them fail?

Needless to say, this is an absurd argument. Which was why I was amazed to see Jonah Goldberg trying it against gay marriage, in a column titled “Gay men not rushing to the altar”.

Jonah notices that even though gay marriage has recently been legalized in Canada, only about 600 same-sex couples have applied for a marriage license. Furthermore, there are a large contingent of Canadian gay men who don’t intend to get married. He extracts some quotes from a gay magazine in which people express their skepticism about marriage, and about monogamy in general. One of them makes a flip, unlovely remark about “something called cheating”. Jonah says:

What such cutely ironic post-modern quips reveal is that many in the gay community don’t really mean it when they say they want access to the institution of marriage.

First of all, it’s not “something called cheating,” it’s cheating, pure and simple. I have no doubt that most homosexuals understand perfectly well what cheating is and understand that the concept applies to all sorts of relationships. Pretending otherwise may seem clever or enlightened, but such word games are astoundingly stupid.

Why? Well, because marriage is an institution of rules. If pro-gay marriage activists aren’t liars, they should respect those rules and not seek to undermine them.

Um…

Jonah disapproves of the sexual morality of some gay people (and, although he doesn’t point it out, some straight people.) Fair enough. He has as much right to express that opinion as I do to express the opinion that the National Review is spending its credibility like a drunken sailor.

But I’m not sure what it has to do with gay marriage. Doesn’t it seem that some gay people might want to get married, while a completely different group doesn’t want to? And that he’s quoting the second group, people who don’t want to get married? I feel rather sure that conservatism usually has something to do with the sanctity of individual choices.

Isn’t it also possible that some people might have supported the fight for gay marriage even though they personally don’t intend to exercise it? I support same-sex marriage. If it passes, and I don’t go marry a man, am I undermining marriage, too?

Finally, I love this:

Also in his article, Goldberg devastates an analogy to interracial marriage, stating, “I’ve never thought such comparisons were sound, and this story demonstrates why. No blacks denounced the concept of monogamy in their struggle to do away with anti-miscegenation laws. When Jackie Robinson fought his way into professional baseball, he didn’t want to change the rules of the game. He wanted the rules to apply to him to.”

The final nail in the coffin of this analogy comes when Goldberg reveals the percentage of black-white marriages that occurred in the U.S. the year after Loving v. Virginia, which is, um, let’s see, where did he put that statistic…?

September 01, 2003

New Timberite

Posted by Henry

Welcome to a new co-blogger: Ted Barlow has very nicely agreed to come on board. Ted doesn’t need much in the way of an introduction - he’s been a voice of reason in the blogosphere for a long, long time. We’re glad to have him.

August 25, 2003

How the news is made

Posted by Chris

I guess at some level we all recognise the syndrome, but Ian Jack’s account of how the news get manufactured (especially by the Sunday papers) is well worth a look. Jack is the former editor of the Independent on Sunday, so knows whereof he speaks:

The political editor is furiously sucking a paper clip. “Well, we could do a little ring-a-round of back-benchers who might not support the new Europe bill.” “And you could talk to that madman X [an alienated cabinet minister]”, says the deputy editor. “He’s bound to say something original.” And so the great hole - the lead story hole - on the front page is filled. The deputy editor, an excellent re-writer, “hardens up” a few of the political editor’s softer and more equivocal sentences. Headline type which really should be held in reserve for something significant, such as the sinking of the Titanic, reads: MAJOR IN NEW BATTLE OVER [something or other]. The first paragraph begins “A beleaguered John Major is this weekend facing one of the gravest crises of his political career.” The political editor looks wryly at the page proof and says, “That’s what you call a scoop of interpretation” The deputy and I (who, unlike the political editor, never need meet politicians) defend the choice of words: “one of” not “the gravest”, so that’s OK, and some clever use of the passive and conditional tenses further down, “It is believed” rather than “One embittered madman who wishes to remain anonymous thinks”, “may” rather than “will”, and so on.

Of course, Jack’s experience of all this is pre-blogosphere. In these newly enlightened times, if the story concerned some appropriate subject it would be referred to by Glenn Reynolds as evidence of something (European anti-semitism; French perfidy….) and then spun into a whole geopolitical theory by Steven Den Beste. And who is to say that “Secret EU plan to slaughter firstborn” wouldn’t get picked up by Samizdata!(Story first linked by Slugger O’ Toole).

August 21, 2003

Greatest figures of the 20th century

Posted by Chris

Matthew Yglesias has some reaction to Right-Wing News’s lists of greatest figures of the twentieth century as voted for by right- and left-wing bloggers. My considered view that such lists are inherently silly hasn’t sufficiently stifled my irritation at the omissions. There’s obviously an argument to be had (on Aristotelian lines) about whether a person can both be great and do really bad things, though the further back in time one goes the easier it seems to be to reconcile judgements of greatness with the fact of a historical figure having committed atrocities or other acts of cruelty (e.g. Alexander the Great, Cromwell).

But I was also appalled by the fact that the so-called left-wing bloggers were, for want of a better word, chicken. Their list contained no leading figures from the international communist and socialist movements at all, and yet quite a few of them warrant serious consideration. Jean Jaures, French socialist opponent of war, murdered on the eve of the first world war, for one. And how about Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, again, socialist opponents of the war, murdered by the neo-fascist Freikorps in 1919? I’d even make the case for Lenin and Trotsky. The leftists have voted, safely and reasonably enough, for Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King jr. Fair enough, but I’d have thought Ho Chi Minh and Ben Bella were in with a shout. Yglesias bemoans the absence of theorists other than Orwell (who wasn’t). I concur: why were there no votes for Bertrand Russell (also a campaigner against WW1), Max Weber and Emile Durkeim (20th century figures both) or John Rawls? No doubt the prevalent francophobia meant that the right-wing crowd denied Charles de Gaulle his place. (And don’t get me started on the artists, writers and composers.)

UPDATE: (Thanks CY) There’s a long thread on this at Electrolite.

UPDATE UPDATE: Norman Geras posts the list he voted for and some reflections.

August 17, 2003

Ireland

Posted by Chris

Pauline and I are just back from a ten-day holiday in Ireland. It was our first time there and we were impressed. It also turned out to be a pretty smart place to visit given the prevailing weather conditions: untypically there was hardly a drop of rain, but the temperatures were comfortable rather than lethally hot (as they were elswhere in Europe).

I may opine further on the country over the coming days, but given CT’s numerous Irish contingent, I’m sure to get slapped down by those with greater expertise. Without them, though, the holiday probably wouldn’t have happened and certainly wouldn’t have taken the form it did. Thanks first to Henry (and family), whom we were lucky enough to meet up with and enjoy a wonderful lunch of Killorglin smoked salmon provided by his mum, which we followed by an exciting drive across the Kerry mountains. Here’s a partial Crooked Timber team photo in Kerry (Henry is the tall, handsome one).


chrisandhenry.JPG

And thanks to Kieran, whose post last year about Newgrange set me thinking about visiting Ireland. Newgrange is a remarkable and magical place which puts Stonehenge in the shade. 5200 years old, perfectly aligned with the sun for the winter solstice, and absolutely dry inside after five millennia. What an achievement.

August 13, 2003

Bah Bah Blog Sheep

Posted by Maria

Maureen Dowd writes today about how bland and trite US political bloggers have been to date, and how it heralds the death of the internet. Right.

It’s true, blogs by Tom Daschle, Howard Dean, John Kerry, etc. are just another outlet for relentless campaign-speak. Even Dean’s guest spot on Lessig’s blog was dull, dull, dull. All that talk about political blogging opening up new opportunities for ‘engagement’, ‘debate’, and creating a truly participatory democracy etc. etc. is a bit of a nonsense when you think of how risk-averse the average candidate is. But before we worry that blogging is being taken over by The Establishment, let’s consider; are these people really bloggers at all?

It’s by no means exhaustive (and thoughts are respectfully solicited), but reading these political bloggers made me think of a couple of essential characteristics of a ‘proper political blog’;

- something you write yourself (a no-brainer for those of us without dozens of campaign elves, but hasn’t yet filtered through to most pols I think)
- not necessarily a diary (‘Today we went to Xville and looked at the excellent farm produce of this wonderful state.’), we’ve got websites for that.
- responds to at least some comments and questions, especially the tough ones
- ideally, links to other blogs or items of interest beyond the campaign website.

Essentially, it should be a genuine two-way / three-way thing (three-way in that the blog comments allow readers to discuss amongst themselves, not necessarily directly addressing the candidate). Otherwise, blogging is just a slightly handier way to update a flat web page.

Tom Daschle and Bob Graham have taken to heart the idea of blogs as ‘online journals’. Travels with Tom gives a day by day account of his summer travels around South Dakota, sticking to the theme of health care and insurance. It’s hard-hitting stuff, but has no comments or external links and so is basically a broadcasting tool. Bob Graham doesn’t actually ‘dub himself “the original blogger” ’ as Dowd states. (Check out the blog itself or Signal vs Noise on this.) In fact, he barely blogs at all. Graham’s blog is actually written by a group of supporters, though is clearly marked “Paid for and authorized by Bob Graham for President”.

Similarly, Howard Dean’s own blog is written by staffers, and his week-long guest spot on Larry Lessig’s blog seemed to have been mostly written by campaign manager Joe Trippi. I’ve commented before on how flat this guest blog was - it seemed a largely wasted opportunity, though it improved as the week went on. Maybe it’s simply too much to ask already maxed out candidates to eak out yet more of themselves into a largely unproven medium.

Lessig was pretty positive about Dean’s guest spot, and I think most people would agree that it was better to have tried and failed, and so on. Lessig exhorts other candidates to blog;

“They should all find places where they can do the same — unprotected by handlers, exposed to many with strong and deep knowledge of a subject, and open to fair criticism. Let there be one week on a blog for every five choreographed “town halls”, and we’ll begin to see something interesting.”

In any case, Lessig is now hosting Kucinich and lessons seem to have been learned. On Day I, Kucinic is already standing out from the crowd by appearing to know something about Lessig’s hot topic of media concentration, and is answering the questions posters have actually asked. In a convincing show of spontaneity, Kucinich even made a typo in his first post.

Early adopters often look gauche in retrospect, and we only find out what works by trial and error, so kudos is due to the candidates who are leading the way on blogging. I hope these teething problems turn out to be just that.

BTW Any thoughts on the value to candidates of blogging given the nature of the ‘audience’? It seems to me that readers (and writers!) of political blogs tend to be relatively confirmed in their views. Do floating voters read blogs, or are the pols simply preaching to the converted?

Update: Thanks to Kevin Thurman for linking to an article on technical features of weblogs from the Berkman Centre which links to another on separating the good from the bad by Glenn Reynolds.

August 10, 2003

Holidays

Posted by Henry

Am on holidays for the next 10 days in London and the West of Ireland, so expect intermittent blogging at best from this Timberite.

August 05, 2003

Hiatus

Posted by Chris

This particular bit of wood is off for a brief holiday in Ireland. Henry reported a while back that internet access isn’t great. So even if I wanted to, I probably couldn’t blog. With luck, I should meet up with Henry in Kerry somewhere - thereby doubling the number of Timberites I’ve encountered in “real life”.

July 30, 2003

Slang

Posted by Brian

I’d like to say that LanguageHat has a grouse post about Aussie slang for you bludgers to go have a perv at next smoko, but sadly a few of those words are neither in my idiolect nor the Officially Approved Idiolect of Crooked Timber.

July 29, 2003

Norman Geras

Posted by Chris

I see that Norman Geras has joined the blogging community. Norm was involved in some of the early discussions around Crooked Timber and even suggested the name. He’s the author of many books on subjects as wide-ranging as Rosa Luxemburg, the holocaust, and cricket and he’s also been a contributor to one of my other collaborative projects, Imprints, which featured an interview with him recently (the current issue has his take on Polanski’s The Pianist). I’m sure that Norman’s blog will be one of my regular visits and I already see plenty to argue with, including his inclusion of Jules et Jim in his list of 20 best films when, as any fule kno, Les 400 Coups is superior. (Norman goes straight into the academic part of our blogroll under political science/political theory).

July 22, 2003

Gilligan's blog

Posted by Chris

Thanks to Mick Fealty, who left a comment in the “Sources” thread below, for the pointer to David Steven’s piece on the blogging activities of Andrew Gilligan, the BBC journalist at the centre of the Kelly/sexed-up dossier affair.

July 19, 2003

Blogfighting

Posted by Brian

Matt from A Bright Cold Day in April has a long post up about how bad things can get when a post becomes the subject of a political blogfight. It’s a pretty messy tale, and also a warning or two for folks at political blogs.

To misquote Robert Solow, everything reminds some bloggers of their political disagreements; everything reminds me of sex but I try and keep it out of the blog posts. Mostly.

I should note that this is hardly a partisan issue. As everyone who follows poliblogs knows, The Volokh Conspirators do as good a job as anyone at forcefully presenting a political view while keeping the tone at a level with which everyone involved can feel pleased. When Crooked Timber started a few people described it as a lefty version of that conspiracy. If we can keep the standards of debate high enough to deserve that comparison, we’ll be doing pretty well.

This is old news, but while I was on Matt’s site I noticed he linked to a story about Sydney starting a new festival called “Festivus”. Somehow I don’t think this is the way to get the tourist dollars flowing like tap water.

The link to A Bright Cold Day in April was via Virulent Memes.

July 15, 2003

Real Politic

Posted by Maria

Howard Dean’s guest spot on Lawrence Lessig’s blog has gotten off to a slow-ish start. Today’s post was pretty waffly campaign-speak and didn’t seem to answer any of the almost 200 questions posed yesterday. Fair enough, as Dean says he can’t get to every question, but I hope as the week continues he’ll get more of a feel for the give and take of blogging. I scanned today’s and yesterday’s comments and didn’t see responses from Dean amongst them, but there was one from his campaign manager, Joe Trippi, asking for some input to speed up their learning process. Perhaps a little unreasonably, Lessig’s readership were expecting a much more detailed treatment of IP and copyright issues. Myself, I’d just assumed this was a free for all for whatever issues the commenters posed. Anyway, as one of the comments pointed out, the very least this exercise has done is bring many Dean supporters to Lessig’s site where they’ll pick up a lot about the IP and copyright protection debate.

But if you’re after politicians who’ve already crested the blogging learning curve, Westminster is where you need to be. Huge thanks to Mick Fealty over at Slugger O’Toole for his account of an informal meeting about political blogging in the UK. Top of the class is Lib Dem Richard Allan. I’ve been following his blog for a while and, insofar as anyone actually does, he really gets it. He’s come up with an ‘adopt an MP idea for getting more MPs into blogging, and is the only person I can think of who could have made a genuinely amusing pun out of the phrase ‘peer to peer networking’. I’m with Mick Fealty, though, in wondering who and when will be the first Irish politician blogger. Probably a Sinn Fein-er. They’ve been several steps ahead on the communications front for a long old time.

Oh, one for the Irish readership. Lessig’s commenters had a long discussion yesterday about the whole FCC and alternative channels of media issue. It got me thinking of the old days of RTE a h-aon agus RTE a do. I think people of Henry’s and my generation are about the last cohort to refer to changing the tv channel as ‘turning it to the other side’.

July 10, 2003

Berlinophiles, Molesworthophiles

Posted by Kieran

A couple of people have wondered whether all the contributors to this blog are big fans of Isaiah Berlin, given that we’ve used one of his favorite quotes from Kant as our title. Not necessarily, I’d say. On the topic of even having a favorite quote from Kant, I’m sorry that I’ve packed away my copy of Alan Bennett’s Writing Home. Somewhere in his diary he has an entry that goes like this (I’m paraphrasing from memory here):

In today’s Times:
“Although Ken Dodd has read Kant, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Malcolm Muggeridge, Spinoza, Wilde and Wittgenstein on the subject of comedy, he is always careful not to appear a clever-clogs.”

I see he’s taking the Isaiah Berlin approach, then.


Conspicuously wearing your learning lightly is a venial rather than a mortal offence, but I think Berlin was guilty of it.

Incidentally, the singular of weetabix is of course “weetabic.” And while we’re making intra-blog comments, like Henry I am a fan of Nigel Molesworth, although — or because — like Henry (and probably also Patrick Neilsen Hayden) I’ve never been near an English Public School. You can’t fully understand Molesworth until you figure out the real name of his “grate friend Peason.”

July 08, 2003

For the benefit of Mr Kite...

Posted by Chris

The bringing of a new blog before the public is a practice now so common as scarce to need an apology. Nevertheless, such lists, assemblages, diaries, complaints, lamentations, polemics and records of triumph and disaster are now so common and so diverse that new entrants into the field must perforce struggle to be noticed. Notwithstanding such difficulties, we believe that our new enterprise - combining as it does the skills, talents and intelligences of personages of experience and distinction - will assuredly meet with the approval of readers of judgment and taste. Crooked Timber is a cabal of philosophers, politicians manque, would-be journalists, sociologues, financial gurus, dilletantes and flaneurs who have assembled to bring you the benefit of their practical and theoretical wisdom on matters historical, literary, political, philosophical, economic, sociological, cultural, sporting, artistic, cinematic, musical, operatic, comedic, tragic, poetic, televisual &c &c, all from perspectives somewhere between Guy Debord, Henry George and Dr Stephen Maturin. We hope you’ll enjoy the show.