Blogging

Unless something changes, I’ll be on the Al Franken show on Air America tomorrow, sometime around 1.30 ET, talking about blogs and politics.

(Cross-posted to Ukraine Study Tour Blog)
It’s amazing how little coverage of Ukraine there has been in the international media in the past few months (with the exception of the ever-dependable Financial Times). After the telegenic euphoria of the December 2004 Orange Revolution had passed, attention focused elsewhere. In TV-land, Ukraine was a simple story with a happy ending; democracy won and the ex-communists were sent packing. Since then, anyone who’s been paying a little attention knows the ‘morning after’ brought a long hangover. President Viktor Yuschenko’s government internally combusted as his Prime Minister, Yulia Tymoshenko walked out. Economic growth stagnated and corruption ran rampant. And in the depths of last winter, a piqued Russia switched off the gas. This spring, a parliamentary election created a three-way stalemate that lasted for months. The pro-Russian Party of the Regions of Ukraine made a convincing comeback (for eastern Ukrainians, it never went away). It was a thumb of the nose to Westerners, including myself, who’d simply assumed that a successful democratic outcome meant victory for the pro-Western parties. For a time early this summer, Ukraine teetered on the edge of a profound split, perhaps even civil war. Sensibly, if belatedly, Yuschenko put US pressure to the side and entered a coalition with his arch enemy, the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovich.
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I’m on a bit of a busman’s holiday. I’m part of a study tour to the Ukraine that involves meeting policy makers, NGOs and media people in Kiev and the Crimea, and deepening international links both ways. So I’ve set up a group-blog for people on the tour and also fellows of the 21st Century Trust to share and discuss what we learn about this amazing country. I’ll be here for the next 10 days and hope to be blogging about it, or helping my fellow study-tourers blog about it pretty much every day. So I’d really appreciate it if you could take a moment to hope over to Ukraine Study Tour Blog and check in on us, leave a comment, or just have a nose around. While I’m here, I’m also going to cross-post here at CT the occasional piece about Ukraine to spread the love around and also entice CT-readers to look a little closer.

Also, while I’m at it, I may as well add that I’ve now been in Kiev for 24 hours and have pretty much fallen in love with it. Salo and black bread washed down with neat vodka may have brought on the most dramatic migraine I’ve had in a while. But now that it’s passed, I can’t help thinking it was worth it. Who’d have thought garlicky lard could taste so damn good?

My piece on the netroots and the Democratic party has just come out in the _Boston Review_ (free webby version “here”:http://www.bostonreview.net/BR31.5/farrell.html, but I heartily encourage people to “subscribe”:http://bostonreview.net/subscribe.html to the real magazine; it’s smart and filled with wonderful things). People who want to comment on or respond to the piece (it’s a broadly positive take on the netroots, but argues that they need to become more self-consciously ideological) can do so here.

Please tell me I didn’t just read a white male blogger dismiss a black woman complaining about the lack of any black or latino bloggers at the Bill Clinton blogger meetup by telling her not to attack “her betters” and insinuating that she is too ignorant to write properly. Pleasepleaseplease. Aw, damn:

So, Liza, dear, before you go assailing your betters and making Jane stand in for every blond white woman who ever pissed you off, maybe you should head back to eighth grade English and, you know, learn to spell and to write in a linear fashion. Although judging from your other posts that I read, mediocrity may be a chronic condition for you….You just might have a future in this blogging thing, although I think you might be more at home on LiveJournal or MySpace where you can post lots of photos of yourself to distract from your decidedly tepid prose and numerous grammatical faux pas.

This is coming on the heels of lots of sarcastic “sic’s” and “ed’s” inserted in the quoted passages. That’s just uncalled for. I make spelling errors too; so does everyone. Telling a minority woman blogger she’s too stupid and uneducated to make it in the big leagues, and telling her not to “assail her betters” (?!) is just bullshit, and all the black-co-blogger-having in the world isn’t going to make it OK. There are plenty of ways to disagree with people, even humorously, even vehemently, that don’t play into harmful stereotypes. I know that sarcastic mockery of other people’s spelling and grammatical errors is an internet trope from the usenet days of yore, and I’m not saying women or minority bloggers are exempt from ordinary mockery, but think about the context a little. Context matters. If someone makes fun of, say, the lovely John Holbo for some typo, there’s really no subtext. It’s just: “ha-ha!” John will think, whoops, I was typing fast. Oh well. No one questions his right to be heard on the internet.

When a black woman is asking a legitimate question about why minority bloggers are absent from a blogger meet-up in Harlem, and you turn around with a lot of complaints about her writing and reasoning ability, there most definitely is a subtext: you’re too stupid to write properly, and that’s why no one who looks like you was at this meeting. You’re not good enough. Don’t assail your betters. I was actually kind of shocked to see this up at Firedoglake, which is an excellent blog. I’ve never read Liza’s blog before, so I have no real opinion about it or her previous dust-up with Jane Hamsher over the Lieberman-in-blackface thing, but I’ll be reading her posts a damn sight sooner than TRex’s, I’ll tell you that.

Watching established news organizations set up homesteads in the blogosphere is a pastime of great interest to me, both as a professional writer and an amateur social psychologist. Few phenomena better illustrate the role that anxiety plays in the life of large institutions.

In some few cases, the internal culture of a magazine or newspaper will encourage (or at least tolerate) a degree of initiative on the part of the writing staff. But most places are just too inflexible for that. And it shows, at all levels.

The habits fostered by an entrenched bureaucracy combine with hazy notions of “our audience” (often treated with an overblown deference finally indistinguishable from condescension) to yield a rigidity embodying pure terror. There is a clutching at reliable formulas, and a deep fear of the interesting, let alone the unusual. A compulsive avoidance of experimentation sometimes alternates (in an almost cyclothymic way) with joylessly frantic, top-down efforts at renewal.

“Be spontaneous!” comes the directive from on high. “Just not too spontaneous!”

And you see the spastic consequence in the blogs, which should probably be called Unclear on the Concept or Lipstick on the Corpse or Watching Grandma Dance the Frug.
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Over at Comment is Free, our very own Daniel “has joined”:http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/group_post/2006/09/post_389.html with other writers on that site to urge support for the Global Day for Darfur.

C’mon it’s The Weblog. You’re missing out on insightful posts like this one from Dominic, on how Fay Weldon is the antichrist:

The model of libidinal economy endorsed by Weldon is essentially that of middle-class parenting: let your children have the smallest possible amount of what they clamour for – sweets, television, computer games – and make their access even to that conditional on an unremitting parade of good manners and the assiduous consumption of vegetables. In such a manner is exorbitant desire acknowledged through gritted teeth – when it is not being exploited to secure obedience. All of this is fair enough in extremis, which is where most parenting of small children is done, but it is nauseating to encounter an adult person still willingly enthralled by such a ruthlessly petty system of restraint and reward. If adolescence has any purpose at all, it is to shatter those bonds.

Read the whole thing, because it really is an excellent little essay. On a lighter note, you can be astounded by the unparallelled quote-mining skills of Adam Kotsko:

In Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), Reinhold Niebuhr quotes a Southern politician protesting against suffrage tests for black voters “on the ground that they would discriminate in favor of the educated Negro against the servile, old-time Negro”:

Now, sir, the old-time Negro is assassinated by this suffrage plan. This new issue, your reader, your writer, your loafer, your voter, your ginger-cake school graduate, with a diploma of side-whiskers and beaver-hat, pocket pistols, brass knucks [sic] and bicycle, he, sir, is the distinguished citizen whom our statesmen would crown at once with the highest dignities of an ancient and respectable commonwealth.

I think I speak for all of us when I say, humina whatsa ginger-whisker beaver-hat whaaaaa? The Weblog has many other fine posters, too; I’m sure your life needs more Ben Wolfson. McLemee may be shy to hype The Weblog, but I’m not. Go ye, and read of it. Also, ginger-cake.

This short Jack Balkin “essay”:http://www.thepocketpart.org/2006/09/06/balkin.html seems to me to be the best thing I’ve read on the relationship between blogging and scholarship.

Law professors now agonize over whether blogging constitutes legal scholarship and what this will do to the legal academy. They needn’t bother. The real threat to quality comes not from the medium of blogging itself but from using citation counts, links, page views, and downloads as measures of merit. People won’t just apply these criteria to judge blogs. They will also apply them to standard-form legal scholarship online. Blogging, in fact, is sui generis. It blurs the traditional boundaries between scholarship, teaching, and service because it transcends the normal audiences and expectations of legal scholarship. Over the years, legal scholarship has become an increasingly self-contained community where scholars write only for each other. Bloggers have burst out of that model: they talk to many different audiences, they teach the world about law, and they perform a public service by drawing attention to the legal and policy issues of the day. Blogging may give scholars publicity that gets their work a look. But it will not by itself generate a scholarly reputation or make a scholarly career—at least, that is, until social and technological change thoroughly reconstitute our standards of merit. … The wrong question to focus on is whether hiring committees should count blogging as legal scholarship. The right question is how we should re-imagine our vocation as professors of law in light of new online media. Should we continue to speak mostly to ourselves and our students, or should we spend more time trying to teach and influence the outside world?

I’m thinking about these questions because I’m deciding whether or not to list a very small part of my blogging – the seminars that I’ve organized and am organizing around academic books – on my cv as some form of academic activity – perhaps under the heading of “unconventional publishing.” Any thoughts?

The International Committee of the Red Cross is very serious indeed about its neutrality. There is an obvious reason for this; neutrality underpins its special status, and if its neutrality is compromised, its personnel may be placed directly in danger and its ability to do its job is reduced. In other words, to impugn the neutrality of the Red Cross is a very serious charge indeed, and ought to only be made on the basis of very strong evidence indeed.

So it is perhaps odd to see Australia’s Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer (who comes across as a hell of a moron; could any Aussie readers confirm this?) merrily asserting that the Lebanese Red Cross conspired with Hezbollah to fake an attack on one of its ambulances, seemingly as collateral damage to a broadside against the media for being biased against Israel.

In fact, his source was a blog, “Zombietime“, which has looked through news agency photos of the ambulance and proved to its own satisfaction that they are fakes. I must say that their case seems pretty unconvincing to me, since it appears to be based on some very strong conditional statements about what “a missile” can and can’t do, and “a missile” is a really quite generic category to be making such statements about.

I think that if I was the Australian foreign minister, I would have considered the pros and cons of undermining the credibility of the Red Cross (particularly as the ICRC is an important provider of the humanitarian aid which supports a lot of the things that the USA, UK and Australia want to do in the sphere of foreign policy) and decided that a political slam on the mainstream media was not worth it, particularly since nobody actually disputes that civilians were killed and ambulances were hit during the Lebanese invasion. Blogosphere triumphalism doesn’t really seem all that important compared to the neutrality of the Red Cross.

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The New Republic‘s “Open University”:http://www.tnr.com/blog/openuniversity blog is up and running. While I’m not at all a fan of the magazine itself in its Martin Peretz incarnation, this new venture has some very good people blogging for it, as well as others who’ll be quite interesting to watch from a safe distance.

Matthew “Big Number of Blogs”:http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2006/08/dont-whine-fight.html Yglesias is “consolidating his efforts”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2006/08/a_new_hope.html at a revamped “MatthewYglesias.com”:http://www.matthewyglesias.com. Update yer blogrolls accordingly.

In the course of a “silly piece”:http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20060830/opcom30.art.htm boosting Joe Lieberman against the loud but ineffectual online hordes, Bruce Kluger says:

If this wasn’t enough to drain the effervescence from the blogger bubbly, America’s noisy Web wags were dealt an even more sobering blow 10 days later when Snakes on a Plane opened nationwide to a decidedly flat $15.3 million box office. Before its premiere, Snakes had been the latest blogger darling, as swarms of online film geeks prematurely crowned it the summer’s big sleeper. This hyperventilating fan base even convinced Snakes’ distributor, New Line Cinema, to up the movie’s rating to R, to ensure a gorier, more venomous snake fest. But all that clapping and yapping couldn’t put enough fannies in the seats.

But what’s the right counterfactual here? I think it’s that _Snakes on a Plane_ is a cheap B-Movie that, in the absence of the jokey attention it got online, would have gone straight to DVD and never come close to the top of the box office for even a single weekend. If anyone was suckered by the “mythology of the blogosphere” it was New Line Cinema, who clearly had convinced themselves that they had another _Titanic_ on their hands. (Maybe they had — just the wrong one.)

Now that there’s something like a ceasefire in Lebanon, I think what needs to happen is for Hezbollah to relocate to the DC area and start firing rockets at suburban homes in the region. This would have the advantage of combining two of “David”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_08_20-2006_08_26.shtml#1156342789 “Bernstein’s”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_08_20-2006_08_26.shtml#1156382394 three main interests in life. I imagine gleeful posts about the sudden drop in housing prices combined with dark suspicions over photos of dead realtors being carried out of the rubble. If the rockets could be launched from the safety of campus free-speech zones, we’d have the trifecta.