Blogging

A link to “Harry Hutton”:http://chasemeladies.blogspot.com/ , who writes one of the funniest sites on the interwebs, and has been “hilariously misidentified by Daily Kos”:http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/6/13/163821/037 as a Republican eliminationist stormtrooper. (Daily Kos also has Crooked Timber’s Daniel Davies down as a follower of Ann Coulter!)

I just noticed via our “Technorati Link Page”:http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/links.html?rank=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.crookedtimber.org&sub=Get+Link+Cosmos that in the last few hours, CT has been linked to by dozens of (presumably) robo-generated blogspot blogs. Each one I’ve looked at is populated with a page of posts with content that looks like it was scraped from Wikipedia. All of them have names of the form AdjectiveNoun. My favorite name so far is TiredStation, which could be used by some pro-business content generators we know. So far the content is innocuous, but I suppose that the next step is for the Wikipedia content to disappear and be replaced by true spam after some suitable delay. Feh.

Meanwhile, the World Cup continues. In the general spirit of four hundred years of oppression I was hoping Angola would beat Portugal, or at least draw. The more anxious English pundits are killing themselves over Eriksson’s mysterious tactics, even though England won their opening game. Eriksson brought relatively few strikers along in the squad, and if the usual number of functioning legs for any _n_ strikers is given by the formula n∗2, in England’s case the calculation is presently the slightly more complex (n∗2)-(n-1). Coming up today: Australia vs Japan, USA vs Czech Republic, and Italy vs Ghana.

_Update_: My “adopted team”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/06/05/allah-allah-dennis-bergkamp-dennis-bergkamp/ came through with a late rush of goals. Australia were unlucky with Japan’s goal, which might easily have been disallowed seeing as a Japanese player impeded the keeper. But then again, Japan should probably have had a penalty just after Australia equalized, so them’s the breaks.

Despite his modesty, we’re going to miss Ted hugely; if nothing else, as “Kieran”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/06/21/crooked-timbers-greatest-hits/ pointed out two years ago, Ted has been responsible for many of our most widely read posts. Among the posts I’ve particularly enjoyed or found thought-provoking over the years are his piece on “MEChA”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/09/02/stories, and his _National Review_ classics, “Punk the National Review”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/02/03/punk-the-national-review/ and “Today’s Activities on the National Review Cruise”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/11/12/todays-activities-on-the-national-review-cruise/. Another Timberite suggests “Please Call Your Senators about Torture Today”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/10/05/please-call-your-senators-about-torture-today. Others may have other posts (including ones from before Ted joined CT) that they prefer- feel free to mention them in comments.

It’s probably long since time that I hang up my blogging spurs. This isn’t a result of any sort of bad news; mostly, it’s just a matter of time. I’ve been increasingly unable or unwilling to carve it out, and that’s not likely to change any time soon.

I don’t want to write a “whither blogging?” bit any more than you want to read it, so I’ll spare you. Suffice it to say that I believe that Sturgeon’s Law (“Ninety percent of everything is crap”) has proven to be much more supportable than each and every rah-rah slogan about how “the blogosphere is self-correcting” or whatnot. I still believe that there are plenty of jewels in the political blogosphere making the world a slightly better place, including (but certainly not limited to) Obsidian Wings, Radley Balko, Kevin Drum, The Editors, Jim Henley, Brad DeLong, Tim Lambert… And that Matt Welch’s old article has held up better than most anything I’d have written.

It was an act of extraordinary generosity for the brilliant folks here at Crooked Timber to give me a platform and lend me some of their credibility. I hope that I haven’t tarnished it too badly. It’s been a great pleasure and honor to be part of the crew here, and I wish them nothing but continued success and good luck.

Seems like the Volokh Conspiracy is now “trolling itself”:http://www.volokh.com/posts/1148855758.shtml.

_Update_: I forgot, Adler is Juan Non-Volokh. All is explained. This “isn’t the first time”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/11/06/libertarian-litmus-test/ he’s shown an ability to home in on sentences he doesn’t like while avoiding interpretive charity, important contextualizing information or broader political questions.

Matt Bai in the NY Times, “Can Bloggers Get Real?”:

The Chicago Reader, an alternative weekly, recently profiled a 23-year-old law student who writes on Daily Kos’s front page under the pseudonym Georgia10, positing that she may well be the most-read political writer in the city, even though few people know her real name. (For the record, it’s Georgia Logothetis, and she lives with her parents.) In this way, Daily Kos and other blogs resemble a political version of those escapist online games where anyone with a modem can disappear into an alternate society, reinventing himself among neighbors and colleagues who exist only in a virtual realm.

Bai needs an additional, ontological premise. Perhaps: the size and reality of an audience are inversely proportional. Also, this is an unfortunate sentence: “She says she hopes the convention will show politicians that the bloggers are just ordinary Americans — and vice versa.”

A “comment by Bitch PhD”:http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/2006/05/go-tell-norbiz-happy-fucking.html reminded me that this week I’ll have been blogging for four years. I’m not sure what to think about that, so let’s look at some data. Here is a time-series of the number of posts per month on “my blog”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog from its “inauspicious beginning”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2002/05/21/the-hello-world-entry/ in May 2002 to the present. (Since CT started, I’ve just posted the same material to my own blog, so the trend represents all my posts.)

*Update*: More trendline goodness added below.

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Over the last few days we’ve been getting a new kind of comment spam; it’s semi-relevant to the posts in question, but has, if you look at it, links back to the usual kinds of websites. Unless artificial intelligence has improved a lot more than I think it has, I presume that real human beings are being paid to generate it, in the hope that it will slip under bloggers’ radar more easily than the automated stuff. If you’re a blogger at a reasonably well-trafficked site, you may want to keep an eye out for this.

I’m reading Learning the World by Ken McLeod (available here) and it turns out that the title is that of a blog* written by one of the characters. This is the first time I’ve seen a novel named for a blog – are there any other instances.

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I’ll be at “Firedoglake”:http://www.firedoglake.com/ on Sunday, leading the discussion in the second part of their Rick Perlstein book club. If you’ve read my “previous post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/05/16/the-wager-won-by-losing/ on the topic, you’ll have some idea of what I’m going to say, although I hope to expand my argument, and also respond to “Brad DeLong’s critique”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/05/losing_by_losin.html. It should be a fun discussion – Rick himself will be participating in comments. I’ve said before that us more wonkish types need to be talking more to the netroots people – I’m hoping that this will be a good opportunity to help build that conversation.

Just when you thought the lamentable “we are too the 101st Flying Keyboardists” thing had plumbed the very depths of warblogger self-regard…you got another think coming. Here I must interrupt myself to post the best warblogger comment of all time, from the “Captain” Ed thread:

Captain,
It seems to me that when one’s country calls, one should respond with the very best one has – with what you are best at. Having served in the military a very long time ago, and being an unwilling victim of advancing age and persistent gravity, I find that my best resource is my ability to express my conviction as eloquently and persuasively as I can. Not to convert those on the opposite end of the spectrum, but to buttress and strengthen those who share my world view and inform those whose opinions are yet unformed. On the surface, of course, this sounds laughably self-serving and a towering rationalization[you reckon?!!!!!!!!!!–ed]. Bear with me a moment, however, for I have a point to advance.

As I have stated on previous occasions, the great achilles heal of a free society at war in defence of its freedom, is its ability to maintain the support of its citizens. If the conflict be short, the enemy of obvious evil and the victory clear, then the support will be easily held. Victory has a thousand fathers, afterall. If however, the war is long and the enemy is elusive and victory is ill defined, then a free society is at a distinct disadvantage. A nation that cannot be smashed, can instead be nibbled to death!

And so, I and my keyboard stand at the pass – the weakest point [He’s like a noble Lacedaemonian, combing his long hair, oiling and strigilling the dust from the bodies of his loyal…where was I?–ed]. Armed only with words and whatever wisdom I may have gained along the way, to point to the danger and urge the defenders determination. To clarify the mist of confusion and uncertainty and to defend the vision of our purpose. These are my best weapons and I stand, old and bent and nearly used up, in the critical breach.

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John & Belle is terribly amusing at the moment – check out our new comments policy, for example. I self-promote so shamelessly because I know many of you sincerely loved the ‘jake’ contributions to this thread – college squid, hepcat leftist sockhopper assumptions J. Edgar etc. etc. (Jim Henley devoted a short post to marvelling.) So you should know there is more to be had. Acephalous is having fun as well. We aren’t yet taking pre-orders for the CT brand “even Ezra Pound would have called you a bitch” Café Press thong underwear (with the delicate ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made’ stitched in). PZ Myers is already banging the table for his college squid baby-t. Ah well. But the future is a long time, as they say. Perhaps the troll will straighten up, fly right – that is, in an away direction, and all will be well.

But all this is just to entertain you, by way of paying you back for answering a question. I’m writing a review of Zizek’s The Parallax View – which, weirdly, doesn’t discuss Pakula’s The Parallax View (see the top post on J&B). But the weird thing about this, seems to me, isn’t just that Zizek is a filmhound, so he should mention the film in a big book of this title – one containing a lot about film. The weird thing is that ‘the parallax view’ is a weird phrase because there’s no such thing as a parallax view. Parallax is a difference between two views – for example, the view through a camera viewer and the view through the lens, which then comes out as the picture you’ve taken. (See all the different things parallax can mean.) A difference between two views is not, itself, any view. The one thing that seems like it could be a ‘parallax view’ would be … healthy eyesight. The marksman with two eyes has better depth perception than the one-eyed marksman, to whom everything looks flat (like a carefully composed Pakula frame). I’m not sure what to make of this, but for starters I’m just asking: I’m not a photographer or astronomer, so maybe my premise is wrong? Does anyone ever use the phrase ‘parallax view’ except as the title of a book or film? If not, then it seems like Zizek naming his book after the film, then not discussing it, is some kind of clue, or joke.

I wouldn’t normally just randomly link to stuff on the Guardian blog, but this one is quite important. The “ongoing genocide in Darfur” has been such a staple of Internet arguments over the morality of humanitarian intervention, the effectiveness of the United Nations, the unique moral awfulness of the European Unions etc etc, that it is easy to forget that this is actually a real place with a real war going on in it and that, as is surprisingly common in wars, the news does not stand still while you are writing your blog posts. The Sudanese government, who are villains right enough and who I am sure will face charges at the ICC in the future, are actually not the problem now; they are co-operating at the peace talks (peace talks? yes! and furthermore, they are being very capably supported by the USA! the USA? yes! apparently they do “the useless chit-chat of diplomacy” a lot better than they do wars!). At present, ill-informed comment in the developed world is potentially even worse than annoying; if it persuades the Darfurian rebel groups that the world is gearing up to decapitate the Khartoum regime, it’s actually dangerous.

“Josh Marshall”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/008342.php talks about the hostility that many journalists have towards bloggers.

bq. It’s really astonishing the amount of self-pity and silliness one hears along these lines today. Not long ago, for instance, I sat down for an interview with a particularly disagreeable interviewer who seemed to want to catch me out and pin me down on every conceivably problematic point about blogs. At one point he suggested that the blogs were pulling away or threatening to pull away the ad revenue streams necessary to support the reportings staffs required for a quality news outlet. Agreed — I didn’t know quite what to make of that one either. I’m happy with my life. And my company is able to pay three salaries and benefits in addition to mine. But to say that we’re more than a financial fleck in the eye of even the smallest mainstream news organization is a really a grand understatement.

This reminded me of one of the weirder undercurrents at the National Press Club bloggers-meet-journalists “event”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/01/29/bloggers-and-journalists/ that I was at a couple of months ago. Halfway during the lunch, someone asked a question about the problems that newspapers face given budget cuts, lack of interest in funding investigative reporting etc etc, and the organizer (an ex-media type from the Shorenstein center) and other journalists jumped onto this, and made it the main topic of the second half of discussion, despite the fact that it was precisely irrelevant to the purported purpose of the lunch – a conversation about the relationship between blogging and journalism. This really struck me as something quite strange. My best interpretation of this was that journalists feel under threat on the one hand from the collapse in advertising revenues (which is about Craigslist and monster.com, not bloggers), and on the other hand from bloggers (who don’t threaten their revenues, but certainly threaten their professional prestige) and that they’ve got a tendency to blur these two quite different threats together into one because they’re both Internet phenomena. I don’t have much contact with journalists, so this impression may fly well wide of the mark – but given Marshall’s interviewer, it seems to me to be at least plausible as an explanation for the weird comments that some journalists have made about bloggers and blogging.