Blogging

Many bloggers are looking back these days, and I’m no different. I was recently reminded of an old post of mine in which I criticized media outlets for prioritizing coverage of the Michael Jackson trial over a massive North Korean train accident.

That was almost a year ago. Since that day, I’m sorry that I can honestly say that not a day has gone by in which I have thought about that train crash again. Not once.

To my fellow Timberites: despite my admiration for countless blogs such as Obsidian Wings, Arms and Influence and The Agitator, if I’m ever caught engaging in anything resembling blog triumphalism, pull the plug on me. I mean it.

It looks as though a lot of CT readers decided to “join the EFF”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/11/18/eff-on-bloggers-rights/ as a result of our post a couple of months ago; the EFF is now “listing us”:http://www.eff.org/bloggers/badges/ as one of the ten blogs that brought in the most donations. They’re doing very good work – thanks to all of you for supporting it.

“Whatte the swyve?” you say? “Anothere of myne servauntes hath just dyede of the blacke death.”:http://houseoffame.blogs.friendster.com/my_blog/2006/01/abbreviaciouns.html This and other useful acronyms from “Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog”:http://houseoffame.blogs.friendster.com/my_blog/. (Via “Making Light”:http://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/.)

Orin Kerr has “partly detached himself”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_03_12-2006_03_18.shtml#1141972931 from the “Volokh Conspiracy”:http://www.volokh.com/ and now has a “new blog of his own”:http://orinkerr.com/, which will focus mostly on legal analysis “with an emphasis on current legal debates and a broader perspective on the legal academy and the legal profession.” The opening in the ideological “vacancy chain”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_labor_Markets_/_Vacancy_Chains created by this move will, I think, come to be occupied by Randy Barnett.

So far as I know the following fallacy has no name: ‘if x is funny, there must be a grain of truth to x.’ It’s sort of like affirming the consequent, but for ‘it’s funny because it’s true’. If you see what I mean. (You have to think of ‘it’s funny’ as the consequent.) It’s part positive ad hominem. Rather than proving what he says is true, the speaker generates a sense of himself as a clever, sharp, perceptive person. The audience then infers that there must be something clever, sharp and perceptive about the position taken. But mostly the fallacy works because funniness is next to truthiness. The mechanisms of stand-up comedy and propaganda are not fully distinct. What makes you laugh has a certain kinship to that which causes the crowd’s madness. When you put it that way, it’s darn obvious what I am talking about. You have read something Mark Steyn wrote in the last several years, I take it? As Hume writes:

[click to continue…]

Scott McLemee: “The effect of constant web access is a kind of mental entropy.” Similarly, a recent comment by “Dave Pell”:http://davenetics.com/2006/01/referrers/:

I can’t read books. I can’t even focus on a magazine article without stopping every few paragraphs to email my team at Rollyo about tweaks we should be making to our new Firefox tool (or whatever happens to be to project of the moment). I can’t listen to other people for more than a few seconds. Eye contact is unthinkable (too much else to see). … Did the internet make me like this? Did the always connected, always emailing, always browsing, always IMing and always going all-in while playing online Texas Holdem gradually destroy my ability to focus and think clearly? Or was I just a guy with a short attention span who was therefore drawn to the internet?

“Lakshmi Chaudry”:http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2485/ has an interesting piece in _In These Times_ on whether or not blogs can revolutionize progressive politics. Interesting – but, I think, based on a flawed premise. Chaudry’s argument, as I understand it, is that blogs aren’t going to be able to fulfil their promise of creating a vital new progressive movement, based on the netroots, unless it becomes more internally diverse, embracing women, minorities and (something which not many people focus on) people from the working class. Lakshmi seems to buy in, at least in part, to the argument that blogs can be an

bq. inherently democratic, interactive and communal medium, with the potential to instantaneously tap into the collective intellectual, political and financial resources of tens of millions of fellow Americans to create a juggernaut for social change.

Where she disagrees with lefty blog evangelists is in her belief that:

bq. any such strategy is unlikely to work if those in charge of crafting it—be they bloggers, politicians or so-called netizens—show little interest in expanding the reach of the progressive blogosphere to include the largest, most diverse audience possible. If the blogs are unable to bridge the class divide online, there is no reason to think they can create a grassroots movement that can do so in the real world.

This seems to me to be based on the flawed premise that blogs can be the heart of a genuine mass-movement, with appeal to working class voters as well as politics geeks. Blogs are still an elite phenomenon, with a relatively low readership among non-elites. There are a lot of inflated numbers being thrown around – the most “convincing estimate”:http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB111685593903640572-fCzpdsaoZQ6NyRKcqCtIKD0afZE_20060531.html?mod=rss_free that I’ve seen suggests that the biggest political blog around, the Daily Kos, had less than 1% of the readership of the New York Times in the middle of last year (it has probably grown since). Blogs are politically important, not because they are the nucleus of a mass movement, or a new form of radical democracy, but because they are read by journalists, federal law clerks, political activists and others who may then be influenced by them. While Chaudry is right that the blogosphere needs more diversity, this isn’t because a greater diversity of voices among bloggers is likely to make blogs more appealing, say, to working class voters. It’s because blogs do sometimes frame political questions for the media, and to the extent that they’re mostly written by white college educated males who are interested in technology, they’re liable to skew politics a but in favour of the interests of aforesaid college educated males, and against the interests of other groups with different priorities. It seems to me that political blogs are a little better than print media or TV at, say, taking trade unions seriously, but not so much that we should be patting ourselves on the back or anything.

– Even though you can’t trust him to tell the truth about Democrats, I’ve always had a soft spot for George Will. He knows a few things, and he seems to have more on his mind than the care and feeding of Bush talking points. This column makes a strong argument that Congress should not allow the Bush Administration to win the legal argument that the ability to initiate warrentless wiretaps, in violation of FISA, is inherent in the President’s powers. If they do so, it will hobble the willingness of future Congresses to authorize military force, out of fear that future Presidents will make further power grabs. (Will believes that Congress should authorize the wiretaps without conceding the legal point, although I’m not sure if he thinks they should still be required to get a warrant.) (via Matthew Yglesias)

– Mickey Kaus might be the only blogger whose comment section is predominated by people who loathe him. This comment, on Mickey’s dishonesty about Brokeback Mountain‘s numbers, is a treat.

– I never heard of this, either. I’ve got a funny vibe about the story, though, like it’s something that will get a lot more attention in history books than newspapers.

I’m off to hear my colleague Jimmy Doyle talk about the “Gorgias”:http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/gorgias.html . In preparation I came across this passage (at about 457d) .

bq. Socrates: You, Gorgias, like myself, have had great experience of disputations, and you must have observed, I think, that they do not always terminate in mutual edification, or in the definition by either party of the subjects which they are discussing; but disagreements are apt to arise-somebody says that another has not spoken truly or clearly; and then they get into a passion and begin to quarrel, both parties conceiving that their opponents are arguing from personal feeling only and jealousy of themselves, not from any interest in the question at issue. And sometimes they will go on abusing one another until the bystanders at last are quite vexed at themselves for ever listening to such fellows.

It seems that even his familiars must be careful when supping with the devil.

Of whom was this said? And where?

bq. Beneath his leftist pseudo-sophistication X is a manipulative intellectually dishonest person, … and his like masters required to guide the rest of us poor great unwashed to achieve their utopia dream – which is a documented nightmare to date built on hundreds of millions of human corpses.

and

bq. typical Fabian Society International Socialist that will never say a bad word against a fellow leftist such as Noam Chompsky [sic].

Details via “Matthew”:http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/2006/02/oliver-kamm-interview.html .

It’s not the most important issue in the world, but I thought it was striking that the Pajamafolk are seem genuinely tickled by the same exchange that lefties think is hilariously pompous. Just one of those things, I guess.

“Brett”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/02/03/friday-fun-thread-rock-out/#comment-142750 just left the one hundred thousandth comment here on CT, at least as far as I can tell. Not bad for a couple of years work. Making the estimate precise is tricky because of the bad old Last Days of Movable Type when comments were often left in duplicate or triplicate (or worselicate) because the software couldn’t keep up. A further complication is the spam we routinely get. I’m confident there is basically no spam in our comments, as we’ve always aggressively weeded it out, but while it sits in the moderation queue waiting to be deleted it gets a comment id number and so makes the total tick up by one. The difference between the number of comments in the database and the ID number of the latest comment tells you how much spam we’ve gotten (and deleted) since March of 2005, when we moved to WordPress. As of now, it’s almost forty three thousand.

At any rate, a hundred thousand comments is a lot of chatter from the chattering classes. Thanks to all our readers and regular commenters for their contributions.

I was at the bloggers-meet-journalists lunch a few days ago which “Matt Stoller”:http://www.mydd.com/story/2006/1/28/1527/04347 and others have been talking about, and even tried to say something, but was shut down by the moderator, who thought that I was going to say something else altogether. What struck me (and what I was going to say) was that the journalists there didn’t seem to understand how the blogosphere worked at all. My half-assed explanation of why is as follows …

I can understand how the people at the _Post_ would get upset at hundreds of commenters from Atrios’ or Kos’s comments sections showing up to make their objections heard – while they’re nothing on, say, the denizens of the slimepit at LGF, their manner of criticism can be … robust. I’m willing to believe that there were some commenters who didn’t make it through the moderation system, and who got hateful (Howell suggested that there were some pretty nasty sexual epithets in there, and I believed her). But even so, the incomprehension with which journalists responded to bloggers seemed to me to point to something more fundamental. Journalism and blogging have different internal systems of authority. Newspaper articles aspire to presenting a comprehensive, neutral and _authoritative_ judgement regarding the facts at hand in a particular matter. Of course, they don’t always succeed in doing this at all – hence the need for ombudsmen, correction columns etc. But even if this standard is often more honoured in the breach than the observance, it still is the basis for the journalistic claim to authority, and status. Blogposts are quite different – they’re arguments in an ongoing debate. They don’t aspire to any sort of finality or authoritativeness (and indeed they’re often updated in response to new arguments or facts). They comment on, and respond to, what others are saying.

The point is that they have very different – and clashing – notions of where authority and responsibility come from. Each newspaper article has the form of a discrete statement, which is supposed to be as authoritative as possible on its own ground. Each blogpost has the form of an intervention in an ongoing conversation – the blogger’s authority rests in part on her willingness to respond to others and engage in argument with them. A blogger who doesn’t respond to good counter-arguments is being irresponsible (of course many bloggers are irresponsible in this way; there isn’t much in the way of formal policing of this norm). These forms of authority are difficult to reconcile with each other, because the latter in large part undermines the former. If journalists start systematically responding to their critics, and getting drawn into conversations about whether or not they were right when they made a particular claim, then they’re effectively admitting that the articles they have written aren’t all that authoritative in the first place. They’re subject to debate and to revision. Thus, in part, the tendency for journalists like Jack Shafer to dismiss criticism from bloggers and their commenters as “organized riots” and lynch mobs. It’s a fundamental threat to their notions of where journalistic authority comes from. Thus also, I suspect, Howell’s reluctance to respond directly to critics like Brad DeLong, when it would obviously (to a blogger) be in her best interests to do so.

Comments are welcome – as I say, these are thoughts in the process of being formed (an intervention in an ongoing conversation if you like).

I have to agree with Scott Lemieux about the validity of self-reported incomes in responses to an online questionnaire. Is the “mean average” [sic] income of LGF readers actually over $105,000? Do Roger Simon readers really pull down a (mean, natch) average of $116,000? Why do I have a sneaking suspicion that user death2dhimmicrats5 claimed to be making…one BILLION dollars a year. Click through to the linked Dennis the Peasant post for more hilarity. A bewildered commenter there wonders:

In a prior career, my title was “Media Buyer”. If this is accurate it’s highly pathetic. With all their money, couldn’t PJM come up with $15k to put together a bitchin’ printed media kit? Media buyers like to have something tangible in their hands. And don’t they have a WebEX account? What the heck is going on?

I feel horrible for laughing at this because I have been a fan of LGF and Glenn and Roger for 3+ years. These guys are savvy at so many things, but this is a fiasco. How can this happen?

How, indeed? And if the Pajamas Media readers love The Blog so much, why don’t they marry it? Oh, wait, looks like they’re working on it.