Blogging

“Here’s a story”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/21/business/21adco.html from the Times about an apparently well-known Ad executive who said there aren’t many female creative executives (the people who come up with Ad campaigns) because they aren’t up to the job:

bq. Mr. French told an audience … that women “don’t make it to the top because they don’t deserve to,” saying their roles as caregivers and childbearers prevented them from succeeding in top positions. … Mr. French is often called one of advertising’s best copywriters … His reputation is built in part on his knack for streamlining print advertising copy. … In an interview, Mr. French defended his remarks. “A belligerent question deserves a belligerent answer,” he said. “The answer is, They don’t work hard enough. It’s not a joke job. The future of the entire agency is in your hands as creative director.” … Mr. French said he did not regret his remarks, but thought the reaction to them was “lunacy.” “I’m extremely sad about it,” said Mr. French, who has been widely pilloried on the Internet. “Death by blog is not really the way to go.”

What I like about this is that he couldn’t blame it on women’s lack of math skills or their preference for communication over analysis, or their edge in verbal rather than numerical reasoning. Unless maybe “streamlining advertising copy” involves a lot of complex topological manipulations. As for “Death by blog,” I guess there’s some irony watching the world’s top ad guy radically misjudge consumer sentiment.

Three new-ish academic blogs that are particularly worthy of attention.

Dan Solove has moved from Prawfsblog to “Concurring Opinions”:http://www.concurringopinions.com/

Tony Arend in the Dept. of Government at Georgetown University now has an “international law blog”:http://explore.georgetown.edu/blogs/?BlogID=2.

Spencer Overton, together with several other black law professors, has set up “Blackprof.com”:http://www.blackprof.com/.

All recommended.

Tim Lambert has done very good work over the years keeping people honest on the John Lott “More Guns, Less Crime” thesis and on the Lancet study. However, his work on the strange subculture of DDT loons also deserves a bit of publicity.

Basically, there are lots of people out there, mainly the same sort of people who are fans of Stephen Milloy’s “junkscience.com”, who believe that “liberals and environmentalists” are responsible for the deaths of over 50 million people in the third world from malaria because they banned DDT in the 1970s, because they read the book Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. This charge is rubbish from start to finish … as in, DDT wasn’t banned in the 1970s, and using DDT is usually not the best way to prevent malaria. Tim’s DDT archive has the whole damn story.

Why are people so keen on DDT? Don’t know. There’s no compelling economic interest in treating the stuff as if it were a panacea; it’s a commodity chemical which is banned as an agricultural pesticide (in order to avoid creating resistant mosquitoes and compromising its use as an antimalarial) and which has only a niche demand as an antimalarial (because pyrethroid-treated mosquito nets are usually a more cost-effective prevention method). All I can think of is that claiming that environmentalists are responsible for millions of deaths in the third world is a handy way of slagging off environmentalists. One has to say, looking at the calibre of human being pushing the DDT argument in Tim’s archive, for them to cry crocodile tears over the genuine problems of the third world while doing nothing to ameliorate them, simply to fight a domestic political battle, would not exactly be out of character. Nice one Tim for exposing this vile, pernicious rubbish.

The issue of how (if at all) to regulate political comment and advertising on blogs (and the Internet in general) has been coming up in many countries as the electoral cycle catches up with the blog explosion. In Australia, the last election produced threats to regulate blogs and other Internet comment on political matters, in particular by requiring identifying details to be posted[1].

This was one of the subjects addressed by the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters Inquiry into the Conduct of the 2004 Federal Election and Matters Related Thereto. I made a submission attacking the idea, and arguing that only paid advertisements should be subject to this requirement. Amazingly enough[2], the Committee agreed.

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“Yesterday on Normblog”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/10/shock_and_mock.html :

bq. Is it just that, for secular liberals and leftists, all those invoking a line to, or about, God in decisions and actions in the public realm, with far-reaching effects on others, are to be seen as laughable, grotesque, or worse? I guess that must be it. But hold on. This seems to apply only sometimes. Like to the US President; or to Republican voters of devoutly Christian outlook; or to fundamentalist Jews in the occupied territories. It seems not to apply so much, or at all, when Islamists appeal to religious sources as a basis for blowing up themselves and, more particularly, others.

Today in the Guardian, “George Monbiot”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1589101,00.html , who must surely exemplify the Guardian-columnist-in-Norman’s-head (if anyone does):

bq. Are religious societies better than secular ones? It should be an easy question for atheists to answer. Most of those now seeking to blow people up – whether with tanks and missiles or rucksacks and passenger planes – do so in the name of God.

Ascription to a whole group, of the sort Geras engages in here, is now a standard move of the “decent left”. I don’t believe it is dishonest, I think they have constructed an image in their own heads of what most “secular liberals and leftists” believe, an image sharpened by their own sense of embattlement and by every BBC or Guardian story that doesn’t exactly resonate with their own views. In this, of course, they increasingly reproduce the paranoid groupthink of the American right about “liberals”.

Like Tom, I have been away for awhile now. With the kind permission of the other CT’ers, I have taken a leave of absence to work for the federal judiciary. I’m hoping to resume blogging early next fall.

I’m pleased to say that, after a truly epic hiatus from blogging of more than a year on my part, my fellow Timberites have very kindly consented to my coming back on board to post here at CT. Nice one fellas.

For the last year I’ve stood to blogging much as Dick Cheney stood towards serving in Vietnam in the late ‘sixties, but the various pressures and distractions that have kept me from writing have receded significantly, so I’m planning to be hanging about the place, wittering pointlessly about such topics as may catch my fancy, much more regularly than hitherto. No, please, control your excitement, really, do.

As part of my re-entry into the blogosphere – do we still call it that, or is that just a bit too 2003? – I’ve wanted to grab hold of all the posts I wrote on my old blog before joining CT in the first place, to find them a home and serve ’em up somewhere in public so that the peanut gallery can take aim, or indeed link to the damn stuff if it wishes.

Well, one thing I’ve found is that although the cool kids all used Movable Type, Blogger is still a deeply cool product. I’ve not put anything on the site since May 2003, still less ponied up any cash to maintain it, but tomrunnacles.blogpot.com appears to be basically intact. That’s very good, but after that date, I moved everything onto a hosted server which is, due to a series of oh-so-hilarious postal mixups, now defunct. I thought I’d lost all the stuff I’d written subsequently, but then I discovered the truly mind-boggling Wayback Machine, which truly makes elephants look like goldfish: it scrapes the web and archives what it finds, forever. They have a very good FAQ if you’re interested.

This is excellent news, in that if you’re the kind of doofus who forgets to renew his server fees, and I am, you can recover your work – my missing posts are here. It also induces, in me at least, a sense of something like vertigo to think of the sheer volume of data that archive.org has to manage. But finally, it’s a fairly sobering reminder that even if you trash your files yourself, and wait for the google cache to expire, your various web-related foolishnesses may remain visible for the public to cackle at for years to come.

So blog carefully, folks – I certainly hope I manage to.

I’ve written an article on the academic promise of blogging which is up on the Chronicle of Higher Education‘s website ( free, permanent link is “here”:http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i07/07b01401.htm). It should be appearing in print in their Oct 7 edition. In addition to the people at the _Chronicle_, and those mentioned in the piece, I owe serious thanks to Scott McLemee (many of my arguments riff on ideas tossed back and forth in our lunchtime conversations), and to Tim Burke, Alex Halavais, John McGowan, Laura McKenna and my fellow CT-ites for comments that fed into various iterations on the piece. Further comments welcome below, as usual.

We have a troll at the Valve, the Troll of Sorrow (among other aliases). I know, I know; just one. But that’s like having just one case of herpes. (Not that I would know, please believe.) We caught him from Adam Kotsko. I don’t blame Adam. We’ve tried the patent remedies. Deleting, IP blocking. A touch of disemvowelment. Nothing seems to reduce the unsightly swelling permanently. It’s an unusual strain, a platypus you wouldn’t believe in if it weren’t plainly real: antisemitic, homophobic, Quine, Russell and logical positivism-fixated. It’s strange that someone should be obsessed with providing slightly mistaken, severely tourettes-afflicted readings of the intricacies of the early 5’s of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. [click to continue…]

My friend, Jim Johnson, who teaches political theory at Rochester, has just started a fascinating new blog. “Politics, Theory and Photography”:http://politicstheoryphotography.blogspot.com/ aims, as its title suggests, to explore the intersection between political theory and photography. Jim has a particular take on this, which springs from a vigorous disagreement with Susan Sontag and others who write about photography as a means towards creating compassion between the subject of the photograph and the person looking at it. He thinks compassion is a bad idea.

bq. compassion, as Hannah Arendt rightly notes, is de-politicizing and I think it is a major mistake to identify the aim of documentary photography as eliciting compassion in viewers. How is compassion de-politicizing? Two ways. First, insofar as it demands that we identify with the suffering of some other, compassion collapses the space for argument which is a basic medium of politics. Second, compassion focuses resolutely on individual suffering and so cannot generalize to the large numbers of people who are subject to war, famine, dislocation and so forth. What photographs might more properly aim for is establishing solidarity. But that would require rethinking many of the conventions of documentary practice.

Jim has written a “long paper”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/jim/compassion2.pdf on this topic, but he’s using the blog to do things that would be difficult or impossible to do in a conventional academic article. The blog mixes together photographs and commentary so that his claims and arguments don’t just emerge abstractly from argument with other writers, but concretely, in dialogue with the work of real photographers. It’s a really nice example of the new uses to which blogging can be put.

“PZ Myers”:http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/why_didnt_anyone_tell_me_its_lurker_day/ announces that it’s Lurker Day, that day of the blogospheric calendar where readers who usually never make comments tell us what they like about our blog, what they don’t like, who they are etc etc. Sounds like a good idea – we have no idea who y’all are, but would like to find out.

As of this evening you can’t get access to the Op-Ed columnists of the New York Times unless you pony up for “Times Select”:http://www.nytimes.com/products/timesselect/whatis.html, a new subscription service. I have no plans to sign up. Don’t know about you. I doubt this spells the beginning of the end either for political bloggers or the relevance of the Op-Ed page to the chattering classes at large. But it does seem that this will reduce the columnists’ ability to set the agenda for online chatterers like ourselves. We won’t have David Brooks or Airmiles Friedman to kick around any more. But is that bad for us, or for them? NYT columnists are the pinatas of the _conscience collective_. If not so many people are reading them, you have to wonder whether it’s worth signing up yourself just for the content. I think we benefit at CT. The _Times_ makes you pay to read Paul Krugman, but his substitutability with our own “John Quiggin”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/author/john-quiggin/ is pretty high, and as of this evening we’re therefore e a better deal than ever.

This Friday and Saturday I had the pleasure of spending some face-to-face time with a group of bloggers several of whom will be familiar to the CT crowd (click on the photo for details). Dan Drezner and our very own Henry Farrell organized a great meeting on The Power and Political Science of Blogs. Ethan Zuckerman kindly took copious notes and has posted some of them on his blog.

Congrats to Dan and Henry for hosting a very interesting and productive meeting. The conference featured some of the best discussions I’ve heard and participated in on the subject of blogging. I think we are all invigorated and inspired now to go and finish writing up our related papers.:)

“Tyler Cowen”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/09/selfexperimenta.html at Marginal Revolution has some interesting things to say about his experiment in allowing comments on his blog.

1. Visitor stats rise considerably. But this happens so quickly, I believe it is people hitting “reload” to read additional comments, rather than more readers.

2. The more that comments are regularly available, the more rapidly the quality of comments falls. The quality of comments stays high when it is periodic, not automatic, and when we request comments specifically.

3. The quality of comments is highest when the matter under consideration involves particular facts and decentralized knowledge. Posts which mention evolution, free will, or Paul Krugman do not generate the highest quality of comments.

So my current sense (Alex chooses his own course, though I believe he agrees) is to ask for comments periodically rather than always having comments open. The goal is to maximize the real value of comments, rather than the number of comments (or measured visits) per se.

Which of these specific claims can be universalized? Speaking, like Tyler, from personal experience, it seems to me that his observations on visitor stats are probably generally true. The relationship between the general availability of comments, and the quality of the comments falling in particular varies considerably from blog to blog. _Making Light_ has been extraordinarily successful in building up a community of commenters with interesting things to say (it has a homier feel than most comment sections; everyone mostly knows each other). The argument that more commenters=less interesting discussions has a lot of truth to it – there is very clearly a Gresham’s law effect, where bad commenters drive out good ones. Which suggests (and again _Making Light_ illustrates this well) that a vigorous moderation policy can help counteract the negative effects of growth. Finally, Tyler may be on to something when he talks about specific facts and decentralized knowledge – but there’s another factor there which I think is even more important. That’s the extent to which there is minimal agreement on a shared set of facts in the first place. Where there isn’t – and where there’s strongly opposed viewpoints – blog comments sections tend to break down rapidly. For Tyler, it’s Paul Krugman; for us, it’s the Israel-Palestine question (where I don’t allow comments any more on the rare occasions that I post ). But even here, Jonathan Edelstein’s Head Heeb seems to succeed in hosting generally civil discussions – I suspect that this is another example of the community effect – the commenters are a group of people who seem to have come to know each other over time, and have a good sense of the ground rules of debate. But enough rabbitting on; over to you.