“Cosmic Variance”:http://cosmicvariance.com/ is a new group blog made up of a bunch of physicists, some of whom — notably “Sean Carroll”:http://cosmicvariance.com/sean/ — are already “well-known”:http://preposterousuniverse.blogspot.com/ for their writing. I used to hang out with a bunch of physicists in college. Never have so many smart people been concentrated in such a brutal job market. On the other hand, they get to have good job titles and cool-sounding research interests. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be in the “Theory Group at Stanford Linear Accelerator”:http://cosmicvariance.com/joanne/ studying “heavy flavor physics”? “Today we will accelerate a particle of this 1989 Château Haut-Brion to very high speeds and smash it into a stationary matrix composed of this bar of “Michel Cluizel”:http://www.cluizel.com/ single-plantation chocolate, in an effort to produce an entity predicted by Larousse but hitherto unobserved, the Michelin 4-star boson.”
From the category archives:
Blogging
I’ve been on sabbatical from CT, working on the Valve and, by extension, pushing pet notions about academic publishing reform. These notions have now born fruit in the form of a book event, conducted more or less on the model of similar events pioneered at CT – massive, multi-thinker online reviews. The book is Theory’s Empire, an anthology of essays critical of Theory – the ofless stuff, mostly indigenous to English departments. Several posts up so far, and several bloggers – inside and outside the Valve – lined up to participate over the next several days. Please feel free to drop by and join the conversation if this sounds interesting. Next month we’ve got a different book lined up: The Literary Wittgenstein. I wrote a long review of it for NDPR about a month back. Under the fold, some general thoughts about academic e-publishing.
This morning’s post brought with it a package from Cambridge University Press containing a copy of “The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521609097/junius-20 , co-edited by Crooked Timberite Harry Brighouse (with Gillian Brock) and including papers by both me and Jon Mandle. With such a heavy contribution from this blog, I hardly need point out that it is the duty of all regular readers to buy themselves a copy (as well as supplementary copies for friends and family)!
Haedro: Socrates, it hurts when I do this.
Socrates: Can I suggest that you don’t do that?
Plato, Philosophy Phunnies
Chris has done a good job of capturing much of the commentary on the London bombings, but I’d like to point out one more ignoble classification. I’m going to pick on Michelle Malkin. It’s certainly not an exclusively right-wing thing, but she’s a professional writer who really ought to know better.
I’m going to assume that Ms. Malkin would have heard about the attacks around breakfast time. By lunch, she had worked through sorrow, anger, grief, and gotten to the healthy point of dumpster-diving. She had taken the time to troll the comments at Democratic Underground and Daily Kos to collect the most appalling, indefensible comments by such pillars of the left as “plcdude”, “talex”, “pyewacket1”, and “TheSnorp”. (Et tu, TheSnorp?) This post was helpfully titled “THE 7/7 ATTACKS: REACTIONS FROM THE AMERICAN LEFT”, and earned her 36 trackbacks.
What’s the point of this? I understand that there are plenty of chuckles to be had by visting Bedlam at Free Republic or Democratic Underground, and occasionally there’s a geniune point to be made. (For example, I thought that No More Mister Nice Blog wrote an interesting post that isn’t just a freakshow.) But I’d suggest that the exact same post (“DERANGED RANTERS RANT”) has been written enough times by now. On a slow day, it’s just hackish and unconvincing; the response, “what about FR/LGF/DU?” always remains the same. But on a day of tragedy, it’s really inappropriate, and it would do us good if we would just knock it off.
UPDATE: I almost forgot Roy Edroso’s response to Michelle Malkin: “DU-oh! I’ma run out and gather me some Free Republic quotes in retaliation. That’s the secret of the blogosphere: it’s self-incorrecting.”
I had to travel to Oxford last Thursday and stayed overnight, so I was, thankfully, away from a keyboard during the initial reaction to the terrorist attacks in London. Catching up on the online and print commentary, there appear to be just three sorts of response. First, there are the people who point out that, though this was a most terrible day for the victims and their families, Londoners (and the British generally) have put up with terrorist bombing campaigns before, and have managed to do so without launching pogroms. I agree with this and haven’t anything to add to it. Second, there are the numerous people who write variations on the “adequacy.org 9/11 standard column”:http://www.adequacy.org/public/stories/2001.9.12.102423.271.html : Robert Fisk (an especially bad one in the Indie on Friday morning), “Nick Cohen in today’s Observer”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1525172,00.html , and so on. “Harry’s Place”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/ is now showering one adequacy-variant with praise for insight and brilliance whilst castigating the other. This is pointless. Finally, there are the “Eurabia”-obsessed nut-jobs who are falling over themselves to tell us that Ken Livingstone, “whose speech was excellent”:http://no-doors.blogspot.com/2005/07/full-text-of-mayor-livingstones-speech.html , has said and done things of which they disapprove in the past. The Eurabians thereby merely remind us how much they value promoting their nasty agenda above elementary concerns with compassion and solidarity (ditto the egregious “George Galloway”:http://www.respectcoalition.org/?ite=819 btw).
[I think the “excellent John B”:http://www.stalinism.com/shot-by-both-sides/ probably linked to the adequacy.org piece first]
I blogged “the other day”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/06/16/pledgebank/ about the “PledgeBank”:http://www.pledgebank.com/ project, and, specifically in favour of “one particular pledge”:http://www.pledgebank.com/justonepercent :
bq. I will give 1% of my gross annual salary to charity but only if 400 other people will too.
Time is running out, as this pledge expires on the 23rd of July. So if you thought about it at the time, but didn’t get round to signing on, or would like to now, visit the site.
My latest Poorman Central Station column is up.
All around the world the problem of how (if at all) to apply campaign laws to the Internet is causing plenty of agitation. In Australia, the main problem arises from laws requiring that electoral advertisements should include the name and address of the person advertising. Usually, this means a TV ad ends with an attribution to a party functionary, spoken in a rapid monotone at the end of the slot. But a site called JohnHowardLies.com (it seems to have vanished, but there’s an archived copy here attracted a lot of attention and suggestions that it should be regulated in the same way.
I’ve just come back from an appearance before the Parliamentary Electoral Matters Committee Inquiry into the Conduct of the 2004 Federal Election and Matters Related Thereto, where I presented a submission arguing that blogs, and commenters, should not be required to identify themselves when commenting during an election campaign, using the analogy of callers to talkback radio, who are allowed to be anonymous. It was a pretty vigorous session, and some members of the Committee were clearly not convinced. So I wouldn’t be surprised to see an attempt to restrict anonymous Internet comment coming out of the Committee’s report.
My immediate analysis is that, if anonymous comments were prohibited, the only way to be safe would be to close down comments during election campaigns. Even if people gave full names and addresses, I don’t have the resources to verify them.
Anyway, it would be good to hear other views: I’ll need to think more about my own.
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I just got a letter on impressive looking letterhead, from Domain Registry of America, offering to renew my domain name “johnquiggin.info” at fairly exorbitant rates. I don’t actually own this domain: out of a frivolous desire to be a dotcommer, I chose “johnquiggin.com”, rather than the more appropriate “johnquiggin.net” or “johnquiggin.info” when I got my own domain from Dotster.
This looked like an Internet version of the old subscription invoice scam, and sure enough, it was. I was happy to find that one practitioner of this scam has been nailed in Canada
These guys give what looks like a physical address at 189 Queen St., Suite 209, Melbourne, so I’ve written to Consumer Affairs in Victoria, suggesting a visit.
Minor update The Daniel Klemann referred to in the Canadian story mentioned above is, apparently the one behind my solicitation. If any Canadian readers would like to get in touch with the relevant authorities, and point that this guy is still active, despite his commitments, I’d be happy to send along a copy of the notice he sent me. I’ll try myself via email.
The US Supreme Court has declined to hear a case in which journalists have appealed against a ruling that they should either reveal anonymous sources or go to jail. A noteworthy feature of the NY Times treatment of the story is the presentation of the issue in terms of whether journalists are entitled to special protection not available to bloggers. At the end of the story Rodney A. Smolla, dean of the University of Richmond School of Law is quoted as follows
The federal judiciary, from the Supreme Court down, has grown very skeptical of any claim that the institutional press is deserving of First Amendment protection over and above those of ordinary citizens … The rise of the Internet and blogger culture may have contributed to that. It makes it more difficult to draw lines between the traditional professional press and those who disseminate information from their home computers.
The failure of journalists to establish a special exemption raises the more general question of whether and when people should be compelled to reveal details of their private conversations. If constitutional limits are to be imposed on such questioning, it may be better to derive them from the right to privacy in general rather than the specific claims of the press. Alternatively, and perhaps preferably, it might be better for the legislature to provide a public interest exemption of some kind.
On the same topic, I was going to respond to this piece by Margaret Simons about bloggers and journalists but, as often happens, Tim Dunlop has written exactly what I would have said, only better.
* And nowadays everyone does
Something that I’ve been wondering about for a while. Google Ads don’t necessarily match their advertisements to websites in quite the manner that you’d expect, presumably because of the way that its underlying algorithm works. “Brad DeLong’s site”:http://delong.typepad.com/, for example, seems to have become the new in-spot for Republican and Conservative singles to hook up with each other, while “Nathan Newman”:http://www.nathannewman.org/log/ rather improbably provides a venue for union-busting specialists to connect with their core clientele in the business community. I wouldn’t at all be surprised if many of Nathan’s readers make a habit of clicking on the link to “Union-Free Labor Relations Training” on a regular basis. After all, each time that they do, a small sum of money presumably disappears from the advertising budget of a rather slimy organization, and reappears (after Google deducts its cut) in Nathan’s Paypal account. Now personally, I’ve no problems with that. But does this undermine the rationale behind using Google Ads for politically targetted advertising? Left-leaning blogs are likely to “sound” Republican to Google’s algorithm because of the frequency with which they mention Republican politicians (and Republican blogs will sound left-wing). Thus, they’re likely to attract a disproportionate number of ads which are aimed at exactly the wrong population. Many of the people who read these blogs are unlikely to want to click on the ads for any sincere motives. The same, of course, is true for right wing blogs harping on how horrible the Democrats are; again they’ll appear to be “good” bets to an automated algorithm for advertisements aimed at leftwingers, unless that algorithm is sophisticated indeed.
Unless Google changes its algorithm, I can’t imagine any easy technical way of distinguishing ‘fake’ clickthroughs from real ones, except in the most straightforward of cases (e.g. the same person at the same IP address repeatedly clicking on an ad again and again). Now this may in reality be a non-problem – I’ve seen no data on it- but in principle, Google Ads seems to me to be quite vulnerable to politically motivated attacks, which could prove quite expensive for the advertisers.
“Chris Bowers”:http://www.mydd.com/story/2005/6/12/17357/3049 has an interesting post trying to explain why left wing blogs are now getting a lot more traffic than right wing ones. Bower’s theory is that this is because the high-traffic blogs in the left-blogosphere make far more use of community based systems such as Scoop and active comments sections than their equivalents on the right. The result, in Bowers’ eyes, is that:
bq. There are swarms of new conservative voices looking to breakout in the right-wing blogosphere, but they are not even allowed to comment, much less post a diary and gain a following, on the high traffic conservative blogs. Instead, without any fanfare, they are forced to start their own blogs. However, because of the top-down nature of right-wing blogs, new conservative blogs remain almost entirely dependent upon the untouchable high traffic blogs for visitors. In short, the anti-community nature of right-wing blogs has resulted in a stagnant aristocracy within the conservative blogosphere that prevents the emergence of new voices and, as a result, new reasons for people to visit conservative blogs.
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According to “a report in Libération”:http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article=305543 , French blogger Christophe Grébert ( “MonPuteaux.com”:http://www.monputeaux.com/ )is being pursued through the courts for defamation by his local authority. His crime? To have set up a blog which centred around the domination of local government in Puteaux (at the edge of Paris) by a single family and their hangers-on and which documented anomalies such as the approval of the budget for a small garden at a cost of 600,000 euros. Grébert seems to have withstood a campaign of personal harrassment, but legal action seems to be the latest means of silencing him. It will be interesting to see how this goes. Grébert appears to have decided (almost certainly correctly) that blogging is a more effective method of pursuing political change than attending section meetings of local Socialist Party. His opponents seem to think he has been all too effective. An interesting case, and one that may set precedents for political blogging in France at least.
I’ve been reading “Red State”:http://www.redstate.org over the last few days, which I’ve been told is the smarter, more thoughtful side of Republicanism. So far, I’ve been deeply unimpressed, especially when it comes to their coverage of Guantanamo. In the last couple of days, we’ve had Erick’s “modest proposal”:http://www.redstate.org/story/2005/6/15/211325/756 that everyone in the camp should be killed (but no, he’s joking; what he really means is that they should all be locked up in perpetuity as enemies of America). We’ve had Mark Kilmer’s “argument”:http://www.redstate.org/story/2005/6/16/205423/099 that Senator Durbin’s statement on Guantanamo is just another example of Democrats’ hatred for Bush and Republicans. We’ve had Krempasky’s “Chris Muir gets it”:http://www.redstate.org/story/2005/6/17/121922/392, copying one of the most egregiously offensive cartoons I’ve seen in a long while (news for Krempasky and Muir: being “chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor” so that you urinate and defecate on yourself is not a choice between orange-glazed chicken and rice pilaff). And that’s not to mention Paul J. Cella’s “doozy”:http://www.redstate.org/story/2005/6/14/205620/932 on why we shouldn’t be letting Muslims come to the US (apparently, Muslims just don’t know how to be Americans).
It’d be easy to use this as a cheap way to accuse everyone on the right side of the blogosphere of being apologists for the inhumane treatment of prisoners, religious hatred etc. It’d also be unfair (it’s clear from the comments sections that a number of right-wingers are pretty disturbed at these posts too). But I can’t understand why, say, Sebastian Holsclaw (who’s nobody’s torture apologist) is happy to be associated as a co-blogger with this particular bunch of yahoos. If the last couple of days are anything to go by, there’s not much real difference between Red State and the hatemongers at LGF.
Update: Is “Pejman Yousefzadeh”:http://www.redstate.org/story/2005/6/18/163230/514 offering some veiled advice to his co-bloggers?
bq. Want to deny lunacy a forum? Great. The best thing to do is to grow up, act responsibly, make your honestly held and believed arguments with as much passion and fervor as you believe appropriate to the occasion and understand that if you step over the bounds of decency, the shadows will come out to embrace you while the rest of society watches in justified revulsion.
From “yesterday’s Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1506976,00.html :
bq. Civil liberties groups have condemned an arrangement between Microsoft and Chinese authorities to censor the internet.
bq. The American company is helping censors remove “freedom” and “democracy” from the net in China with a software package that prevents bloggers from using these and other politically sensitive words on their websites.
bq. The restrictions, which also include an automated denial of “human rights”, are built into MSN Spaces, a blog service launched in China last month by Shanghai MSN Network Communications Technology, a venture in which Microsoft holds a 50% stake.
bq. Users who try to include such terms in subject lines are warned: “This topic contains forbidden words. Please delete them.”