We’d like to welcome Kimberly Morgan, who’ll be guest-blogging with us for the next several days. Kimberly’s a colleague of mine in George Washington University, with a particular interest in the financing of the welfare state, and in the sources and consequences of family and childcare policy. Garance Franke-Rutka made some well-targeted complaints a few days ago about the stunted definition of ‘politics’ that often passes among among op-eds and big name bloggers. As she says, “the question of how to combine work and family and not go crazy” is fundamentally a political question. Much of Kimberly’s previous work speaks directly to this, looking at, for example, how the decision to leave childcare to the market in the US has reinforced the low wage economy, and how new coalitions have been created around the financing of Social Security and Medicare. We’re delighted to have her with us.
From the category archives:
Blogging
“Justwartheory.com”:http://justwartheory.com/ is a very useful set of resources on just war theory maintained by Mark Rigstad of Oakland University. There’s also “an accompanying blog”:http://www.justwartheory.com/editorial.html .
You should read Scribblingwoman more. Also, Jonathan Goodwin. Here’s a thing, courtesy of the former. [Specifically, tomorrow I want to visit Miriam’s blog and find more edifying ‘recent comments’ are available than those left by that hopeless ‘online casino’ character. Not that I blame Miriam. She just deserves better.]
Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money asks, “Who is America’s worst blogger?”
My vote: Kim du Toit. Best known as the author of the infamous “The Pussification of the Western Male” (well-skewered by the Philosoraptor in “The duToitification of the Western Conservative”. I love the description of du Toit as “a Neanderthal crybaby”). He’s the guy who disgraced himself on the first anniversary of 9/11 with this vile essay, “Traitors Within Our Walls“, in which he throws around accusations of treason like Rip Taylor with confetti:
4. We find the manifestation of traitors in those who espouse causes other than (small “r”) republican ones: those who call themselves “progressives”, “socialists”, “communitarians”, “populists”, “globalists” and so on.
Then there’s “Let Africa Sink”:
So here’s my solution for the African fiasco: a high wall around the whole continent, all the guns and bombs in the world for everyone inside, and at the end, the last one alive should do us all a favor and kill himself.
He combines the quiet reasonableness of an Ann Coulter with the eliminationist rhetoric of Dave Neiwert’s worst nightmares. du Toit was a finalist in “The Vicious Instapundit Blogroll Contest” for this post giggling at the bruises of war protestors. I could go on and on. As I write this, his most recent post sighs that there may be a Democrat in the White House, due to Bush’s immigration policy. Shooting enthusiast du Toit concludes:
Just what we needed: Clintons in the White House, Part II. Oh, joy.
Range time.
“But who reads Kim Du Toit?” According to BlogAds, more people read Kim Du Toit than Andrew Sullivan or Hugh Hewitt. More people read Kim Du Toit than Tim Blair and Matthew Yglesias combined. There’s a big audience for this stuff.
Apologies for yet another meta post. How many sets of teeth can one site have, anyway? I’d really appreciate some help, though.
Kevin Drum recently wrote about the danger of the unceasing partisan war against the media:
If this continues, the eventual result will be an almost universal ability to ignore any news report you don’t like simply by claiming it’s the result of bias and therefore not to be trusted. This is unhealthy.
I’ve been noticing this for a while. It used to be limited to blog comment threads, more or less, but it’s been creeping up the food chain. Look at the way that popular right-wing bloggers talk about Seymour Hersh, for example. Nobel Prize-nominated blogger Tom Maguire from Just One Minute is one of the most intelligent, careful right-wing bloggers, but he’s not immune to it. See this uncharacteristic post.
I don’t know — and neither do you — if “Glenn Reynolds is trying to murder his wife”:http://instapundit.com/archives/021948.php (or if Bill Hobbs is trying to murder his) …. but I do know that I find it gratuitously offensive just to leave the possibility open, just hanging there, for rhetorical purposes. But, whatever … if they can dish it out, they can presumably take it. Read the whole thing.
Watching from the UK, the Terri Schiavo case makes the US look like a very weird and deeply troubled polity. All those homely and patronising sermons about “government of laws not of men &c”, and then the US Congress passes a law to deal with a particular case and to subvert a prior decision of the judiciary, just so that Republicans can grandstand to their Christian fundamentalist base (see “Obsidian Wings for the best commentary so far”:http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2005/03/terri_schiavo.html ). And all this signed into law by a President who, “when governor of Texas, approved a measure to switch off life support where people didn’t have the money to pay any more”:http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2005_03_20_digbysblog_archive.html#111134934659869241 . I note, by the way, that the so-called “right-to-life” brigade have been “pretty free”:http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/05_03_20_corner-archive.asp#058829 “with their use of”:http://www.therant.us/staff/guest/federer/the_court_ordered_death_of_terri_schiavo.htm “Nazi analogies”:http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/tallahassee/news/breaking_news/11134243.htm on this one. Since any Nazi-comparison (however casual) involving George W. Bush, Ariel Sharon, Daily Mail journalists or Abu Ghraib elicits instant howls of outrage from the British-based neocon cheerleaders, I expect we’ll be hearing from them shortly. Or not.
Hello again everyone. By “resident guru”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/03/22/back-in-business/, Henry means I am the person who gets to ask better-informed people questions like this: Does anyone know how to get the “ComPreVal”:http://dev.wp-plugins.org/wiki/ComPreVal plugin working when “Staticize”:http://dev.wp-plugins.org/browser/staticize-reloaded/ is also installed? The former previews and validates comments while the latter turns on page caching, which helps when the server is under heavy load. But they don’t play together: when someone tries to preview a comment, I think the cached version of the page keeps appearing rather than a new version including the preview.
After several days in limbo, we appear to be back in business. Crooked Timber now has its own dedicated server, which should mean that we don’t run into the same problem again in future. Kieran, who is our resident guru for all things technical, has rejigged the setup, and installed a plugin which should reduce server load substantially in the future. We are grateful to you all for your patience – we owe a particular debt of thanks to the CT readers who generously donated money to help us get back up. Between those donations (which have been applied exclusively to CT’s running costs) and our own resources, we are now on a pretty good footing. In retrospect, this is something which had probably been in the offing for a while. We now have quite a large readership, which we’re extremely grateful for, but which also means that we now have rather greater technical needs than we did when we began this enterprise back in 2003. Again, thank you all.
Via “Elayne Riggs”:http://elayneriggs.blogspot.com/2005/03/estrogen-month-day-14-welcome-any-new.html comes Tild~’s “She-Blogger”:http://tildblog.blogspot.com/2005/03/return-of-she-blogger.html. Enslaved to the conventional wisdom, constantly whoring for attention and desperate for validation by the polite society they affect to despise, these sad creatu– I’m sorry, those are the He-Bloggers. That should have read, Sharp-tongued, lurking in the shadows and heedless of their proper place in life, these slatterns tempt innocent young boy-bloggers to “subvert the dominant link hierarchy”:http://www.google.com/search?q=subvert+the+dominant+link+hierarchy. Disgusting. Yet strangely alluring.
The Eastern Sociological Society annual meetings will be in Washington, D.C. this weekend at the Wyndham Hotel. I organized a mini-conference on Sociology and the Internet for it that includes a session called “Can Blogs Influence Public Policy?”. This session will be held at 8:30am this Friday. If you’re in the area and inclined to be up and about at that hour, please stop by. Panelists are as follows:
* Tyler Cowen, George Mason University (Update: Unfortunately, it turns out that Tyler Cowen won’t be able to make it.)
* Henry Farrell, George Washington University
* Eszter Hargittai, Northwestern University
* Amy Sullivan, The Washington Monthly and Princeton University
* Discussant: Jeff Weintraub, Lehigh University and University of Pennsylvania
See information about the other panels in this mini-conference below the fold. [click to continue…]
This NYT report shows how the Bush Administration has been producing covert propaganda, which is then shown on US TV stations as news, with actors posing as reporters. It would take much more than this to surprise me in relation to the Bush Administration, and in any case, the practice apparently began under Clinton.
What did strike me was that, while the NYT went in for plenty of handwringing about the government manipulating the news, the report showed no concern about the fact (news to me) that corporations have been doing this for years, more or less openly, to the extent that those involved in producing “video news releases” have their own association, annual awards and so on
Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance.
Of course, reprinting press releases with minimal editing has been a standby of lazy journalists for decades. But the standard press release story opens with what is presented as a paraphrase of a quote “In Washington today, Senator X criticised the neglect of problem Y …” or whatever. Even if the reader is led to imagine that the statement was actually made to an audience of reporters, there’s no serious deception, though a well-designed press release can certainly ensure that the writer’s key points get prominently reported in a way that makes them seem like fact rather than opinion.
But the video news release goes way beyond this. The closest analog in the print world is those supplements, designed to look like news, with “advertisement” in small print at the bottom of the page.
I don’t know anything about the legality of all this. Here in Australia, radio commentators got into a heap of strife over “cash for comment”, accepting money from corporations to say nice things about them. But this was advertising presented as opinion. Presenting advertising as news seems far worse to me.
The issue of paid-for or sponsored political comment has already arisen in relation to blogging. It seems unlikely that commercial PR can be far behind, if it isn’t here already.
Teething continues apace. Right now the main issue is with formatting. More below the fold.
Update: Now we have comment previewing and validation. We aim to please. Seems to be working OK.
So I’ve been experimenting with various “Textile”:http://www.textism.com/tools/textile/ plugins for WordPress. The best one so far seems to be “Text Control”:http://dev.wp-plugins.org/wiki/TextControl, which allows for a lot of flexibility. In particular, it’s supposed to support per-post choices about which markup to use. But although I can set global options, no options menu appears when I’m editing a new post. Is this a known bug?
I’ve also been looking at various spam filters. “Spam Karma”:http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/ looks comprehensive, but so far has proved a little enthusiastic with the false positives. Sorry to those affected. I’ve turned down the volume on it a bit, so hopefully that will stop being a problem. Any advice on fine-tuning Spam Karma’s options?
Also, if you notice any severe slowdowns or other performance issues, please let me know.