Blogging

Various things have caught my eye around the blogosphere. First up, Chris Brooke ran with a suggestion of mine concerning “our latter-day Widmerpool”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2004_09_01_archive.html#109637795060626791 (and _splendid_ work he has done too). Chris also “reacts to Melanie Phillips’s response”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2004_09_01_archive.html#109639297627260980 to the Blair speech. Marc Mulholland comments on the latest “degenerate hackery”:http://marcmulholland.tripod.com/histor/index.blog?entry_id=461417 from Christopher Hitchens. Brian Leiter “posts”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/bleiter/archives/002121.html moral philosopher Jeff McMahan’s “essay on the the injustice of the Iraq war”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/bleiter/archives/McMahan%20on%20Iraq%20War.rtf (rtf). Finally, Damian Counsell has “disturbing news”:http://www.pootergeek.com/index.php?p=408 on the racism in the campaign around a change to Switzerland’s nationality law.

You should read the crucial interview with Roy Edroso of alicublog which was somehow cut from the final version of the NYT bloggerama. Here’s how it begins:

I knocked several times on the green steel door of Edroso’s Williamsburg apartment before a loud, phlegmy voice bade me enter. I found the author of “alicublog” — a little-read website devoted to politics, the arts, and bitter denunciations of the buy-back policies of local bars and clubs — in his tiny bedroom, nestled between a closet and a bookshelf stuffed with volumes of 19th-century literature and old issues of Black Tail, and pounding furiously on an ash-smeared keyboard.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said, not taking his eyes off the screen. He jerked a thumb toward his bed. I pushed aside empty bottles of vodka and Astrolube, and a copy of Commentary, and took a seat.

Go read the rest.

From “The Poor Man”:http://www.thepoorman.net/archives/003174.html

bq. Relying on Free Republic losers to “fact-check” the media is like relying on the proverbial roomful of typing monkeys, except with somewhat more feral howling and feces-flinging.

Today’s Guardian Online has “a piece by Jim McClellan about academic blogging”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1310111,00.html . I get quoted quite a bit and accurately too. But, as always, I’m not sure that what comes across is exactly what I meant to say. So I guess I wanted to make two points: (1) that blogs can be used as an interactive teaching tool but that rival courseware technologies which lock out “outsiders” pose a threat to that expansion of the medium (a point that “Eszter makes more eloquently here”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000912.html ); and (2) that concerns over intellectual property and corporate liability on the part of universities are in tension with academics increasing use of the blog medium. Those points get rather run together in the piece (that’s probably my fault, not Jim’s). As for my own experiment to use a blog in teaching — it wasn’t a great success, as the article says. But others have done better, and I’ll have another go this year.

Over at his blog, Stephen Pollard “reproduces his own article from the Times”:http://www.stephenpollard.net/001786.html . A few paragraphs:

bq. The Anthony Powell Society is to give its annual Widmerpool award this year to the journalist Sir Max Hastings. The award is in honour of Kenneth Widmerpool, one of the 20th century’s great fictional characters, a recurring presence in Powell’s series of novels, A Dance to the Music of Time.

bq. According to the society: “Widmerpool is variously pompous; self-obsessed and self-important; obsequious to those in authority and a bully to those below him. He is ambitious and pushy; ruthless; humourless; blind to the feelings of others; and has a complete lack of self-knowledge.”

bq. The description is redolent of so many characters in public life that more must be made of it.

Indeed, Stephen, indeed ….

The Washington Post “hints as strongly as it can”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30043-2004Sep17.html that the blogosphere’s counterattack against the Killian memos began at the White House.

bq. In another development, the Los Angeles Times reported that an Atlanta lawyer with conservative Republican connections posted the first Web log entry questioning the authenticity of the CBS documents less than four hours after the initial broadcast on “60 Minutes.” The paper identified Harry W. MacDougald as the “Buckhead,” who became a hero of conservative Web sites after pointing out technical problems with the documents, such as fonts and proportionate spacing.

bq. MacDougald declined to say how he learned about the problems with the documents so early. In addition to being released by CBS, copies of the documents were e-mailed by the White House to reporters as “60 Minutes” went on the air.

It’s unlikely that we’ll ever know quite what happened, but it seems highly plausible to me that the White House is communicating with bloggers to spin the news. We already know that the White House’s Internet Director thinks that blogs are “pretty important”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30043-2004Sep17.html. Equally, I’d be very surprised if people in the Democratic party aren’t communicating with some bloggers in order to try to get their spin across (if they aren’t, they’re bad at their job). As Kieran “said”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002517.html a couple of days ago, there is a mythology of the blogger that sees him (or more rarely, her) as a lone hero speaking truth to power (or the “New York Times” as the best local approximation). The reality is murkier. To the extent that blogs help set the agenda for the media, pols have an incentive to spin the blogs, just as they have good reason to spin reporters. Blogs aren’t critiquing the system from outside – they’re increasingly part of the system. Expect more of this over time, not less.

Following up on my “review”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002484.html of “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1582344167/henryfarrell-20 last week, there’s a very nice piece on the book at “N+1”:http://www.nplusonemag.com/strange.html, which has a lot more to say about the book’s “levelling streak” than I could fit in a blogpost.

I know about N+1 thanks to a conversation with Scott McLemee, who does a very interesting article on ‘big processes’ sociologist “Michael Mann”:http://chronicle.com/free/v51/i04/04a01001.htm for the Chronicle. There’s a short critical quote from David Laitin, a Stanford political scientist – this reflects a long standing argument (Laitin is “no great fan”:http://www.ingenta.com/isis/searching/Expand/ingenta?pub=infobike://sage/j292/2003/00000031/00000001/art00006 of the kinds of research that Mann and others like him are interested in).

Finally, “Cosma Shalizi”:http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/247.html makes it into _Physical Review Letters_, which I understand from my colleagues in the hard sciences is a pretty big deal. Congratulations.

Those of us who enjoy a good InstaFactCheck will delight in Scott Lemieux, on Reynolds’ attempt to eliminate the gap between Kerry and Bush on gay unions. I wish that Lemieux had an instructional videotape or something.

OK, so this may be the first and last time I quote anything by Steven Den Beste with approval, but “this observation about blogging”:http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2004/08/Thanksforallthefish.shtml (and comments) struck me as right on the money.

bq. I’ve learned something interesting: if you give away ice cream, eventually a lot of people will complain about the flavors, and others will complain that you aren’t also giving away syrup and whipped cream and nuts.

(via “Dan Drezner”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/blog/ ).

I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend. This campaign mudmeter is especially interesting. (I know it’s true because it’s on the internet.)

Ross Silverman, formerly known as the Bloviator, has moved his excellent medical policy blog to a new site, the Public Health Press. And he has managed to choke me up with only seventeen syllables.

On the subject of public health, and while I have Ross’s attention, there was some brief discussion here the other day about the scope of the role of the federal government (specifically, the National Institutes of Health) in pharmaceutical research.

I’ve done enough work with pharmaceuticals to know how much I don’t know. It’s a complicated subject, and difficult to summarize. But Derek Lowe makes a genuine contribution here. He’s a research scientist at a pharmaceutical company, and he shares his perspective on what the NIH does and doesn’t do.

[click to continue…]

Atrios “says today”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004_09_12_atrios_archive.html#109507803280168769:

bq. So, it’s pretty much the case that we went into Fallujah because some warbloggers got excited about the video of the desecration of the dead civilian contractors.

This seems to me to be either (a) paranoid nonsense, or (b) stupid trash-talk. If there’s a third possibility, I’d like to hear it. Either Atrios is seriously claiming that warbloggers set US military policy, or he’s casting a dumb slur. Claiming that the disaster of Fallujah proves that the warbloggers were badly, horribly, wrong, is fine; it’s probably even correct. Claiming without any evidence that they were the main people responsible for the policy disaster is either tinfoil hat stuff, or Glenn Reynolds calibre scuzzy innuendo.

Jonathan Derbyshire of The Philosophers’ Magazine, “on his new blog”:http://jonathanderbyshire.typepad.com/blog/2004/09/emthe_guardian_.html :

bq. here’s a view, call it the “Crooked Timber thesis”, according to which the truth of statements about a group or a set of beliefs ought to be weighed against the perlocutionary effect of uttering such statements on the group or the holders of the beliefs in question. In one recurrent variant of this view, true statements about what, for shorthand purposes, I’ll call “political Islamism” ought to be circumscribed, if not actually withheld, for fear of inciting “Islamophobia”. Now, I’ve conceded in the comments section of an earlier post the persuasiveness of the point about perlocutionary effect, though I did wonder whether one of its proponents hadn’t unhelpfully mixed it up with a much less congenial argument about meaning. And it seems to me obvious that the point applies in contexts different to the one in which it’s usually applied over at Crooked Timber.

I think that the most reasonable way to read Derbyshire’s statement here, which seems to have been picked up enthusiastically by CT-bashers whom I can’t be bothered to link to, is that it contains a claim about what has been argued here on Crooked Timber. That claim would be that people at Crooked Timber have argued _repeatedly_ (“recurrent variant”, “usually applied”) that we shouldn’t tell the truth about political Islamism for fear of inciting “Islamophobia”. [1] Trawling through our posts, I _can_ find some evidence for the claim that we have alleged that it is possible to utter true statements (about political Islamism or anything else for that matter) in a manner that demeans (or threatens, intimidates etc) either the person to whom the utterance is made or other hearers. That doesn’t seem to be a thesis to which Derbyshire objects, though. (Which is just as well, since it is a true thesis.) Note, by the way, the ambiguity in Derbyshire’s formulation. He could be saying that we have said that people should _sometimes_ be careful about uttering true statements about political Islamism out of due regard for the perlocutionary effect of those utterances. But he expresses the thought in an unrestricted way, such that the effect on the reader is to mislead them into the false belief that people at CT have claimed that political Islamism just shouldn’t be criticized. Nobody here holds _that_ view or anything remotely like it.

fn1. I can find just two instances of the word “Islamophobia” on CT. The first was in the title of a blog post by me, where the point of using the word was to point to someone else’s writings on the subject. The second is by Ophelia Benson (with others picking up on her use) in comments to another post.

Thanks to Henry Farrell and Dan Drezner, those attending the American Political Science Association’s meetings in Chicago this weekend were in for quite a treat at yesterday afternoon’s session on The Power and Politics of Blogs. The session started out with two papers (one by Henry and Dan, the other by Laura McKenna formerly of Apt 11D and Antoinette Pole) followed by some interesting commentary from well-known political bloggers Mark Kleiman and Ana Marie Cox aka Wonkette and a final discussion with some good questions and thoughtful points by Cass Sunstein. The Q&A was interesting as well, congrats to Henry and Dan for putting together such a great panel! (As an additional treat, I finally got to meet (albeit way too briefly) another Timberite, Harry, so my CT number improved a bit again.)

Later in the evening, a bunch of us met up for drinks and dinner, which provided a nice oppportunity to chat with people whose blogs I’ve been reading for a while. I enjoyed discussing the topical versus ideological splits in the blogosphere with Cass Sunstein. I have a project that is attempting to test the latter (which I usually just refer to as the Sunstein thesis) empirically, and will certainly keep you posted. All-in-all, it was really fun to meet all these bloggers face-to-face and, again, thanks to Henry and Dan for organizing such a great blogger day!