Scott Martens looks into some of Daniel Pipes’ sources for the article on Tariq Ramadan linked in Ted’s post below, and comes up with a pretty appalling picture of misrepresentation and intellectual dishonesty. As Scott says in comments below, how the hell did Pipes think he was going to get away with this?
From the category archives:
Blogging
I managed a mere 39 per cent on “Chris Lightfoot’s estimation quiz”:http://roughly.beasts.org/ I’m sorry to say. Instructive and entertaining it is though. (Hat-tip “Dave Weeden”:http://backword.me.uk/ ).
I spent a very pleasant evening with other bloggers who live somewhere close to Britain’s M4 corridor at Bristol’s Severnshed last night. Pictured from left to right are myself, Dave Weeden (“Backword”:http://backword.me.uk/ ), Josephine Crawley Quinn (“The Virtual Tophet”:http://tophet.blogspot.com/ ) and Chris Brooke (“The Virtual Stoa”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/blogger.html ). Topics discussed included Equatorial Guinea, leading Welsh politicians, the excavations at Herculaneum, and, naturally, other bloggers. It was great to meet Dave and Josephine for the first time and Chris once again. A fine time was had by all.
Be Amazed: as warblogger Bjorn Staerk comes to the stunning conclusion that some people might have gone a bit off the rails in wanting to ban Islam. People like, well, LGF commenters! And Bjorn Staerk commenters!
What has gone wrong when Norwegians, Americans and other Westerners who rever the enlightenment ideals of reason and freedom of thought more than anything, justify restrictions on thought with bad reasoning and paranoia? It’s not just LGF readers. You can read similar views (though fewer of them) at Free Republic, Dhimmi Watch, and Liberty Post – all in reply to the Kristiansand story.
Again, I’m not saying these views are shared by the owners of these websites, or the majority of their readers. But neither do I see many strong, principled objections. Phil says above that “the failure of good Muslims to object or organize and stop bad Muslims indicts the whole Islamic movement”, which doesn’t justify a ban on Islam, but is true in a sense. We all have a responsibility to speak up clearly against extremists in our own ranks, whether we are Muslims or peace activists or bloggers who criticize Islam and support the war on Islamist terror.
And so it’s time to stand up for the basic values of our democracies and confront those in our own ranks who want to abandon those values. Because if we don’t, outsiders will be justified in interpreting this as silent approval or apologism.
Something has gone rotten. We can’t blame it on the “left”, the “relativists”, the “PC crowd” or the “multiculturalists”, (and don’t anybody dare blame it on the Muslims). It’s gone rotten here, among people who on 9/11 woke up to the danger of Islamism. The ban Islam meme and all its relatives (Islam is Islamism, Islam is war) must be confronted here, now, before it spreads.
Laura has moved and renamed her blog simply 11D. She now has comments, which presumably has the upside that she doesn’t have to have millions of mini-email conversations; on the other hand it means she won’t have as many nice email conversations. Since I link to her every other post, this affects me more than most: I’ll have to start thinking of things of my own to say. Most impressive is that she has, thus far, only one blog on her blogroll — guess which one? No, don’t guess — go and see.
He is no longer merely “Big Media Matt”. He is become Giant Media Matt. Mentioned by name in a Krugman column, thank you very much. Who would have thought that mere editorship at the Harvard Crimson Independent would take a young man so far…Advantage: blogosphere. Sort of. Well, OK, advantage traditional old boys network. Still, Matthew kicks ass.
Most of the on-line obituaries for Henri Cartier-Bresson are photograph-free, which is a bit pointless. But the “New York Times is an exception”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/04/arts/04CND-CARTIER.html?hp , and includes links beyond to Magnum and elsewhere.
UPDATE: _Libération_ has “a good set of links”:http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article=228457 to HCB galleries on the web.
Milbarge, blogging at Crescat Sententia, has a nice post up about blogcrushes.
I’ve been talking a lot about this with a friend of mine. My friend confesses to a blog crush here and there, too. But my friend’s position is that the crushes are on the blog, not the blogger. I think my friend believes that the image of bloggers we get via the blog aren’t “real,” and my friend would rather have a crush on the idea of a person, based on what one sees on the blog, rather than the reality.
Do you think blogs reveal a person’s true personality? Is the truth-shading, the omission of embarassing details, etc. one gets in a blog any worse than one would get from a conversation with the person? Or are people perhaps more exhibitionist in print than they would be otherwise? (This must be true for many shy bloggers. And, I think, none of you will be surprised to learn that I am not shy.) A friend who hasn’t seen me in a long while read John and Belle Have a Blog recently and said that it was just like talking to me–that the posts were perfectly Belle-ish. I think that’s true, although I try not to curse so much on the blog. (Then again, now that I have small children I don’t curse in front of them either.) Thoughts? Do any of you hasve blogcrushes? Are we seeing the real Kieran here? Can Little Green Footballs possibly represent the real Charles Johnson, who appears at one time to have been a mild-mannered web designer of some talent, not notably lizardoid in any respect?
Congratulations to Norman Geras, who “has now been blogging for a year”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/07/first_anniversa.html .
It’s been a great pleasure having Ross Silverman of The Bloviator as a guest poster this week. Ross is a genuine expert, and The Bloviator is an excellent addition to anyone’s blog diet. Many thanks to Ross.
The paper that Dan Drezner and I have been writing on political blogging is now fit, more or less, for human consumption – it’s available “here”:http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~farrell/blogpaperfinal.pdf. We’re going to present it at APSA where we’re organizing a “panel on blogging”:http://www.apsanet.org/mtgs/program/program.cfm?event=1431368. We’re grateful for comments, suggestions and criticisms – this is only a first draft.
The key arguments of our paper:
(1) Blogging is politically important in large part because it affects mainstream media, and helps set the terms of political debate (in political science jargon, it creates ‘focal points’ and ‘frames’). Note that we don’t provide an exhaustive account of blogs and politics – some aspects of blogging (fundraising for parties, effects on political values in the general public), we don’t have more than anecdotal data on. There’s plenty of room for other people to do interesting research on all of this.
(2) Incoming links in the political blogosphere are systematically skewed, but not according to a “power law” distribution, as “Clay Shirky”:http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html and others have argued of the blogosphere as a whole. Instead, they follow a lognormal distribution.[1] We reckon that the most likely explanation for this is that offered by “Pennock et al.”:http://modelingtheweb.com/pennock-pnas-2002-weblinks.pdf – they argue that not only do the ‘rich get richer’ (i.e. sites that already have a lot of links tend to get more), but that link-poor sites stand a chance of becoming rich too. Late entrants into the political blogosphere can do well as long as they’re interesting and attract some attention – bad timing isn’t destiny.
(3) Because of the systematic skewedness of the political blogosphere, a few “focal point” sites can provide a rough index of what is going on in the blogosphere – interesting points of view on other sites will often percolate up to them as smaller blogs try to get big blogs to link to them, by informing them of interesting stories. Thus, we may expect that journalists and other media types who read blogs will tend to all gravitate towards a few ‘big name’ bloggers as their way of keeping up with what is going on in the blogosphere as a whole.
fn1. For which we’re grateful to “Cosma Shalizi”:http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/ – when we realized that we weren’t dealing with a power law distribution (the log-log relationship looked dodgily curvilinear), he not only suggested alternative distributions and how to test fit, but actually volunteered to do the tests himself.
We’re delighted to announce that Ross, the man behind the excellent blog The Bloviator, will be joining us on Crooked Timber as a guest poster. I’ve long been a fan and an admirer. At the Bloviator, Ross concentrates non-exclusively on public health policy and law. For a while, he was surely the only blogger with a recommendation in his masthead from both me and Bill Quick of Daily Pundit.
After taking a few months off of blogging, he’s tanned, tenured and ready to debate. It’s a great pleasure to have him join us this week.
The Hansard Society “have produced a report on political blogging”:http://www.hansardsociety.org.uk/node/view/189
bq. “Political Blogs – Craze or Convention?”:http://www.hansardsociety.org.uk/assets/Final_Blog_Report_.pdf [pdf] reports on the relatively new phenomena of political blogging and examines whether these blogs can offer an alternative to traditional channels of political communication in the UK . The research study focuses on eight political blogs as representative examples of how individuals and organisations are harnessing blogging as a tool to promote political engagement. The research monitored activity on these blogs and, in addition, a blogging “jury” of members of the public with little or no experience of blogging scrutinised the blogs to assess their relevance as channels of political thought and debate.
[via “Harry’s Place”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/ ]
* It wasn’t intended as a follow-up to our earlier discussion on private vs public health-care performance, but nevertheless in that context it was very helpful for “Chris Shiel”:http://backpagesblog.com/weblog/archives/000537.html to link to “this paper”:http://dll.umaine.edu/ble/U.S.%20HCweb.pdf (PDF) on how well, or as it turns out badly, the US does on health-care outcomes.
* I missed this when it was posted a week ago, but if you’re still interested in this stuff “Geoff Nunberg”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001169.html has a very good dissection of that study by Groseclose and Milyo purporting to show liberal media bias.
* And “Ben Bradley”:http://mt.ektopos.com/orangephilosophy/archives/000563.html wants reader input to help choose a murder victim. Purely for academic purposes.
We introduced an innovation a few weeks back and completely forgot to announce it. We’re a group blog which frequently has quite lengthy posts. Thus, when one of us does a post of more than a paragraph or two, it’s usually excerpted on the main page, so that the reader needs to click on “read more” in order to finish reading it. As far as we can tell, most readers prefer this ‘radio edit’ – it means that posts don’t disappear rapidly to the bottom of a very long page. However, some don’t. For the latter, we’ve created the Crooked Timber “Extended Play Mix”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/fullposts/, which publishes each post in its entirety to the Crooked Timber main page (you still have to click for comments). If you prefer not to have to click through to read full posts, you should bookmark this version instead (it’s also available in the left sidebar as ‘full post version’).