There appears to be some problem with our service – new comments are being registered – but are not appearing on the site. We’re trying to figure out what the problem is …
Update: Things seem to be working again.
From the category archives:
Blogging
* Katherine of Obsidian Wings is hanging up her blogging spurs. I’ll miss her. She’s written a long, thoughtful swan song about why we should care about U.S. human rights abuses towards people we suspect of terrorism.
* Tim Dunlop at The Road to Surfdom argues that right-wingers probably shouldn’t crow about this story. According to the Financial Times, a British governmental report is about to say that the British claim that Saddam was trying to buy uranium from Niger was “reasonable and consistent with the intelligence.”
The famous sixteen words in Bush’s State of the Union, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa”, are arguably technically correct. However, the use of the word “learned”, and the context (in the SOTU, as part of an argument for war on Iraq) strongly implies that the United States believes that the substance of the statement is true.
Tim points out, in great detail, that the best intelligence in American hands said otherwise. (It wasn’t just Joe Wilson.) He points out that the CIA had successfully removed the claim from previous speeches. He also points out that the Administration already apologized for using the claim when Ari Fleischer said “This information should not have risen to the level of a presidential speech.”
(Also, Tim reminds me to mark my calendar. July 14th is the one-year anniversary of the outing of Valerie Plame by two senior Administration officials. Congratulations to the lucky felons!)
* From Reason’s Hit and Run, Tommy Chong is out of jail, having served nine months for selling bongs over the internet. He’ll be on the Tonight Show this evening. According to the Drug Policy Alliance:
Tommy Chong was arrested and indicted following a series of DEA raids in February 2003 as part of the Government’s “Operation Pipe Dreams” crackdown on illegal drug paraphernalia. The crackdown involved at least 1200 officials, including hundreds of DEA agents, and at least 103 US Marshals. The operation led to 60 arrests. It occurred during an Orange Alert against terrorist attacks.
* The Poor Man is right about everything.
Finally, at least two evangelical Christians have written about Focus on the Family’s decision to distribute Michael Moore’s home address to their email list.
* David Wayne at Jollyblogger has a very good post arguing that FOTF is only hurting the Christian cause.
* Joe Carter at the Evangelical Outpost thinks that the concern is overblown. He thinks that the real issue is (surprise!) the hypocrisy of the left. I agree with him that politicially motivated outings of gays are shameful. However, I don’t understand how Carter can dismiss the right-wing invasion of privacy, condemn the left-wing invasion of privacy, and then feel secure enough in his own righteousness to condemn the left for selective outrage.
There ought to be a word for these kinds of arguments, in which one simultaneously displays and condemns hypocrisy. They happen a lot.
I should note that Carter doesn’t seem to have much support in his comments. If you choose to comment, please be polite.
The recent discussion of blogs and their democratic characteristics (or lack thereof) prompted by Laura’s comments at Apt 11D in response to critiques of her blog study’s survey instrument has gotten me thinking about the comments option on blogs yet again. It is a question I have pondered numerous times already, probably ever since I started reading blogs and certainly since I decided to start my own.
For me, the question of whether a site that calls itself a blog has comments option turned on is actually quite directly related to what constitutes a blog in the first place. I realize this is a question that is probably impossible to answer in a way that would satisfy everybody, but it is one still worth asking especially if one is to do research on the topic (as I am doing now) where a definition would be helpful.
One of Laura’s concerns is that the blogosphere is not very democratic. That’s true (she mentions some reasons and others have discussed this point at length elsewhere as well). However, blogs can have a democratic component: Comments. Why is it that certain bloggers decide to go without comments? And what makes their Web site a blog in that case? (Clearly I am showing my bias here in that I believe comments are an essential part of a blog. That said, I do realize and accept blogs as blogs even when they do not have comments turned on.. but do so mostly because the community has decided to consider them blogs. You know which ones I mean.)
Someone has to make the announcement: Crooked Timber is one year old today!
Blogger Jonathan Ichikawa has gotten an email back from Focus on the Family about their distribution of Michael Moore’s home address. His comments are very good.
I see that Mickey Kaus is asking of John Kerry and John Edwards, “When do they hold hands?” and “When do they kiss?” Lighthearted plays on homosexual panic haven’t always been a Slate trademark, but maybe they’re trying new things.
How time slips by. It was only two years ago that Mickey Kaus was warning us that this country was in for a wave of left-wing violence.
It only takes a few, we’ve learned — and if you figure that for every 500,000 pissed off and frustrated citizens (in either camp) one or two might resort to terror, then increased left-wing violence is something we can see coming down the road.
Mickey apparently faced some blowback, but found a way to back up his accusation: a year-old anonymous message on an unmoderated left-wing message board.
No danger on the Left? If you don’t think there’s any danger of political violence coming from the angry anti-Bush left, check out this creepy message-board post on the subject of how to seat Gore (the “duly-elected President”) in the White House. I’d repeat the money sentence here but I don’t want the Secret Service on my case.
As an anniversary present to M. Kaus, I’ve got an old post about how his research methods warn us of the coming violence from left-wingers, right-wingers, Dominique Moceanu fans, Beatles fans, Vietnamese people, Will and Grace watchers, and me.
Americans, of all ages, of all stations in life, and all types of dispositions are forever forming associations. They are not only commercial or industrial associations in which they all take part but others of a thousand different types – religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very minute … Nothing, in my view, deserves more attention that the intellectual and moral associations in America.
– Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
I stumbled on that passage – appropriate unto the day, for what is declared independence if not a precondition for happier association? – while poking around regarding blogging and social networks and such, following up Henry’s interesting ‘blogosphere as 18th century coffee-house’ post, following up Laura at Apartment 11D’s ‘blogging polis’ post. (I’d tell you who posted that Tocqueville passage, but I’ve forgotten.)
Laura at “Apartment 11d”:http://apartment11d.blogspot.com/2004_06_01_apartment11d_archive.html#108847109152995261 posts on the blogosphere as a space for debate:
bq. is the blogosphere a public space, like the New England townhall meeting? Is it a place where individuals can debate ideas and policy proposals and have some impact on political officials?
Perhaps it should be neither. The most attractive ideal for the blogosphere that I’ve come across is in sociologist Richard Sennett’s brilliant, frustrating shaggy-dog of a book, “The Fall of Public Man”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393308790/henryfarrell-20. Sennett is writing about the eighteenth century coffee-house as a place where people could escape from their private lives, reinventing themselves, and engaging in good conversation with others, regardless of their background or their everyday selves. They could assume new identities, try out novel arguments usw. This kind of polity doesn’t so much conduct towards a shared consensus, as allow the kinds of diversity and plurality that Iris Marion Young (who’s heavily influenced by Sennett) talks about in “Justice and the Politics of Difference”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691023158/henryfarrell-20.
I’m quite sure that eighteenth century coffee houses weren’t actually like that (unless you were bourgeois and male) – but Sennett’s arguments are still helpful in understanding how the blogosphere differs from a New England townhall. Like Sennett’s patronizers of coffee shops, bloggers don’t usually know each other before they start blogging, so that it’s quite easy for them to reinvent themselves if they like, and indeed to invent a pseudonym, or pseudonyms to disguise their real identity completely. This has its downside – “some bloggers”:http://apartment11d.blogspot.com/2004_06_01_apartment11d_archive.html#108854101450715172 take it as license for offensive behaviour – but in general, if you don’t like a blog, you can simply stop reading it, or linking to it. The blogosphere seems less to me like a close-knit community (there isn’t much in the way of shared values, and only a bare minimum of shared norms), and more like a city neighborhood. An active, vibrant neighborhood when things are working; one with dog-turds littering the pavement when they’re not.
Jacob Levy is doing an admirable job (here, too) of trying to answer the question: Did the Administration veto plans to attack the terrorist Zarqawi, or his base in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, prior to the beginning of Gulf War II, because the presence of a genuine terrorist in Iraq was too useful for their case to give up?
It seemed too dark to believe at the time. If there’s any reason not to believe it, I’m sure that Levy will get to it. So far, he hasn’t.
Distinguished legal scholar “Cass Sunstein is guest-blogging over at the Volokh Conspiracy”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_06_21.shtml#1087950677 (and starts with some useful reflections on the legacy of FDR). What a coup for the Volokhs and what an improvement in the class of their guest-bloggers!
In the course of the recent “great database fiasco”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002042.html, I took a look at the history of traffic to this site. The AWStats program gave me a the number of unique visitors for every day from our launch last July through to June 16th this year. I was interested in which posts had made the biggest splashes. Now, if I just looked at the posts that got the greatest number of visitors, there would be a bias towards posts from later in the year, because we get far more visitors these days than six or ten months ago. How can we get a fair estimate?
It’s possible to statistically “decompose”:http://www.jos.nu/Articles/abstract.asp?article=613 a time series into three components. First, there’s the _seasonal_ component: in this case, it’s the regular ups and downs caused by what day of the week it is. Generally, traffic will dip every weekend, regardless of how many visitors we’re getting on average. The average number of visitors from week to week net of the seasonal ups and downs is the second, _trend_ component. This has grown consistently over the year. And finally there’s the _remainder_ or “irregular” component, which is whatever spikes and dips are left over once seasonal fluctuations and the underlying trend are accounted for.
The nice picture above shows CT’s unique daily visitor series decomposed in this way, with the raw data at the top and the three components underneath. (You can also get this figure as a “higher quality PDF file”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/misc/ct-decomposition.pdf [only 34k].) As you can see, the trend is one of healthy growth. These days we typically get about seven to nine thousand unique visitors a day. But what about those spikes in the lowest panel? Which posts brought in the crowds? *Read on* for the Top 10 list. The punchline is that, even though we’re known for being a bunch of “pointy-headed academics”:http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/week_2004_01_25.html#002424, the out-of-the-ballpark hitters on our roster are not the ones with Ph.Ds.
I’ve spent the last few hours doing something that I’ve meant to do for months; going through the academic blogroll to see what updates and changes need to be made. I’ve marked blogs which haven’t been updated in several months as ‘moribund.’ Those which I’m not sure about, I’ve added a question mark to. Some, which seem to have disappeared entirely, I’ve removed from the blogroll. These include “Chun the Unavoidable,” who I’m sort of sorry to see go – the _Invisible Adjunct_ once remarked that he took trolling to a higher level, and I reckon that’s about right. On the other hand, it’s nice to see that “Jeff Cooper”:http://www.jeffcoop.com/blog/ is back – and with what appears to be good news.
I’m sure that there are still some inaccuracies in the blogroll – feel free to let me know, either by comments or by email. Also, I know that I’ve missed out on some new academics in the blogosphere during my month of travelling; if you want to be in the academic blogroll, and meet the “criteria”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000273.html send me an email.
Queen of SQL statements. _Pray for us_.
Empress of Emacs. _Pray for us_.
Sacred Heart of Search and Replace. _Pray for us_.
Defender of Write Permissions. _Pray for us_.
Patron of Manually Edited Dump Files. _Pray for us_.
Savior of unexpectedly small Disk Quotas. _Pray for us_.
Shepherd of Lost Posts. _Pray for us_.
Protector of Hapless Administrators. _Pray for us_.
Scourge of “Wholly Inadequate Import/Export Formats”:http://lemonodor.com/archives/000730.html. _Pray for us_.
Mother of all the Bloggers. _Pray for us_.
I think we’re back. Fresh — or at least unrotted — permalinks and all. Thank you, thank you to everyone who commented in the now-destroyed post where I wailed about the problem. The solution was to get an SQL dump of the database from the old server and read it in to the new database. Not as easy as it might have been, because the old server had old blogs, with old hard-linked archive sources and all the rest of it. But I think it worked.
My sincere apologies to fellow-posters and commenters whose recent contributions got deleted in the course of the database restoration. I guess I revealed myself to be a utilitarian at root: five or six posts and their comments were sacrificed on behalf of about two thousand posts and their permalinks. Moral: Do not put me in charge of interrogating suspected terrorists.[1]
So, as predicted in my “Don’t Upgrade”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001967.html post, I’ve just spent an unconscionable amount of time (I am about to start paying off large debts to my wife and daughter) getting us back to where we were last week. But now we are where we were last week, but on new servers. To switch religions momentarily, Oy.
fn1. Alternative moral for high-ranking Pentagon officials: By all means put me in charge of interrogating suspected terrorists, because I will lose them.
But don’t panic! This is a sub-etha move. A behind-the-scenes move. A the-audience-noticed-nothing move. In other words, a New Host Provider move. So from your point of view, gentle readers, we are where we’ve always been. Very soon entering https://www.crookedtimber.org in your browser will bring you to our new server. In a day or two it’ll be like nothing happened, but you may have some difficulty connecting to our new server while the Domain Name transfer is happening. To get your new-server CT fix in the short term, “follow this link”:http://crookedtimber1.dreamhost.com. But as I say, in the next 12-24 hours the url https://www.crookedtimber.org will begin pointing to the new site, and everything will be as it was, only spiffier in an ineffable, new host provider sort of way.
Steadfastly ignoring “our own good advice”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001967.html, Crooked Timber is moving to a new host provider, with all the potential headaches that entails. I’m doing the transfer now, so comments posted here from now on will not be imported to the new server. Please hold yer thoughts for a few hours.
Once the move is done, we’ll transfer the Doman Name registration to our new hosts, and https://www.crookedtimber.org will point to the new servers. The process of “DNS propagation”, where the big internet servers tell the little ones about the new location, may take a little while. Thanks for bearing with us.