Blogging

I’m very happy to report that, after his stint as a guest blogger recently, John Quiggin will be joining us as a regular here at Crooked Timber. John is a distinguished Australian economist at the University of Queensland, and many readers will already know him from his own excellent blog. We’re delighted John’s agreed to join the gang, and his doing so brings our number to thirteen. I’m not sure who gets to be Judas. Or Jesus, for that matter.

Head over to Wampum and vote for your favorite blog named “Crooked Timber.” We are nominated for Best Writing, Best Series, Best Group Blog and Best Design. Unfortunately, the “Best Group Blog” and “Best Blog” categories seem mutually exclusive.

I just saw a documentary yesterday about the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the organization behind the Golden Globes. Apparently it’s made up of people who need be neither foreign nor press, but who share a desperate desire to be photographed with celebrities. I will happily pose for a photo with anyone who votes for us in the Koufax Awards. Head and Shoulders shots only, though.

– Ana Marie Cox, formerly of The Antic Muse, formerly of Suck.com, formerly of a lot of things, has a new political gossip site: Wonkette.

Ana Marie is an outstanding, witty writer who makes most of us look like we’re blogging in crayon. Long live the Wonkette.

– Michael Pine, of Off the Pine, is back to semi-regular posting on a new site. I was fond of Off the Pine before he gave it up, and I can’t imagine that he’s gotten any dumber.

– The Mr. T Experience, aka MTX, has a new album out called Yesterday Rules. It’s very good, and you should buy it. Full review shortly.

According to our log-analysis program, Crooked Timber received its 1,000,000th unique visit today; a nice milestone. I think it’s fair to say that none of us anticipated how well CT would do when we started it in July. Thank you all for reading us.

The competition among Weblog competitions is heating up; in the last two months, we’ve had Wizbang’s “Weblog Awards”:http://wizbangblog.com/poll.php#BGB poll; the “Warblogger”:http://www.rightwingnews.com/special/warblogger2003.php awards, the Koufax awards at “Wampum”:http://wampum.wabanaki.net/ and now the “Bloggies”:http://www.fairvue.com/?feature=awards2004. It’s all very confusing: which competition should you be paying attention to? To help answer that question, I’m proposing the Best ‘Best Weblog of 2003 Competition’ Competition. I’m sure that y’all can come up with appropriate categories and nominees – in order to start the ball rolling …

*Most egregious award decision*
The winner by a mile: Wizbang’s “Best Overall Blog” award for _Little Green Footballs_. In fairness, this isn’t Wizbang’s fault; I imagine that thousands of slavering trolls from LGF’s comment section were clambering over each other in their frenzied efforts to cast their vote for the Dark Lord. Like a scene from the siege of Minas Tirith. If LGF were really the best overall blog on the Internet, I’d want to give up, right away.

*Vote early, vote often award*
A number of hot contenders for this one – lots of fishy business of one kind or another in various competitions. “Dive into Mark”:http://diveintomark.org/ at the very least deserves special mention for his script ensuring that anyone who clicked on the Wizbang awards from his site would find themselves willy-nilly “voting for him”:http://wizbangblog.com/archives/001268.php.

*Awards competition that is most likely to be any use*
A tie between the Koufax awards, and the Warblogger awards, I reckon. Given the vast diversity of blogs, it makes much more sense to concentrate on a limited section of the blogging community than to try to cover the whole gamut. Readers are more likely to find new blogs that are of interest to them among the nominees, which is presumably the point of the exercise.

*Most glaring omission*
Why the hell has “The Poor Man”:http://www.thepoorman.net/ not gotten a nomination in any of the broader competitions?

Update: Andrew Northrup does a perfect blog-post on the State of the Union speech within moments of its ending, “as if to prove my point …”:http://www.thepoorman.net/archives/002291.html#002291http://www.thepoorman.net/archives/002291.html#002291

Worth reading:

“Michael Froomkin”:http://www.discourse.net/archives/2004/01/florida_taliban_3.html on a story that should be getting a lot more play; how a Florida Judicial Nominating Commission has been asking potential judges whether they’re “God-fearing.”

“Brad DeLong”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000065.html on Seabiscuit versus Elmo the Banana Slug.

“Mrs. Tilton”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/archives/000261.php on long-haired wastrels and the end of conscription in Germany.

“Chris Brooke”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/archives/000251.php on British Conservative party deviationism.

“Ken MacLeod”:http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/2004_01_01_kenmacleod_archive.html#107396002535502694 on Marxist sectarianism. Ken namechecks the British and Irish Communist Organization, a defunct grouplet that I’ve always been fond of for their ability to argue themselves from one position to its radical opposite (viz. from a 32 county solution to the Northern Ireland problem, to advocating the region’s full integration into the UK).

In an interview with Norman Geras, J Bradford DeLong makes the following odd statement:

If you had to change your first name, what would you change it to?

> Brad :)

So in an ideal world, he’d be called Bradford Bradford DeLong? Without wanting to cast aspersions, I have to say that if Prof DeLong had ever been to Bradford, he might not be so keen on having it in his name, twice.

There’s been much hand-wringing over Chris’s post and related links about the role having a blog might have when it comes to getting an academic job. I think it’s all much ado about nothing, but since I’ve done very well professionally out of blogging I suppose I might think that.

[click to continue…]

I see that “Chris Brooke”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/blogger.html is guest-blogging over at a “Fistful of Euros”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/. He’s sure to say much of interest at what is becoming one of the best blogs around. His “first post there”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/archives/000246.php alerted me to something I’d missed, namely “Scott Martens’s excellent exposition of Marx’s On The Jewish Question”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/archives/000228.php (in comments – you have to scroll down), which connects with some of the issues discussed in “my post below”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001118.html about Clermont-Tonnerre and the 1789 debates about the rights of man in the French National Assembly.

I’m just back from the Oxford Political Thought Conference — and great fun it was too. One of the things I managed to do in Oxford was to meet up with Chris Brooke of the “Virtual Stoa”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/blogger.html in his palatial college rooms. Just over a year ago Chris and about the board games: me about “playing Monopoly in the old GDR”:http://junius.blogspot.com/2002_12_15_junius_archive.html#90066036 and “he about”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2002_12_01_archive.html Bertell Ollman’s game “Class Struggle”:http://www.aardwolfgames.com/aardmakehtml.mv?look4=2985.00000&src=DETAILS . I was fortunate enough to find myself sitting next to Professor Ollman at lunch today and asked him about the game, and one of the things he told me was the Monopoly itself was originally conceived as an _anti-capitalist_ game by a follower of Henry George. The story of the game’s invention and its subsequent appropriation by Parker Brothers is “here”:http://www.adena.com/adena/mo/ (scroll down to list of articles) and “here”:http://www.washingtonfreepress.org//36/monopoly.html .

I’m not a big fan of the Googlebomb, but Moe Lane at Obsidian Wings has one that I’d be proud to be a part of.

Ninja.

The 2003 Koufax Awards, hosted by Wampum, are now at the voting stage. Four CT members are nominated in the Best Writing category. Best Group Blog nominees are still to be revealed, though I think we’ll be on the list. Head over there and cast your vote. Remember, as Churchill said, “Crooked Timber is the worst blog, except for the all the others that have been read from time to time.” Similarly, Isaiah Berlin once remarked to me at High Table that “The Instapundit knows one thing; Crooked Timber knows many big things.” Or words to that effect.

Provided that I can figure out the technology, I’m going to be participating in an online chat with Wesley Clark and a dozen or so bloggers tomorrow (Wednesday) at 5:00 Eastern time.

Watch it here…

or log in.

Public IRC Server: irc://irc.forclark.com
Read-Only Channel: #wireside

UPDATE: I’ve never used IRC, and I couldn’t figure out how to get it going in time. CURSE YOU, TECHNOLOGY!

Here was my question:

I recently read an article in Inc. magazine about how the Democratic Presidential candidates are talking about international free trade issues in general, and NAFTA in particular. The article didn’t have a summary from you about your views. How would you describe your position on international trade?

Here in Australia it has been 2004 for some time. My advice from the future is, buy IBM. Reading around this morning I see Glenn Reynolds going out on a high, high note for 2003, reminding us all why he dropped his tagline “The New York Times of bloggers” in favor of “If you’ve got a modem, I’m shouting in your ear!” Meanwhile Tacitus closes 2003 with a variant on one of the most popular themes of the year, viz, “I’ve noticed a disturbing tendency on the American left…” Yeah, me too. It barely exists. I hope you won’t stop reading Crooked Timber now that Tacitus has shown that “the American left” relies wholly on “murderous racism based on junk economic theory.” Another of our sins is noted by Steven Den Beste, who observes that we at CT think “white men don’t actually matter.” In case you haven’t twigged, CT policy is that white males are only good for use as the sexual playthings of rich and beautiful women. Email me for more details about this.

All of this rhetorical overkill reminds me of a line about the late rants of F.R. Leavis: “In his later books he libelled his literary opponents so scandalously that when he tried to condemn Stalin he had no harsh words left over.” Excitable bloggers take note.

Update: Checking back on this post reveals a comments thread swept up in a wave of huffiness, demands for apologies and assertions of lost credibility. Oh my. I guess I’ll have to work on spelling things out rather than letting the tone make the point. Tacitus says that the “American left” is either an unwitting apologist or a hopelessly naive water-carrier for what is really “murderous racism based on junk economic theory.” That’s why he accuses the “American left” of suffering from “battered wife syndrome” in their supposed denial, downplaying or defence of communist atrocities, and why he orders them to “cut the crap about communism.” If you think there’s nothing wrong with each step of his argument then you will not see the point of my original post, which was intended to show that this reflected reality about as well as the statement “Crooked Timber believes white men don’t actually matter.”

Tacitus’s post would have been a good deal less obtuse (though wrong for other reasons) if he had begun with a generalization he could support. The post refers in passing to identifiable entities (e.g., the Democratic party) that have a history of anti-communism but are still left-wing, and Tacitus probably thinks this immunises him against charges of illegitimate generalization. In fact, it just exposes the strawy nature of his imaginary target. What he really meant was something like “I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in some of the comments to this Calpundit thread,” which seems to have been the inspiration for his post. But I suppose saying a few bloggers got up your nose doesn’t give you the same buzz as indicting a notional “American left” tout court without a shred of evidence.