A Happy Christmas to all our readers and fellow bloggers. I’ve been enjoying a traditional East Midlands Christmas here in England — and that means starting the day with a choice of ham or pork pie before moving on to the turkey (accompanied by a rather good Margaux from 1983) somewhat later. I’m sure that many of my fellow Timberites have also been enjoying themselves in their various climates and time-zones. See you all soon!
From the category archives:
Blogging
Yet another post in the “we right-wingers are smarter because we say we are” genre, this time from “Alex Singleton”:http://www.adamsmithblog.org/archives/000160.php at the Adam Smith Institute. Singleton puts forward the self-evidently preposterous argument that the blogosphere is dominated by the right wing because the blogosphere favours reasoned argument, leaving leftwingers (who are good at chanting slogans and spouting jargon, but lousy at reasoned thought) in the lurch. Weak stuff, which is barely worth jousting against. Indeed, the post effectively furnishes its own refutation; it advances a thesis which is based on
* One unproven (and “probably false”:http://volokh.com/2003_12_14_volokh_archive.html#107145978917150777) generalization – that the blogosphere is dominated by the right
* One preposterous claim – that the most successful bloggers are those who are most adept at reasoned argument. The exceptions to this rule are too many and various to require explicit mention.
* One tendentious and silly piece of polemic – that leftwingers, unlike rightwingers, have no real arguments.
If this is the sort of reasoned debate that the Adam Smith Institute thinks will help the right to prevail on the battlefield of ideas, then more power to them. But of course, it isn’t an argument as such. Rather, it’s a sort of intellectualized gut-rumbling, a tarted up set of prejudices without any factual basis. Just the sort of nonsense that you might expect from a jargon-spouting, sloganeering leftist in other words.
Many thanks from everyone here at Crooked Timber to John Quiggin for being our guest for the week. You can read all of his CT posts on our newly-instituted Guest Blogger Archives, and of course be sure to make his own blog a regular read if it wasn’t already.
Incidentally, while setting up the guest archive I removed the calendar that used to live in the top left corner there. I did this on the sudden conviction that it served no useful purpose on a group blog that reliably has more than one post a day. But if the outcry from the calendar-loving public is strong enough I can of course restore it.
My week as inaugural guest blogger on Crooked Timber has come to an end. It was a lot of fun, with a (largely) new audience and a new way of blogging. I enjoyed the interplay with other members of the group, which is a kind of interaction subtly different from that of comments threads. I also started wondering about the unexplored territory between group blogs and online magazines like Salon and Slate, and whether there are technical improvements to blog software that would enable some of this territory to be colonized, but I didn’t get very far with this.
So thanks everyone for having me, and please come to visit.
If you haven’t seen already, the Guardian has announced its blogging award winners. They reminded me of how limited my knowledge of other (especially non-political) bloggers is, and the amazingly wide range of things you can do with a blog. Bruce Sterling was one of the judges.
There are a couple of absolute crackers. Call Centre Confidential reminds you that The Office is funny because it is so horrifyingly accurate.
Belle de Jour has its doubters, but seems to be the diary of a sassy and articulate London call girl. Warning; best read at home.
Going Underground’s Blog is all about the London Underground and has loads of pictures of drunken santa clauses. It’s my favourite UK public transport blog after Transport Blog. Who says the British are a nation of trainspotters?
I had half-written a post about the latest adventures in dumpster-diving, but Gary Farber beat me to it.
I have to say that the ever-increasing recent trend of many political bloggers — some from both sides of the column as they perceive it, though I’m seeing more from the right guilty of this of late (but that might be sample error on my part) — to react to any news event they perceive as likely to be politically polarizing by going to a site known to be full of what H. L. Mencken called “the booboisie,” mouthing off with sub-simian mewlings admidst the mouth breathings, is not a pretty sight. It would seem to be a masochistic endeavor, but no! It has a purpose! Because then said blogger can pull up this eagerly sought handful of soiled straw and proclaim: this is what The Other Side believes! That Other Side! They’re so stupid! Ha ha ha, stupid other side! Me not stupid like them! Me smart. Stupid other side!
The world is full to the gills with stupid people who say awful things on the Internet. Pointing this out doesn’t constitute a political argument.
Philosoraptor has some related thoughts. Philosoraptor is also a really excellent, thoughtful website, and we should encourage him to keep blogging. I’m not pointing to any one post because it’s all good.
So, with reference to the weekend’s big news story, Norman of Normblog writes that a particular pleasure has been
“The sight of some people trying to say ‘hooray’ through gritted teeth.”
If I understand this correctly, Norm is expressing his pleasure in some other people’s displeasure in having to express their pleasure in yet a third group of people’s expression of their pleasure in a separate individual’s displeasure. I don’t know what to think about this at all. Which is just as well, I suppose because at least it means that the chain of meta-levels ends here. I tell, you, this is why expected utility theory will never catch on ….
When we set up this blog, several of us were inspired by the “Volokh Conspiracy”:http://volokh.com/, which has done a quite remarkable job in combining smart political and intellectual commentary. We’re now taking another leaf from the Volokhs’ book; from here on, we hope to invite the occasional guest-blogger to join us for a week or so. We’re all very grateful to “John Quiggin”:http://mentalspace.ranters.net/quiggin/, who has very decently agreed to be our inaugural guest-blogger. We hope that most of you are already reading his blog (if you aren’t, you ought to be) – he’s one of the smartest economic and political commentators out there. We’re pleased to have him on board.
Question: Is there a way to automatically close comments threads in Movable Type after a fixed period of time? I know this can be done when your MT installation runs an SQL backend, but ours doesn’t. I suppose we should have used SQL from the get-go, but what can I say?
It’s a law of nature that whenever normblog moves to a new platform the first profile has to be of a Timberite. So today’s profile is of me.
Dwight Meredeth and Mary Beth at Wampum are being kind enough to run the 2003 Koufax Awards to recognize the best in left-of-center blogs. I really enjoyed them last year, and I’m delighted that Dwight is volunteering his time again. They’re taking nominations now, so please feel free to contribute.
UPDATE: Because they’re not accepting nominations for their own posts, I wanted to take the opportunity to say that Dwight Meredeth’s post “Tell His Parents”, about Michael Savage’s cruelty about autism, is one of the very, very few blog posts that I’ve gone back and re-read months later.
Later on today, the magnificent Gus Hosein, will be logging in to CT and giving us his impressions of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).
Gus is a key figure in a global community of privacy activists – the people who say “huh? you mean what?!” to the proliferation of government initiatives that “seek to balance” the “dynamic equilibrium” between privacy and security in this post 9/11 world.
I know Gus from my time at LSE. Henry knows Gus from a book project in internet governance being organised by Ernest Wilson. I know Ernest Wilson from a conference organised by the 21st Century Trust. Eszter knows Gus too. How, we don’t know yet. Did somebody say something about networks?
Anyway, welcome to Gus. He’ll be blogging here over the next day or so with his thoughts on the WSIS.
Norman Geras tells me that he has finally given up on blogger and moved his blog to typepad “here”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/ . Please adjust your links.
to “Russell Arben Fox”:http://philosophenweg.blogspot.com/2003_12_01_philosophenweg_archive.html#107066373986271483 , who has a new daughter.
Various stuff I’ve seen so far tonight…