At some point in the last 24 hours or so, someone left the ten thousandth comment to have been posted in the discussion threads on Crooked Timber. We don’t keep direct links to individual comments so I don’t know who it was. But thanks to all our readers from everyone here at CT. Cheers.
From the category archives:
Blogging
This is a little bit freaky. Right now if you do a Google search for Weatherson you get in the sidebar two ‘sponsored links’, one for Philosophy Body Care, and the other for Philosophy the Gingerbread Man. (No I’m not making this up. Not even I have that twisted an imagination.)
Looks as though there’s a lot of “cheating”:http://wizbangblog.com/archives/001268.php going on in the Blog Awards. Various methods used – “Dive into Mark”:http://diveintomark.org/ seems to have employed a particularly cunning trick. The polls link directly to the websites of the nominated blogs, in order to allow people to check out the blogs that they’re voting on,. Apparently, the eponymous Mark set up a script to trap anyone clicking on the link to his website into voting for his blog automatically. Scroll down through the comments to see his justification for doing this – it’s a minor masterpiece of chutzpah. Fortunately, CT readers don’t seem to have been up to any mischief, either because you don’t have the skillz, or because you’re nice and honest people. Naturally, I prefer the latter explanation. (Via “Scripting News”:http://www.scripting.com/)
How does one best describe someone who engages in a blatant exercise in Newspeak (viz. arguing that all opponents to the Iraq war were objectively ‘pro-fascist’), and then “invokes Orwell’s blessing”:http://rogerlsimon.com/archives/00000528.htm on his project? Me, I can’t find the words.
Update: goof (Newspeech for Newspeak) fixed.
Update 2: In the spirit of Mr. Simon’s interesting and helpful contribution to our public discourse, we might press for the relabelling of the “Best Liberal Blog” and “Best Conservative Blog” “awards”:http://wizbangblog.com/poll.php as the “Best Pro-Fascist Blog” and “Best Anti-Fascist Blog” respectively. Just to clarify matters.
Wizbang is running a Blog Awards competition. CT is nominated for best group blog and best liberal blog, though not, somehow, for best blog. So head over there, and vote early vote often. I voted for Calpundit, Fistful of Euros and Caoine. (At least, I voted for them in the categories they weren’t competing with CT!) Hat tip: Dave Winer, who would also like you to vote for him.
“Harry Hatchet”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/ has “a piece on the Guardian website”:http://politics.guardian.co.uk/egovernment/comment/0,12767,1099845,00.html on British political blogs. He’s kind enough to mention CT among others.
This is one of those list-of-links posts. But first:
– Bush’s trip to Iraq seems to have driven a few good people insane. It seems likely that just about any President who had committed a large number of troops overseas would visit them over the holidays. This shouldn’t be much more controversial than lighting the White House Christmas tree.
Now we find out that Bush had his picture taken with a prop turkey that wasn’t actually served. Wow. I also have a confession- my third grade pictures weren’t actually taken in front of a sun-dappled woodland. The nice lady at Sears used a big poster as a backdrop.
It feels good to have that off of my chest.
A group of well-known history bloggers — including Timothy Burke, Robert ‘KC’ Johnson, and Ralph Luker — have banded together to form Cliopatria. Proof if proof were needed that group blogs are continuing their irresistable rise to global dominance. Or, as a historian would put it, proof if proof were needed that at least one, probably quite atypical, group of historians launched what we can loosely refer to as a group blog (with all the difficulties that amorphous term implies) in late 2003 or thereabouts, according to the best available sources (but see below for futher discussion on this point).
I think the screenplay looks pretty good.
“Nasi Lemak”:http://nasilemak.blogspot.com/2003_11_23_nasilemak_archive.html#107012858027084618 on intellectual consistency, racism, and Zell Miller.
Chad Orzel on “exam design”:http://steelypips.org/principles/2003_11_23_principlearchive.php?show_id=106978332107661755#bk_106978332107661755.
Bruce Sterling on “Brazilectronica”:http://wiredblogs.tripod.com/sterling/index.blog?entry_id=154868 (although he’d have been better advised to write about “DJ Marky”:http://www.discogs.com/artist/DJ_Marky than Bebel Gilberto, if you ask me).
Chris Genovese on “boosting”:http://signalplusnoise.com/archives/000311.html and decentralized filtering.
It looks like a quiet day today on Crooked Timber. But I’ve noticed a couple interesting links elsewhere. “Tyler Cowen over at the Volokhs”:http://volokh.com/2003_11_23_volokh_archive.html#106994007245191210 points to “a new article in Nature”:http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v426/n6965/abs/nature02029_fs.html&dynoptions=doi1069939982 about the origins of Indo-European languages (Anatolia is where they come from according to this study). And Brian Leiter “finds something to like about Stanley Fish”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000513.html who has “a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education”:http://chronicle.com/jobs/2003/11/2003112601c.htm about right-wing threats to academia (some of which sound not dissimilar to New Labour threats over here in the UK).
Met Lance Knobel yesterday and had a cup of tea. I raise my hand and claim responsibility for the quote about Canberra in the first paragraph of his post this morning. Lance himself tries harder than I did to be charitable to Canberra, and comes up with “it bids fair to make it to the better category of invented capitals.” High praise indeed.
David Beaver on Gricean maxims of blogging: “Occasionally say what you are certain is true. It adds credibility.” Funniest blog post I’ve read in months.
Geoff Pullum on corpus fetishism in reviews of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language: “A couple of the reviews published in Britain have been so stupid that the only thing a fair-minded man like me can wish upon the reviewers is that they should die in obscurity.” I love the smell of blog wars in the morning.
Geoff Nunberg on Bush in Britain: “But it’s certainly convenient that Bush fits the negative stereotype of Americans so neatly — he’s a self-made straw man.” If I’m a good blogger one day I’ll be able to write phrases like that.
John Holbo on The Issue Regarding TCS and Confessions of a Former Protein Sheath. As they say in the classics, read the whole things.
The response from various right-wing circles about the TCS brouhaha is either charmingly antique or extraordinarily naive. The position seems to be that we should ignore who’s paying the piper and just listen to the tune to see whether we like it. Arguments, they say, can be evaluated independently of the context they appear in. But this relies on views about the nature of testimony that don’t stand up to empirical or philosophical scrutiny. As Grice put it, communication requires cooperation, and since advertising masquerading as honest opinion is not particularly cooperative, it is unlikely to be communicative, but without successful communication there simply isn’t a presented argument to evaluate.
A former student, himself living and working in China, emails to tell me about what looks like an interesting co-operative blog project: “Living in China”:http://www.livinginchina.com/index.shtml — definitely worth a look.