Blogging

Jim Henley has a good post about an excerpt from the new memoir of Mariane Pearl, widow of the murdered journalist Daniel Pearl. (The book can be purchased here.)

Jim Henley’s analysis of the kidnapper’s emails is very good, but the excerpt itself is extraordinary. Mariane Pearl writes in the present tense, giving it an immediacy that makes it hard to read.

Every little detail—the type of camera used, the make of the weapon threatening Danny, the way words are used—is analyzed, and everyone has a theory. I let everybody play out his or her line because I want to get hooked by one. But through it all, I know this is my husband.

In the chatter, I hear Randall ask, “Do you recognize the wedding ring?”

“Yes,” I say. “It’s loose on his finger. It’s always been loose.”

The room falls silent.

Anyone who’s at all interested in the relationship between law and the Internet has heard of Michael Froomkin; he’s done seminal work on “ICANN”:http://www.discourse.net/archives/2003/09/rose_burawoy_political_scientist.html and “privacy regulation”:http://personal.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/articles/privacy-deathof.pdf. He’s also run “ICANNWatch”:http://www.icannwatch.org for the last few years. And now he’s started a blog at “www.discourse.net”:http://www.discourse.net/. Early posts include “one”:http://www.discourse.net/archives/2003/09/virtual_worlds_real_rules.html on law in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games and a wonderful “discursus”:http://www.discourse.net/archives/2003/09/rose_burawoy_political_scientist.html on his grandmother and John Ashcroft. One for your blogrolls.

Josh Chafetz cooks from the Volokh Cookbook. (“All ingredients available from your market and don’t you forget it.”) Bam! Oxbloggers suddenly guests on Volokh. Coincidence? I think not. Expect Drezner [and his Ed! — Ed.] to show up soon with the cucumbers. Unsurprisingly, Crooked Timber’s smoked salmon socialism is ignored by this new right-wing Axis of Entrées, despite its manifestly higher quality in all respects. As the appetizers are served, Andrew Sullivan is denied entry and is seen outside the window yelling “Rhodes Scholars! Mega-losers! Curriculum-vitae fetishists!“

The UK Adam Smith Institute has started its own blog. It’s quite a good, snappy read, and the first few days cover many of the hoary old chestnuts you might expect; how vouchers are the panacea for under-performing public services, how Naomi Klein attacks branding, but actually is a brand herself (fair enough), and how, erm, left-wingers are too angry and put upon to be funny.

It’s worth keeping a look at to see how this blog develops. Though, as with other more ‘corporate’ blogs, the house style is a bit uniform. There seems to be a word limit on entries which has the effect of making the pieces sound a bit samey, and also rather superficial.

Funnily enough, on my way back from lunch today I was giving out (extremely superficially) that all the rich seem to do is distort markets by defending their privileges and/or monopoly rents. While the ASIs of this world seem to spend their time defending these guys (you know, ‘the rich’, i.e. suitably vague) – e.g. saying embezzlement and fraud should be dealt with by companies, not law enforcement – it seems to me that the really rich have no interest at all in truly competitive markets. Just ask Bill Gates, Halliburton, et al. And then the conversation turned to whether George Bush was a kleptocrat, plutocrat or just a plain old vanilla flavoured oligarch…

Maybe there’s a joke in there, but I was too down-trodden to see it.

Today I came across “John Palfrey’s”:http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/palfrey/2003/09/12#a391 blog for a class that he’s teaching in Harvard Law School on the Internet and the global economy. Interesting stuff; all the more so for those of us who are beginning to take the first, wobbly steps towards using blogs in the classroom. “Dan Drezner”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/blog/ used Blogger to put together his syllabus last semester; John Holbo runs a “couple”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/nietzsche/ of “class”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/ph1101egem1004/ blogs, and I’ve recently installed Movable Type on the university server so that I can do so myself. Palfrey is pushing his students to start their own blogs as part of the classroom experience – I haven’t had the courage to do this myself. But it seems to me that there are a variety of different ways that you can use blogs in the classroom, each with their own pros and cons. Discussing them in order of increasing ambition …

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One of the most common complaints about blogs is that we’re essentially parasites; without the mainstream media, we’d be talking about our pets. I generally agree.

But every once in a while, bloggers get to a story first. Just yesterday, for example, Andrew Sullivan revealed the surprising news that Howard Dean, presidential candidate and governor of Vermont, is fluent in Haitian creole.

To be fair, I’m reading between the lines a little. I have to assume that Howard Dean speaks Haitian creole. Because if he doesn’t, Andrew’s criticism of a song in Creole doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense. (I notice that respected economics professor Tyler Cowen loves Don Giovanni. To the Babelfish! Get ‘im!)

Jeez. Sullivan is not a stupid man, and I feel certain that he didn’t go to the Kennedy School of Government with the dream of dumbing down political discourse. And yet, here we are. As a wise man once said, “What a waste it is to lose one’s mind.”

Jack O’Toole has more.

UPDATE: Another scoop! The Bush administration and congressional investigators say that they don’t have sufficient evidence to connect Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks, but Andrew has found the proof.

(That’s enough Andrew – Ed)

I just got the offprints for my most recently published article, as it happens a reply to the article mentioned by Brad DeLong last night in his theology post. It’s quite pretty too, since The Philosophical Quarterly put nice covers on their offprints.

This article was interesting from a blogging perspective for a few reasons. First, I got the idea for it from reading blogs. Second, I even cited the relatively well-known blog from which I got the idea. Third, the paper itself grew almost entirely out of some blog entries.

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Via “Larry Solum”:http://lsolum.blogspot.com/, two new scholar-blogs that are worth a special mention. As a supplement to his Conspiratorial machinations, Tyler Cowen has started a side-project with Alex Tabarrok, called “Marginal Revolution”:http://marginalrevolution.blogs.com/. As the name suggests, it mostly focuses on economic theory and its applications. Second, Rodger Payne, an international relations scholar at University of Louisville, who’s written some interesting stuff on framing, has started “blogging”:http://rpayne.blogspot.com/ too. Nice to see another IR type in the blogosphere.

Every once in a while, you’ll see a story about some local government regulations that force an 11-year old girl to shut down her lemonade stand. Most readers (including me) come away with the feeling that the law that prevented the kid from opening a lemonade stand is ridiculous and should probably be eliminated.

But should they? Keep in mind that there are countless 11-year olds who have no intention of starting a lemonade stand. Some children who began lemonade stands would surely run them poorly. We can’t just go around lifting regulations willy-nilly until we can be sure that 11-year olds have reached a consensus. If we start lifting regulations and leaving the decision about whether to sell lemonade to individual choice, it will devalue the whole concept of commerce. What if some of them fail?

Needless to say, this is an absurd argument. Which was why I was amazed to see Jonah Goldberg trying it against gay marriage, in a column titled “Gay men not rushing to the altar”.

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Welcome to a new co-blogger: “Ted Barlow”:http://tedbarlow.blogspot.com/ has very nicely agreed to come on board. Ted doesn’t need much in the way of an introduction – he’s been a voice of reason in the blogosphere for a long, long time. We’re glad to have him.

I guess at some level we all recognise the syndrome, but Ian Jack’s account of how the news get manufactured (especially by the Sunday papers) is well worth a look. Jack is the former editor of the Independent on Sunday, so knows whereof he speaks:

bq. The political editor is furiously sucking a paper clip. “Well, we could do a little ring-a-round of back-benchers who might not support the new Europe bill.” “And you could talk to that madman X [an alienated cabinet minister]”, says the deputy editor. “He’s bound to say something original.” And so the great hole – the lead story hole – on the front page is filled. The deputy editor, an excellent re-writer, “hardens up” a few of the political editor’s softer and more equivocal sentences. Headline type which really should be held in reserve for something significant, such as the sinking of the Titanic, reads: MAJOR IN NEW BATTLE OVER [something or other]. The first paragraph begins “A beleaguered John Major is this weekend facing one of the gravest crises of his political career.” The political editor looks wryly at the page proof and says, “That’s what you call a scoop of interpretation” The deputy and I (who, unlike the political editor, never need meet politicians) defend the choice of words: “one of” not “the gravest”, so that’s OK, and some clever use of the passive and conditional tenses further down, “It is believed” rather than “One embittered madman who wishes to remain anonymous thinks”, “may” rather than “will”, and so on.

Of course, Jack’s experience of all this is pre-blogosphere. In these newly enlightened times, if the story concerned some appropriate subject it would be referred to by Glenn Reynolds as evidence of something (European anti-semitism; French perfidy….) and then spun into a whole geopolitical theory by Steven Den Beste. And who is to say that “Secret EU plan to slaughter firstborn” wouldn’t get picked up by Samizdata!(Story first linked by Slugger O’ Toole).

Matthew Yglesias has some reaction to Right-Wing News’s lists of greatest figures of the twentieth century as voted for by right- and left-wing bloggers. My considered view that such lists are inherently silly hasn’t sufficiently stifled my irritation at the omissions. There’s obviously an argument to be had (on Aristotelian lines) about whether a person can both be great and do really bad things, though the further back in time one goes the easier it seems to be to reconcile judgements of greatness with the fact of a historical figure having committed atrocities or other acts of cruelty (e.g. Alexander the Great, Cromwell).

But I was also appalled by the fact that the so-called left-wing bloggers were, for want of a better word, chicken. Their list contained no leading figures from the international communist and socialist movements at all, and yet quite a few of them warrant serious consideration. Jean Jaures, French socialist opponent of war, murdered on the eve of the first world war, for one. And how about Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, again, socialist opponents of the war, murdered by the neo-fascist Freikorps in 1919? I’d even make the case for Lenin and Trotsky. The leftists have voted, safely and reasonably enough, for Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King jr. Fair enough, but I’d have thought Ho Chi Minh and Ben Bella were in with a shout. Yglesias bemoans the absence of theorists other than Orwell (who wasn’t). I concur: why were there no votes for Bertrand Russell (also a campaigner against WW1), Max Weber and Emile Durkeim (20th century figures both) or John Rawls? No doubt the prevalent francophobia meant that the right-wing crowd denied Charles de Gaulle his place. (And don’t get me started on the artists, writers and composers.)

UPDATE: (Thanks CY) There’s a long thread on this at Electrolite.

UPDATE UPDATE: Norman Geras posts the list he voted for and some reflections.

Pauline and I are just back from a ten-day holiday in Ireland. It was our first time there and we were impressed. It also turned out to be a pretty smart place to visit given the prevailing weather conditions: untypically there was hardly a drop of rain, but the temperatures were comfortable rather than lethally hot (as they were elswhere in Europe).

I may opine further on the country over the coming days, but given CT’s numerous Irish contingent, I’m sure to get slapped down by those with greater expertise. Without them, though, the holiday probably wouldn’t have happened and certainly wouldn’t have taken the form it did. Thanks first to Henry (and family), whom we were lucky enough to meet up with and enjoy a wonderful lunch of Killorglin smoked salmon provided by his mum, which we followed by an exciting drive across the Kerry mountains. Here’s a partial Crooked Timber team photo in Kerry (Henry is the tall, handsome one).

And thanks to Kieran, whose post last year about Newgrange set me thinking about visiting Ireland. Newgrange is a remarkable and magical place which puts Stonehenge in the shade. 5200 years old, perfectly aligned with the sun for the winter solstice, and absolutely dry inside after five millennia. What an achievement.

Maureen Dowd writes today about how bland and trite US political bloggers have been to date, and how it heralds the death of the internet. Right.

It’s true, blogs by Tom Daschle, Howard Dean, John Kerry, etc. are just another outlet for relentless campaign-speak. Even Dean’s guest spot on Lessig’s blog was dull, dull, dull. All that talk about political blogging opening up new opportunities for ‘engagement’, ‘debate’, and creating a truly participatory democracy etc. etc. is a bit of a nonsense when you think of how risk-averse the average candidate is. But before we worry that blogging is being taken over by The Establishment, let’s consider; are these people really bloggers at all?

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