Alan Johnson of Labour Friends of Iraq emails to tell me of a new online journal he’s editing, “Democratiya”:http://www.democratiya.com/default.asp . It won’t be any great secret around here that we’ve not exactly seen eye-to-eye recently with people who call themselves the “pro-liberation” left (or similar). But Demokratiya includes writings from some people who didn’t think the war was such a great idea, such as Gideon Calder (who has an “interesting review of Walzer on war”:http://www.democratiya.com/details.asp?id=2 ), and involves some others whom I continue to like and respect. And I certainly share with them the hope (against hope) that Iraq somehow turns into a flourishing democracy. So surf over there and take a look.

I hesitate to come over all Mel P here, but I was astonished to read “the following bit of opportunism”:http://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/breaking/view=newsarticle.law?GAZETTENEWSID=252206 in the Law Society Gazette from the Solicitors’ Pro Bono Group:

bq. The government should not profit from compensation payments made to victims of the London bombings when its own policies may have contributed to the attacks, the Solicitors Pro Bono Group (SPBG) claimed last week. SPBG acting chief executive Robert Gill said that lawyers had not provided advice to victims free of charge ‘so that the government could save money’. ….

bq. ‘It is normal for CICA payments to be taken off benefits, but in these circumstances it should be different. It is about a particular set of actions which in part were brought about by the fact that Britain has taken a prominent role in Iraq – which was a government decision. Government action is part of the reason [for the events], so it is not fair that the government should benefit from private citizens who are injured.’

The government quite reasonably insists that the same rules apply for all Criminal Injuries compensation cases and that bomb victims should be treated the same as everyone else.

“Tyler Cowen”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/09/selfexperimenta.html at Marginal Revolution has some interesting things to say about his experiment in allowing comments on his blog.

1. Visitor stats rise considerably. But this happens so quickly, I believe it is people hitting “reload” to read additional comments, rather than more readers.

2. The more that comments are regularly available, the more rapidly the quality of comments falls. The quality of comments stays high when it is periodic, not automatic, and when we request comments specifically.

3. The quality of comments is highest when the matter under consideration involves particular facts and decentralized knowledge. Posts which mention evolution, free will, or Paul Krugman do not generate the highest quality of comments.

So my current sense (Alex chooses his own course, though I believe he agrees) is to ask for comments periodically rather than always having comments open. The goal is to maximize the real value of comments, rather than the number of comments (or measured visits) per se.

Which of these specific claims can be universalized? Speaking, like Tyler, from personal experience, it seems to me that his observations on visitor stats are probably generally true. The relationship between the general availability of comments, and the quality of the comments falling in particular varies considerably from blog to blog. _Making Light_ has been extraordinarily successful in building up a community of commenters with interesting things to say (it has a homier feel than most comment sections; everyone mostly knows each other). The argument that more commenters=less interesting discussions has a lot of truth to it – there is very clearly a Gresham’s law effect, where bad commenters drive out good ones. Which suggests (and again _Making Light_ illustrates this well) that a vigorous moderation policy can help counteract the negative effects of growth. Finally, Tyler may be on to something when he talks about specific facts and decentralized knowledge – but there’s another factor there which I think is even more important. That’s the extent to which there is minimal agreement on a shared set of facts in the first place. Where there isn’t – and where there’s strongly opposed viewpoints – blog comments sections tend to break down rapidly. For Tyler, it’s Paul Krugman; for us, it’s the Israel-Palestine question (where I don’t allow comments any more on the rare occasions that I post ). But even here, Jonathan Edelstein’s Head Heeb seems to succeed in hosting generally civil discussions – I suspect that this is another example of the community effect – the commenters are a group of people who seem to have come to know each other over time, and have a good sense of the ground rules of debate. But enough rabbitting on; over to you.

A serious problem with content filters – whether add-on software or the “safe” search mode of systems – is that they often block legitimate content that should not be filtered out. These false positives can include important information that most would have a hard time defending as harmful. Paul Resnick and colleagues have done some interesting work on this regarding filtered health information.

Now comes to us a helpful little tool (found through ResearchBuzz) that lets you run searches to see what content is blocked in the safe-search modes of Google and Yahoo!. Type in a search term and see what sites would be excluded from the results when running the safe mode on the two engines.

Curiously, Google blocks the TheBreastCancerSite.com when you turn to safe mode for a search on “breast cancer” while Yahoo! doesn’t. (The Breast Cancer Site does not seem to have objectionable material, its noted mission is to raise funds for free mammograms.)

By the way, Google’s and Yahoo!’s results can be quite different regardless of what gets filtered. Dogpile has a nifty little tool that visualizes some of the differences. I discussed it here while guest-blogging over at Lifehacker a few weeks ago.

I agree entirely with Henry that blogging can be extremely useful for an young academic career, although perhaps not for exactly the same reasons.
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There’s been a lot of back-and-forth in Italy recently about the role of the governor of the Bank of Italy in blocking a foreign takeover of a domestic bank, and possibly showing favouritism to one of his mates in the process. This is creating a rift in the main government party, Forza Italia, between those (led by economy minister Domenico Siniscalco) who want to try to force him to resign, and those (including Berlusconi) who are trying to duck the issue. But there’s an accompanying story which, as far as I know, has received zero attention in the American press. A prominent member of Forza Italia has come out with his theory of why foreign bankers want to come to Italy – a conspiracy among the Elders of Zion. According to this “editorial”:http://www.corriere.it/Primo_Piano/Editoriali/2005/09_Settembre/13/quando.shtml (English version “here”:http://www.corriere.it/english/editoriali/Riotta/130905.shtml ) in _Corriere della Sera_, Guido Crosetto, a member of the Italian parliament’s finance committee, has announced that the Italian banking sector is (my translation) “proving tempting to many, above all to the hordes of Jewish and American freemasons who are already at the doors.” When asked to clarify, he “limited himself to pointing out that Merrill Lynch was ‘a particular institution in which the shareholders were specifically Jews.'”

I don’t need to stress how disgusting this is. But it’s also a little strange that it hasn’t been picked up in the US press and blogosphere (the Italian media didn’t do a great job either until the last day or two). There’s a minor cottage industry that tries (sometimes on the basis of quite remarkably dubious evidence) to identify instances of West European anti-Semitism, usually in order to insinuate that it’s the motivation behind European policies on the Middle East. But as a result, it focuses its attentions either on the European left, or on right-wingers (such as the French government) who opposed the Iraq war. The patently anti-Semitic outbursts of a politician in a party that’s one of the Bush administration’s few allies in Western Europe apparently don’t merit the same level of attention, just as Berlusconi’s own comments about “Mussolini’s prison camps”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/09/11/he-made-the-trains-run-on-time-you-know/ and his notorious cracks about concentration camp kapos were greeted with silence from the right.

Update: translation slightly modified and English version of editorial added thanks to comments.

“Ralph Luker”:http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/15702.html has a round-up post of reactions to the second “Ivan Tribble” “missive”:http://chronicle.com/jobs/2005/09/2005090201c.htm on blogging and academia. This is something that I’ll be speaking to substantively in the near future in a longer piece; for the moment, I just want to observe that blogging has been helpful in a very practical but unexpected way to my academic career. I moved last year from the University of Toronto to George Washington University (I loved Toronto and the university, but had good personal reasons, unconnected to the Department, to move). I know for a fact that my blogging at Crooked Timber played a minor (but real) role in helping me land my current job – one of the people involved in the job search for a new position was a CT reader, clicked through to my homepage, and saw that my research interests seemed a plausible fit with the Department’s needs. I suspect that the blog only played a marginal role in helping bring me to the attention of my current Department, but when you are one of many people applying for a job, every bit of name recognition helps. I can easily imagine how some kinds of blogging wouldn’t be helpful – but the vast majority of academic blogs that I read don’t fit into the rather peculiar stereotype that Tribble seems keen to perpetuate.

The European Parliament has just launched a fantastic new website that should be a model for any similar organisation. It has a snappy design, great navigability, and the breadth and depth to accommodate casual surfers and political hacks. The news page is particularly inviting and informative, and gives a sense of the sheer range and volume of vital issues going through parliament at any given moment. You can look up MEPs’ motions, resolutions and reports (a feature sorely missing from the old website), and also get a live video stream of the main parliamentary events of the day. There was a roundtable discussion on blogging on Monday that looked interesting – but they don’t seem to be archiving this stuff yet (I’ve emailed a question to the webmaster and will post the response in the comments thread if I get one soon enough.). Oh, and it’s available in 20 languages too.

I hope the EP can keep up the work to sustain this enormous but beautifully user-friendly website. It’s a huge step in keeping the institution closer to the people it serves. Next time you meet someone who says it’s all just too complicated and impossible to follow, give them this url. There are no more excuses for being unengaged.

Update: Oh dear, the English version homepage of the website is unavailable – teething problems, I presume. Deep links still work, so I’ve replaced the two links in this piece to the EP homepage with one to an internal page.

A column by Mikita Brottman in the “Chronicle”:http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i04/04b00701.htm contends that

bq. It has often been observed that the more prodigious the intellect, the more it can compromise other aspects of the personality, such as self-awareness and social grace … All vocations attract certain personality types; academe appeals particularly to introspective, narcissistic, obsessive characters who occasionally suffer from mood disorders or other psychological problems.

The piece is pretty bad, and in places is a bit stupid — John Nash is cited as an example of a “forgetful genius,” when in fact he has been mentally ill for much of his life. But it did bring to mind A.J. Liebling’s remark that the University of Chicago constituted “the biggest collection of juvenile neurotics since the children’s crusade.” (With apologies to Dan, Jacob, et al.) I notice also that Brottman contends that “Eccentric characters seem particularly common in those departments known for the more abstract realms of thought, like … most often, philosophy, the field of notorious oddballs.” Moreover, she says people with Asperger’s Syndrome — a condition freely and confidently diagnosed by amateur psychiatrists everywhere, like ADD — are characterized by their “persistent preoccupation with parts of objects.” As it happens, my “wife”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lapaul/ is a notorious oddball philosopher, and is presently writing an entire book about “parts”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lapaul/papers/logical-parts.pdf of “objects”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lapaul/papers/ajp.pdf. Hmm.

Turns out that some of those “Godfearing, family values penguins”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/13/science/13peng.html?ex=1284264000&en=36efde9c1de3fa22&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss may be “playing for the other team”:http://www.jrn.columbia.edu/studentwork/cns/2002-06-10/591.asp.

(via “Max”:http://maxspeak.org/mt/archives/001605.html).

The blogosphere ecosystem just lost a bit of its biodiversity with John Band’s decision to shut down “Shot by Both Sides”:http://www.stalinism.com/shot-by-both-sides/ . I’ve alternately enjoyed and been infuriated by John’s blog and he’s certainly been a major irritant to the decent smug and self-satisfied former left and the samizdatistas. Both Daniel and I were regular commenters on John’s site and I’ll miss the mix of friendly repartee and ill-tempered invective there. Still, there’s an upside: John says he’ll be writing more at the excellent “Sharpener”:http://thesharpener.net/ . Go to read him there.

I haven’t been following the buildup to the Roberts hearings closely, but today, “via Bitch PhD”:http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/2005/09/and-theyre-off.html, I see this analysis from the NYRB:

Roberts was in favor of limiting the progress of African-Americans in participating in the political process and of making far-reaching changes in the constitutional role of the courts in protecting rights. … Roberts conceded that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment could pose a formidable barrier to legislation intended to strip the federal courts of jurisdiction over cases involving school desegregation. But, he noted, the problem might be surmounted, since strict scrutiny would be applied only if there were “racial classification,” and the legislation in question would only classify cases by type, i.e., not “race” but “school desegregation.” Giving state courts the final say over school desegregation, he added, *would not involve unequal treatment because white officials as well as black groups would lack the right to appeal*. … Nowhere in any of the memos that have been made available did John Roberts acknowledge the effect of the many years of disenfranchisement on black citizens. Instead his concern was about the effect of an imagined quota system on whites, a concern that twenty-five years later has proved to be groundless. (Emphasis added.)

I’d be interested to see the original text that this paraphrases. It looks like it was just lifted directly from Anatole France: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets or steal bread.” Or sue under the fourteenth amendment. It’s hard to imagine someone with an education like Roberts’ writing that sentence and not immediately thinking of France’s epigram. Maybe he smirked.

Kevin Drum “says”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_09/007112.php:

bq. The fact is, conservatives haven’t won much of anything in the last 10 years except a PR triumph. Their biggest successes have been on taxes — a Pyrrhic victory at best without corresponding spending cuts — and in the court system, which hasn’t actually delivered much real world benefit. Plus they have a war in Iraq, for whatever that’s worth. Public opinion simply hasn’t allowed them anything more.

I think that this misunderstands what has been happening these last few years. I’m reading Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s _Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy_ (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/s?kw=Off%20Center%3A%20The%20Republican%20Revolution&PID=29956, “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&camp=1789&tag=henryfarrell-20&creative=9325&path=tg/detail/-/0300108702/qid=1126622313/sr=2-2/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_2?v=glance%26s=books) at the moment, and it’s very good on this topic.

bq. As is often noted, usually with a “gotcha” thrown in, the size of public spending under President Bush has _not_ fallen, even as tax revenues have plummeted. … And while Republicans are reducing the beast’s daily rations, they are asking it to do more things – from new subsidies for corporations and rich investors to new drug benefits for the aged to trillions in potential borrowing to establish private accounts for the Social Security system. Some say this means the Republican revolution never happened. The truth is more complex. Although Republicans have not starved the beast in the short run, they are putting it on a very specific diet that is transforming the role of government in American life. This special diet is not principally aimed at making government larger or smaller, at least in the short term. It is aimed at tilting the balance of benefits and protections – usually away from ordinary Americans and toward the well off, the well connected and the Republican base … Plus, the day of budgetary reckoning _will_ come. The Republican innovation has been to separate the pleasant business of cutting taxes from the unpleasant business of slashing popular social programs. But if the Republicans continue to cut taxes, or even simply maintain existing tax reductions, the unpleasantness is coming. And it will be especially painful for those who value the popular government programs likely to come under the knife.

Update: See also “Brad Plumer”:http://plumer.blogspot.com/2005_09_01_plumer_archive.html#112660240377724548.

Henry pointed me to this Financial Times report of an interview (over lunch) with rightwing Australian historian Keith Windschuttle, which begins with Windschuttle saying he regrets his involvement in the dispute over Australia’s Aboriginal history, seeing as a distraction from his ambition to write a polemical defence of Western civilisation, aimed at the US market, and make heaps of money in the process.

”If you have a reasonably big hit in America you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he says. “That’s my aim – to have a couple of big sellers and have a leisurely life.”

It is unclear how much of this is intended as tongue-in-cheek affectation, but it’s certainly consistent with notable elements of Windschuttle’s past career, which has been marked by repeated political and methodological somersaults.

Although a lot of attention has been focused on Windschuttle’s political jump from Marxist left to Christian right, I’ve always been more interested in his shift in methodological stance. Having made his name as a defender of objective truth against politicised history in both left-wing and right-wing varieties, Windschuttle has become a practitioner of an extreme form of politicised history, and now looks ready to abandon any remaining links to the world of fact.

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