I am reviewing data about blog authors and blog readers (I don’t just mean aggregate numbers but specific demographic info about them). As far as I know there have been few systematic studies of these questions. The recent data memo by the Pew Internet and American Life Project has some helpful figures as does their earlier report on Content Creation Online (p.5.). Some have collected related data by analyzing blogs. We also have some information from reports by commercial firms. Plus we have some figures from informal surveys conducted online, but unfortunately these are not at all representative. I want to make sure I haven’t missed anything. Please point me to additional sources that come to mind. Thanks.

A little off-topic, but this is a promotional photo from the off-Broadway show COOKIN’!

They’re all playing cooks. In the show, they’re cooking a big Korean dinner, rhythmically. (Contain your excitement. CONTAIN IT!) And they put the woman in a chef’s coat with the belly cut out. You know, where the burners are.

I can’t even begin to express how stupid that is.

Direct him or her to “Scott McLemee’s”:http://www.mclemee.com/id4.html speculations about where Rand got her ideas (Scott doesn’t do permalinks – so if this link decays rapidly, don’t blame me).

In the conclusion to his “state of the union address”:http://mywebpages.comcast.net/duncanblack/sotu.txt last night, President Bush invoked Franklin Roosevelt’s words from his second inaugural: “each age is a dream
that is dying, or one that is coming to birth.” Here’s a bit more from that speech by FDR:

Instinctively we recognized a deeper need-the need to find through government the instrument of our united purpose to solve for the individual the ever-rising problems of a complex civilization. Repeated attempts at their solution without the aid of government had left us baffled and bewildered. For, without that aid, we had been unable to create those moral controls over the services of science which are necessary to make science a useful servant instead of a ruthless master of mankind. To do this we knew that we must find practical controls over blind economic forces and blindly selfish men.

We of the Republic sensed the truth that democratic government has innate capacity to protect its people against disasters once considered inevitable, to solve problems once considered unsolvable. We would not admit that we could not find a way to master economic epidemics just as, after centuries of fatalistic suffering, we had found a way to master epidemics of disease. We refused to leave the problems of our common welfare to be solved by the winds of chance and the hurricanes of disaster. …

In fact, in these last four years, we have made the exercise of all power more democratic; for we have begun to bring private autocratic powers into their proper subordination to the public’s government. The legend that they were invincible-above and beyond the processes of a democracy-has been shattered. They have been challenged and beaten. …

In that purpose we have been helped by achievements of mind and spirit. Old truths have been relearned; untruths have been unlearned. We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics. Out of the collapse of a prosperity whose builders boasted their practicality has come the conviction that in the long run economic morality pays. We are beginning to wipe out the line that divides the practical from the ideal; and in so doing we are fashioning an instrument of unimagined power for the establishment of a morally better world.

As they say on the internets, “read the whole thing”:http://www.search.eb.com/elections/pri/Q00114.html.

In his push for Social Security privatization choicepersonal accounts abolition, George Bush is raising the prospect that, some time around 2050, Social Security will go bankrupt. This claim has been refuted quite a few times, so let me raise a different answer.

If you’re a young working-age American, don’t routinely pay your credit card balance(s) down to zero each month, and don’t have top-flight health insurance, it’s odds-on, based on recent experience[1] that you’ll go bankrupt at some point.

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I meant to blog a couple of weeks ago about the EU’s decision to end sanctions against Cuba and accede to a Cuban government veto on invitations of opposition figures to Embassy parties. Now I see via “Jim Lindgren”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_02_00.shtml#1107363948 that Vaclav Havel has condemned the EU’s action. Quite right too – but unfortunately the EU seems to have gone rather cool on democracy promotion across at least three fronts at once. In addition to Cuba, there’s the EU’s relationship with Iran. Here, the EU has effectively sidelined demands for greater democracy in favour of concentrating on the nuclear security issue. In its relations with China, the EU is abandoning the post-Tianamen arms embargo for no better apparent reason than to boost trade, and make nice with a rising power. Of course, it’s still interested in democracy promotion in its own back yard (various bits of Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean region), where it has a clear selfish interest in stabilizing wobbly governments, slowing down immigration flows etc.

It seems to me that there are three plausible explanations of what’s going on.

(1) Pure coincidence. It could be that this is just a random conjunction of three unrelated events. In favour of this theory – the changes in policy are being pushed by different coalitions of states within the EU. Spain has been pushing the change in Cuba policy, France the change in China policy, and a troika of France, Germany and the UK (with the tacit support of most other EU states) have been reshaping Iran policy. But still, it seems a little odd that these different policies would all change in the same direction within a relatively short period of time.

(2) A sea-change in the EU’s _raison d’etre_. A large part of the EU’s self-image is bound up in the idea that it represents an alternative order to the wars that ravaged mainland Europe in the first half of the last century, which is based on mutual coexistence and the spread of democratic norms. Critics like Robert Kagan have been telling the EU for a long while that it needs to wake up, and realize that it’s been leading a sheltered existence – its model depended on a unique set of historical circumstances. Maybe the EU is beginning to smell the coffee.

(3) A variant of old fashioned balancing. The EU (and its constituent states) are pushing back against US dominance, by (a) seeking new friends which give it new options vis-a-vis the US, and (b) demonstrating in the process that it isn’t to be taken for granted by the hegemonic power. As a side-effect, this means that the EU is less inclined to push for democracy, except where it’s demonstrably in its own self-interest to do so (i.e. around its own borders, or where it’s not liable to annoy potential friends).

My personal inclination is to plump for (3) as the most likely explanation of what’s going on. Which is personally disappointing for those, like me, who’d like to see the EU to continue to work seriously to promote democracy (it actually did pretty good work in Cuba back in the day). But the other two possible explanations have some merit too (as I’m sure do others that I haven’t thought of).

Update: “Quentin Peel”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/b30a6d44-754f-11d9-9608-00000e2511c8.html has an interesting article on EU policy toward China today (sub. required) – he seems to plump for a mixture of 1 and 3, with 1 dominating.

Nick Barlow has the details on the new political party “Veritas”, launched by former TV presenter Robert Kilroy-Silk (Yanks; kind of like Jerry Springer meets Tucker Carlson, uptown!). I hope he will form some sort of bloc with the Ulster Unionists, simply because I’ve been saving up an “Orangeman” joke for that eventuality for the last three years.

Below the fold I reproduce (with minor editing) an old D-squared Digest post, explaining why these parties are doomed, and why it’s a big mistake for Kilroy et al to extrapolate from their strong showings in European and local council elections to any hope of not getting carted out at a General Election. This analysis generalises, by the way, and that is why (full disclosure time) I have a chunky bet on Oona King to keep her seat in a two-way fight against George Galloway. As and when a spread betting market opens up, I will be a seller of Kilroy-Silk’s chances, in reasonable size.

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Heavy blog readers know that Glenn Reynolds has picked an obscure wanker and dubbed him “The Authentic Face of the Left”. I can scarcely imagine a more dignified and convincing form of argument; not since a particularly devastating eighth grade game of “That’s Your Girlfriend” have I been so ashamed. (Hilzoy is not so contrite, for some reason.)

But has Reynolds picked the right target? It takes a very particular individual to represent the authentic face of roughly 40% of all Americans. I think that we can do better.

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Via “Political Theory Daily Review”:http://www.politicaltheory.info/, a “review”:http://context.themoscowtimes.com/story/139588/ of Robert Conquest’s new book, _The Dragons of Expectation_ which apparently makes some rather outrageous claims in the course of a general attack on leftist academics and internationalists. I haven’t read the book yet (I’m trying to get my hands on a copy),[1] but if the reviewer is quoting him accurately, Conquest argues that a fair portion of the blame for September 11 can be laid at the feet of left-leaning professors. The reviewer quotes from Conquest’s introduction:

bq. “And we are told that a number of members of the Middle Eastern terror groups had originally been in the local communist movements … The members of [the Real IRA and the Shining Path], as with those in Italy or, for example, the Naxalites in India, were almost entirely recruited from student elements who had accepted the abstractions of fashionable academics. And the September 11 bombers were almost all comfortably off young men, some having been to Western universities and there adopted the extremely anti-Western mind-set.”

According to the reviewer, Conquest doesn’t bother even to try to provide any evidence in support of this accusation.

There’s an interesting juxtaposition between this and the “disgusting efforts”:http://instapundit.com/archives/020810.php of Glenn Reynolds and others to use Ward Churchill’s comments as a means to smear the left. On the one hand, Conquest’s language and claims are less inflammatory and offensive than Churchill’s. On the other, Conquest is one of the right’s most senior and respected figures, a fellow of the Hoover Institute, and a key player in the Anglo-American right’s intellectual network. Churchill, in comparison, is a relative nobody who represents no-one except himself. I’ve always had a fondness for Conquest; he was dead right on Stalinism, and he comes across as a very human figure (and a first rate composer of limericks and light verse) in his letters to Kingsley Amis. But if he’s seriously trying to claim, on the basis of no apparent evidence, that leftwing professors in Western universities shoulder some of the blame for September 11, he should be deeply ashamed of himself. It’s a vicious, disgraceful slur, and it’s every bit as unacceptable as the claim that the West and the US had September 11 coming to them. Still, I don’t think that Reynolds or any of his cronies will be following their advice to the left and disassociating themselves from Conquest (indeed, judging by Reynolds’ dishonest and hate-filled post, I wouldn’t be surprised if he agrees with Conquest’s claims).

Update: to be quite clear (there’s already one “rather bizarre misinterpretation”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/006239.php out there in the blogosphere), Conquest isn’t referring in this passage to Western ideas percolating through into radical Islam in some indirect fashion. First, he draws a link between “the abstractions of fashionable academics” and the propensity of the students accepting those abstractions to then become terrorists. Then, in the very next sentence, he asserts a direct connection between the fact that some of the 9/11 terrorists attended Western universities, and the fact that they absorbed an anti-Western mindset. In the absence of any evidence of a connection between what the 9/11 terrorists were taught in Western universities, and what they then did, this is a slur, clear and simple.

Update 2: “Armed Liberal” “replies”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/006252.php (or, more precisely, purports to reply) to my post.

fn1. If, when I get the book, I find that the reviewer has seriously misrepresented Conquest, I’ll very happily apologize – however, given the unambiguous slur in the quote above, I don’t expect that I’ll be in a position where I need to.

Somehow I missed “this appalling sequence of photographs”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/05/middle_east_shooting_in_tal_afar/html/1.stm of a shooting in Iraq a few days ago, probably because they were running in newspapers outside the U.S. on inauguration day. I want to know whether any of them — especially “this one”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/05/middle_east_shooting_in_tal_afar/html/3.stm — ran anywhere in the U.S. media?

Look, I know I’m asking for trouble. I don’t want the comments to degenerate into angry whataboutery. All kinds of terrible things happen — purposely and by accident — in war zones. These photos are just awful. That’s all.

We’re dealing with a flood of trackback spam this morning. Sorry for even more inconvenience than usual. We will get around to upgrading eventually, even though my past self wisely tells me “not to”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001967.html.

I’m very excited about the launch of “Inside Higher Ed”:http://www.insidehighered.com/, a new web-based publication with “news, opinion and career advice and services for all of higher education.” This is, of course, not entirely dissimilar from what the “Chronicle of Higher Education”:http://chronicle.com/ has been offering for many years, but there are some very important differences. The Chronicle has some great writers, but it’s primarily a print-based publication, and it shows. Most of the interesting web content is only available to subscribers. This is highly frustrating for bloggers, who don’t, as a rule, like to link to articles that most of their readers can’t access. Individuals within the _Chronicle_ are pretty understanding about this, but there is only so much that they can do. _IHE_ is beginning from a very different model, one which I think is much better designed to capitalize on the explosion of web-based discussion over the last three years. All their content is going to be free, which means that bloggers can link to their stories without a second thought. Furthermore, they’re deliberately seeking to integrate _IHE_ into the debates that are happening among blogs, highlighting and picking up on the more interesting discussions. They’ll also have a jobs service (which will be the bread-and-butter of the website), and a weekly email digest.

In short, I reckon that _IHE_ is going to be an extremely valuable resource for bloggers and non-blogging academics. It will provide the kinds of reporting and detailed analysis that bloggers themselves aren’t much good at. It’s worth noting that the people behind _IHE_ include Scott Jaschik, who was editor of the _Chronicle_ during its glory days, Doug Lederman, who has done some superb academic reporting and editing at the _Chronicle_ and elsewhere, and “Scott McLemee”:http://www.mclemee.com/id4.html, who will be their ‘Essayist-at-Large.’ Scott McL has his first “column”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/intellectual_affairs up today, where he describes the blogosphere as

bq. that agonistic realm routinely combining the best qualities of the academic seminar with the worst traits of talk radio

With any luck, _IHE_ will mean less talk radio, and more grounded discussion. As I’ve said, I’m excited.

As noted in previous posts, there has been a lot of triumphalism among pro-war bloggers about the success of the elections in Iraq and, even allowing for a low turnout in Sunni areas and the difficulties that lie ahead, it’s certainly the best news we’ve had for some time. But I’d be interested to know how many of these bloggers supported democratic elections a year ago, when Bremer was pushing a bizarre system of regional caucuses? A limited Google search found sympathy for Bremer’s plan from Belgravia Dispatch , den Beste and Winds of Change, but I couldn’t locate any premature democrats in the pro-war blogosphere. However, the collaborative power of blogreaders is better than Google, so I invite links. Ideally, I’d like examples of prowar bloggers rejecting Bremer’s plan and supporting Sistani’s call for elections. I’m happy to concede that anyone in this class is entitled to a bit of triumph today.

Update A better Google search “bremer sistani elections support blog” finds this from The Brothers Judd and this from Norm Geras. I’m not surprised to find Geras, whose support for the war has been based on more defensible arguments than most. I don’t know much about the Brothers Judd but they go up in my estimation for this. Still the general pattern is pretty clear. Most of those who are now crowing about the elections backed Bremer’s attempts to block them, while those who supported elections all along are mostly found among opponents of the war.

Crooked Timber aren’t the only lefties to be attacked for failing to celebrate the Iraqi elections before the sun hit the yardarm yesterday morning. Intrepid sleuth-columnist, “Justin Darr”:http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/darr/050130, of Renew America, is on the case. He outs “Stephen Bainbridge”:http://www.professorbainbridge.com/2005/01/im_a_what.html, that notorious “radical”:http://www.professorbainbridge.com/2005/01/soros.html and bête-noir of the “Republican establishment”:http://www.professorbainbridge.com/2005/01/howard_dean_hat.html, and Stephen Green, the saturnine Svengali behind Bolshevik agitprop collective “Vodkapundit”:http://www.vodkapundit.com, as undercover members of the “Let’s Pretend It Didn’t Happen Faction” of the allied Internet Liberal Bloggers of America.

bq. a group who broke with the traditional liberal habit of talking endlessly about anything so long as it can be twisted into a childish penis reference about Vice President Cheney, and said nothing.

Still, Mr. Darr is more charitable than Ms. Malkin – he acknowledges that there may be an innocent explanation for the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy’s failure to blog on Iraq by lunchtime.

bq. Perhaps it was unfair of me to look into their sites on Sunday afternoon when so many liberals are just beginning emerge from the drug induced haze of their traditional weekend medicinal marijuana benders.