“Dan Drezner”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/000756.html and I are co-writing an academic paper on blogging and politics – if you’re a journalist, columnist, commentator, producer, or editor for a newspaper, magazine, or television station, we’d appreciate your help. We’d be grateful if you could take two minutes to send an email to ddrezner@hotmail.com with answers to the following five questions:

1) How many blogs do you read a day?

2) Please name the three blogs you read most frequently. [What if you read less than three? Then just name the ones you do read.]

3) Why do you read the blogs you read? In other words, what makes those blogs worth checking out on a regular basis?

4) Have you ever read something on a blog that affected your decision-making on what to air/publish? If the answer is yes, can you give an example?

5) How much influence do you think blogs have on political discourse? A lot, a little, or none at all?

All answers will be kept confidential unless you give us explicit permission to do otherwise in your email. Dan has also posted our “working definition”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/000754.html of what a blog is – comments and suggestions gratefully appreciated.

Thanks!

There’s been much blogospherical and press comment about the recent report that capuchin monkeys have a built-in sense of fairness. In case anyone missed the story here’s “Adam Cohen’s summary in the New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/21/opinion/21SUN3.html?ex=1064721600&en=64f9933e4a7be38d&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE :

bq. Give a capuchin monkey a cucumber slice, and she will eagerly trade a small pebble for it. But when a second monkey, in an adjoining cage, receives a more-desirable grape for the same pebble, it changes everything. The first monkey will then reject her cucumber, and sometimes throw it out of the cage. Monkeys rarely refuse food, but in this case they appear to be pursuing an even higher value than eating: fairness.

bq. The capuchin monkey study, published last week in Nature, has generated a lot of interest for a scant three-page report buried in the journal’s letters section. There is, certainly, a risk of reading too much into the feeding habits of 10 research monkeys. But in a week when fairness was so evidently on the ropes — from the World Trade Organization meeting in Cancún, which poor nations walked out of in frustration, to the latest issue of Forbes, reporting that the richest 400 Americans are worth $955 billion — the capuchin monkeys offered a glimmer of hope from the primate gene pool.

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I mentioned Caroline Bradley and Michael Froomkin’s “paper”:http://intel.si.umich.edu/tprc/papers/2003/240/VirtualReal.pdf on law in MMORPGs (massively multi-player online role-playing games) earlier today. Its argument is straightforward – these online communities offer a nice way to test legal scholars’ (and social scientists’) arguments about how different rules will affect behaviour and exchange. By looking at how this or that rule in an online game affects how players behave online, we can (with plenty of provisos and cautionary footnotes) reach interesting conclusions about social behaviour more generally.

My tuppence worth: one theory has already been ‘tested’ in this way; the argument that easing restrictions on weapons and their use will lead to a drop in violent crime. If you grant the assumption that MMORPGs are analogous to everyday life (a whopping assumption to be granting, I’ll admit), then the evidence is unequivocal. A society where each can use weapons against each without restriction is likely to deteriorate into Hobbesian anarchy. People will positively beg for a Leviathan to come in and put an end to the Warre of All against All.

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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.

Via Kai von Fintel, I see there’s a new blog Language Log being run by four very talented linguists. I was very pleased to see that Geoff Pullum, author of my favourite academic book, agrees with me about the learned/said controversy that erupted here soon after CT opened.

As Terry at Nitpicker reveals, Robert Novak and Matt Drudge are stepping up to the plate to smear Wesley Clark on factually untrue grounds. This is really awful.

Here’s Novak:

Clark was a three-star lieutenant general who directed strategic plans and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. On Aug. 26, 1994, in the northern Bosnian city of Banja Luka, he met and exchanged gifts with the notorious Bosnian Serb commander and indicted war criminal, Gen. Ratko Mladic. The meeting took place against the State Department’s wishes, and may have contributed to Clark’s failure to be promoted until political pressure intervened. The shocking photo of Mladic and Clark wearing each other’s military caps was distributed throughout Europe.

Matt Drudge has this photo front and center at his page right now, with the caption “GENERAL CLARK WORE BOSNIAN WAR CRIMINAL’S MILITARY CAP”.

How could Wesley Clark smile for a photo and exchange gifts with an indicted war criminal? Well, he didn’t. Here’s the chronology:

Aug. 26, 1994: Clark and Mladic meet, and the photo (sorry, the “shocking” photo) is taken.

July 6- July 21, 1995: Bosnian Serbs under the command of Mladic begin their assault on the safe area of Srebrenica, killing or expelling 15,000 Bosnian Muslims. Many surrender, after being falsely promised prisoner of war status, and are slaughtered in mass graves.

November 14, 1995: For the Srebrenica massacre, Mladic is indicted for genocide and crimes against humanity.

Novak is seriously distorting the facts to make his claim. To say that Clark took this photo and exchanged gifts with an indicted war criminal is just not true. It’s like blasting the producers of the “Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out” Nintendo game for using a convicted rapist as their spokesperson. When they made the game, he wasn’t a convicted rapist.

Then there’s this, from Novak’s column:

Clark attributed one comment to a Middle East “think tank” in Canada, although there appears to be no such organization.

Novak is wrong. A quick Google search reveals the appearance of such organizations, such as the B’Nai Brith Canada Institute for International Affairs, the Inter-University Consortium for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies, the Canadian-Arab Federation, the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, and the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

This is a shameful column, and it’s only going to get worse. I know this is an old point, but it’s worth making again: Al Gore is not the President because no one fought hard enough against garbage like this. No one else is going to do it but us.

Robert Novak’s email is: novakevans@aol.com

Matt Drudge’s email is: drudge@drudgereport.com

The letter to the editor at the Sun-Times address is: letters@suntimes.com

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.

I’ve been working for a while on a paper that argues for a “sufficientarian” criterion for the problem of global justice. Sufficientarianism (horrible word) is the notion that what matters, normatively speaking, is not the the pattern of distribution of whatever currency we think is important (welfare, resources, capabilities, whatever…) but that everyone gets beyond a certain threshold. Not that inequality of income, say, ceases to be important because once we focus on the dimension in which we want people to achieve sufficiency it often turns out that distributive patterns impact on their ability to meet the relevant threshold.

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Following yesterday’s news about Jupiter, CNN turns its attentions to Munich:

You can see all 5.5 liters in the photo. Thus we continue our culinary theme today at CT. Coming soon, Cooking with Crooked Timber — “To each according to his kneads, from each according to his Mille-Feuilles.”

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!“

Chris’s post below notes some disturbing ways in which Amazon seems to be backing out of the academic bookselling business. This would really be too bad if it happened, because online booksellers have been a boon for people wanting access to academic books but without access to New York quality bookstores. So just to make people feel a little better about Amazon’s business plans, you can, in America at least, get a Journal of Philosophy subscription through Amazon. I was rather surprised by this, and it’s a kind of involvement with academic publishing that I hadn’t expected at all from Amazon.

If there starts being competitive distribution of academic journals, this could really put downward pressure on prices. (Of course, I get all of these journals for free through my department, but not everyone has jobs which allow them access to all the journals they want, and this kind of development could be good news for them.)

Technical standards are dull stuff for the most part; engineers or techies talking to other engineers or techies about the appropriate ways to implement this or that. While the politics of standard-setting is interesting in its own right^1^, it usually isn’t a very _political_ kind of politics. Here comes a prominent exception.

Via “Cory”:http://boingboing.net/2003_09_01_archive.html#106401808835764965 at BoingBoing: the Electronic Frontiers Foundation (EFF) has issued a “call to arms”:http://www.eff.org/Activism/E-voting/IEEE/ over voting machine standards. According to the EFF, various vested interests are trying to push through a weak standard for voting machines in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). If the EFF is right, this isn’t just an argument over technical issues; it has potentially serious consequences for politics and vote-fraud.

So what exactly is going on here?

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The funny thing is, it’s kind of true about the robot ship death crash, though I wouldn’t have put it that way myself. Or maybe the skateboard generation is also gaining influence over CNN’s subeditors.

A blog calling itself “the unofficial Bush-Cheney campaign blog” has followed much of the right-wing media (like here and here) in reporting some comments Bruce Springsteen recently made at a concert in Washington. Under the heading “More Signs the Left Is Just Losing It” is the following: “At his Fed-Ex Field concert last weekend, Bruce Springsteen said Bush “ought to be impeached and started chanting, ‘Impeach, impeach.’ But the call was not picked up by the multitude, some of whom even began to boo.”

The obvious comeback is: they weren’t saying “boo” they were saying “Bruce”.

But whatever they were saying (most reports didn’t hear anything), and whether or not the comments reflected Bruce’s true views, they were obviously a joke. He was laughing when he said it!

For over two decades, Bruce has introduced his sax player Clarence Clemons as (among other things) “the next President of the United States”. He even did this at a concert in 1999, with Al Gore in the audience. I wasn’t in Washington, but here’s a report of Bruce’s introduction of Clarence (taken from a usenet group):

Bruce said, “It’s time, it’s time to impeach the president and get someone in there who knows what the f*ck they’re doing! – Clarence ‘Big Man’ Clemons!” After the applause, Bruce continued joking, “impeach him! Throw him out! Dick Cheney too!” as Clarence and Bruce were making the baseball ‘you’re out!’ hand gestures.

Often, Bruce has serious points to make in concert. For example, when introducing “Born in the U.S.A.” over the past year, he often used a variation of this line, which he said on March 6, 2003: “I wrote this song back in the early 80s about the Vietnam War. I hope I don’t have to write it again. I’m gonna send it out tonight as a prayer for peace, for the safety of our sons and daughters and the innocent Iraqi civilians.” That was no joke.

And they say liberals have no sense of humor.