Sources

My weekends are Tuesdays and Wednesdays, so I’m back in Albuquerque visiting and tying up some loose ends.  I was looking at the Albuquerque Journal this morning and saw on the front page an article about some recent difficulties at Los Alamos National Labs with an x-ray machine that inadvertently zapped one of its own interior parts, creating a big mess.  The Journal has an annoying paywall, so I can’t link to the article itself, but this post by the same reporter seems to be an early version of the story.  The reporter, John Fleck, seems to have first seen this on a blog, which was duly linked in the early blogpost version, but what I found interesting when reading the article is that he also cited the blog by name as his source for the story there, although most of the further details in the article came from a lab spokesman.

This is the first time I’ve seen an article in a (relatively) prominent mainstream newspaper cite a blog as a source for a story, and one on the front page, no less.  I know some of the more “reporterly” blogs such as TPM often complain that traditional media outlets steal their stories without crediting them, but this seems like an interesting and relatively new development, where a blog begins to fill the role usually occupied by behind-the-scenes tipsters but with the difference that a blog, unlike a tip, is public and available for anyone to see.  It allows a certain amount of additional accountability for the newspapers when their readers can personally check up on the sources for their articles and decide for themselves how accurately the newspapers are representing the information they’re getting.  It’s an interesting example of the complex and growing symbiosis between the blogosphere and the traditional media that goes well beyond the stereotypes each frequently promulgates about the other.

Another Reason I Haven’t Been Posting Much Here Lately

Allow me to introduce 1692 in America.  This is a project I’ve been working on for a while that will continue for the rest of the year.  It’s a day-by-day account of some important events that happened in 1692, described in blog posts on the equivalent dates in 2008.  Since today is April 4, which in 1692 was the Gregorian date of the civil new year, March 25, in England and its colonies, this seemed like a good time to unveil it.  Take a look and see what you think.

Nyah

Megan’s new comment policy is interesting, but I’m not really sure how successful this sort of thing is likely to be.  While endless nitpicking of everything one says is one of the persistent irritations of the blogging life (and trust me, it is), in some respects I think that critical attitude is essential to both the nature and the appeal of the medium.  Exposing one’s ideas and opinions in a public medium like this can be a useful way of testing them and seeing if they stand up to scrutiny and challenge, and having to answer questions forces one to refine and amend those ideas to make them either more accurate or more persuasive, depending on the purpose of putting them out there in the first place.  Banning criticism if it doesn’t come with independent added value seems like it would discourage a lot of the most interesting comments one is likely to get, since those who think the deepest thoughts often live the least interesting lives (or so I would like to think, anyway).  And besides, if people can’t pick apart one’s ideas in comments, they can always link to them in posts on their own blogs and say whatever they damn well please.  So, I remain skeptical that this policy is likely to help Megan in the long run, though I’m not always sure what exactly she wants out of her blog, so maybe she’ll find the new situation more congenial.  From my perspective, it’s hard to say.

Anyway, comment policies aside, Megan still gets most things exactly right.

Special Interests

What’s up with this?  Did Yglesias sell out to the Pliosaur Lobby or something?

Simplify

My recent time of involuntary separation from the internet has made me realize that I really don’t miss reading blogs that much when I go without them for a while.  This is a realization that I have every time I go through a period like this, but this time it seems strengthened a bit by the fact that I also just met a bunch of blog people, which was very nice but really reinforced for me the fact that I don’t actually have a whole lot in common with most of the other people who comment on the blogs where I comment and that, much as I do like them, they’re not going to be able to provide for me what I really want and need in terms of social interaction.

I just took a look at Unfogged, and six of the eight most recent posts were political in nature, all with dozens of comments.  For the past few months I’ve had a general policy of not reading Unfogged political threads, since all they do is upset me, and if there are going to be that many of them (as there often are), there’s not much point in me spending as much time there as I have been recently.  I doubt I’ll stop reading entirely, at least as long as I have a job that involves sitting at a desk for hours at a time waiting for the phone to ring, but I suspect my involvement at Unfogged will decline a bit in the near future.

I still don’t want to give up on Unfogged entirely, since when it’s good it’s still a lot of fun, but I’ve been finding the general tone there increasingly uncomfortable and it’s just not as fun as it used to be.  I’ll still post here, of course (and, indeed, my posting frequency may increase, though I make no promises), so if anyone wants to get in touch with me, the best ways are probably to comment here or send me an e-mail.

Despite all this, I really did enjoy meeting some of you this past weekend, and I do hope to keep in touch with you virtually.  You’re always welcome here.

Discomfort

To expand on this and this, after giving it some more thought I think what really bothers me is not so much disagreement (which is, after all, an unavoidable aspect of interacting with other people at all) as the tone that tends to accompany it at Unfogged.  It really does seem like the place is full of people who are determined to be gratuitously mean to each other as often as possible, even over the smallest and least important differences.  I can understand this to an extent in arguments about politics and other contentious areas like religion and gender roles, where many people have strong opinions and are naturally inclined to express them vigorously, and I deal with that mainly by just not reading the political threads.  What I don’t understand, though, is why certain people (okay, usually B, but not just her) feel the need to adopt that same angry, contemptuous tone when arguing about totally trivial matters of personal taste.  The original argument in that thread, about mangoes, is a good example of this.  Though this sort of thing, I now realize, is meant entirely in fun, I just can’t understand how someone could find it fun.  To me it just feels like wildly disproportionate cruelty to anyone who expresses a contrary opinion, no matter how innocuous or mildly phrased, and it creates an atmosphere where people (okay, me, but there are probably others) are afraid to express their opinions on even the most anodyne subjects for fear of being screamed at for hundreds of comments.

This is, I am realizing, really all about tone rather than substance; I’m not uncomfortable with strong differences of opinion being expressed, as long as they are expressed civilly and respectfully without any needlessly inflammatory language.  Since preferences about conversational tone are obviously matters of personal taste that differ wildly from person to person, I don’t want to suggest that people change their tone for the sake of my feelings, and I also realize that there’s a problematic gender angle to complaining about women being “uncongenial” or whatever (although I don’t intend this to be a gendered complaint, it’s nonetheless true that the main person who irritates me this way is a woman).  This is, of course, reminiscent of some very unpleasant arguments about tone and gender at Unfogged in the past, and I don’t want to reopen those wounds.  It’s just that the confrontational tone and attitude that seems to prevail over there most of the time is deeply alienating to me, and it makes commenting there pretty unpleasant much of the time.  Which may not be a big issue for most people, but it’s a problem for me because I do like the group there and I’d like to be able to have calm, respectful discussions about interesting topics with them, and Unfogged seems to be an increasingly poor place to do that.

Some people in that thread suggested that the stuff I was complaining about is actually good for the conflict-averse, because it provides a safe venue in which to become more comfortable with conflict.  There’s a certain amount of sense in that, but as I pointed out in response, it’s not clear to me why Unfogged should have to be used that way even by people who don’t want to toughen up.  I’m not unfamiliar with conflict; I work in a law firm, so I deal with conflict all day, every day (from the perspective of an observer rather than a participant, to be sure, but that’s just analogous to reading a thread rather than commenting on it).  Reading Unfogged is what I do in my free time, and I don’t like having to deal with the same things I tolerate at work when I come over there.

I don’t really have a coherent argument to make here; I’ve just been thinking about this a lot lately and I had more to say than I could really fit into a comment thread at Unfogged.

But Enough About Me

How are you doing?

Data Point

I am not particularly interested in discussing libertarianism at great length.  I think the interminable debates on this subject in the blogosphere are due largely to the massive overrepresentation of libertarians there, which stems from their massive overrepresentation on the internet (which, in turn, is probably because there are a lot of libertarian engineers and programmers for some reason).  I also think many of the participants in these debates, particularly on the anti-libertarian side, have very little experience with libertarians in real life and often don’t know how to handle them when they encounter them online.  Coming from the Southwest, something of a hotbed of libertarianism, I’ve known a lot of libertarians in my time, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the best thing to do is ignore them.  They’re generally not going to be convinced by any arguments you can offer.

Also: Spanking?  Really?

What The Fuck?

Yglesias’s blog may be PG-13 according to this dating site, but mine is apparently G.  I’m skeptical of the validity of these ratings.  I also signed up for the site (even though there’s nothing particularly special about it), but there don’t seem to be any other people in my area on it.

Beginnings

This is not actually the beginning of my life as a blogger. I already contribute under my real name to a very serious linguistics blog with some of my colleagues, and I have been commenting for a while on various blogs, particularly Unfogged. This is, however, my first experience with personal, pseudonymous blogging, and I’m not really sure where I want to go with it. I guess I’ll just see where it takes me.

Tomorrow I also begin a new job, one of those unpaid internships that are what’s wrong with America. I don’t want to reveal much more at this point, but I’m pretty excited about it and I hope it goes well.

I suppose that’s enough for a first post. There will be others.