Bloggerithmetic

Word problem for the Doubting Padwans of Fu:

• On Feb. 13, The Other McCain passed 1 million visits in cumulative traffic since March 1, 2008. (See The Rules.)
• As of 3 p.m. today -- March 20, 2009 -- cumulative traffic exceeded 1,191,000.
• At 10:27, the Instalanche hit, delivering approximately 5,000 additional visitors over an initial 4-hour span, with residual traffic descending over ensuing hours.

Ergo, ceteris paribus:

• At the current rate of traffic (including relevant calculations for likely rates of increase/decrease), what will be The Other McCain's final daily visitors total for March 20, 2009?
• Also at the current rate of traffic (including relevant calculations for likely rates of increase/decrease), what will be The Other McCain's final monthly visitors total for March 2009?
• As of 12:01 a.m., Saturday, March 21 (making relevant calculations based on weekly traffic), what will be The Other McCain's "Average Per Day"?
• Estimate, to the nearest date, when The Other McCain will exceed 2 million cumulative vistors.

Deadline for eligible entries (either on your own blog or in the comment field) is 10 p.m. ET tonight. This may be on your mid-term exam. No gambling permitted. Hit the tip jar, you ungrateful bastards.

Internet civility, an oxymoron?

John Hawkins does have a point:

That sort of compartmentalization is one of the reasons politics has become so ferociously partisan. On the Internet, people have broken up into small, like-minded groups where they have minimal contact with people who disagree with them. As a result, there is little pressure to show respect for the opinions of people who see the world differently -- since those people are, for the most part, not present. It means that facts that run contrary to their ideology will tend to be viewed with suspicion at best and will be totally ignored at worst, thereby creating groupthink on a titanic scale.

Yes, but also no. The Internet is a medium and, as Marshall McLuhan taught us, the medium is the message. Television has been a far more powerful contributor to the decline of civility and the loss of the sense of civic duty. The rise of the 100-plus-channel cable environment has made it easier to "drop out" of mainstream society, to spend all your leisure hours watching sports or whatever specialty programming suits your taste. And considering what is now "mainstream" -- the worthless dreck of network programming -- this is an understandable instinct.

TV destroys civility because TV watching absorbs time that educated people once filled with reading. Furthermore, by its very nature as a primarily visual medium, TV celebrates the superficial. This is as true of TV news as of any episode of "Oprah" or "American Idol." Give credit to Fox News impressario Roger Ailes for the brilliant insight of finding glamorous anchorettes like Laurie Dhue. If we're going to tune in for an hour of war, murder, celebrity gossip and political intrigue, why not let a hottie be our hostess?

One of McLuhan's students, Neil Postman, wrote a great book about the culture-killing phenomenon of TV, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, and it's a book I wish everyone would read. Postman was a man of the Left, politically, but he cared deeply about how the image-based medium of television, when consumed in large quantities, rendered people incapable of engaging effectively with the text-based medium of writing. Another great book addressing the same basic issue is The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, by Sven Birkerts.

All this is far afield from the question of how the Internet -- and especially the blogosphere -- contributes to the loss of civility. But the blogosphere is still, for the most part, a text-based environment. Literacy and civility generally coexist, and I think the savagery that sometimes erupts among bloggers is due in large part to the influence of TV on the discourse.

When does TV ever explain, in a dispassionate way, the fundamental facts of economics? If you understand how markets work, and if you understand the inherent limitations of the alternatives to a market-based economy, then the entire class-envy rationale of the Democratic Party's economic agenda becomes absurd.

I refuse to apologize for "incivility" toward dangerous ignorance, which is why I was so curt in dismissing Rod Dreher's Crunchy Cons. How does a man, describing himself as a "conservative," reach a mature age without apparently ever having read Mises or Hayek? The Road to Serfdom is less than 300 pages, and I don't think it took me more than a weekend to finish the first time through. Socialism is a bit over 500 pages, and might take longer.

Yet in 10 days, I believe, you could read through both books, and any intelligent, decent person would finish that experience wholly persuaded of the case these great Austrian economists make: Socialism doesn't work, it is ultimately destructive of both liberty and prosperity, and even a liberal democratic government attempting to implement socialist ideas will tend toward increasingly undemocratic and illiberal governance.

If I am contemptuous of the intellectual laziness of "conservatives" who can't be bothered to read economics -- hello, Governor Huckabee! -- why should I be less contemptuous of liberals who are equally ignorant if not more so? And what about Paul Krugman, who can't even plead ignorance, but whose advocacy of welfare state socialism must be attributed to evil?

We are right, and they are wrong. We do not merely "disagree with them." We advocate liberty, and they are enemies of liberty. The socialists aim to destroy all opposition, to deprive us of our liberty, and to immerse our nation in hopeless poverty. Some support socialism due to their ignorance, while others are simply evil. We can hope to educate the ignorant, but what shall we do with the evil?

Am I engaged in "groupthink on a titanic scale"? Were Mises and Hayek likewise engaged? When it comes to the basic truths of economics, "the opinions of people who see the world differently" -- i.e., people whose opinions are rooted in ignorance, falsehood and error -- ought not be respected, and indeed ought to be disrespected loudly and often. If we would resolve to be less tolerant of these economic ignoramuses, perhaps we might shame them into actually learning something.

The evil, of course, are another matter.

UPDATE: Fear & Loathing in Georgetown comments:

The conservatives he refers to are Dreher's Crunchy Cons and, as mentioned in the quotation above, the evangelical types. I agree wholeheartedly that they should read their economics, but that might miss something more fundamental. The Crunchy Cons and the evangelicals to an even larger extent pursue politics for their own therapeutic purposes. They want the government to ban, discourage, encourage, promote behaviors because that's what makes them feel better about themselves. The economics aren't particularly relevant to accomplishing that.

I am myself an evangelical, but like James Madison (who was educated at Princetown under the Presbyterian tutelage of Witherspoon) my views on faith are heavily Calvinistic. That translates, politically, into a distrust of power and a skeptical view toward "progress." Men are not more virtuous today than they were 50 years ago, nor will men 50 years from now be any better. Original sin is a constant, and which is more likely over the next 50 years, enlightenment or decadence?

"Progress"? We've made progress down the road to hell. We appear to be gaining momentum as we go, and the young do not even notice the acceleration.

However, the failure to learn economics is not exclusively a problem of "crunchies" or evangelicals. Crazy Cousin John confessed his own economic ignorance, and many who rallied to the colors after 9/11 -- the patriotic hawkish types -- share that ignorance.

I consider economics of the Austrian school completely compatible with Christian faith. What did the Good Samaritan do to deserve Christ's praise? He gave personal and direct assistance to the waylaid traveler, from his own resources. He did not circulate a petition or stage a protest march or enact legislation on behalf of waylaid travelers in general; the Good Samaritan's mercy was self-sufficient and independent.

Much of this noise you hear about "social justice" from evangelicals nowadays is nothing more than Pharisaical do-gooderism. If you want to help the poor, help the poor; nothing prevents you from doing so. But if you're waiting for me to praise you for collecting a six-figure salary as head of a 501(c) operation -- as if being the president of a non-profit makes you Mother Teresa -- you will be waiting a very long time.

UPDATE II: Linked at The Week. Thanks, you %@#&ing @$$holes.

Second-guessing Palin's pregnancy

All caveats on this chart criticizing Sarah Palin's decision to fly home and have her fifth baby in "a podunk hospital outside Wasilla."

This was linked by a "progressive" blogger who cites it as evidence of Palin's flawed "judgment." I remind you that, if it were up to the "judgment" of progressives, the pregnancy would have ended in abortion. I'm sure we're all so touched by progressive concern for the well-being of baby Trig.

It was Palin's fifth child. As a father of six, I can tell you that women who've been through a few childbirths become rather adept at judging the progress of labor. My wife used to work in the obstetric ward of a hospital. Any ob veteran will tell you that first-time mothers are notorious for false alarms or arriving at the hospital too early and then wallowing in labor for 36 hours, whereas more experienced moms are much better at waiting until the labor is well-advanced before going to the hospital.

There is not a scintilla of evidence that Trig was harmed because Palin returned home for the birth, and the continuing repetition of this bogus meme by the leftosphere is disgusting.

Liberal love for Bob Novak

Dramatic readings from the Leftosphere:



(Via Johnny Dollar.) Think Progress:

Vulgarity, bigotry, atrocious lies, and name calling are what they’re about, and ALL THEY’RE ABOUT! So, yes, let’s be gracious, but let’s also not forget that our battle is against soulless, mindless vermin, without a shred of compassion or human decency…

The Prince of Darkness is really a great book, considering it was written by soulless, mindless vermin.

Wrightmania

The controversy over Rev. Jeremiah Wright appears to have driven some of Sen. Barack Obama's supporters over the cliff, from messianic fervor into outright lunacy.

Exhibit A, a young Obamaphile writes to Andrew Sullivan:

If Obama is done in by this whole Wright thing I am done with politics. I can't invest myself in something that is so sure to disappoint me time and time and time again.

Nice to have the starring role in your own adolescent melodrama, isn't it? Pouting and sulking are not effective strategies, and neither is denial. Which brings us to Exhibit B:

The only reason there is a "furor" as the press likes to say, is because the Repubs and the press who are so firmly snuggled up in their pockets have created one. And the only credibility Obama has lost in my eyes is due to him feeling that he has to address it as if it is valid.

Once you stop laughing at the contention that the "Repubs" have the press "in their pockets," consider the fierce denial involved in this Obamaphile's refusal to grant the validity of Wright as an issue in the Democratic primary.

That's the key point. Democratic voters (and superdelegates, too) are being asked to evaluate whether Obama's 20-year association with Wright -- and the revelation of Wright's radicalism -- creates a political vulnerability that will hurt Obama's chances of being elected in November.

It doesn't matter whether the Wright issue is "valid" in some objective, logical, bird's-eye-view perspective. What matters is how it will be perceived in the general election by independent voters. The Wright issue matters because of its potential to sink Obama in November.

If Sullivan and his sulky young e-mailer want to ignore Wright and keep pushing for Obama's nomination, nobody's stopping them. And if any other Obama supporters want to blame the media for the "furor," go right ahead. But if Obama does get the nomination, and then his association with Wright contributes to a loss in November, don't say you weren't warned.

On the other hand, maybe all this "furor" will be forgotten in a few days, and Obama will sail to a great triumph in November. Somehow, though, many people seem to think such a scenario is less likely now than it was before Wright decided to go on his media tour -- and you can't blame that decision on "Repubs and the press."

BTW, it's May 1, and we just finished the month of April -- best month ever for The Other McCain, with 16,174 visitors and a daily average of 780 page-views. During the best 7-day period of the month (April 19-25) the daily average page-views was 1,046. Thanks to all the bloggers who linked here during April, and thanks to the regular readers (and regular commenters, like SueK) who've contributed to a 137% increase in traffic in a single month.

Not exactly a blog yet

This is not yet a blog, but I set it up because (for reasons that should be obvious) I wanted to call "dibs" on a particular idea.

Students of Marshall McCluhan will be familiar with his saying, "The medium is the message." What McCluhan meant by that was that each particular means of communication has its own way of conveying information: A TV show can be "about" any number of subjects, but it is first of all "about" TV -- that is to say, it is about images and sound. TV is not a book, it is not a newspaper, it is not any other form of communication, and it can only convey messages in certain ways. Furthermore, there are some messages which TV is most effective at delivering (e.g., advertising) and the medium has characteristics to which any message must be adapted in order to be effective. Thus, the phenomenon of television -- its intrinsic characteristics --- has an independent effect on the content of what is televised. Ergo, the medium is the message.

The advance of computer-based communications technology has met with resistance in some quarters of journalism from the very outset. It is not unusual to meet some old-timers who proudly boast that they don't use computers. George Will insists on writing his columns in manuscript, as if he were still in an old-fashioned grammar school, where "writing" included grades for penmanship. (The sloppiness of my left-handed scrawl always resulted in the automatic deduction of one letter grade so that -- although I have since spent 20 years as a professional writer -- I never once was able to get better than a "B" in writing.)

I think that the word "computer" is a big reason for this resistance to computer technology. Some of us are old enough to remember when a "computer" meant a giant room-sized thing with blinking lights and spinning tape reels that worked on IBM punch cards. "Computers" were the province of science fiction films, or conveniently sinister weapons used by some James Bond villain plotting to take over the world. Folks under 40, who started using Apples or PCs when they were still children, have no idea what a cultural prejudice against computers there is (or at least, was) among some old-timers.

Nevertheless, by the mid-1990s, nearly all newspapers were being "paginated" -- that is, the layout and pasteup was being done on a computer screen, rather than by the cold-type pasteup method that had replaced the hot-lead Linotype-era method. While working at the Rome (Ga.) News-Tribune, I was the designated "guinea pig" for our company's entry into pagination; it was there I learned to use Quark, PhotoShop, etc., and it was always a hands-on, learn-as-you-go kind of thing.

(Diversion for a pet peeve: Why do some people never learn to use basic keyboard commands? I get annoyed every time I say to someone, "Page Up," and they start to reach for the mouse instead of hitting the "Page Up" key, which is what I mean when I say, "Page Up." It is much quicker to hit "Page Up" than to reach for the mouse, click on the scroll bar and scroll upward in the window. If you are in the business of words -- e.g., journalism -- learning keyboard commands is like a magic formula for productivity, because you lose "time on task" everytime you reach for the mouse. Anything that keeps you from having to reach for the mouse -- e.g., Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V to define, copy and paste, rather than using the mouse to point-and-click with pull-down menus -- will save you time. This is not rocket science. Anybody can learn this stuff. But some people get so habituated to reaching for the mouse that, even after you point out to them the easier way to do something, they refuse to adopt the superior method.)

Here's the important thing: I didn't learn to paginate because I felt some gee-whiz enthusiasm about the marvels of computer technology. I learned to paginate because this was a tool that my employer wanted to use to put out the newspaper. Frankly, I am sort of a technophobe -- I don't know how to hook up a DVD player (that's what teenage sons are for) or burn a CD. But when working with computers is your day-to-day job -- editing photos, designing pages, etc. -- that experience tends to demystify the technology.

It was during the 1990s, while I was serving as pagination guinea pig at the Rome News-Tribune, that the Internet developed as a mass medium. This was another place where I was kind of a first-in-the-water guy, writing columns about the Internet at a time when most other newspaper people didn't know a URL from a BBS. As with pagination, the experience of being online regularly tended to demystify the medium. I was routinely using the Internet for research years before the arrival of Google.

(Another pet-peeve diversion: Why do some people not seem to understand the beauty of simultaneously operating multiple browser windows? My home page is set for Google. When I log onto the 'Net, the first thing I do is create multiple windows -- Cntrl+N -- and set one window for Memeorandum, just so I can stay on top of the blogs. I'll open another window for my e-mail, and so on, depending one what I'm doing. I always have at least one Google home page open, in case I need to research something. As I'm Googling, I open results with a right-click -- Apple-click for Mac users -- to create a new window and keep the original results available. That way, if the result doesn't turn out to have everything I'm looking for, I can toggle -- Alt+Tab -- back to the search and either choose a different result or refine my search terms. At this particular moment, I've got 31 Explorer windows open. That makes perfect sense to me, but other people don't seem to grasp the benefit of this.)

The same kind of gripes that I'd heard about pagination from technophobic newsroom colleagues, I also heard about the Internet. In the mid-90s, the big rap against the Internet was that there wasn't any way to make it pay. Of course, 10 years later, the Internet is now a huge money-maker -- one ad at DailyKos costs $3,000 per week -- but nobody could envision that in the days before PayPal, Amazon, Fandango, etc. Other typical anti-Web beefs heard 10 or 12 years ago included the idea that the Internet is a waste of time (as if watching TV isn't generally a waste of time, yet still lucrative as a business) and that most people don't enjoy sitting around in front of a computer (as opposed to sitting around in front of a TV).

Nowadays, of course, most people use the Internet for so many different things they don't even think twice about it. Just think about Mapquest, for example. Anytime anybody under 40 wants to go somewhere they've never been before -- like when they get an invitation to a friend's wedding, for example -- they will get directions from Mapquest. It's just automatic, a given, a thing taken for granted.

And now the blogs

I am told that there are currently 56 million blogs. That's probably inflated somehow (as if every MySpace page were a blog) and it is certain that very few of what they are counting as blogs are oriented toward news and politics. Based on my experience in spring 2006 blogging at Donkey Cons (where our best month was 9,000 hits) you have to be fairly active just to average a few hundred hits a day.

There are certainly fewer than 50,000 news/politics blogs that regularly attract any significant readership and, as Jon Henke likes to say, 90% of everything is crap. Most blogs aren't really good. Most don't have anything significant to say. The few hundred blogs that stick around and develop something of a following are in some way better than the rest -- the bloggers who create or contribute to them actually add something useful to the discussion. So when a Joseph Rago starts trashing blogs generically, he's mashing together into one big wad a bunch of blogs (and a bunch of bloggers) that are really quite different.

It doesn't require any journalistic training -- or any special insight, or even basic literacy -- to throw up a Blogspot page. But to attract readers and keep them coming back for more, if I may paraphrase Billy Preston, you gotta have something. That "something" may be a snarky sense of humor (like Wonkette, Allahpundit or Ace of Spades), or it might be some special area of expertise (like the "milbloggers" at Blackfive), but the blogs that succeed do so for a reason.

To trash "blogs" generically is to trash, on the one hand, people like Instapundit (whose site doesn't even have comments) and, on the other hand, the big membership group blogs like Townhall, Red State and DailyKos, where anybody can create their own account and start blogging. Very different things, as I said ...

Bloggers, with few exceptions, aren't "journalists" (another term that lumps together a lot of very different things). Most bloggers don't pretend to be journalists, or want to be journalists, or consider that what they're doing is the same thing as being journalists. Bloggers are not going to replace journalists, any more than TV has replaced radio or magazines or newspapers. A blog is a medium -- a means of communications -- that has its own unique characteristics, its own strengths and weaknesses.

An essay with links is not a blog

One of the weaknesses of blogging as a medium is that it favors short-form expression: a few links to timely news stories, a quick comment or two, and then on to the next thing. It is possible to do actual reporting on a blog, although few people do so. It is a medium peculiarly suited to short attention spans.

Because of the medium's predisposition to the brief, the timely, and the ephemeral, nobody in their right mind would use a blog to post a 2,000-word essay, but, as I said, this is not a blog yet -- and nobody has ever accused me of being in my right mind.

Which brings me to the thing about blogging that distinguishes it from every other medium of mass communication: Anybody can try it. There are effectively zero barriers to entry. If you have a computer with Internet access, you can blog. No publisher, no editor, no producer. No application to fill out. No need to send a query and wait for a reply -- nothing. Just log on, write and publish.

Of course, there's no guarantee that anybody will read what you write, and very little prospect that you'll make a cent from your writing on the blogosphere, but you can put it out there for anybody to read.

On the one hand, I could write a 2,000-word essay on blogging, send it The New Republic, and never hear back from them -- the editors at The New Republic are a bunch of liberal snobs who don't know me from Adam's housecat. Unless you are a member of the tiny clique of people whom the editors of The New Republic consider important, it doesn't matter how well you write, or what you have to say, there is no point even bothering to try to offer something to them on a freelance basis. The old saying about "who you know, not what you know" is quite true in publishing. If you wonder why you find yourself bored to death by most of what's in The New Republic, it's because the editors would rather publish tedious articles by their tiny clique of friends than to publish anything remotely interesting by somebody they don't know.

So, finding myself in a mood to share a few observations about the blogosphere, I wrote it -- just the way it came into my head, pet peeves and all -- and put it up on the Web.

This is not a blog, but it is an essay attempting to explain (in part) how the blogosphere works as a medium, what its distinct nature is, and why it has become popular. Probably nobody will read this. But if you do read this, please (a) buy my book, and (b) be advised that the comments are moderated.