Samizdata

The ASI hosted a gathering of bloggers and curious old media types in Westminster last night. Times journo Danny Finkelstein and well known blog commentator Tim Worstall. As with all the ASI events I have attended, I rather enjoyed myself and there was a large posse of OG bloggers to swap scandal with.

Read more about it from Jax here.

Matt Welch has written a farewell lament in Reason on what he describes as the demise of warblogging. He harks back to the explosion of the grassroots media after 9/11 when many Americans found that their assumptions about the Middle East and terrorism were turned upside down. From this development, he defined the warblogger as a writer who transcended old partisan divides due to the defining event of a terrorist threat to the homeland.

“What do warbloggers have in common, that most pundits do not?” I enthused. “I’d say a yen for critical thinking, a sense of humor that actually translates into people laughing out loud, a willingness to engage (and encourage) readers, a hostility to the Culture War and other artifacts of the professionalized left-right split of the 1990s…a readiness to admit error [and] a sense of collegial yet brutal peer review.”

Man, was I wrong.

Now, Welch has acquired a new job on the Los Angeles Times, and argues that the political blogging movement has reinforced partisan politics rather than bridging this supposed gap. Yet, the developments that Welch cites to bolster his thesis are disparate and amenable to alternative interpretation. He argues that the “current-events bloggers” have taken a strident approach to particular issues within the Culture War:

The Culture War, which seemed to take a back seat to the genuine article in those traumatized days of late 2001, has come back with a vengeance, with current-events webloggers taking a central role in the hysterical Red/Blue scrums over Terri Schiavo’s comatose body, Janet Jackson’s exposed nipple, and the pressing national security issue of whether people of the same sex should be able to obtain a marriage certificate.

His other examples are the inability of the blogosphere to create a permanent alternative to the mainstream media, like the Pyjamas website and the use of bloggers to galvanise activist support, especially within the Democratic Party. Welch does also emphasize that weblogs are now far more useful for the dissemination of knowledge and the procurement of differing viewpoints on particular issues. But he still views the development of warblogging as a lost opportunity:

But as I look back at December 2001, and prepare to hang up the blogging fun of Reason’s Hit & Run for the stodgier print pages of the L.A. Times, I can’t shake the feeling of nostalgia for a promising cross-partisan moment that just fizzled away. Americans are always much more interesting than their political parties or ideological labels, and for a few months there it was possible for readers and writers alike to feel the unfamiliar slap of collisions with worlds they’d previously sealed off from themselves. You couldn’t predict what anyone would say, especially yourself.

To which the answer is: if you just look at blogs from the political perspective, it will appear more partisan, as activists have established and learned how to use these tools to their advantage. More importantly, many of those who blog on current events have strong and individual voices ranging over a wide spectrum of subjects. Warblogging did not run into the sands or fade away. After a while, bloggers preferred to jaw-jaw on more than just war.

I do so agree with what Madsen Pirie, who is now guest blogging at the Singleton Diet, says about mustard:

Second breakfast consisted of a croissant with the rest of the honey-roasted ham, this time with Florida mustard and fresh orange juice. After it came black coffee. As you might gather, I like mustards, pretty well all of them, wholegrain, English, Dijon, French, Florida, and so on. I even regard sausages as just an excuse for mustard.

I have a jar of Tesco wholegrain mustard on the go right now, and very tasty it is too. I also often eat meat just to eat mustard, but I never really spelled this out for myself before, so I am grateful to Madsen Pirie for doing this for me.

The Singleton Diet, as already reported here, started out as occasional Samizdatista Alex Singleton blogging about what he was eating. The idea was for him to get slimmer. But after a while, Alex got fed up with blogging every day or even every few days about his dietary intake, and the Singleton Diet faded. (Whether Alex is now any slimmer, I am not sure, but I rather think he is.)

But now, the Singleton Diet has sprung to life again, with Madsen Pirie as a guest writer. I think this is a really good idea. Who wants to blog about everything they eat for ever? Almost nobody, and if anyone did, who would want to read that for ever? But a succession of different eaters is another matter entirely.

As regular Samizdata readers will know, if you have a pro-freedom attitude towards the world you will always have lots to complain about. But the economic rules and institutions that we favour have also poured forth a Niagara of good news, and in no area of life is this more true than in the matter of food. Thanks to the farmers and especially to the food retailers, we – especially we who live in London, as Alex Singleton, Madsen Pirie, and I all do – now have a world of exciting and exotic food products to choose between and to enjoy. What better way could there be for a man like Madsen Pirie, one of the most notable of London’s freedom mongers of recent decades, to demonstrate that he is capable of enjoying life and not just of proposing improvements for and regretting the derangements of it caused by others, than for him to do a spot of food blogging? It should be a lot of fun.