In an article titled The Fall and Fall of Blogging Debate in Britain, fellow Samizdatista Jackie Danicki puts the boot in (though in a quite measured way) regarding ‘expert’ views on the nature of blogging and how it relates to journalism. She attended a high profile event at the London School of Economics called The Fall and Fall of Journalism and was clearly deeply unimpressed with what she heard. Read the whole thing.
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I will leave our own Alex Singleton to write about it… but I just spotted him (representing the Adam Smith Institute) in a discussion with the Channel 4 News anchor and a representative of the ‘Fair’ Trade organization. I must admit I have no problem with voluntary ‘fair’ trade. I firmly believe in the PT Barnum principle that no fool should remain unparted from their money. If someone is willing to pay more for a product because it has a certain certification to it, so be it… so long as I am free to buy otherwise if I so choose. February 28th, 2005 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I have just read Glenn Reynold’s article on the Gorman affair. What interests me is not this story in and of itself. It is the bigger picture of which it is a part that fascinates me. There was a time, not so long ago, when someone such as Mr. Gorman could speak with the power of an organization behind him. He could say “WE” instead of “I” on a subject and like it or not, the entirety of his organization’s membership was subsumed into public agreement. A statement was not that of Mr. Gorman, but of “librarians” as a class. If you happened to be a librarian who disagreed, you were out of luck. If you believed, for example, it was good to support dissidents against Castro… you would be pictured as someone who was not in step with their fellow librarians. The same was true of any membership organization. The leadership was your voice. This does not seem to be true any longer, as you will rapidly discover upon reading the responses by Mr. Gorman’s fellow librarians. The dissident view is as available and as well spoken as the leadership view. Could we be witnessing the death throes of the non-consensual “WE”? The last nail in the coffin of the involuntary collective? We will just have to wait and see. February 27th, 2005 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
I reckon we ought to be a part of (better somewhat belated than never) this:
Notice how, what with this being from News.com (www address: news.com.com, which I rather like), it is full of links. Old Media stuff which has merely been shoved online but without links, even to things mentioned in the text with .com in them, or to bloggers that they deign to name, are starting to look, even to a www latecomer like me, very dated. As for Iran, my understanding of Iran now is that it is rapidly moving towards being a very sensible country, and that a little pressure from outside, of the sort described in this posting, will be all that is required. It only needs for the priests to stop getting above themselves and go back to being priests, and to let politics be done by politicians, with plenty of overlap between these two trades, but nevertheless a distinct separation of realms also. Any attempt at military conquest from outside is, or at least should be, out of the question. Mind you, it does help that the country next to Iran has been conquered. When that happens, and you then say things like “… out of the question …”, it still causes flutters, even if, like me, you absolutely mean it. They do not know that, is the point. Without the Iraq invasion, the Iranian government would not be nearly so bothered about all this blog chatter. Anyway, it all looks like a situation well worth watching. I would love to be able to say that I saw this kind of thing coming before Iraq was even invaded, and, looking back to then, I reckon I did. Many of the comments on that posting also look even cleverer now. February 23rd, 2005 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Guardian is serious about blogging, and it is also serious about presenting the occasional non-left piece of writing. (They used regularly to publish pieces by Enoch Powell.) So the surprising thing about this piece about blogging is not that the Guardian published it, but that the name of Iain Duncan Smith appears where the author’s name goes. (I share Patrick Crozier‘s doubts about the piece’s true authorship. And when we are talking about blogging, being who you say you are is a big thing, I think.) IDS (I will assume this to be real from now on) hopes that blogging will revitalise the right in Britain, and notes that blogging has already revitalised the right in the USA, and has utterly deranged the left by causing the left to drag their party away from electability. I wonder. I suspect that the problems of the Conservative Party are more serious than that, and that blogging will as likely serve to dramatise all the many differences that are now contained, if that is the right word, within the Conservative Party. The Conservatives now have a hideous problem. Having lost confidence in its own economic nostrums, with the collapse both of the old USSR and of its own attempts to galvanise the British economy by seizing control of it, the British dirigiste left is content to allow Blair – or, I suspect, any likely successor of Blair – to triangulate away into the sunset. Labour knows that for them, it is either New Labour or no Labour at all. Which means that the Conservatives are no longer united by Labour. Instead they are divided by New Labour. I do not go out of my way to converse with Conservative Party activists or critics or cheerers-on, but every one of such persons I have met with during the last decade or so has had his own distinct plan for the future of the Conservative Party, consisting of his own preferred mixture of policies. Each activist knows that his particular plan is The Answer, and that all that is needed is for all those other Conservative morons to stop with the negativity and embrace his plan without reservation. Easy really. The Conservative Party should take a firm stand about this (or its opposite), without compromise. But, it should fearlessly compromise on that, by either lying or not talking about it. Go hard with England, Britain, Europe, the Anglosphere, the World (mix and dilute to taste). Be anti-immigrant, pro-immigrant. Anti-ID-cards, pro-ID-cards. Smash the welfare state, buy voters with an even better welfare state. Cut pensions, raise pensions. Support state education, destroy state education. Defend fox hunting, ignore fox hunting. Applaud the Americans, denounce the Americans. (I once thought that the Conservatives could maybe agree about applauding the Americans and leave the rowing about the Americans to the Labour Party. Fat chance.) Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Every policy front is a distinct way to destroy Conservative Party unity. It used to be that the Leader would decide all these things. Now they all want to be the Leader. And if they are not the Leader, and a different mixture of policies and attitudes is propose to their preferred mixture by the bloke who is the Leader, they are about as loyal to the Leader as a basket of low-IQ, but poisonous, snakes. As a result, the Conservative Party is now nigh on unleadable. It is not that they have chosen bad Leaders, or for that matter that they have chosen their Leaders by the wrong methods. It is that they cannot be lead. I cannot see blogging being much help with all this. On the contrary, I think it will only allow the stupid snakes to hiss louder and louder. Blogging will be a whole new source of indiscretions and vituperations, a whole new way to destroy the Conservative Party. The anti-Conservative journalists could have a field day, and I think the Guardian knows it. IDS says that blogging will put the fear of God into the “metropolitan elite”, and assumes that this will help the Conservative Party. It is just as likely to start a new civil war within it. IDS says that lazy journalists think only of the impact of this or that policy on the opinion polls. Which the leadership of the Conservative Party never does, does it? The title of IDS’s piece is “Bloggers will resue the right”. But what it blogging rescues “the right” from the Conservative Party? But, we shall see. Politics is weird. Often something that seems utterly impossible one month, becomes unavoidable a few short months later. Maybe blogging will provoke a big Conservative revival. Personally I do not much care one way or the other. I agree with Perry that a speedy return of a Conservative government would improve very little, and very possibly make things even worse. My loyalty is to blogging itself. This is where I have placed my bets. If blogging very publicly sweeps the Conservatives back into office, hurrah! If it rips the Conservatives into unmendable fragments, hurrah also! Or then again, maybe the unanimous ignorance of the modern world and its possibilities will mean that the stupid snakes continue to neglect this new way for them to hiss, and we bloggers will have to spread our enthusiasm for this new and amazing medium by quite other means. February 20th, 2005 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
February 19th, 2005 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Off-the-record debate mixed with off-the-cuff publication is a recipe for disaster. – Rebecca Blood on the decision to introduce a Davos weblog February 15th, 2005 | Comments are closed
During the last fortnight or so I have watched with fascination as the Eason Jordan story has unfolded. Here is a recent Instapundit posting about it. Briefly, at a meeting in Davos on January 27th. Eason Jordan accused the US army of deliberately killing journalists. When challenged he retreated, but what exactly did he say, and how far did he retreat? A video exists, apparently, but has not yet been unveiled. For about a week, the Mainstream Media, hereinafter termed (as my QC Dad liked to put it) the MSM, ignored the story, while bloggers went to town with it. Last Friday, Eason Jordan resigned from his job, as executive vice president and chief news executive of CNN. He did not accept any blame for his remarks, but said that he wanted to protect CNN from being “unfairly tarnished”. At first, Eason Jordan and his colleagues probably hoped that this would be the end of the matter. Now that the lynch-bloggers had got their scalp, maybe they would stop their baying and yelling and go back to writing about God, guns, kittens, and suchlike. But the bloggers are not satisfied. Eason Jordan himself is only the label for this story, he himself being only a part of it. The matter is absolutely not now closed, as the increasingly horrified MSM (mainstream media) are learning, to their severe discomfort. They have much more to learn yet. → Continue reading: Eason Jordan etc. February 14th, 2005 | 47 comments - (Comments are closed)
…an angry digital lynch mob. Many fellow bloggers have been attacked by waves of trackback spam by some thieving vermin peddling online ‘texas holdem’ to idiots stupid enough to click those links and part with their money. We have been hit by over 450 trackbacks (which we de-spam swiftly via MT Blacklist every time they change their payload URLs). What is to be done about this? If left unchecked this will simply destroy the trackback system and the beneficial network effect it brings. Presumably the spammers are being directed by companies to drive traffic to target sites, so if a digital lynch mob was to attack those target sites (who are presumably owned by the ones at the end of the chain who pay the spamhaus to do the dirty work), it might impose some cost on their actions, which at the moment involve stealing bandwidth and defacing private property with impunity. As the people involved in this are criminals, it seems to me that the best way to discourage them would be to hurt their ability to make their money. Any ideas? February 3rd, 2005 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am having problems with my two blogs, Brian’s Culture Blog and Brian’s Education Blog. Go there, and you just get big coloured blanks next to the sidebars. I cannot post new stuff, and the only way to read my latest from when I could post is to look in the January archives (here and here). And all this at a time when I am heavily involved doing other things, and do not need such complications as these. The good news is that this computer genius is even now giving this problem whatever attention he can spare, in among all the other demands that the world has for his skills. I have told him to take his time. Culture and education will continue. Digital photographs will go on being taken and being displayed on the Internet, even without my inspiring example. Classical CDs will still be enjoyed, even though I am unable to tell people which. People will continue to teach and to learn, even though I am temporarily unavailable to teach them, or to say what I have learned. Meanwhile, my thanks to all those who have kindly enquired after these blogs, and especially to those who have said that they miss them. They will return. February 3rd, 2005 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
If you have not checked out the marvelous Social Affairs Unit blog recently, please let me commend some simply splendid articles that have appeared of late, such as Stumbling towards the EU door marked exit. In particular, keep an eye out for all the ‘Maurice and Gerhard’ articles. January 28th, 2005 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
At a Samizdata social gathering a few months back, one of the attendees (I think it was Patrick Crozier) posed the question of how much influence the blogosphere was having on the ‘real’ world. The answer I gave at the time was plain and direct: none. A rather negative prognosis for sure but sincere and truthful as far as I was concerned. However, my candour was not well-received. My dear chum Brian Micklethwait, in particular, took issue with me claiming that the blogosphere could well have be having an impact in ways that were not yet manifest. I countered this with the contention that in the absence of evidence of influence, one must assume that there is no influence at all. Anyway, if memory serves, the rest of the bickering trailed off into a lake of libation and no firm conclusions were ever reached (are they ever?). Since then, I have been forced to qualify my above-stated position because, in common with most other bloglodytes, I am all too familiar with the ‘Rathergate’ scandal over in the USA; a incident of such profile that it has made it impossible to deny that blogging is now having some degree of impact on the wider American polity. But, as far as the UK is concerned, I have maintained my stance. Sadly and frustratingly, neither the blogosphere nor anything else seems to have been able to lay a glove on the great, heaving, suffocating beast of the hegemonic British intellectual climate. That was my view. Until today. I required some proof to the contrary and now there is infallible proof:
I refuse to even attempt a rebuttal of this ludicrous and obviously desperate smear, preferring instead to let it stand naked in all its ignominy. Besides, it will not be the last. Blogging has clearly begun to make an impression on the minds of the political classes and they fear it. The blogosphere has now landed in Britain. January 28th, 2005 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
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