Monthly Archives: September 2003

From Usenet to Blog

This entry was posted in Blogging on by

I still read and post to some Usenet groups. For many specialized areas of interest Usenet and some of the other list serve environments still seems a better medium then blogging for staying on top of a specific subject matter.
The other day Phil Wolff wrote a piece that makes an interesting case for Usenet leading the way for blogging. He describes a number of similarities which Jen acknowledges and then adds two more from her experience:

Two other similarities that crossed my mind were the varying signal-to-noise ratio of each “channel”, as well as the increasing sense of information overload that I got from Usenet, and am getting from the blogosphere.

The signal-to-noise issue reminds me of yesterday’s post on civility. It is often clear that many Usenet users as well as bloggers seem to have extra time to troll, write thought free insulting posts, or engage in long ‘humor’ threads that lose their humor about 7 posts in.
As for information overload, the large and growing number of interesting blogs potentially fills all available time plus some more.
Oh, and Wolff also links to a nice short style post that while originally target at the Usenet crowd is relevant to the blogging community.

Punishment and Release

This entry was posted in Humor Libertarianism on by

I chuckled when I read Moira Breen discussing appropriate penance for telemarketers and Natalie Solent’s proposed ditching dialogue:

“Hi, my name is Shelley and I’m calling to ask if you’d be interested in a new service offered by British Orangecom.”
[Very enthusiastically] “Yes!”
“Wo-? Um. It’s about ‘Friends & Family 2003’, a new call tariff that–”
“Yes. Oh yes.”
“A NEW CALL TARIFF THAT OFFERS-”
“Yes! Yes! Yes! Oh, oh, oh yes!”
[Click.]
See, it is quite possible to dispose of these creatures while maintaining an entirely positive attitude.>

’nuff said.

Late Night Reading

This entry was posted in Late Night Reads on by

Kevin Drum wonders why, since the bushies are executing a Democratic foreign policy, we didn’t elect a Democrat in the first place.
Is democracy possible in Egypt? Tarek Heggy discusses this in a guest appearance at Winds of Change.
Alex, A List a Day, continues to provide links to odd and not so odd lists…always good for some diversion. Try out Fametracker’s (who are they??) list of the 10 least essential fall movies of 2003.
And, over at Open Source Politics, Mark Kleiman has a proposal for Controlling Teen Drinking in an Age of Terror.
Good Night!

presidential Prevarication

This entry was posted in bush Election 2004 Iraq US Foreign Policy War on Terrorism on by

Josh Marshall in his article The Post-Modern President, Washington Monthly September 2003, discusses presidential deception and has this to say about the bush administration:

Bush and his administration, however, specialize in a particular form of deception: The confidently expressed, but currently undisprovable assertion.

They may be slipping though. Rice and Rumsfeld have been arguing that our occupation experience in Iraq is similar to post war Germany. Their problem, though, is that the post war Germany experience is verifiable and as this Slate article asks:

So, how did this fanciful version of the American experience in postwar Germany get into the remarks of a Princeton graduate and former trustee of Stanford’s Hoover Institute (Rumsfeld) and the former provost of Stanford and co-author of an acclaimed book on German unification (Rice)? Perhaps the British have some intelligence on the matter that still has not been made public. Of course, as the president himself has noted, there is a lot of revisionist history going around.

I think the pressure getting to be too much for them and we are starting to see major cracks in the administration facade. If this is indeed the case we are likely to see increasingly drastic and dangerous maneuvers on the part of the bushies as they struggle to maintain power.
Via Walter at idols of the marketplace.

Civility in Discourse

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Civility in the Blog World
Complete and continual civility in the kind of open forum that a blog with comments presents is wishful thinking as the trolls will always pop up.
This isn’t an issue here…Modulator’s comment threads currently are lucky exceed 0 in length. But we all read other blogs and from time to time add our comment to the discussion.
So, as Kevin Drum and Jane Galt point out civility is certainly a goal to reach for and will not only raise the level of discussion but increase the chances of your comment being thoughtfully read.
More discussion of this here and here.