Blogging

So the day that would never arrive has dawned. Open Source Media finally got off the ground with a great deal of schmoozing and feel-good speeches. That’s great, and I wish them all the luck in the world. I just don’t think it’s a great idea for the Boyz. There are a few reasons for this.

Steven den Beste is worried about all of this. (If there’s any way to link to an individual post at Chizumatic, I haven’t found it yet. Just look for the essay that starts “20051116: Single points of failure…”) The reason why is that it puts a great deal of blogs that he now reads on one platform, which means that a great deal of content is now on a single point of failure. This is proof positive that Steven is first and foremost an engineer.

Still, he makes a good point. The core reason that the Internet was created was to disperse communications so they couldn’t be destroyed in the event of a nuclear war. It wouldn’t take nearly as much firepower to down OSM. A few lawsuits would do it.

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We value all of our readers, and that also applies to the thoughtful comments that you leave. Unfortunately, comment spam is a real problem here just like any other blog. Sometimes that means a comment is blocked by our spam protection software because a word or phrase was also used by the spammers.

If that should happen, if there are any problems at all, then please send me an Email with the text of the message you want to leave. Also make sure that you indicate which post you want to comment on. If you want to use a pseudonym then please let me know in the Email. I’ll do my very best to make sure that your message is included toot sweet.

My Email is…

james_43202 at yahoo.com

Most of my freshmen rhetoric students choose current topics – off-shoring, CAFTA, privatized social security, the 10% rule–for their series of argumentative papers. (I’ve given up on legalizing drugs; I never got one that was coherent. While I’m sympathetic with the positions expressed on this blog, reading these made me doubt their authors had time or brain cells to waste on recreational drugs. Indeed, their lives seemed pretty much recreational.)

This semester, I added another option. They could choose among some controversial books, read the book, and analyze one of its major arguments. Rhoads, Hayek, Pinker, Lomberg challenge orthodoxies; only a couple of ambitious students chose to do this, but they are becoming quite engaged. Of course, I have an agenda, but since they have to neutrally define the controversy, then write papers both for & against, the goal is less which side than increased understanding.

One girl chose Steven Rhoads’ Taking Sex Differences Seriously, but has been having trouble finding arguments or reviews. This is her first semester in college, but I suspect this is not just her lack of research skills. Some studies are best left unreviewed. Last week, I approached one of my colleagues from psych and asked if she knew of any work specifically countering his arguments. She hadn’t heard of it.

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During the last few years, I’ve felt myself buoyed time and again when I turn to blogs—ours and others. Many are free market; they have a more tragic view of man than pure libertarians do (and much wiser), but are generally resilient and more likely to see the glass half-full. The “open marketplace” is optimistic – it may take us a while to sort out the best ideas, the best beliefs, the best products, but in the end we do. This attitude trusts man—his heart & his reason.

One of my favorite metaphors was Glenn Reynolds’ “not a herd but a pack.” It seemed to bode well: it describes 9/11, when the first plane loads in New York had one perspective on high-jacking but the one in Pennsylvania, with a new paradigm, coordinated and acted. It is Victor Davis Hanson’s perspective on war. It is a bracing and attractive meme. And in the great tragedy of this week some took action. The New Orleans news is full of charity and the beauty of a country that opens its arms, pocketbooks and even homes to others. Hours away from Houston, our community is filling centers and churches; my daughter talks of the girl from New Orleans new to her class.

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I love BlogAds, but sometimes it looks like their servers are slow and that that problem sometimes causes our blog to hang, on my browser anyway, when it’s loading. As an experiment, I removed the BlogAds from the ChicagoBoyz front page while leaving them on the individual-archive pages (e.g., this one) and our Contributors’ page. The result, for me at least, is that the page without the ads loads much faster. The question that I have for readers is, do you experience any of the same difficulty with slow-loading pages that I am experiencing? I’d really like to figure out what the problem is, so that I can fix it. I hope it’s the result of a coding error on my part.

UPDATE: OK, first update ever before I published a post. I see that the slow-loading problem has disappeared for the moment. That suggests that a server issue is responsible. At any rate this problem is intermittent, so I am not reassured by its current absence.

UPDATE2: I’m deactivating BlogAds from all pages until the problem is resolved.