Brian Weatherson announces

A New Blog!

A new group blog, Crooked Timber, has just been born. So far the group is Chris Bertram, Henry Farrell, Maria Farrell, Kieran Healy and moi.

There will be others appearing on the scene in the near future – to a first approximation Crooked Timber will be a broad-based leftie academic blog. But we’re open-minded about what counts as leftie, and as what counts as academic. To mangle a cliche or two, the party is meant to be more prominent than the party line. It’s a very exciting project, and I was rather honoured to be asked to join it.

Brian’s first entry joins the Nozick debate, with partial endorsement of the argument I presented against Nozick.

Gianna has taken the (as far as I know unique) step of moving from MT back to Blogger. She hasn’t being deliberately contrary, as is evidenced by the fact that she’s joined the trend to an open mike posting, my most successful (well, my only successful) technical innovation in blogging.

In a post from the dim dark past (June 28, 2003) Chris Sheil wrote

Although Iâm only very new to this medium, it is obvious that the dynamism of blogosphere is incredible. Most blog-hosts seem to feel a need to add at least one fresh post to their site each day to retain their readership. If the issue upon which they post is hot, comments will come a-flying, links will come a-pinging and, before you know it, the debate will become a control freakâs nightmare. In the case of a hot issue, it is simply not possible to have an influence at every point where the matter begins breaking. The difficulty of contributing is then compounded by the press of fresh posts, which usually means comment windows close in a day or three or four, as the posts slip into the archives.

I’ve been frustrated by this, especially as I’m finding that time pressure (aka having a life) is slowing down my responses and my posting more generally. So I’m going to try a new approach, for a while, of which this post is an instance, responding to news stories and other blogs on a scale of weeks rather than hours. Perhaps this will produce more considered responses, perhaps not.

In another attempt to reduce pressure for immediacy, I removed my hit counter when I shifted to MT. On the other hand, I now get email alerts of new comments, so I don’t know how much this has done to reduce the compulsive aspect of blogging.

I’ve added a lot of articles from 1991 and 1992. If you want to see what I was up to ten years ago, now’s your chance.

Gianna has joined the move to MT, but has bypassed mentalspace in favour of rival blog empire ubersportingpundit (when Alston gets his reforms through the Senate will we have to merge?). Still no photo, though.

Meanwhile, a couple of blogs/plogs I’ve somehow missed are Mortigi Tempo and dolebludger.

I’ll fix my blogroll soon. Meanwhile this is a good time to remind everyone who hasn’t already done so to update their bookmarks and links to point to my new site.

A classic poser that first arose in debates over creation vs evolution is the notion of ‘apparent age’. The idea is that, if God created the earth, He would necessarily have done so in a way that gave it an apparent natural history. For example, even though Adam had never been born, he would, on this account have been given a navel. As (I think) Bertrand Russell observed, once we start on this, there’s no way we can stop. Perhaps the universe was created 10 minutes ago, containing us, our memories and an apparent history going back to the Big Bang.

Anyway, a couple of commentators on my first anniversary post noted that they imagined I’d been blogging for years. I had exactly the same perception when I started, with respect to people who’d only been going for a few months or even weeks. Obviously if there are any cues that distinguish newbies from old hands, they are too subtle to be picked by someone who is, by definition, a newbie themselves. More generally, the social conventions of the blogosphere are such that newcomers are absorbed very rapidly, cross-linked, added to blogrolls, and, before you know it, seem like part of the furniture.

Perhaps this will change. Blogging in the US seems much more dominated by ‘first movers’, though there’s still room at the top for high-quality entrants like Kieran Healy and Kevin Drum at Calpundit .

Just when we thought Windschuttle had been blogged to death, the issue has been taken up on the other side of the Pacific. First, Erin O’Connor posted a long piece derived from an uncritically pro-Windschuttle source, taking at face value his claims to be a critic, rather than a practioner, of cultural relativism. Then Henry Farrell at Gallowglass responded with some of the many critical links including mine, and O’Connor posted an update (Thanks to Ehud Rostoker for the alert).

There’s a lot of other interesting stuff on O’Connor’s blog, Critical Mass. In the same post, there’s a link to Eugene Volokh, who links to and slams this (nearly six months old) press release from Gun Control Australia attacking the University of Adelaide for “supporting” pro-gun academic John Whitley. As Volokh points out

the group is essentially trying to pressure a university to shut up a faculty member who is making law reform proposals with which it disagrees.

(Obligatory Voltaire (mis)quote and allusion to JS Mill On Liberty here). I haven’t heard anything about this and Whitley is still at Adelaide and still involved in the debate. Still, statements of the kind made by Gun Control Australia have a chilling effect on debate and are always to be deplored.

Back at Critical Mass, O’Connor gives a personal account of how she came to be so down on academic relativism, after spending eight years becoming a “resident Body Critic” (every top English department must have one, she informs us). Great reading.

Finally, a little quibble. I know the spelling of my name is not obvious from its pronunciation, and I always take care to spell it out when I’m talking to someone. But how can people get it so consistently wrong when they’re taking it from a printed source? O’Connor has it right in one sentence and wrong in the very next one, and she’s not alone in this.

Today marks the end of my first year of blogging. Although I didn’t note it at the time, I started on the winter solstice, which in Canberra means something. The year has seen a lot of changes for me, most of them positive. I’ve moved from Canberra, where I lived most of my life from 1970 onwards, to Brisbane, and, correspondingly from ANU, my alma mater, to the University of Queensland. I’ve finished up an ARC Research Fellowship and managed to land the best job available in Australian academia, a Federation Fellowship. I’ve become a father-in-law, and am looking forward, in due course, to becoming a grandfather. All of these transitions have involved some breaking of old and familiar ties and the beginning of new adventures

In blogging terms, a year is still long enough to go from newbie to old hand. I’ve moved from the training wheels of Blogger to the Mac-like elegance of Movable Type, and have established myself in a fairly satisfactory corner of Ozplogistan (this term based on ‘plog’ for ‘political weblog’, was coined by Bright Cold Matt in a comments thread, and popularised by Ken Parish. Matt gives more etymological details in the comments thread for this post). I was going to list the people who play a central role in this virtual universe, but I realised I was sure to omit someone, and you all know who you are anyway.

I was also going to do a “state of Ozplogistan” assessment, but I see my blogtwin, Tim Dunlop, has already written one. I’ll just make two observations. The first is that, after a period of explosive growth, blogging seems to have entered what economists call the “mature phase” (this refers to industry structure, not to the content of posts!), with roughly equal numbers of entries and exits. Among those most missed, I’ll nominate Don Arthur, whom I keep on the blogroll in the forlorn hope that he’ll finish his thesis and resume blogging. My other observation is that the political makeup of Ozplogistan now resembles that of Oz, whereas, when I started, the echo effect of American-inspired warblogging was still a dominant factor.

My big problem, coincidentally mentioned by Homer Paxton in one of today’s comments is “How in heaven’s name do you combine Uni work, blogging, family time, reading etal.” I’m still trying to figure that one out. If I find the answer I’ll tell you. If I join the legion of departed bloggers, you’ll know I haven’t managed to crack it.

Finally, thanks to all who have linked to my posts, commented in my comment boxes, or just read and enjoyed the blog. A particular thankyou to Rob Corr, who provided hosting for the new site.

I’m in the middle of updating the journal articles on the website. The site is now pretty much update for current publications, and I plan to go back to those from 1992 and earlier as soon as I get time. This is a good time for anybody who has suggestions to make them. I do pay attention, even if, either because of disagreement or inertia, I don’t implement them all.

To complicate matters further, I’m switching to a new computer setup at home, using a Powerbook G4 as my primary computer. This is a job which has not got simpler over time, or with new and improved versions of Mac OS. I didn’t get an exact count, but I appear to have about 80 000 files, which is, I suppose consistent with creating 10/day over 20 years of use, and then doubling that with application and system files. Most need to be transferred from the old computer to the new one, but there are some that shouldn’t be (for example, computer-specific preferences, so it’s a messy business. Add to that some touchy hardware (notably my Telstra cable modem) and there’s several hours of downtime involved. But it all seems to be up and running now, and is definitely an improvement, as the Powerbook supports a second (external )monitor, which is a big aid to productivity.