Bloodless Coup

You assume that because someone stumps for a vote, that people are going to vote for them. I followed some links, and then voted for others in the category. I never pay attention to things like that so unless someone whacks me in the head with a 2x4, I won't know there is a contest, much less a vote to be made.

That being said, as long as you are back blogging, I don't care if you're feeling pissy and moralistic.

:)

That point doesn't change my general criticism. Moreover, as you know, anecdotal evidence is limited. How many people, do you think, followed the links and didn't vote for the blog they came from?

In my case, a shitload.

Actually, Norbiz, you can't count me in the shitload. I voted for you. :)

See, and the funny thing, is that I like Happy Furry Puppy Time. I think your writing is both clever and funny (which is, I think, very difficult; good comedy is much harder than good drama), and I would have hoped you would have been "finalized" (or whatever you call winning this round of the Koufaxes). Your satirizations of Bush's press conferences are well worth reading; combined with the cinema criticism, your site manages a nice balance between politics and culture, which makes it much more interesting to read than Kos or Atrios. The Koufaxes focus on single-post excellence, which misses (I think) some of the interesting aspects of blogging - what authors say about many issues over a longer length of time (day, week).

I don't get my suggested books to read or music to buy from reading bestseller lists or SoundScan top album sales. The more Koufax looks like a popularity contest, the less I'm interested.

Still, sorry to hear you didn't get votes.

What would it have meant for you to "win"?

Sniff

"I don't get my suggested books to read or music to buy from reading bestseller lists or SoundScan top album sales. The more Koufax looks like a popularity contest, the less I'm interested."

Mmm, smells like hipster music snob in here.

I made that clear at the start of my vote-grubbing: I just want the chance to be an also-ran to a fake general or an intergalactic lobster-dragon-gravy.

If that's considered winning, then it's free Boone's Farm Strawberry-Kiwi malt beverage in a Dixie cup for everybody*!

*just me

And here I thought this weirdo was the only one interested in space lobsters.

regarding your comments on orin kerr, huh? so an elitist comment policy is "remarkably anti-blog," yet you consistently link to blogs (e.g., tpm, and volokh itself until about six months ago) that provide no direct way to comment on posts.

and overly technical is bad? what -- heretofore there aren't any technical, subject-matter-restricted blogs out there that any of us ever read or link? bashman's site, to name another, is well-trafficked, comment-free, and generally technical in its predominate linkage to actual legal opinions and technical discussions thereof. ditto becker-posner (well, they allow comments, but their blog is hyper-technical).

the sort of thought-experimenting and information promulgation that is endemic to the blogosphere (and is perhaps its chief value-add) has little to do with the refined thought of an academic journal, with all the narrow focus, painstaking preparation for peer-review, and formal standards that must be satisfied before the ideas contained therein see the light of day. furthermore, it enables people to discuss the issues of the day with an immediacy that formal academic writing simply doesn't allow. surely a law professor does not somehow violate the Code of Blogging, such as it is, by tailoring content in a way that he finds most edifying and that informs his more staid, formal academic work. it's possible that he feels he learns a lot from his best commenters, but spends too much time reading crap, and that by his new system he hopes to gain more insight into his own ideas and those of others by pre-filtering a bit.

there are an awful lot of very narrowly focused blogs out there, regardless of their comment policies (and you're fond of citing a number of bloggers who, if they allow comments at all, not only assert but exercise a policy of excluding / deleting the comments of those who disagree with them a little too stridently, regardless of whether the stridence is roughly proportional to that of the initial post).

as an attorney who learns from legal discussion devoid of heavy-handed ideological editorializing i welcome the development. though you're right in some sense that law is political, lawyers in their natural habitat have very little leeway to consider the ideological implications of what they do, and academic legal writing in large measure avoids heavy political content (yes, much does, and it's most of what lay people read, but the journals are simply stuffed with ultra-narrow, ultra-technical articles no one except a lawyer cares about).

moreover, i'm not bothered by a comment policy that welcomes unsolicited submissions and indicates a willingness to publish those that advance the discussion, and ultimately rewards those who consistently forward the discussion with the option to register. the onus shifts to me, but why shouldn't it? the blog, after all, is his real estate. just because you own a movie theatre doesn't mean you should have to project every film some customer lays at your stoop.

after reading kerr for a while now, i trust that he will go about this process for as long as it lasts entirely fairly. furthermore, i'd be willing to bet he publishes / registers comments / commenters that directly confront him with perceived flaws in his analyses to an extent that far exceeds that of many other venerable bloggers. finally, if it's a crime to want to restrict technical discussions from trolls of both parties who transform every narrow discussion into a referendum on one of several hot button issues and hijack the discussion accordingly (and that happens here plenty, so i know you're familiar with the phenomenon (and yes, i'm one of the guilty parties, i admit)), then i wish there was more civil disobedience in the blogosphere. would that more bloggers emulated kerr's rigor and discipline, not to mention his unfailingly civil tone.

I can't seem to get worked up about Kerr's comment policy. You guys have been pretty fortunate in your choice of commenters, but lots of the high-traffic political blogs get tons of dreck (insert snarky Kos comment here). If I wanted technical discussion on subjects that interested me, I might well limit participation in the discussions to people who seemed to have the background to participate at a high level. (In fact, I often do something very similar with my LJ, using the function that allows me to make specific posts visible only to (all or any subset of) the people I've designated as "friends".)

You are too kind. When in fact, the reality is, we are too dorky and insignificant to really draw any serious "dreck."

I'd say "underpromoted" rather than "dorky and insignificant", but whatever. :-)

Moon keeps telling me the same thing.

If you like what you have, then there's no reason to change your approach.

jacflash; as Binky notes, we have no "choice" of commenters - this blog is open to any and all. If you surf back to some of threads in the summer/fall of 2004 (pre-election), you'll find several that were semi-"trolled" (especially regarding the John Kerry/swiftboat/Vietnam issue). I can't speak for the other posters here, but if a troll shows up, my usual response is to ignore them (and, of course, all threads eventually die a natural death, as people just get bored with the subject). Moreover, having an "open" comment policy allows the blog to speak to a larger audience; if anyone is confused about a term or argument, they can post a question and get it clarified. Thus, we avoid being "technical" (we're all political scientists, so it is possible), and having anyone be able to comment keeps us more honest, in the sense that we need to explain ourselves to a general audience. Kerr will avoid that constraint. That's not good (in my opinion), as it means that a public blog will not be "readable" by the public.

that being said (re: moon's comment), it's his blog. As I noted, it's a free blogosphere/blogistan, and Kerr can do what he wants. That doesn't mean I have to like it, or agree with it. And yes, it is elitist. The fact that Bloodless links to blogs that have no comments (TPM is on the blogroll, but is rarely "linked" in posts; Volokh ditto) isn't a "litmus test" of blogs. I wish every blog had open comments; it seem (in my moral opinion) more in keeping with what the blogtopia is supposed to be. We link to blogs that have interesting/relavant comment on politics/society/whatever, not because their comment policies are "good".

I always think it is bad when blogs (of whatever content) deliberately set themselves up as less "public" (i.e., more technical, more jargon, less clear, etc.). I don't care what the subject, but clearly saying you want less traffic with the unwashed masses (as Kerr implicitly argues) is elitist. And how does this improve his blog? How will he choose which comments to repond to? Will their be an ideological litmus test? An intellectual litmus test? A legal litmus test? How will the rest of us (the unwashed masses, who can only read what the blog does) know what the level of disagreement with Kerr's posts is? After all, comments can run 100 to 1 against Kerr's blogged position, but if Kerr chooses to ignore all hundred, it looks as if the comments agree with him. If he only posts a single disagreement, it looks as if few disagreed. The great advantage of open comments is disclosing to the public what the general consensus is over the positions espoused by the blogger/bloggers. The blogpublic is more democratic when open comments allow a general sense of agreement/disagreement with any particular post to be seen by all (of course, any blog owner can choose to respond or ignore what the mass opinion argues; I'm certainly not going to argue that the masses are right even most of the time).

If Kerr wants to avoid all the "crap" in the world 'o blog, why doesn't he fire up a listserve, where only selected people can join, comment, and be informed about the discussion. No, Kerr wants the world to see his ideas, but doesn't want the world to intrude on his ideological utopia. If that isn't elitist, I don't know what is. I don't mind an elitist (I'm one, myself, on music and wine), but trying to claim not to be one is silly. Making a public pronouncment of becoming more elitist (as Kerr did on Volokh) is even more elitist ("Hey, everyone, the special people are going off over here; come watch what we do, but don't participate!").

You are welcome to "not be bothered" by Kerr's policy; as I've noted (again and again) it's a free internet, and anyone who claims their corner of if (orinkerr.com, for example), can do what they want in it. That doesn't mean I have to like it, nor does it mean I have to approve of what he chooses to do. His public annoucement (he could have choosen to do this without the fanfare that a post on volokh.com would have created) leaves him open to this exact criticism. Do I expect him to respond to this? No. Do I expect him to change because of this? No. Do I expect him to care because of this? No. Do I expect him to even notice this? No. Doesn't matter: he violated my norms of the blogosphere, and I choose to make that criticism public (mostly because he choose to announce the decision so pubically).

How would you feel about a doctor's blog announcing (publically) that they were going to be more obtuse than usual, to avoid having to explain things to everyone? Or a politicians blog announcing that they were going to discuss proposed bills and votes in a narrow, technical sense to avoid the real public effects of the issues? The law, in a general sense, affects everyone's life. For a lawyer to announce that he is deliberately moving his discussion in a direction to alienate most of his audience (while still keeping that discussion open to viewing by the public; again, there are multiple technical options available if he wants to have a private discussion among invited participants) is elitist, and reinforces the ongoing stereotype of lawyers - divorced from reality, and the "traditional" concerns of justice, fairness, and equality. That attitude isn't helpful to the general perception of lawyering as a profession, or a public service.

But, hey, Kerr is just being a lawyer.

My excuse re: Koufax self-pimping is that it technically wasn't self-pimping, since I didn't get nominated for squat. Sure, I was pimping the guy who runs the blog I permanent-guest-blog at, but at least it wasn't for me personally, right?

baltar, i was all primed not to respond, until you tacked on that entirely gratuitous last sentence.

you write: "having anyone be able to comment keeps us more honest, in the sense that we need to explain ourselves to a general audience. Kerr will avoid that constraint."

you conclude this based on what? as i noted, kerr's track record on contemplating and responding civilly to criticism is way more substantial than any number of bloggers with so-called open comments policies, and i'm inclined to give him benefit of the doubt. he didn't specify that only tenured professors, or even that only lawyers can comment. he pretty clearly indicated that anyone can comment (subject to review) and that anyone can register (who has demonstrated a consistent track record of commenting robustly in a way that advances discussion, which does not on its face preclude an interested layperson from earning kerr's trust and gaining registration precisely for purposes of asking the sorts of questions that you worry won't be asked now).

consider this: recently, the Court ruled unanimously on a technical matter of federal state comity in an abortion case, punting on the merits of the abortion issue implicated in the underlying litigation. now, as a lawyer, there may be a great deal of interest to me in reading a nuanced, professionally informed discussion of the nuances of the Court's decision. unfortunately, at a blog like volokh, after kerr's (say) initial post on the details of the ruling, a 300-comment thread follows. in the first five comments, people who know something about the legal issue in the case and who care about the jurisdictional minutiae of the decision independently of the underlying issue sound off in a way that improves my understanding of the Court's decision. then in the sixth comment some troll rails about murderers and bla bla bla. boom -- thread hijacked, and now a combination of two things completely wipe out my opportunity to participate in the discussion that prompted the post and as to which the post was unique (unlike the standard partisan railing on abortion, which we've all heard before from every side). either a) people who care about the issue delineated keep commenting here and there in a sea of familiar garbage but i don't have the time to sift the wheat from the chaff so i lose out; or b) people who care about the issue look for somewhere else to talk about it because they don't feel like mixing it up with a bunch of trolls.

i also don't know that i look to the blogosphere for referenda on public perceptions, especially because so many of the "unwashed masses" have no idea what the blogosphere is or why they should care. if you're looking for a representative cross-section of america, virtually any source you'd name is inapt, unless you want to point to the weekly American Idol poll.

moreover, kerr's including trackbacks, which on his site are actually displayed as interspersed with comments. if you want to disagree with him, do so on your own blog and provide a sharp first sentence and your disagreement is likely to be noticed by anyone inclined to read the thread in the first place.

your doctor example is flawed. while i might benefit from doctors interacting with patients, that doesn't mean i don't think doctors also benefit from interacting with other doctors, and indeed i hope my physicians do so. will i understand what they talk about over dinner? often not. but i'll benefit from their sharing every time i enter one of their offices, and that's all i really care about. should we all be allowed to lurk over their shoulders at dinner and kibbutz in all our ignorance of the finer points of their practices, bearing in mind it takes years of education just to know what the finer points are? how does that advance medical thought, pray tell.

i consider this akin to adult swim at a public pool. i'm not intending to implicate anyone here, the vast majority of whom are prepared to swim laps and observe rules, but on the more crowded blogs things get out of hand and discussion is no more effective than it would be with limitations on who can post because it's a schoolyard free-for-all rather than a town meeting. if i want to know what consensus is on a certain issue, i'll consult gallup; in the blogosphere, i look for meaningful conversation, and with that in mind i haven't read a Kos thread, or even a VC thread, in quite a while, because the signal-noise ratio is ridiculously low.

you're right, though, that kerr is "just being a lawyer." and as such, he derives some benefit from interacting with those who have some knowledge in law. he then writes in formal journals, and some of what he learns might filter into the minds of legislators and practitioners, who in turn may effectuate far more change than any group of bloggers can. anyway, he hasn't said he's foreswearing politics entirely; he's simply indicated that he's going to split his commentary between the fundamentally political and the fundamentally legal, with the former to appear on VC and the latter to appear on his own site.

i remain unclear on where you'd draw the line, baltar, and why you do. how interesting would a wine blog be to you where every post contained 200 comments arguing the merits of gallo vs. yellow tail. i'd be willing to bet that you'd tire of reading that sort of thread very quickly. and on something technical, where you have an expertise, there's something to be said for elitism: you didn't learn wine by listening to the masses anymore than i've learned law by listening to them. and to the extent someone who already has an education in something wants to further that education, a regulated comments policy on a specialty website seems a perfectly effective way to go about.

The adult swim at the pool? And the rest of us should stay in the kiddie zone and continue to pee on ourselves?

Sifu: I'll give you half a point. I'll give you the other half for being part of a cool blog.

moon: I'm glad we agree that Kerr is being elitist. I wasn't arguing that he can't be elitist, just that his public announcement of a closed-comment blog is being elitist. He's welcome to do that, but I can call him on it.

And my doctor example isn't out of place: you missed the analogy. If a doctor blog (with public comments) announced that they were moving to a new site, with closed comments, in order to restrict the public's ability to interfere (hijack, etc.) their discussions, that would be elitist. It's not the moving to a new blog, it is the public announcement of the new blog, with the closed comments that makes it so elitist.

Again, my argument is that by closing themselves off to public content (and Kerr can remove the "trackbacks" from the comments as well, so it isn't public) Kerr runs the risk of turning the place into an echo chamber. You note that Kerr has a long history of responding to comments and criticism - fine, but why is that proof against the arguments I have made here? Again, how will the commenters be chosen?

Having public comments allows the public to let a writer know when they are off base. That does advance the discourse, and can lead to better discussion. Closing the comments means that some points of view won't be expressed, or some arguments won't be heard. That is bound to reduce the quality of the discussion. Yes, there are trolls. I avoid many comments sections for exactly that reason. That being said, ignoring trolls isn't really that hard. Volokh gets only maybe 50 comments for the legal posts - how hard is it to wade through 50 comments?

I'll grant you that some sort of "knowledge litmus test" would raise the standard of any comment thread - not an ideological one, but a filter that keeps out the people who literally know nothing (though, once again, smart-ignorant people can ask very simple questions that often illuminate a complex subject). However, how do you put such a filter in place? The advantage to the blogosphere is that it is immediate. If I want to comment on Kerr's site, I need to send the comment to him, and get it approved. That process doesn't promote free expression/free discourse. (Especially since the public has no knowledge of who Kerr lets comment versus the ones he rejects - again, what litmus test is Kerr using. We don't know, because it isn't a public process.)

My overall point remains: closed comments reduce the overall "goodness" of a blog by reducing potential discourse. In addition, I'm annoyed by lawyers claiming that all they want to do is talk about "technical" subjects - as if the law is divorced from reality and society, and their just arguing about particle physics. Whatever the legal discussion or topic, it is clearly something related to public discourse and affects the public in some way. To argue that the law is unrelated to what happens in the public sphere is, I believe, to fundamentally misinterpret what the law is about. Kerr plays into that (mis)interpretation by his actions.

if you want to feign ignorance of what i meant, and ignore every valid (and surely refutable) point i offered, just to mock an illustrative metaphor by taking its worst possible meaning (which requires removing it from its context of a detailed defense of specialty blogs) among several candidate meanings on a spectrum, that's fine. but doing so only tends to illustrate my point that threads all too easily descend into something less than a conversation.

my point wasn't that kids can't swim laps, or that adults don't enjoy splashing around. it's that some sessions (or blogs, to spell it out) are good for something things, and some blogs are good for others. i'd be pissed off if a rocky horror contingent acted out rocky horror during the middle of brokeback mountain, too. it doesn't mean i don't like rocky horror or its fetishists, it just means that's not what i went to brokeback mountain to see, and to me, democracy means choice, not equal access / subjugation to the least common denominator.

or if you'd prefer another metaphor, i like boutique stores, and i believe in regulatory efforts to keep target from taking over the world with all its delightfully economical sameness. i know where target is, and i know how to shop there. but having a choice among twelve different types of towels at target isn't the same thing as having hundreds of entirely distinct retailers at which to shop for towels. that those boutiques may cost more than target, and that the prices might exclude some people, isn't a reason to wish them gone.

At your service, here to mock. Said mocking was to underscore the point that defending elitism by referring to its practitioners as adults only serves to underscore that the rest of the masses are the equivalent of children. Rather than defending a legitimate notion of the merits of a technical discussion, it instead dug the elitist hole deeper.

and so it did. in about 50 words of 600 or so. what about the other 550, which endeavored to "defend[] a legitimate notion of the merits of a technical discussion." surely i'm not the only one who resorts to pithyness from time to time.

likewise surely you are not the only one who gets called on pithyness either. ;)

ah yes, and if that weren't the case i wouldn't hang around pissing and moaning so damned much. goodness, i feel like i've got no life . . . oh wait . . .