I'm going with law professors. I had higher expectations of them to begin with.
The states of Tennessee and Wisconsin. Jeez, you guys must have been hard up to find people to bore the shit out of 1Ls.
And Weiner comes through with the Hegelian synthesis. Nice.
I keep thinking of Thomas Friedman and how his decline coincided with the arrival of a medium in which people who aren't paid to opine could make compelling and widely available arguments that he's full of crap. Sux, dude. Maybe things will get better in the next six months.
In fairness, Friedman is not a journalist proper but a pundit. And I think pundits were known to be gasbags prior to blogging, while journalists, especially their love of power and herd mentality, have been a little more exposed by blogs.
Friedman was a journalist (and a highly respected one) before he became a pundit.
For me, any strong claim about meritocracy. That's been somewhat surprising. At this point, at a granular level, I'm at least as willing to believe any fellatio-based theory of success-sorting as a meritocracy claim. I'm astonished by how idiotic some people have been with no repercussions. And also, IR scholars.
Do you have any particular IR scholars in mind, Tim? 'Cuz I'm not seeing it.
Any and all who didn't immediately get up and start shrieking prior to the invasion of Iraq. Particularly those who supported it. Off the top of my head, Dr. Rice and Dr. Drezner. What's really the point if you can't hit the easy pitches out of the park?
The only IR scholar I know of who blogs is Drez/ner. You got it in for him?
I believe most IR scholars did oppose the war, and many shrieked. Policymakers don't listen to IR scholars.
No, I think he's pretty smart, but OTOH, he also supported the war in Iraq. I assume those are the questions he's supposed to get right. Blogging comes in only to the extent I saw much better cases against the war in Iraq being put together by bright but totally untrained amateurs like Henley. At a minimum, I'd expect some explanation of what the amateurs (and the professionals on the other side) were missing. But I don't think I ever saw that. If you're aware of something, I'd love to see it.
I'm not really sure how much I'd trust my doctor if he missed an obvious diagnosis and my neighbor, the accountant, caught it. To the extent a lot of doctors missed the diagnosis, I'd wonder about the field.
(Can someone google-proof Dre/ner's name in comment #13?)
Is there a style guide to googleproofing someone can put up at some point? I honestly don't know which proper nouns are allowable here.
I think it's just who, or whose fans, we want to attract and spat with, and who not.
Tim, I agree. I think the case against the war was a flat no-brainer, and you had to be devoted to thinking like the in-group to argue yourself out of it. They had to lie to the American people to sell it, and they had to justify to themselves that it was okay to lie to the American people to sell it.
I had originally typed something smarmy here about how only those with sophisticated training can grasp the theory that justifies all this, but I think that's actually the wrong point to make. I think the right point is, if you want to get the invitations to the cushy think-tanks and government offices, if you want to feel like you're in the in-crowd, you can persuade yourself that all that is just right. I.e., it's not inherent to IR scholars, it's a problem of people who love being with the powerful.
That's why I hate powerful people so much -- it keeps me remarkably clear-headed.
URGENT:
According to the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List, Osama Bin Laden is NOT wanted for the crimes of 9/11 See for yourself: http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/topten/fugitives/laden.htm
What Else Haven’t We Been Told?
FBI says, it has “No hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11”: CIA unit that hunted bin Laden closed:
http://www.twf.org/News/Y2006/0608-BinLaden.html http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13699308/
Two dozen members of Osama bin Laden's family were urgently evacuated from the United States in the first days following the terrorist attacks on New York: CIA Commander: U.S. Let Bin Laden Slip Away:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/09/30/archive/main313048.shtml http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8853000/site/newsweek/
What Do the Experts Think?
Veterans of Viet Nam, Korea, Afghanistan, and Iraq believe 9/11 was an Inside Job. Visit the Veterans for 9/11 Truth here: www.v911t.org Scholars including Physicists, Engineers, and University Professors believe 9/11 was an Inside Job. Visit the Scholars for 9/11 Truth here: www.st911.org
Lt. Col. Robert Bowman; professor, retired USAF pilot, Viet Nam Veteran, and director of the “Star Wars” program under Presidents Ford and Carter believes 9/11 was an Inside Job.Visit Robert Bowman here: http://bowman2006.com/ Morgan O. Reynolds, Ph.D.; professor, former Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, former Director of the Criminal Justice Center in Dallas, Texas believes 9/11 was an Inside Job. Visit Morgan Reynolds here: http://nomoregames.net/
Goddammit, 21. If you're delurking with that crap, you are upgraded from pastry to bong. Get with the program.
I believe most IR scholars did oppose the war, and many shrieked. Policymakers don't listen to IR scholars.
650 odd of em signed a petition against the war. Shag all good it did of course, but they were mostly opposed to it.
And to quote one of them (Jack Snyder, who's a big name among IR types.
The vast majority of American experts on foreign policy have been saying all along that the Bush policy in Iraq is based on myths cut from whole cloth. It’s time for the media to let the American public in on this news.
Sadly, the media did no such thing. I think it got a writeup in the Boston Globe, and that was it.
slol, I'm not sure you'd be far off. An interview candidate I heard once had a body of work devoted to justifying torture (though that was not his job talk). This was pre-Abu-Ghraib and all, but there is a sense in which the people who deal with theory all day should be reminded, by calabat, that sometimes their theories have practical consequences.
--
SAM
Well, we play with live ammo around here. You convinced me, I convinced Leo,
Leo'll convince the President.
AINSLEY
Sam, I...
SAM
It's a short day, Ainsley, and a big country. We've got to move fast.
AINSLEY
Is it because I said in here, the President in there...
SAM
Yup.
AINSLEY
You've got to tell me when that's going to happen. Is this how you guys
decide
to go to war?
SAM
I don't know, I'm usually not in the room when they do that.
And to quote one of them (Jack Snyder, who's a big name among IR types.
The vast majority of American experts on foreign policy have been saying all along that the Bush policy in Iraq is based on myths cut from whole cloth. It’s time for the media to let the American public in on this news.
Sadly, the media did no such thing. I think it got a writeup in the Boston Globe, and that was it.
I'm a lawyer, long familiar with law profs., and I'm stunned with how stupid insta and alterhouse come off. I'm way past the point where I only read insta when referred there (from here, among others) and never read alterhouse regularly.
I'm very tired after a long day of being a lawyer, so not up to explaining *why* they so set my teeth on edge. If anyone cares, I'll explain later. I alternate between thinking insta in particular is outside any real debate that matters to lawyers-- he's just doing pretend versions of real lawyer thinking when he 'writes like a lawyer' (the 2nd amen stuff) and he's even more full of shit on the blog-- and panic that what passes for thinking in the profession has sunk so low. I'll elaborate on this another day if anyone cares, though
I CAN'T HELP THINKING IN ANY LONG OR MEDIUM RUN IT JUST WON'T MATTER. He's been too wrong too often.
Tom, angry rants about Glenn Reynolds are always welcome.
But it's the local custom to work in a reference to "meaty cocks".
and to address the question in the post---
is it a bigger fall from zero (who heard of Glen Reynolds preblogging) to where he is now
or from whereever Tom Friedman was to where he is now?
From my own personal perspective, Glen is way into the negative numbers and Tom Friedman only had an unpleasant downward lurch. He may have bottomeed out into a hole, but Glen has found a deeper one.
But I never much liked Friedman to begin with, so I may underestimate how far he's fallen.
There are law professors who have improved people's view of them via blogging. Are there pundits for whom we can say the same?
I've felt pretty justified in assuming law professors could be idiots, or at least crazy ever since I found out Phillip Johnson taught at Berkeley.
I'd just like to point out that Hugh He/witt is also a law prof, and makes both Reynolds and Alt/house look like Immanuel Kant. With Reynolds and Alt/house, I can kind of see how they got their jobs, I mean, y'know, no hiring system is perfect and it's too late to fire them now and they are at least aping the motions of thought sometimes: but Hew/itt?
(HH's name googleproofed out of caution because not used yet in this thread: does it need to be?)
does it need to be?
No, there are few things I would enjoy more than Hugh showing up here for abuse.
30: Ahem.
34: Ahem, 6. I don't think it needs to be Googleproofed because he's Googlefamous enough that these comments won't show up high (not to mention that these comments don't show up on Google anyway), and anyway it would be hilarious if he showed up and started arguing.
But what about his zombie army, 'Postropher?
That never happens without a trackback.
35: Hugh Hewitt Hugh Hewitt HUGH HEWITT
36: Fuck. Explain these "link" things to me again?
Alternatively, we could refer to him as "Hugh Hugetits."
Hey check it out guys: Gary Shteyngart (really promising young author of The Russian Debutante's Handbook and Absurdistan) has an op-ed in today's Times.
23, 24: We don't need a list of the ones against the war, Henry. We need a list of the ones who were for it, if only to make sure that asterisks are consistently affixed to any listing of their Ph.Ds. But I'll change my vote from IR scholars to "the media."
Was this affected by the rise of blogging, though, or by the war and in general the rise of Bush? A lot of bloggers who should have known better also pushed the war for a long time.
43: See #17. It seems to me that the effect of blogging is less a function of people you were supposed to respect making asses of themselves on a consistent basis (though that certainly happens), and more a function of (a) finding out that the purported distance, particularly in native intelligence, between experts and amateurs is vastly overstated, and (b) making clear that all of those questions you thought needed to be answered weren't so stupid. As for the latter case,when confronted with an expert explanation that makes no sense, people have a tendency to assume that they don't understand because of some personal failing. Seeing a lot of bright people ask the same questions makes it clear that, no, it's not you, and, yes, the experts really didn't do their job. Even nicer is seeing other experts asking the same questions. You get a sense of precisely how deep and how technical a field is. And, it turns out, at least when trying to clarify important questions of the day, the answer is often, "Not very."
Exactly. It's made it much easier to separate fallacious claims of authority from the real thing.
Sounds good. I won't buy any claims about the blogosphere replacing the media, but some parts of it do a good job of pointing out where they're systematically fucking up. Other parts do a horrible job.
Interestingly, the parts that do a horrible job seem also to be the parts that go on about blogs replacing the media.