A bit OT, but this is about 'technology'...

"By allowing expert contributors to remain anonymous, Wikipedia's plan does seem to raise a question: might it be a good idea simply to abandon the tradition of "screen names" that has grown up with the Web, and start encouraging people to use their real names when they contribute to discussion or debate online?"

First they came for Essjay, and I did not speak out, because Essjay did not comment at the Mineshaft.

Also a bit OT, but I just reread Chasing The Sea, by Tom Bissell, an ex-PCV in Uzbekistan. Highly recommended - a little bit of a memoir, mostly history and journalism about Central Asia. He left Peace Corps early because of troubles with the girl-back-home and general isolation in his part of Uzbekistan, and came back to write an amazing book. "If the sea, for Melville, was 'my Harvard and my Yale,' I believed I could make Gulistan my Boston College and my University of Connecticut."

I do realize that this is a little silly, given that I was reading SueAndNotU while Sue was in Georgia. The former Soviet Union just seemed totally different from Samoa -- everyone in Samoa having Internet access completely did not occur to me.

we researched things the old fashioned way

Ah back in the day, when you had to walk uphill 5 miles both ways in the snow (in the tropics!) to get a drink of watter.

Things are different now, granny.

The Country Director when I was in Samoa was an old volunteer from PC Philippines, and would go on endlessly about how he swam five miles to work every day, upstream, both ways, and lived in a cave with a buffalo as his only friend. We made endless fun of him for it. But I can kind of sympathize now. Internet access... I bet volunteers don't play cards any more, they're all blogging instead.

So I was arguing in the comments over at Jane Galt's blog

Why not just bang your head against a brick wall? Cheaper and easier.

She sounds so reasonable?

Totally off topic, but this is the GREATEST THING EVER.

Is he a good guy, or a bad guy?

Bloggers promoted to Big Media: Jonah Goldberg, Jane Galt and Ana Marie Cox. Is there a pattern there?

7: I've been trying for a long time to figure out whether she is (a) dumber than she often appears to be; (b) just bullheaded about sticking with positions she got started arguing as a teenager and refuses to reconsider; or (c) mercenary. I lean toward (c) on the grounds that she's seemed saner since she's been working for the Economist, but I don't read her that often any more.

Also, her comments section sucks worse than Kevin Drum's.

She's the sort of person who is entertained by her own prejudices and consistently mistakes anecdote for evidence. When confronted with contrary information -- especially from sources she feels are ideologically suspect -- she will do anything to avoid assimilating it. This is because at bottom she is convinced that right-leaning, pro-market types simply must be smarter than their opponents and therefore right -- despite the fact that she herself is an anecdotal counterexample to this belief.

I gave up on JG after the 2x4 incident. If you're caught up in a wave of post-9/11 Hippyhate and want to get all Nico-if-I-had-a-machine-gun on them, that's fine, but don't claim ignorance of what a 2x4 is when you realize this will damage your credibility as the Internet's Most Reasonable Crazy Schmibertarian. The Economist can have her.

I missed that one - must not have been reading her yet.

I can't be mad at these little dweebs [participants in a New York peace rally in February 2003]. I'm too busy laughing. And I think some in New York are going to laugh even harder when they try to unleash some civil disobedience, Lenin style, and some New Yorker who understands the horrors of war all too well picks up a two-by-four and teaches them how very effective violence can be when it's applied in a firm, pre-emptive manner.

Stupid modernity. The link.

15 -- I remember that but didn't know about (or don't remember details of) a follow-up in which she claimed not to know what a 2X4 is. How did that come about?

Clownie: Anti-war protesters are great. I disagree with them, and I really, really disagree with letting ANSWER organize their rallies, but I think having people who are willing to stand out in the cold to show their feelings about something as important as war is vital to the health of our nation.... Violent protesters, I have no sympathy for. Do I think that if some thug is about to smash someone's window to show -- whatever -- that bystanders are justified in beating him up to prevent it?.... Am I advocating that they be torn apart by a mob of angry New Yorkers? No. And some of the confusion maybe my fault, because until a friend emailed me, I didn't know exactly how large a two-by-four was. That's a native New Yorker for you.

So: is Galt in the ass-fucking camp or the pantload camp?

Huh. Maybe just hit them with 2X2's, that should be acceptable. What a doofus. And suddenly for some reason I am thinking of "Beat on the Brat" by the Ramones.

(I wonder if DeeDee knew exactly how large a baseball bat is.)

Jane seems more like a "Bonzo Goes to Bitburg" type to me.

Use a table leg to club son-in-law.

18 is actually something I've always wondered about -- two-by-fours have (I presume) three dimensions, right? In that they are objects existing in our locally-three-dimensional surroundings. But '2x4' seems to only measure two of those dimensions. Presumably the phrase 'exactly how large a two-by-four [is]' is under-determined?

Not really. "A 2x4", without more, would refer to a standard 2x4 stud, which is 8' long.

I was so disappointed when I discovered that a 2x4 ain't. It's a 1.5x3.5 and that's not a beat I can dance to.

The internet entity known as Jane Galt really does write stunningly stupid shit on a depressingly regular basis. Watching her in that cookoff made me remember that I did in fact sort of meet her at UnfoggeDCon, and in person she comes across much better.

But God's Little Monkeys does she write some stunningly stupid shit. This is a good example (and having it filtered through The Poorman makes it much more bearable).

Watching her in that cookoff

I had the same experience, M/tch. She can't possibly be as stupid as the things she writes in her blog (and jesus christ but that North Korea thing makes my head spin—seriously, wtf), and she really doesn't seem evil in person or in that video. So I'm leaning toward "just bullheaded about sticking with positions she got started arguing as a teenager and refuses to reconsider."

I really think 12 must be right.

Speaking of technology being wonderful, a little birdie told me you can sign up for accounts on Conservapedia as of right now, for a limited time. Act now, and you too can expand the discourse!

Link doesn't work any more. Sniffle.

On the other hand, there's the macaroni and cheese argument, featuring a guest appearance by our favorite irascible Welshman.

I think I actually went to that protest. It wasn't even organized by ANSWER and I sure don't remember violence.

What did she think a 2 x 4 was? A small block of wood?

33: She was probably referring to the discovery of 26. She didn't say she didn't know what one is, just how large they are.

I went to that protest too, Katherine! I didn't see any 2x4s, which I would assume look something like railway ties, but I do remember the police horses looking pretty scary.

I stopped reading or watching the Galt a while ago because I find her so maddening. She seems to be reasonable and sincere, and yet her opinions are--if not usually, then often enough--strange and difficult to reconcile with "reasonable" and "sincere." I have mildly warm feelings for her, and I think that if I regularly (more than once a year) encountered her opinions plain, I'd have a hard time maintaining that.

I don't think this seeming contradiction is a function, per Apo, of bullheadedness and unwillingness to reconsider. I think she just picked the wrong ideological side--she committed herself to the Stupid Party just as the Stupid Party committed itself to deserving the nickname. And I don't mean to say that because she's ideologically committed, she says things she does not believe, but rather that because of the commitment, she believes things she would not otherwise believe.

We all look to trusted sources for trustworthy explanations, and this is particularly true in areas where we lack professional competence. (She once said she thought the Padilla policy was justifiable because some smart attorney told her it was; I think that's when it became less easy for me to read her charitably and take her seriously.) Her problem is that Democrats own the smart people. We clearly own the people who are professionally smart: professors. And because we have a lot of smart people, and our explanations have to be harmonized among them, our explanations are simply more rigorous. Republicans--especially now that all of the GHWB Republicans except for GHWB are Democrats--are just at an institutional disadvantage. Any individual Republican might be as smart as any Democrat, but the intellectual resources at his disposal aren't anywhere close to those at hand for a Democrat. (That's why the neocons get a seat at the table, I think; they provide intellectual ballast. That itself is a pretty good measure of the intellectual bankruptcy of the Republicans these days. So's the Doughy Pantload.)

I guess I think of this as paralleling the relationship between Catholic thought and everybody else (into which I fall). Catholic thought seems much richer, broader, and more rigorous than similar arguments among Evangelicals, for example. I don't think that's because Evangelicals are necessarily stupider than Catholics; I think it's because Catholics have been doing this forever and have thrown a lot of resources at it. (NB: My exposure to various sectarian Christian arguments is unbelievably limited.)

I find the whole thing depressing, because, despite the results of the November elections, the Republican Party isn't going to go away, and it is going to regain power at some point. But it's really hard to disentangle good from bad in a system of knowledge (or any system) gone so far bad. Mostly, it seems to me, you have to blow it up and start again. That's really expensive, and it means that you've accepted a fallow period for the near future, so most people just stay with the bad system and make modifications on the fly. (E.g., the Knicks.) Which means the Republican Party will be the Really Stupid Party for some significant part of my lifetime, and will regain power for some part of that. So it won't end in 2008, no matter what happens. And that's depressing.

As I think I said to TLL before, I really think we should dump serious amounts of money into the education systems in some of the Red States.

We clearly own the people who are professionally smart: professors.

While we are all flattered to be called the professionally smart class, I think people overestimate both how smart and how liberal the professoriat is. A lot of people are hyperspecialized and really no smarter than anyone else unless you are talking about alpha synthase signaling pathways. Also, anyone who lets their politics interfere with their self interest is one in a million. Academics stop being fans of unions when they organize on campus.

36: I think that the Republican party only became the "really stupid" party fairly recently - whether as a consequence of GWB, his cronies, 8 years of single-party control of house and senate, I'm not sure. This also coincided with my move to the SF Bay Area, so my judgement is clearly suspect. I don't see any reason that it couldn't switch back, particularly if a lot of the higher ups end up discredited or in jail. Conservatism has a lot to recommend it - it's a lot easier to come up with a bad idea than a good one, so "no" is a good default response.

37's comment about "professionally smart" is also pretty much on the money. Management is management the world over, and there are lots of intelligent people outside the academy (particularly in areas where you can get good paying jobs).

For what it's worth, and apologies for getting back on topic, when I visited in 1999, the biggest predictor of whether or not a town in Mongolia had internet access of any sort was the presence of a Peace Corps volunteer. People wanted their e-mail.

(This was no small accomplishment, either, given that the country was not then hooked to any backbone by cable, and that there was nothing like a national net either. Clever solutions.)

While we are all flattered to be called the professionally smart class, I think people overestimate both how smart and how liberal the professoriat is.

Yeah, I don't know about "liberal," but I feel increasingly confident about "Democratic," which would be the label I'd tie to the professors. As for "smart"--there's a fair bit of slide available to the term (I'm not sure I'd want to claim we know what "smart" is), but I mean, in large part, professionally smart. Academics are paid to be rigorous in a way that other people aren't. E.g., I think LB's pretty smart, and I can easily believe that she's smarter than many law professors, in some general sense. But, even restricted to those professors, she's not going to be as professionally smart in their areas of expertise--that's not her day job, and it is theirs.

: I think that the Republican party only became the "really stupid" party fairly recently

I don't think that's true. You can look back at, for example, Reagan, and see a fair number of people in his Administration calling him stupid. You could do the same for Eisenhower. (I think everyone admits that Nixon was smart.)

Furthermore, there is some weird overlap between what we mean by "smart" and what we mean by "the Establishment." I know you can look at Nixon, Reagan, and W., and see a real sense of distance between the Republican Establishment and the incoming staffs. (Not true, to the best of my knowledge with GHWB; I'm not sure about Ford, though, given some of the people in his Admin, I doubt it.)

You can further look at the various media faces presented by either side and see the difference: NPR vs. Rush, et. al., Goldberg vs. Chait (who I think of as an Establishment Republican, but whatever), the Weekly Standard vs. TNR, etc. All of this has been true for a long time, well before GWB.

The difference now, I think, is that the part of the base that they added to get to a majority is now the biggest part of the base, and controls the party.

and there are lots of intelligent people outside the academy

Here's where some of the sliding on "smart" comes in, I think. Academics just are, on average, more professionally rigorous. You can have two equally smart people leaving the university at the same time, with one going into academics and one into business. My claim is that the academic is, in general and by virtue of the nature of his job, going to be "smarter" or more rigorous than the person in industry. (This will probably vary by industry.) As ogged noted, the real world is different, and values things differently (one might say "more properly," I guess).

Putting to one side the schoolboy taunt nature of the claim that Democrats are smarter (and no doubt better looking, sexier, funnier and have better teeth too), I am not sure your argument that academics are more "professionally rigorous" than other professionals actually works. I think it must vary by profession. You used the example of the law. I think that in the law, practicing lawyers certainly are called upon to justify their opinions formally and rigorously much more often that academics. Litigators like LizardBreath and I probably write dozens of briefs/memoranda of law a year; most law professors write articles once every year or two, probably. And of course our work is "judged" by real judges; law review articles only have to get by student editors at a law review. I imagine that the law is not the only field like this. Are their counterexamples? Sure. Comparing a practicing physician to a medical researcher, for example, the researcher likely is much more methodical and rigorous. That is the nature of research. I imagine that this is true for many fields, but it is not obvious that it is true for the overwhelming majority.

I'm reveling in my superior dentistry right now.

Putting to one side the schoolboy taunt nature of the claim that Democrats are smarter

I genuinely didn't mean it as a taunt; I think it's a real problem, and it honestly worries me. I don't believe that any individual Republican is less smart (and maybe here I'm gesturing at some sort of innate intelligence claim) than any Democrat; I certainly know Republicans that I think of as among the smartest people I know. Would you find it similarly problematic if I claimed that the products of US grad schools were "smarter" than the products of Saudi grad schools, as a general rule? It seems to me that it's the same sort of claim.

As to law professors vs. practitioners: my sense is that practicing lawyers have to supply the best arguments that they don't quite believe from time to time, and deal with a great deal of muddlework that is simply a function of litigation, and that professors generally don't need to do either. I think you're talking about general, daily rigor--habits of mind--where I mean something (mainly) about subject matter coherence.

I want politics to be genuinely competitive, on the plane of ideas, too. I'm not conservative but I want conservatives to make the best arguments they can, and remind us of things we'd otherwise forget. I'm literally afraid that after this administration some Democratic victories may be too easy, as I think some were in the post-Nov-22nd era, or as Republican victories were too easy for a couple of elections after September 11th.

subject matter coherence

I would agree that academics often have a greater mastery of their fields in whatever narrow slice of their field the specialize in. I do not think I would call that either rigor or--outside the narrow area of specialization--subject matter coherence. Indeed, speaking only of legal academics, I think it can lead to less coherence in that specialization can lead to a coherent view of a narrow slice of an area but little ability to see how it fits into a coherent whole. Put otherwise, all things being equal, you likely are better off having a building built by a practicing architect than a professor of architecture.

But mostly I'm quibbling about something that I realize was secondary to your main point so I can avoid writing a brief. Sorry. Back to work.

I'm waiting for SCMT to resort to saying that Idealist is misunderstanding the point because he's just not smart enough.

Don't make too many judgments about the PCVs here based on a sample of one. I work a the National University of Samoa (NUS), and I think I am in a unique position here. I have access at work, though it's only fast enough to browse the web reliably on weekends, before 8am and after 6pm on the weekdays. Google is useful, but I've been able to get instructor copies of texts which have been really useful for me -- some of which have really good online resources.

Though there is some truth to your statement about how 'hard core' the PCVs here are. Other posts call the Pacific rim posts 'Peace Corps Lite' or 'The Beach Corps'. The volunteers here seem to have a sense of entitlement (I know, go figure), heck I've even heard it expressed by the token self described neoconservative here. There are also folks living in the villages, learning the language (much better than I), and getting a more traditional experience. I'd hate to think that me living it up in Apia would tarnish their effort ;).

Of course, how many folks could join the Peace Corps and still find the time to stalk some person named Lizardbreath. I'm just being resourceful. I dont know how close you were to the folks here, but if you want me to pass anything on to people from your post or host family, just send me an email. I get around quite a bit when school isn't in session.

As to law professors vs. practitioners: my sense is that practicing lawyers have to supply the best arguments that they don't quite believe from time to time, and deal with a great deal of muddlework that is simply a function of litigation, and that professors generally don't need to do either. I think you're talking about general, daily rigor--habits of mind--where I mean something (mainly) about subject matter coherence.

On the other hand, law professors don't really have a lot of evaluation of their work. They spend most of their time in class, where they are always right, and a fair bit of what's left writing law review articles, the quality of which are notoriously poor. If, on the other hand, a lawyer writes a shoddy brief, either the other side or the judge will tear it to shreds.

In my field (software), while there are definitely axes on which academics can do things better than praticioners, there are not nearly as many as academics like to think, and academics are often blissfully unaware of their limitations and just how much "reducing to practice" entails.

The implications for politics should be clear.

When the Republicans decided to base their electoral coalition on a bunch of biblical literalists that think science in particular and higher education in general constitute a liberal gayocratic plot to fag our children up through flouridated water and banning phonics, it was inevitable that the collective IQ of the party was going to lag well behind the Democrats.

I really like that sentence in 49 a lot.

Why, thank you. I credit the bottle of shiraz I drank while watching Stranger than Fiction just now.

Surely 49 has to be the new hover text, as well as a hell of a t-shirt.

What'd you think of Stranger than Fiction?

I laughed my ass off at it, but what percentage was due to the inherent funniness of the movie versus the wine is up for debate. If anybody rents the movie, though, I HIGHLY recommend the extra features parts with Kristin Chenoweth interviewing the authors. Funny funny funny.

Anyhow, I thought it was completely worth the $3 I paid for it and that it was very well-cast.

I'm not sure lay people understand just how far out of touch your run of the mill law professor really is. Rather than architect v. professor of architecture, I'd go with artist v. professor of art history.

What happens when we have a case is that we get much greater knowledge than any academic on the narrow question before us. Some professor might be able to talk about various theories of sovereign immunity, but I'd be quite surprised if you can find anyone in a law school who knows the law surrounding 28 USC 1605(a)(7) as well as I do. Ten years ago, I'd have said it about espousal and settlement (that's where private citizens have a dispute with a foreign government, and the US government takes ownership of your claim, and settled it on terms it thinks advances US foreign policy).

The only time I ever look at law reviews for anything is when I'm making a point for which there is no case law either way, and the point I want to make is so counter-intuitive, that it sounds dopey coming from me. Since you can usually find an academic who'll say just about any dopey thing you can think of, I'll prefer to put it in his/her mouth, then I can reluctantly agree only to the extent necessary to win the case, and thus look like the reasonable one.

Also, for the price, the Milton Park shiraz can't be beaten. Fair warning, though: it's probably best if you don't give a shit about the enamel on your teeth.

I except practicing professors from 55, of course. I saw Joe Margulies argue the Munaf case in the DC Circuit a couple weeks ago, and damn that guy is good.

I had shiraz tonight too, the house brand, which doesn't cost any more on sale. I didn't know until I looked for a link, that it's 97% shiraz and 3% "mixed blacks."

"mixed blacks."

Hot.

Fair warning, though: it's probably best if you don't give a shit about the enamel on your teeth.

You're at least somewhat under the influence, so it's worth a try:

Show us your titsteeth!

As for STF, I too enjoyed it, despite a number of things about it that could have seriously annoyed me if they'd been in a different movie.

The Ravenswood shiraz is surprisingly good. Some of the folks who attended UnfoggeDCon know this already, but here's a funny story. Many years ago, I got the Ravenswood logo tattooed pretty big between my shoulder blades. It didn't have anything to do with the wine, really; I just liked the drawing a LOT (the triple raven has specific meaning in Celtic mythology that had big, big resonance for me at the time), and it was still a little boutique winery that only real wine enthusiasts had ever heard of. Now, of course, it's one of the biggest wineries in the United States and ships to just about every grocery store in the country. It's kinda like having a "Diet Coke" or a "Marlboro" tattoo.

Sigh. Turns out they're permanent.

Show us your titsteeth!

I would, but my camera is in Tennessee.

Fair warning, though: it's probably best if you don't give a shit about the enamel on your teeth.

"enamel on your teeth" s/b "skin on your back"

I would, but my camera is in Tennessee.

Um, is that a euphemism?

Crap, 63 was me.

No, but it should be.

61 -- To be fair, at UFDC, it was a higher grade of RW. Send me a picture of the tattoo, and I'll see if RW wants to add to your fame.

Ah, so it's the camera you're missing, huh?

the triple raven has specific meaning in Celtic mythology that had big, big resonance for me at the time

Care to eleaborate?

I'd say law professors as smart but out of touch is about right. They don't have to be, of course, and some of them aren't at all (not just the clinical folks either.). But it's a field where being off in the ivory tower doing pure research doesn't make much sense to me, and yet that's how most law professors spend their time.

Law is one of the only fields where you can get away without being peer reviewed, of course...

Care to eleaborate?

Well, okay, but you'll probably thinkrealize that I'm a total flake. When I first decided I was going to get it, I told my friend the witch, who raised her eyebrows, looked at me sideways, and chuckled:
"You're going to get a triple raven? Whew. Well, you're a big Irish boy, you can probably handle it."
"Uhh, excuse me?"
"The triple raven is the sign of the goddess whose name we don't say aloud."
"Who's that?"
" 'we don't say aloud', dumbass."
"Could you email it to me later?"
"[heavy sigh] Yes, for you I will email it, dear."

Turns out it's the sign of the Morrígan, who would appear to soldiers before they were going to be killed in battle, washing their armor. You can invoke her to protect your children, but not yourself. And the triple nature had all sorts of tie-ins with my father dying and Keegan being born and yadda yadda yadda.

"realize" s/b "have definitive proof that"

Thanks apo, you big flake.

Jus' kiddin' (dude, I grew up in Austin). I googled and found out about the Morrigan, and just wanted to know what you found resonant about it.

But, the above story seems to imply that you decided to get the tattoo before you knew what it meant. Was it basically that you liked it (and the wine it rode in on), and then the resonance of the associated myth was lagniappe / a sign?

I liked the graphic but was on the fence about it. The mythology sealed the deal.

I told my friend the witch, who raised her eyebrows, looked at me sideways, and chuckled ... "The triple raven is the sign of the goddess whose name we don't say aloud."

Woo, the Celts.

"The triple raven is the sign of the goddess whose name we don't say aloud."
"Who's that?"
" 'we don't say aloud', dumbass."

This is why I have a hard time talking to Wiccans and their ilk. Their responses that are totally serious I always think are a joke as I can't comprehend someone taking that stuff seriously.

Although I guess it pretty much applies to most religious people.

I can't comprehend someone taking that stuff seriously.

When you're actually from a Celtic country it's even harder to stop snorting. Tell me again about Samhain, or the Brenin Llwyd or the Fucking Loch Ness Monster. And make sure you mispronounce it like you did the last time.

Their responses that are totally serious

"Serious" is a slippery concept with her. She rolls her eyes at me as often as I roll them at her and that's a lot of the reason why I love her so. The other Wiccans I know well strike me mostly as vaguely deist hippie-goths who have a well-developed sense of humor about the whole thing. On the other hand, the straight-up Church of Wicca people tend to look like they stepped out of a panel of The Far Side.

On the other hand, the straight-up Church of Wicca people tend to look like they stepped out of a panel of The Far Side.

Yeah, those are the ones I've run into.

Coincidentally (or IS it?), I just purchased a used copy of this book, which I remember loving as a kid (checked it out frequently from the public library, along with many others in the D'Aulaire's ouevre). I still love it, but damn are those Norse myths some weird weird shit (not that other culture's myths aren't also). I thought of it because just tonight I read the section on the Valkyries, which seem to have a lot in common with the Morrigan.

Also, here's a pretty nice version of the triple raven.

And sort of related, this book sounded kind of interesting.

Also, here's a pretty nice version of the triple raven.

See, goddammit, I should have just waited until the internet was there to find a better stencil.

Also, here's a pretty nice version of the triple raven.

Yeah, but read the comments.

Yeah, but read the comments.

Clearly, apo is an insatiable 42 year old female living in Boston.