Asymmetric Blogfare

I visit various blogs and post critical comments from time to time. Even on libertarian blogs. Indeed, to anti-paraphrase Thumper from Bambi, if you can't post something critical, why post anything at all?

Cafe Hayek focuses on the benefits of free markets, free trade and innovations, and, as everyone here is (painfully?) aware, I'm very much in agreement. However, unlike the economist Don Boudreaux, the main Cafe Hayek blogger, who remains willfully ignorant that sometimes people are damaged by these things, especially innovations, especially in the short term, it's clear to me that sometimes change is painful.  As a result, I wrote the following comment in reply to one of the posts:

Change nearly always produces both winners and losers, and while innovations heavily favor the winners, especially over the long run, libertarians willfully ignoring the real pain of those whose lives are badly damaged or even destroyed by economic changes are a major turn off to vast swaths of the populace. 

The ideology that it's perfectly okay, indeed a wonderful thing, to allow and encourage serious destruction of some people's lives for the greater good is not widely shared by your fellow americans.

For me, pretty much a 30 second, throwaway comment, right? Well, much to my surprise and amazement, Prof. Boudreaux dedicated not one, but two long posts in an attempt to skewer my throwaway comment.

I'll leave it up to you whether or not and to what extent he succeeded in his skewering. He certainly succeeded as far as his avid readers (i.e his "choir" to which he preaches) are concerned. One reason for that is that I have no way to respond that will have the force of his posts. I guess that's what happens when you attack someone on their blog - asymmetric blogfare. I hope none of you feel that I've done that to you.

Trifecta!

A recent post on Bookworm Room blog  pointed to post elsewhere and raised the reparations question. The real gem was an additional link to a truly outstanding post on the Wolf Howling blog titled: The Roots of Slavery & The Race Hustlers' Holy Grail - Reparations.  The three primary topics addressed are the race hustling industry and reparations, the history of slavery, and how this reflects on human nature and power.  It's worth reading the whole post.  (Video on the post as well.)

Prof. Henry L. Gates, a Prof. of African American Studies at Harvard and late of Beer Summit fame, is chasing the Holy Grail of the race-hustling industry – reparations for slavery.…Prof. Gates has no problem “parcelling out the blame” for slavery on this side of the Atlantic. It is, he tells us, the “whites.” So under Gates's theory, if you are a white American, you are born with the sin of slavery hung about your neck. What troubles Gates is the fact that the historical record shows that the people on the supply side of the African slave trade – the people selling African slaves into bondage - were not the evil white skinned devils, but rather black Africans themselves.  

… 

The issue is not divisive at all. It's ludicrous. Those who took part in slavery in America are long dead. It is a fundamental aspect of our legal system that people are held responsible for the wrongs they personally commit; responsibility for those wrongs does not follow down blood lines. But, as Prof. Gates would have us, let us leave that fundamental issue aside. Even so, over 145 years having past since the end of slavery in America, there are a host of issues associated with who should owe what to whom such that every aspect of Gate's call for reparations passes into the surreal. Obama himself perfectly encapsulates some of this. 

… 

Slavery didn't begin with the African slave trade. To the contrary, slavery, as an accepted practice in the world, ended with the African slave trade. Slavery began with the dawn of civilization and it has involved virtually every race. Indeed, unless Gates is historically illiterate, he must know that slave based agrarian economies have been the norm throughout much of the world's history.
…
And of then there are the world's most prolific slavers of history – the Arabs. Indeed,the Arabs in Saudi Arabia still teach today that it is permissible to make slaves of non-Muslims. And indeed, they still practice what they preach - enslaving blacks in Mali when it fell under al Qaeda rule. Under the Gates theory, we should all be getting reparation checks from Ridyah. 

The bottom line, if slavery is, as Gates posits, an original sin that passes not only through the generations, but also among entire races, then it hangs around the necks of most people in the world today - including President Obama and Prof. Gates. Obviously that can't be right. That doesn't fit the Gate's narrative at all. 

…  

The only way Prof. Gates call for reparations can have even a patina of legitimacy is if it holds culpable only the descendants of those who actually owned slaves and supported the institution of slavery. Fortunately, they are identifiable. The slave owning class in pre-Civil War America and the supporters of slavery as an institution were all to be found in the Democrat Party. It is beyond perverse for Gates, on this historic record, to also seek to hold culpable the Republicans who never supported slavery and whose ancestor's gave their very lives to end slavery. Do you think an Executive Order condemning the Democrat Party for slavery in America and ordering them to pay the reparations per a special levy would satisfy Dr. Gates? I for one could be persuaded to accept that as a reasonable settlement of the problem. 

… 

Gates's push for reparations has more holes than a block of Swiss cheese. If he wanted to actually do something constructive for blacks in America, then Gates would be shouting to the rafters about the call of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for a color blind society. That is certainly in the best interests of both blacks and our nation. Yet instead of focusing on furthering that cause, Gates is pursuing an issue that is sure to, by its very nature, drive whites and blacks apart. 

I am sure Dr. Gates is not so dumb as to be ignorant of any of the above. Nor can he be ignorant of the fact that the descendants of slaves in this country have, today, all of the opportunities of America open to them. No one, Prof. Gates included, could possibly believe that the call for reparations will add anything to that. 

Actually, given that Prof. Gates's wants to apportion blame to all "whites" in America for slavery, it would seem self-evident that the purpose of Dr. Gate's push for reparations is to foster a permanent sense of guilt in the white population of America on one hand and, on the other hand, to separate blacks from whites in society by keeping blacks focused on past sins. That has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with politics. It is naught but a variant on the sermons of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, damning America and calling for blacks to eschew the values of "white" America. 

More specifically, this is the “sins and grievances” approach to politics about which Thomas Sowell recently wrote in his brilliant four-part essay, Race and Politics. It directs blacks and other members of 'victim classes' to “nurse their resentments, instead of advancing their skills and their prospects.” As Dr. Sowell notes, the only beneficiaries of this type of grievance politics “are politicians and race hustlers.” The losers in this equation are those blacks ignoring their opportunities and the reality of America in 2010 and instead, following the ilk of Prof. Gates on the hunt for the race hustlers' holy grail.…

The post then continues with an update that draws upon a different article by Dr. Sowell:

. . . Slavery is a classic example. The history of slavery across the centuries and in many countries around the world is a painful history to read — not only in terms of how slaves have been treated, but because of what that says about the whole human species — because slaves and enslavers alike have been of every race, religion, and nationality. 

If the history of slavery ought to teach us anything, it is that human beings cannot be trusted with unbridled power over other human beings — no matter what color or creed any of them are. The history of ancient despotism and modern totalitarianism practically shouts that same message from the blood-stained pages of history. 

But that is not the message that is being taught in our schools and colleges, or dramatized on television and in the movies. The message that is pounded home again and again is that white people enslaved black people.…If American society and Western civilization are different from other societies and civilizations, it is in that they eventually turned against slavery, and stamped it out, at a time when non-Western societies around the world were still maintaining slavery and resisting Western pressures to end slavery — including, in some cases, by armed resistance. 

Only the fact that the West had more firepower put an end to slavery in many non-Western societies during the age of Western imperialism. Yet today there are Americans who have gone to Africa to apologize for slavery — on a continent where slavery has still not been completely ended, to this very moment. 

It is not just the history of slavery that gets distorted beyond recognition by the selective filtering of facts. Those who mine history in order to find everything they can to undermine American society or Western civilization have very little interest in the Bataan death march, the atrocities of the Ottoman Empire, or similar atrocities in other times and places.
Those who mine history for sins are not searching for truth but for opportunities to denigrate their own society, or for grievances that can be cashed in today at the expense of people who were not even born when the sins of the past were committed.

The politics of grievance and division and a grossly distorted version of history are meant to undermine a free society, not to promote incremental improvement.

I think this is a terrific example of how the internet allows people to share their efforts to be more knowledgeable and aware.

Thanks GW at Wolf Howling.

1,000

This is this blogs 1,000th published post.  It's also more or less the ten-year-anniversary of this blog (the first post was in September, 2003).

The name "Great Guys" was a joke among eight friends from college. The blog was started to help coordinate annual get-togethers and to provide a forum for continuing discussions from those get-togethers.  The get-togethers still happen every year.

At least one of the Great Guys never posted anything at all.  Three of us posted regularly for about a year.  Those were some interesting posts since the third regular poster was quite liberal, while Howard and I are, ummm, well, decidely less liberal/progressive/left-wing/statist/collectivist/etc. and too much less so for blogger #3 to continue so he dropped out.  That's unfortunate, because he provided balance to Howard's and my perspectives.

Averaging 2 posts per week for 10 years feels like decent output and decent staying power.  I'm likely to continue for several reasons:

• I enjoy the debates that many of my posts seem to stimulate
• It's a great way to keep in practice with writing and I find when I write proposals they go a lot faster and easier when I've been blogging
• It provides a way for me to organize my thoughts and think about things and I hope it does the same for at least some of my readers

I think Howard, who has become the infrequent co-blogger will probably continue at his current rate as well.

Well, at 1,000 posts per decade, I'm hoping to hit a 5,000 post (I'll be 94 then), but surely we'll see number 2,000 one day?

Many thanks to our loyal readers for all their support and feedback!

A Conflict of Inference

Lately, my favorite saying has been:

The curse of authorship is that the information conveyed is not necessarily what the writer intended, but rather what the reader chooses to infer.

As someone who attempts to write, both for fun on this blog and the technical, management, and business documents as part of my work, I'm often flummoxed and bemused by the apparent lack of clarity in my writing when a reader ends up inferring meaning that not only didn't I intend, but would've never guessed in a million years that's how they would interpret what I had written.

The only thing that keeps me from feeling totally humiliated by my inability to write clearly is that it happens to real authors as well.  I recommended  Sowell's "A Conflict of Visions" to a friend and when he wrote a summary/critique of what he had read, I was wondering if he had read a different "A Conflict of Visions" than I did.  It turns out it was the same book, but we had just interpreted it completely differently.

Poor Sowell, either my friend or I or both have completely misinterpreted his work.  But that's the curse of authorship.

Blog Friends

Today I had the pleasure of not only having his company, but also of having Hey Skipper of the Daily Duck treat me to lunch. He's every bit as insightful, thought provoking, and witty in person as he in his posts and comments and I thoroughly enjoyed my time with him. This is the first time I've met in person a "virtual" friend from the blogosphere and given the positive experience, I hope to have the opportunity to meet more blog friends in the future.

A second blog friend, Jeff Shattuck from Cerebellum Blues, just finished his first album. I've listened to it several times now and it's an amazingly, stunningly, jaw-droppingly good album. In fact, it's really two amazing albums as there are 14 songs. As a song writer I'm feel very humbled by his accomplishment.

Jeff Shattuck's narrative prior to the release of his album was that he suffered a brain injury and "woke up" with a "rekindled" desire to write songs. My feeling was that this was a great human-interest story that could be leveraged to help sell his music if he wanted, almost regardless of the quality of the songs.

That's all out the window now as he's proven himself to be a truly great song writer. The background is no longer interesting in comparison to the music.

My 15 year old daughter also likes the album a lot so the music appears to have wide appeal. The chord changes are innovative and sophisticated so I was concerned that it might be what I call "an album by and for musicians", where the appeal to mere mortals was limited, but my daughter walked into the room when I was first playing it and quipped, "I really like this song - who is it by?" and has since really enjoyed the rest of it as well, so I think most people will enjoy it.

The Wisdom of the Swivel-Eyed Loons

James Delingpole gives blog commenters a big compliment:

... without wishing to flatter you [blog commenters] too much, you blog-addicted, foaming-mouthed, swivel-eyed loons – I’ve found the comments sections on blogs to be bastions of wisdom, rough-hewn common sense, wit, and often amazingly well-informed insight. And I don’t just mean on my blogs. What I always find equally heartening is when you look up an article online by, say, Polly Toynbee or some crack-papering fraudster from the Met Office and find its inconsistencies and idiocies being torn to shreds by a readership far more intelligent and on the ball than almost anyone in the liberal commentariat.

And this, I think, is the crux of the matter. The main reason so many left-liberals so loathe and fear the internet is that it is a medium that favours the libertarian right.

I don't think that the internet particularly favours the libertarian right. I think that it favours any group with at least some reasonable arguments that has limited or no access to any other media outlet. Libertarians happen to be one such group.

Since I'm feeling particularly loony today (though perhaps not swivel-eyed), I'll take the compliment whole-heartedly.

Brief History of Great Guys

They say that "on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" and that's a good thing since it allows us to concentrate on the argument itself rather than on who is making the argument. While I can't rationally disagree with that, not knowing who's making the argument still doesn't sit well with me, and I often find myself curious about a person who posts something on a blog.

In a recent comment on this blog, erp asked:

I see this was posted by Howard, but Howard who and who are the other great guys posting on this blog?

Since I can relate to erp's curiosity, I've decided to post the following history of this blog.

Eight of us who went to the same college (MIT) and now live all over the place get together once a year (usually sans spouses and children). We jokingly call it the Great Guys weekend. It's certainly a great weekend for us guys! We had such enjoyable conversations during those weekends that we decided to start up a private team blog to continue the conversations (in writing) throughout the year.

Two or three of us never posted at all and two or three others only ever posted a handful a times. Three of us were very active in the beginning. One of those three dropped out after a few months. There was one guest blogger a year or so ago (not one of the original "Great Guys"), but he also stopped posting after just a handful of posts. It seems that this blogging thing takes somewhat more energy and/or a thicker skin than most people have.

That left Howard and me as the only active members.

To answer erp's question almost directly, Howard is a turtle. Really! I'm not kidding! Not the type with a shell, of course, but rather this type:

To settle this dispute with William Eckhardt, a friend and fellow trader, in 1983 Dennis recruited and trained 13 people who became known as the "turtles." Many turtles have gone on to successful careers as commodity trading advisors.

Howard is still trading futures. He's one of those boring, single career type people.

Not me! I'm well into my third career. Signal and telemetry processing systems for defense applications in the 1980s, working with Howard to provide him with computer support for financial data collection and artificial intelligence modeling for his futures trading in the 1990s (I also traded futures privately), and vision based robotics in the 2000s. I'm not sure what I'll do during the 2010s, but I doubt it could be any more fun than the futures trading or the robotics. Perhaps I'll just be an old stuck-in-the-mud and stay with robotics.

Futures trading is an extremely unforgiving occupation. Every mistake, every misconception about how economies and markets work, and every hint of arrogance and certitude is immediately and irrevocably punished by the markets. I read tens of thousands of pages about markets, economics, and finance during those years I worked with Howard and Howard's study dwarfed mine by an order of magnitude. I believe that study coupled with the immediate and harsh feedback provided by the futures markets leads to a very specific and practical worldview. If Howard and I seem to have a very similar perspective, that's probably why.

Comments Feeds

Erp has now added a legible recent comments section and I'm sure The Daily Duck is close behind.

On my sidebar, there's a "Subscribe to Comments" link. I was going to describe to erp how to get that, but it's not really necessary. One can just type the comments feed URL into bloglines or whatever you happen to be using for your feeds.

For erp's new blog:

http://etrp.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default

For The Daily Duck:

http://dailyduck.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default

For Great Guys (if you don't want to right click on "Subscribe to Comments"):

http://greatguys.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default

For Thought Mesh:

Beats the heck outta me! Maybe aog can enlighten us.

Update: The instructions on how to use those comments feeds URLs above no doubt varies depending on which tool you're using to manage your feeds. I use bloglines so I can give instructions for that tool. To add a feed, I click on "add" under the feeds tab which brings up a dialogue that says "Blog or Feed URL:". That's where I paste the above URLs (one at a time) and then click on subscribe.

Larisa Alexandrovna States Her Position

In the comments section of this post, commenters (including me) were trying to classify Larisa Alexandrovna's world view. I think that there was the assumption that since she was attacked by the right wing bloggers "The Sanity Squad", that Larisa must be left wing. Larisa was kind enough to outline her world view in the comments which is reproduced by the following:

So my position is basically the following (very high level), listed as sort of statements (you decide on the label):

1. All forms of centralized power work against the people, although representative government can work well if the people are indeed represented.

2. Basic survival needs should not be delivered by a for-profit structure, like water, for example, delivered by Halliburton, for example. Same goes for law enforcement needs.

3. Companies who make their bottom line demands by profiting off of war are dangerous to a democracy, because they make their biggest profits during war time.

4. Illegal immigration allows for human rights abuses and allows for the importation of slave labor. It is a human rights issue first foremost.

5. The Constitution is more important than any single person or office and it must be defended if we are to have a democracy. Party above country is the Soviet Union, if memory serves.

6. Voting rights, free press, civil liberties, and human rights are all key foundations of democracy.

7. Separation of church and state are necessary to the survival of a democracy.

8. The death penalty is amoral because a). we cannot be 100% sure that every single person put to death is truly guilty or rightly sentenced and b). because we can never be sure that human beings with power won't abuse it.

9. Terrorism is not a country, it is a type of crime and should be treated as a criminal act, not an act of war (with but a few exceptions).

10. There is no single property more valuable nor more fully my own than my body. The government or religious groups or anyone else has no right to tell me what I can and cannot do with my body. I am pro-choice, but also responsible choices.

I'm going to end this post here and begin commenting on her various points in the comments section. Please join in!

Kettle and Pot Boiling Over

A few days ago, the Pot was calling the Kettle black, but now they're both boiling over and scalding me! That's what I get for not staying away from the hot stove.

The "Pot" in this case is Dr. Sanity. The "Kettle" is Larisa Alexandrovna who runs the blog "atlargely.com".

Sanity described one of Alexandrovna's posts as histrionic. Alexandrovna is threatening to file an ethics complaint against Sanity:

...And this is a professional opinion then is it? Interesting, because the professional opinion of a 2 bit shrink distributed in order to smear a journalist for political reasons sounds to me like exactly the type of extremism I am talking about and smells terribly familiar of the Soviet stench. It is also a very good reason reason to file a an ethics complaint against the good doctor.

In the Soviet Union - a police state - medical experts often trotted out to discredit dissidents and free thinkers by applying such standards of medical practice. She appears to be proving my point rather nicely.

I suggest the good Dr. clarify her statements rather quickly because I will file an ethics complaint against a medical "expert" for using her expertise and professional authority to attack me in public and smear me as mentally unstable for my political views. ...

Sanity basically told Alexandrovna to stuff it:

You are a fraud. You wouldn't mind a police state at all as long as you and your friends were in charge. Your threats towards me and those of your commenters demonstrate a obvious desire to silence anyone who dares to have an opinion differing from your own. I would also suggest you hone your reading skills since the post in question merely uses your confused and convoluted rhetoric ("It's official, we are in a police state..."!!!!) as an example of the kind that is often found on your side of the political spectrum.

Foolhardily, I made a comment on Sanity's site that pointed out that, in my opinion, Sanity was attacking the messenger as well as the message:

Dr. Sanity wrote: "I would also suggest you [Alexandrovna] hone your reading skills since the post in question merely uses your confused and convoluted rhetoric ("It's official, we are in a police state..."!!!!) as an example of the kind that is often found on your side of the political spectrum."

That doesn't seem accurate to me since later in the post Dr. Sanity also wrote, "[t]hus our adolescent drama queen linked to above can say with absolute sincerity and passion...". That seems to me to explicitly link Alexandrovna to the rest of the post and the "diagnosis" of hysteria.

Sanity didn't think much of my comment and wrote a long response (my snarky comments are interspersed):

Bret, several points.

1. Her [Alexandrovna's] post is in my PROFESSIONAL opinion a perfect example of the kind of hysterical rhetoric that passes for intellectual thought on the left.

Got that.

2. In writing that post she is behaving like an adolescent drama queen (or, didn't you bother to read her post about the police state we are in?) and I called her on it. "Adolescent drama queen" is not an approved psychiatric diagnosis as far as I know.

Yeah, I read her post. But did Sanity read my comment? I wasn't complaining about her calling Alexandrovna an adolescent drama queen, rather I was pointing out that she was linking the messenger to the message and that Alexandrovna's reading skills were adequately honed for this purpose.

3. "hysteria" is not a diagnosis either but a perfectly acceptable descriptive term to describe overly exaggerated emotional behavior. Psychologically, the exaggerated behavior is specifically and often unconsciously used by the individual to obscure some aspect of reality that is unpleasant or unacceptable. Usually it is the case that it obscures some unpleasant truth about one's self (e.g. a person likes to think of themselves as being a champion of freedom and justice, but actually is a closet tyrant and only cares about their own freedom and is intolerant of other's speech)

I know that "hysteria" is not a diagnosis. That'd be why I put diagnosis in quotation marks in my comment.

4. You know the expression "if the shoe fits, wear it" ? Well Alexandrovna is not only wearing it, she's modeling it proudly to the world in her subsequent post. Fine. She can say whatever she wants about me and even disagree with anything I say; and she can be as ridiculous as she likes--it is a free country after all in spite of the BushHitler Police State and all the oppression we have to suffer under--but I will continue to describe HER behavior using the skills in which I have been trained.

I don't wear shoes (literally, as my co-blogger can attest - why do you think I moved to San Diego?) Alexandrovna did not use the term BushHitler. Sanity was and is putting words in Alexandrovna's mouth and claiming she modelled shoes that she never even wore. And those shoes are really ugly!

5. Ask yourself who is trying to censor whom here. I describe her behavior and call her to account for her exaggerated fearmongering rhetoric and she talks about "reporting" me to the state board for some sort of unethical conduct. Good luck with that. Clearly she hasn't a clue about what psychiatry or psychiatrists do or even what a psychiatric diagnosis is. My guess is that I hit a sensitive nerve and that she knows exactly what I was trying to say and that it cut through her emotionalism to the real person beneath. It must be very upsetting for her. Tough.

In my opinion, both are clearly trying to suppress the speech of the other. One through appeal to authority and ad hominem intimidation, the other via an ethics board. Bad, bad girls, both.

6. And here's a non-diagnosis for you: You are an idiot. I don't think that's in the DSM, but it sure describes a lot of the behavior of trolls like yourself.

I'm wondering if it's possible for Sanity to write anything without resorting to insult. I'm also wondering which behavior she's referring to. Me making a comment?

7. You have a nice day, too. Preferably somewhere else.

You got it, babe. Since I don't think my comment was particularly abrasive, I have to conclude that Sanity wants a pristine echo chamber to sound off in. I'm not exactly banned, but clearly very unwelcome, so per her request I'll stay away. At least she didn't delete my comments like some other bloggers we all know.

I sure hope Sanity doesn't work with mentally ill patients. I'm imagining that her bedside manner might leave a wee bit to be desired.

Site Additions

I have a cold. I'm all hyped up on sudafed so this post'll be a bit ramblin' and I'll probably cringe when I look back at it after the sudafed's worn off. It's been a long time since I last had a cold and I'd forgotten just how annoying they can be. This particular cold has the particularly annoying feature that without any notice whatsoever, my eyes completely tear up and blind me. As a result, I decided not to drive to work today, thereby saving the lives of many of my co-commuters. They should be eternally grateful.

The blindness from tears was just frequent enough that I couldn't do any serious work from home either. So, instead, I hacked at this blog's template. The first thing I did was to finally update the blog links to include the Post-Judd Alliance, of which we're very proud and flattered to even be thought to be included in such a list of blogosphere luminaries. In the process of doing so, I discovered (I think?) that "Susan's Husband" is the same person as "Annoying Old Guy (aog)" at Thought Mesh. (Yes, I am sometimes embarrassingly slow on the uptake). Now I'm so confused that I'm wondering just who is Susan anyway (other than Susan's Husband's Wife's Husband's Wife's Husband) and just how old aog is anyway. He's got kids, so he can't be any older than me, and I'm not old. Am I? AM I?!?!?

Next, I noticed from David's Secret Blog that it's possible to subscribe to the comment stream of a blog or individual post so I added that feature as well. If you click on the subscribe to comments link, your browser (if it's reasonably modern) will probably add some sort of "feed" bookmark for you (at least that's what Firefox does). Nonetheless, I heartily recommend using bloglines instead. If you do use bloglines, then right click on the link, select "Copy Link Location" (or equivalent), and then paste it into the bloglines subscription form and then you'll be notified when any new comments come in for this blog. You can also do this on a post-by-post basis also, by clicking on the subscription link just above the comments on the post's individual page. We have low comment frequency here so I'd recommend just one subscription to all comments for this blog.

This ability to subscribe to comment feeds is very important to me. The problem this solves is that I tend to forget what posts across the various blogs I read that I'm currently commenting on. It's not that I'm commenting on all that many posts at a given time, but I just space it out. Ya know, with work and all kinds of annoying real life distractions. With the ability to subscribe to comment feeds, I won't have to do any work to keep track of it anymore. I'll be automatically reminded. A second advantage is I can feel more comfortable to take time and think about responses to comments and posts on other blogs without having to rush. Rushing often causes me to write something stupid. The reason I rush is that comment threads seem to die after a couple of days so I'm in a hurry to have my say before that happens. It happens partly, I think, because people move on to new posts, but partly because it's hard for everybody to keep track of everything . This will help. I think it has the potential to raise the level of discourse and extend discussions to new heights.

All of the Post-Judd Alliance except Thought Mesh and The Daily Duck have this capability (at the post level, anyway). Thought Mesh isn't using blogger and might not be able to add this capability easily. The Daily Duck is using blogger so I hope they add it soon, especially since there's four of them posting and they are relatively prolific.

Note that there is a substantial delay between when a comment is posted and when bloglines picks it up. This delay seems to be on the order of several hours so this method is mostly useful for the more extended, less frenetic comment threads.

The last addition to this site's template is the Recent Comments column, the idea again coming from David's Secret Blog. I'm not sure how useful it is, but I figure it's worth a try.

In closing, I'll note that we've just had our 10,000th page view since I installed the statcounter. Unfortunately, I can't remember when I installed it so I have no idea what rate of readership that implies,
especially since probably 9,000 of those views are Howard and I checking the formatting of our posts. It's admittedly rather feeble no matter how you look at it since Instapundit probably gets that many views every few minutes. Nonetheless, it's always fun to pass a round number, so I'm celebrating. A round of sudafed for everybody in the room on me! Let's Party!