Matt Yglesias

Congratulations to the Aardvark

Foreign Policy magazine is going to be bolstering its web presence with a new group blog that apparently will feature Daniel Drezner and Marc Lynch along with other similar sorts whose identities I don’t yet know. This seems like a great project. I’m especially excited about Lynch. Drezner is a sharp thinker and a good blogger, but I think the kind of point-of-view he has is already pretty well-reflected in the US media.

Lynch, on the other hand, like Juan Cole comes out of the weirdly neglected corner of academia that specializes in knowing things about the Middle East. You would have thought that 9/11 and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would bring a lot more prominence to people working in this field. But instead, the mainstream views represented in this field weren’t — and aren’t — what the political powers that be wanted to hear so somehow the conclusion came about that Bernard Lewis was the only Middle East expert worth listening to about anything. After all, he was willing to tell people what they wanted to hear!

One of the things the blogosphere has done, however, has been to open up some space in which a more diverse set of voices can be heard. I’ve been a reader of Lynch’s blog for years, going back to before he had tenure and it was a pseudonymous site. Back then, the about page asserted that the unnamed author was an expert on Arab media and political reform, and at one point I realized that I wanted to quote something this fellow had said for a print article. But whereas on the blog it was fine to attribute something to Abu Aardvark, that wasn’t going to fly in print so I had to uncover the writer’s secret identity and I was certainly glad when it turned out to be a real expert. Meanwhile, besides Middle East issues Lynch also has considerable expertise in the field of comic books which I hope FP will consider an important area.

The Snub

Andrew Golis lists ten young progressive intellectuals who make him hopeful. But who cares about that? The real issue is those of us who didn’t make the cut:

I probably would have included Jessica Valenti and Josh Marshall if not for the painfully obvious conflicts of interest (fiancee and boss). I might also have included a few more bloggers (Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Atrios) but for a desire to not overwhelm things with whiteboysblogging.

I’m going to have to start leaning harder on my Hispanic credentials so I can make it onto more prestigious lists. Admittedly, my skin is pretty pale. But look at Bill Richardson! And I’ve got an actual Spanish name which is more than he can say.

The Hierarchy of Blog-Bashing

Adam Thierer writes about “internet optimists” versus “internet pessimists”:

The problem with the Internet pessimists, however, is that their skepticism often borders on Chicken Little-ism or outright Ludditism. I thought Andrew Keen’s Cult of the Amateur was about as over-the-top as things could get in this regard. (See my 2-part book review here and here), but then I worked my way through Lee Siegal’s tedious screed, Against the Machine. It made Keen seem downright reasonable and cheery by comparison! Keen and Siegal seem to be in heated competition for the title “High Prophet of Internet Doom,” but Siegal is currently a nose ahead in that race.

And it’s true — Keen’s book is quite annoying, but Siegel’s absolutely blows it away. Both, though, seem a bit like cleverly postmodern efforts to undercut their own theses and prove that the quality control mechanisms of traditional media don’t actually work. Lots of blogs suck, in other words, but so do lots of books.

Predictable Ideology is Predictable for a Reason

Joshua Foust’s CJR critique of blog commentary on the Russia-Georgia conflict makes some good points. One failing, though, is that it doesn’t put its complaints in any kind of perspective — the newspaper punditry on the conflict was mostly uninformed and the cable news coverage, as usual, was actively misleading. But more interesting to me is the complaint that “big blogs . . . retreated to their comfortable and predictable ideological corners.”

You hear complaints of this form being leveled all the time and not just against blogs. Something happens that’s politically relevant. And most-but-not-all conservatives see it one way, and most-but-not-all liberals see it another way. Then we bemoan everyone’s predictable ideological responses. It’s as if we’re supposed to believe that in an ideal world, folks would walk around with these ideologies in our heads, but then when things happen in the world our understanding of those events would not at all be impacted by our large set of pre-existing beliefs about how the world works. But why would that happen? And why would that be a good thing? After all, the reason it’s predictable that most liberals will react to a given politically-relevant occurrence is that most liberals have a lot of beliefs and principles in common. Similarly, most conservatives have a lot of beliefs and principles in common. So, again, it’s predictable that people who share many background beliefs will usually have similar responses to new events. But how else could things possibly go?

A lot of the journalistic ideal and bien pensant critiques of partisanship implicitly partakes of some very naive ideas about empiricism whereby if we just all somehow cast aside the blinders of pre-existing prejudice we could see things as they are and our unmediated perception of them would lead to consensus. But nobody who thinks seriously about these issues has believed anything of the sort for a long time — fact and theory are interdependent and all that would happen if we looked at new events without any pre-existing commitments is that we’d have no way whatsoever to make sense of things.

The Future of Kevin Drum

In case you haven’t yet heard, Kevin Drum’s blog has moved from The Washington Monthly to a new home at Mother Jones while his old digs at the Monthly have been taken up by Steve Benen and Hilary Bok. Two great magazines, three great bloggers, now with different URLs! Be advised.