Quotulatiousness

May 10, 2020

Quotulatiousness at sixteen

Filed under: Administrivia, Personal — Tags: — Nicholas @ 03:00

Blogging may be a stagnant backwater of the internet these days, but some of us have been polluting the pool with our blog posts for a long time … sixteen years in my particular case. I used to publish annual traffic figures, but the statistics plug-in I had been using since 2009 blew up spectacularly and I no longer have anything like a continuous series to point to. Over the last few years, I was regularly clocking in between one and two million “hits” in a year, but a significant portion of those were bots rather than actual human beings. As the years have gone by, I’ve actually written less and less for the blog, as the effort involved didn’t seem to generate much interest or reaction (the regular visitors to my comment section are a very small, select, elite crew … thanks, guys!)

Earlier anniversary postings:

Unfortunately, the first five years of postings — when I was merely a freeloading tenant on Jon P’s site … and eventually consuming some 90+% of his paid bandwidth and storage — don’t seem to be accessible any more, at least I haven’t been able to get access for quite some time:

May 5, 2020

QotD: Social media encourages autistic behaviour

Nothing like that happens today, as far as I can tell, and I spent a lot of time in a wide variety of ivy-covered halls. Part of it, of course, is the general, catastrophic decline in reading comprehension among today’s student body — Lenin was a wonderfully effective polemicist in his day, but for the modern kid it might as well still be in Russian — but a lot of it isn’t. A much bigger part of it is that modern kids can’t overcome the genetic fallacy, and a large part of that, I argue, is the autism spectrum-like effect of social media.

The genetic fallacy, you’ll recall, is the inability to separate the idea from the speaker. Or, if you’re under age 40, it’s simply “communication,” as our public discourse nowadays proceeds in very little other than genetic fallacies. Try it for yourself. We all know what kind of reaction you’ll get in respectable circles if you say “You know, Donald Trump has a point about …”, but you can do it on “our side” of the fence, too. Watch: Obama was right about Race to the Top. No, really: Compared to W’s No Child Left Behind bullshit, pretty much anything short of letting kids be raised by wolves would’ve been better (and hey, even being raised by wolves worked out ok for Romulus and Remus). Even with the qualifier attached, almost everyone on “our side” instinctively bristles — we’ve been so conditioned by the words “Obama” and “race,” especially in close proximity, that we can’t help ourselves. Even I do it.

It’s especially bad for the younger generations who, as I keep arguing, have been effectively autismized (it’s a word) by social media. Twitter, especially, is so constructed that “replies” can come in hours, days, months, years later. Blogs too for that matter — one of the reasons we close the comments here after a few weeks is to prevent drive-by commenters clogging things up trying to re-litigate something from years ago. Modern “communication” must take place in discrete, contextless utterances. That being the case, understanding a statement in context is impossible — I repeat, impossible. So Lenin (or Hitler, or Mao, or William F. Buckley, or the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man) didn’t have a point about ___; because that requires understanding how his point fit into the larger context of his thought, his times, his culture, his world. None of that shit fits into a tweet, so we’re trained to respond to the name — Lenin (etc.) is either a good guy or a bad guy, full stop, so anything he says about anything must be good or bad, automatically.

I hardly need to elaborate on the effect this has on our public culture. If Our Thing really wants to get serious, the first thing any “organization,” no matter how loose, must do is: Ban social media.

Severian, “Education, the Genetic Fallacy, and the Spectrum”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-27.

January 31, 2020

QotD: The heyday of blogging

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

This was a birthday party, not a blogger meeting. You could tell it wasn’t a blogger meeting because NO ONE WAS SPEAKING ELVISH OR KLINGON, and several of the people there weren’t virgins.

Steve H., “Cracking on Crackers”, Hog On Ice, 2005-01-21.

December 21, 2019

QotD: Blogging

Filed under: Humour, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Blogs exist to fill the important market niche of writing that is so dull that your eyes will burrow out of the back of your head to escape. People do read blogs, usually by accident, sometimes on a dare, but those readers are later mistaken for Mafia victims with what appears to be two holes in the back of their heads. On closer inspection, you might find their eyeballs clinging to the drapes directly behind them. Unless the cat gets them first.

Scott Adams, 2004-11-11.

August 4, 2019

Blog housekeeping notes

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Sorry to anyone who tried to access the blog on Saturday morning, as it went down hard for about an hour after my WordPress statistics plug-in got holed below the waterline and had to be scuttled. I’ve been using it for several years without a problem, but somehow Saturday was the day it decided to stop working. A reader notified me on one of the social media sites that the blog wasn’t loading and I checked the dashboard to see a long list of fatal errors pop up. It looked like the initial problem was a call to a non-existent function in SQL which then caused a cascade of other uncaught errors and the blog no longer displayed for would-be readers. I switched to the troubleshooting tab and then looked at the details on the CyStats plug-in, and suddenly the answer appeared:

You may have to look really closely to see what the issue is…

I guess I’ll have to do without my old stats package now.

June 29, 2019

QotD: Blogging versus social media

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Even the “blogosphere” of the early 21st century, in which independently run blog sites posted items on news and responded both to Big Media stories and to each other was more like traditional media in some respects than like Usenet or social media. To read content on blogs, readers had to go there. To interact, bloggers had to read each other’s sites and decide to post a response, generally with a link back to the post they were replying to. If you didn’t like a blog you could just ignore it. A story that spread like wildfire through the blogosphere still did so over the better part of a day, not over minutes, and it was typically pretty easy to find the original item and get context, something the culture of blogging encouraged… In addition, a story’s spreading required at least a modicum of actual thought and consideration on the part of bloggers, who were also constrained, to a greater or lesser degree, by considerations of reputation. Some blogs served as trusted nodes on the blogosphere, and many other bloggers would be reluctant to run with a story that the trusted nodes didn’t believe. In engineering parlance, the early blogosphere was a “loosely coupled” system, one where changes in one part were not immediately or directly transmitted to others. Loosely coupled systems tend to be resilient, and not very subject to systemic failures, because what happens in one part of the system affects other parts only weakly and slowly. Tightly coupled systems, on the other hand, where changes affecting one node swiftly affect others, are prone to cascading failures… [On Twitter,] little to no thought is required, and in practice very few people even follow the link (if there is one) to “read the whole thing”.

Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds, The Social Media Upheaval, 2019. (link goes to Althouse, who posted this quote based on the Kindle edition)

June 9, 2019

The blog as a modern “commonplace book”

Filed under: History, Media, Personal — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’ve been blogging continuously for over fifteen years, but I’ve never found — or even considered — a single unifying theme for the blog. There are consistencies over the years, like the QotD posts, but in general the blog acts as a place for me to note things that interest, excite, or agitate me. After my grandfather died in 1979, I inherited a few of his notebooks, which included scores of lists on all kinds of things … my grandmother said it was all gathered to help with crossword puzzles, but the range of information was much wider than you’d normally find in crosswords. I think, had he lived long enough, my grandfather would have been a dedicated blogger. The blogging world has a lot of blogs like mine, where the blogger notes seemingly random bits of information, and this is far from new: they used to be called “commonplace books“:

Anonymous mid-17th century manuscript containing poems by various authors, in various hands, including Shakespeare’s second sonnet.
Wikimedia Commons.

Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces are used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts. Each one is unique to its creator’s particular interests but they almost always include passages found in other texts, sometimes accompanied by the compiler’s responses. They became significant in Early Modern Europe.

“Commonplace” is a translation of the Latin term locus communis (from Greek tópos koinós, see literary topos) which means “a general or common topic”, such as a statement of proverbial wisdom. In this original sense, commonplace books were collections of such sayings, such as John Milton’s example. Scholars now understand them to include manuscripts in which an individual collects material which have a common theme, such as ethics, or exploring several themes in one volume. Commonplace books are private collections of information, but they are not diaries or travelogues.

In 1685 the English Enlightenment philosopher John Locke wrote a treatise in French on commonplace books, translated into English in 1706 as A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books, “in which techniques for entering proverbs, quotations, ideas, speeches were formulated. Locke gave specific advice on how to arrange material by subject and category, using such key topics as love, politics, or religion. Commonplace books, it must be stressed, are not journals, which are chronological and introspective.”

By the early eighteenth century they had become an information management device in which a note-taker stored quotations, observations and definitions. They were used in private households to collate ethical or informative texts, sometimes alongside recipes or medical formulae. For women, who were excluded from formal higher education, the commonplace book could be a repository of intellectual references. The gentlewoman Elizabeth Lyttelton kept one from the 1670s to 1713 and a typical example was published by Mrs Anna Jameson in 1855, including headings such as Ethical Fragments; Theological; Literature and Art. Commonplace books were used by scientists and other thinkers in the same way that a database might now be used: Carl Linnaeus, for instance, used commonplacing techniques to invent and arrange the nomenclature of his Systema Naturae (which is the basis for the system used by scientists today). The commonplace book was often a lifelong habit: for example the English-Australian artist Georgina McCrae kept a commonplace book from 1828-1865.

May 10, 2019

Fifteen years of Quotulatiousness!

Filed under: Administrivia, Personal — Tags: — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’m not one of the original wave of bloggers, but I have been keeping this blog going pretty much continuously since 10 May 2004, which I think is pretty good going. If nothing else, I usually have a month of QotD entries scheduled along with daily 2:00am videos, so if I can’t get online for whatever reason, there’s at least a minimum of blog activity for regular visitors. Those visitors seem to be holding to the same rough volume as the last few years: just over 900,000 non-bot hits so far, which points to a likely two million+ hits by the end of December. Not too shabby for a very off-the-beaten-track blog after 15 years.

Earlier anniversary postings:

Unfortunately, the first five years of postings — when I was merely a freeloading tenant on Jon P’s site … and eventually consuming some 90+% of his paid bandwidth and storage — don’t seem to be accessible any more, at least I haven’t been able to get access for quite some time:

  • (Very belated) Fifth anniversary
  • (Premature) Fourth anniversary (a few days later, I welcomed my 150,000th visitor)
  • Third anniversary
  • (Belated) Second anniversary
  • First anniversary
  • January 1, 2019

    Blog traffic in 2018

    Filed under: Administrivia, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

    As I try to remember to do every New Year, here’s a snapshot of the blog statistics gathered for me by the CyStats WordPress plug-in from 1 January to mid-morning 31 December (click to embiggenate):

    As you can tell if you compare this to last year, CyStats have updated their UI so that relevant bits aren’t quite as easy to screencap.

    Overall, the numbers are down a bit from 2017, but I still feel it’s worthwhile to carry on…

    November 3, 2018

    Freedom’s Fighters with Tim Worstall

    Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

    Adam Smith
    Published on 1 Nov 2018

    Every month the Adam Smith Institute hails one of those who have fought the good fight for freedom over the decades. In this month’s Dr Madsen Pirie interviewed our blog maestro Tim Worstall, who visited the UK from his rather sunnier climes in Portugal.

    May 10, 2018

    Fourteenth blogiversary

    Filed under: Administrivia, Personal — Tags: — Nicholas @ 03:00

    How time flies! It’s been fourteen years since my friend and then-co-worker Jon offered me a “blog” on his MovableType website (he also offered me a template that might have been more suitable to a porn site — black and red background, flaming letters in the title, it might even have had an embedded 70s porn music track — but that’s another story). By 2009, my blog was consuming almost all of his monthly bandwidth (yes, kids, back in those days bandwidth wasn’t “too cheap to meter” … it cost money to shift those bits), so I set up my own WordPress installation at HostGator and have been blogging here since then.

    Blogs aren’t as relevant today as they were a decade-and-a-half ago — social media in general and Facebook in particular having carved away much of the audience — but for the first time since 2014 my annual traffic went up substantially in 2017 (going from over 1.7 million to 2.44 million — 2,446,311 unique visits according to my WordPress stats page, from a total of 3,619,782 hits). Last year, I mentioned that I’d been adding a minimum of one video per day (in the 2am slot, after the QotD entry scheduled for 1am) and between that and posting links to blog entries on Gab.ai, the spike in traffic seems to indicate it was the right decision.

    Earlier anniversary postings:

    March 22, 2018

    The social media mistake

    Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

    Robert Tracinski explains why the move to social media was dangerous to free public discourse despite the otherwise-attractive nature of TwitFaceTube and other factions of the social media Borg:

    Was social media a mistake? Two recent events crystallized my answer to this question. First, conservative comedian Steven Crowder had his Twitter account suspended for a week because he posted a video on YouTube that was critical of “gender fluidity” and used a Bad Word. The video was also pulled from YouTube, which you might not think of as a social media platform, even though it definitely is.

    Then Brandon Morse noticed Twitter was preventing him from tweeting a link to an article by a controversial conservative columnist. This follows stories of Google-owned YouTube “demonetizing” videos by conservatives, unplugging them from the ability to make money from ads, and Facebook and Google targeting conservative sites for hilariously inaccurate and tendentious “fact checks.” It’s becoming clear that the big social media companies are targeting ideas and thinkers on the Right, and not just the far-out provocateurs and trolls like Milo Yianopoulos, but everyone.

    What strikes me most is the contrast between this and the Internet era before social media, before Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube swallowed up everything. I’m talking about the 2000s, the great era of the blogs. Do you remember what that blog era was like? It felt like liberation.

    The era of blogging offered the promise of a decentralized media. Anybody could publish and comment on the news and find an audience. Guys writing in their pajamas could take down Dan Rather. We were bypassing the old media gatekeepers. And we had control over it! We posted on our own sites. We had good discussions in our own comment fields, which we moderated. I had and still have an extensive e-mail list of readers who are interested in my work, most of which I built up in that period, before everybody moved onto social media.

    But then Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube came along and killed the blogs. There were three main reasons they took over.

    I have various social media accounts, but in most cases I just use them to link to my blog posts. The old saw about never reading the comments applies with even greater force to most of the social media platforms. I don’t do “breaking news” on the blog, because that’s one thing social media can do better — most of my regular visitors come here once a day to see what I’ve posted since their last visit, not to check for smoking hot takes on something that happened in the last fifteen minutes. For immediacy, the social media sites will win over the blogs (and even the mainstream media, in many cases).

    H/T to American Digest for the link.

    January 21, 2018

    QotD: When to stop reading an article

    Filed under: Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

    I read full-time to edit The Browser, and I abandon a hundred articles for every one that I finish. I generally stop if I hit “eponymous”, or “toxic”, or “trigger warning”, or “make no mistake”. Summary labelling of anything in an article as “complex” means that the writer does not understand or cannot explain the material. I don’t often read beyond headlines that use the words “surprising”, “secret”, “really”, “not” or “… and why it matters”. Any headline ending in a question mark is a bad sign. I know writers don’t usually write their own headlines, but the headline represents a best effort to say what is useful in the article by a sympathetic person who has been paid to read it.

    Robert Cottrell, quoted by Tyler Cowen, “When does Robert Cottrell just stop reading? (from the comments)”, Marginal Revolution, 2016-05-19.

    January 1, 2018

    Blog traffic in 2017

    Filed under: Administrivia, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

    The annual statistics update on Quotulatiousness from January 1st through December 31st, 2017. The numbers will be a couple of thousand short of the full year, as I did the screen captures mid-morning on the 31st.

    I stopped paying much attention to the blog stats years ago, but the jump in traffic from 2016 to 2017 is amazing! Going from a stable ~1.7 million visits per year to nearly 2.5 million last year is quite unexpected. That’s getting up toward the region where it might seem to make sense to try to monetize the blog … but I tried doing the Amazon affiliate thing earlier this year, and it generated exactly $0.00 in revenue for Amazon, and I got my full share of that revenue (as Jayne put it: “Let’s see, let me do the math: 10 per cent of nothing is, … (mumble) carry the zero …(mumble) … “)

    June 16, 2017

    Coyote Blog going dark? Say it ain’t so!

    Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 05:00

    Sadly, it appears that Warren Meyer is thinking of closing down his excellent blog:

    I am not sure I am able to continue blogging in the current environment. When I began blogging over 12 years ago, it was to report on my various adventures in trying to run a small business. It soon morphed into a platform for me to think out loud about various policy issues. For example, while I didn’t really understand this when I started, it became a platform for me to think through mistakes I made in my initial enthusiasm for the Iraq War. You can see me in the early years evolve from a kind of knee-jerk global warming absolute denier to a lukewarmer with much more understanding of the underlying science. I think of myself as an intellectual (though one who cannot spell or proof-read) who likes to discuss policy.

    But I am not sure this is the time for that. The world seems to be moving away from intellectualism. I say this not because Trump voters were somehow rejecting intellectualism, but because intellectuals themselves seem to be rejecting it. They act like children, they are turning universities into totalitarian monocultures, and they compete with each other to craft mindless 140-character “gotchas” on Twitter. I challenge you to even find a forum today for intellectual exchange between people who disagree with one another. In politics, Trump clearly rejects intellectualism but for whatever reasons, the Democratic opposition has as well.

    We have a tribal war going on in this country that has officially gone beyond any real policy issues. While the US and the Soviet Union had real differences in philosophy and approach, most of their confrontations were in proxy wars which bore little resemblance to these values. That is what politics are now — a series of proxy wars. We spend several days focusing attention on Jeff Sessions, but spend pretty much zero time talking about real issues like approaches to the drug war, and police accountability, and sentencing reform. Instead all we can focus on is the political proxy war of this stupid Russia hacking story. Obama’s birth certificate and Hillary’s servers and Russian hacking and Trump’s real estate sales — all we fight are proxy wars.

    And like most tribal warfare, the two tribes are incredibly similar. I have called them the Coke and Pepsi party for years. Go talk to the the rank and file and sure, one group may like Nascar and barbecue while the other likes Phish concerts and kale, but you will see them asking for the same sorts of things out of government. Take the minimum wage, a traditional blue tribe issue. In Arizona, a heavily red state (we have a super-majority in the legislature of the red team), a $10 minimum wage referendum passed by nearly 60% of the vote last year. The members of the two tribes absolutely hate each other, but they support the same laws. I guess I should be happy they don’t get together, since as a libertarian I think many of these things they want are bad ideas.

    I frequently link to Coyote Blog, as I find his analysis of issues to be though-provoking and often well worth sharing — despite his addiction to the archaic, pre-digital age “two spaces after a period” typing tic. I’ll be sorry to see him go.

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