Summaries of last night’s Blogger Bash have been posted by Len, Abby, Eric, Mick, and Aaron. Topics of discussion included Japanese horror movies and Vietnamese restaurants.

Abby has pictures.

Mick says I look like Matt Drudge. You decide: me, Drudge.

Blogger triumpalism at it’s finest.We made it to the dictionary!!:

A four-letter term that came to symbolize the difference between old and new media during this year’s presidential campaign tops U.S. dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster’s list of the 10 words of the year. Merriam-Webster Inc. said on Tuesday that blog, defined as “a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments and often hyperlinks,” was one of the most looked-up words on its Internet sites this year. Eight entries on the publisher’s top-10 list related to major news events, from the presidential election—represented by words such as incumbent and partisan—to natural phenomena such as hurricane and cicada.

Eric Janssen of webraw is organizing a bloggers bash for Wednesday, December 1, downtown at Cafe Francisco. Cafe Francisco has a WAP, so if you want to, you can bring your laptop and liveblog it.

(þ Len Cleavelin.)

To begin with, thanks to Chris for inviting me along as a co-blogger. We share a lot of the same points of view, though I’m more of a statist than him, I suppose.

I’m still in school and time is scarce, but I’m going to try this group blog thing and see how it works. I think it’ll be fine and certainly beats maintaining a site of my own.

One of the things I’ve missed the most about blogging is seeing things of interest and not being able to tell people about it. Take, for instance, this post over at Volokh. I read that yesterday—follow the links, it’s a parody of a leftist / humanist denial of objective reality (it’s from academia, of course)—and was dying to blog about it.

Well, enough nostalgia. Thanks to Jeff for the early link and to James Joyner for the kind words of encouragement.

Speaking of Jeff Goldstein, I’m listening to Journey right now. How 80s am I? Ok, so I wasn’t done with the nostalgia…

Apparently I’m easily amused:

The search for “Killer Grease Munkowitz” turns up nothing. Or at least did before this post was indexed by Google.

Eric Muller notes that Michelle Malkin doesn’t talk to David Neiwart (who generally strike me as white-collar versions of LGF and Atrios, respectively).

In other news, I hear John Kerry doesn’t have George Bush on speed dial. Go figure.

For Brad DeLong (who frankly should know better) and the other dipshits operating ShrillBlog: disagreeing with George W. Bush does not make one “shrill.” Going five years without criticizing someone in one’s own party, however, might well do so.

Amber Taylor is underwhelmed by Jim Lindgen’s performance thus far at The Volokh Conspiracy, although unflattering comparisons to such paragons of Volokhness Clayton Cramer, Cathy Seipp, and Cori Dauber have not (as of yet) been made.

For what it’s worth, I think Jim is a good blogger and (at least from my correspondence with him in the past) a smart guy, but I don’t think he fits in particularly well at the Conspiracy; then again, I never really thought Jacob Levy fit in well there either.

As much as I dislike Michelle Malkin and her poisonous agenda*, I have to object to slinging ethnic slurs at her.

Even if he doesn’t recognize the sheer nastiness of such slurs, Vox Day should recognize how easy they make it to dismiss his criticisms of Malkin’s shoddy scholarship: “Day is just prejudiced against her because she’s Asian.”

And yes, it would be ironic for Malkin’s supporters to accuse Day of anti-Asian bigotry when they’re the ones defending the racist internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. But they’ll say it anyway, and it makes Day’s case that much weaker rhetorically.

The Washington Post reports that the Bush guard memos were faxed to CBS News from a Kinko’s location in Abilene, Texas, which just happens to be down the road from Bill Burkett’s home.

On the other hand, it’s possible that CBS producer Marla Mary Mapes (or some other person working on the story) faxed the documents to New York herself while in Abilene pursuing the story, and Burkett was uninvolved. So it’s hardly a smoking gun as to the source of the documents.

Also, the WaPo account quotes, on its jump page, a comment (attributed to Bill Burkett, although there’s no way to authenticate that it is genuine) from this comment thread at Steve Verdon’s weblog, Deinonychus antirrhopus. Interesting… (þ OTB)

Update: Via Jim Glass in comments at Tom Maguire’s place, WaPo writer Howie Kurtz has part of an interview with Rather:

"If the documents are not what we were led to believe, I'd like to break that story," Rather said in an interview last night. "Any time I'm wrong, I want to be right out front and say, 'Folks, this is what went wrong and how it went wrong.' "

Glass says “It's a little late for that, Dan.” Six days and counting, I think.

Ed Brayton finds an amusingly ironic Google ad at the blog of my favorite anti-gay bigot.

Mr. Cramer has added a disclaimer to the top of his blog, so that no one will associate him with, you know, “those people.”

(Back in January, I blogged about another ironic Google ad.)

Dean Esmay is right; anyone speculating in public over the identity of the “memo forger” without evidence is (a) an idiot and more importantly (b) doing the exact same crap CBS pulled in the first place—making charges based on stuff that could just be made up. Sheesh. (þ OTB)

Nick Troester was outed as a blogger by his department chair. That’s gotta hurt.

On the other hand, I guess blogging is no longer cool when department chairs start doing it…

As Brock mentioned below, Matthew Yglesias has closed down his comment section (at least for now); Will Baude has predictably approved of this decision.

Some of our commenters suspect that Matt’s recent spat with Glenn Reynolds (in which Matt castigated Glenn for failing to appreciate the nuances of one of his posts when quoting from it) motivated the decision—for background on this, see Von’s post at Obsidian Wings.

Matthew Yglesias turns off comments on his blog:

I'm sorry it's come to this, especially for folks who've been commenting on this site in a while, but I think the time has come to shut comments down, at least as a default option. We've become totally overwhelmed by trolls who come to write in the spirit of deliberate insult and misreading rather than fairminded debate, and the folks more "on my side" are just left responding in kind.

While my evidence isn't good enough to be featured on a late-night "documentary" on the Sci-Fi Channel (or even the State of the Union), I think you'll agree that this is no time to be "reasonable" or "sensitive". Here is my evidence:

I propose that the Tarzissian space aliens from the planetary system of Bellatrix Orion have started abducting Pundits. I have reason to believe that Andy is just part of the first wave.

Fortunately, the Aliens lack a sophisticated understanding of our political mores so this fake Andy can be easily spotted, however some abductions aren’t so easily discovered:

“Solid” intelligence from “reliable” sources indicates that Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds was replaced almost two years ago by a cheap Casio synthesizer.

Heh. Er… I mean, “gee, that’s too bad.”

The Tarzissian space aliens have also snatched away Mike Hollihan, but have not replaced him. They must have realized that he was irreplacable.

(þ Brad DeLong.)

I enjoyed the bloggers’ panel. Andrew Sullivan was rightfully castigated for his absence, but the remainder of the panel managed admirably in his stead. Ana Marie Cox did ably incorporate repeated sexual references into her comments, but somehow managed to omit references to butt sex, which I suppose was admirable self-restraint on her part.

On a more personal note, I enjoyed meeting (in person) panelists Henry Farrell (who, as it turns out, really sounds Irish in person—try reading his posts sometime with an Irish accent in your head for some amusement) and Laura McKenna, as well as audience members Russell Arben Fox and Stephen Karlson.

One surreal note: an audience member asked Ana Marie about the importance of fact-checking and the blogger’s responsibility for following up on their mistakes as they are more widely disseminated; unfortunately, it appears at this point that the mass media do no better—and perhaps worse—than bloggers in this regard (þ InstaPundit).

Update: Steve the Llama Butcher has a hysterical rundown of the proceedings, wherein the ghost of Woodrow Wilson, esteemed racist bigot and past president of the APSA, makes an extended appearance, although I didn't notice him or INDC Bill in the room (þ PoliBlog and Rusty Shackleford).

At lunch with Dirk today, I mentioned a minor dilemma I’m facing.

Dan’s thoroughly excellent bloggers pannel is organized, in part, by the New Political Science section, a section whose aims are squarely at odds with my personal conception of what the scientific study of politics is all about, but that’s neither here nor there.* This is all hunky-dory and wonderful—except, allocation of panels at APSA is a zero-sum game, and the sums are determined by panel attendance. Showing up at a NPS panel, rather than the competing methods panel, will help NPS get more panels at APSA in 2005, probably at the expense of political methodology (who have already been marginalized down to 7 panels—total).

So, my attendance will be under protest, with absolutely no slight intended to the wonderful panelists, audience members, or Dan’s work coordinating the panel.

Also, I’m taking wagers on which panelist will first mention anal sex. The smart money would be on Ana Marie Cox, but there are others who might be called on to speak first and who might be tempted to raise the issue for discussion.

Since the Canadian libertarian bloggers are doing it, it must be cool. I hereby endorse the emerging dagger (†) convention for attributing links stolen borrowed from other weblogs or sites, even if it may make people think the target of the link is dead or is subject to being changed to some other cool-looking character (such as þ or ☣, the latter being highly useful for linking to Atrios or LGF) in the future.

You can tell your perceptual screens are kicking in at full throttle if you’re tempted to go out and verify that Kahneman and Tversky actually wrote what Mark Kleiman says they wrote.

Alas, my PDF of the original article (cited in my dissertation, no less) is not in front of me…

Because we considered Signifying Nothing‘s pages insufficiently cluttered, we have added the manual trackback link to individual post and daymode pages, as requested by James Joyner.

And, before you ask, no, we wouldn’t jump off a cliff if he asked us to.

Sorry, I’ve been busy with this stuff for the past few days, plus I have a parent in town. More blogging this weekend, hopefully.

The blog revolution has apparently reached this corner of academe; one of the topics of discussion at lunch (not raised by me, mind you) among our group of incoming faculty members was whether or not faculty members could set up class blogs on the college server.

That said, I’m still leaning against using blogs for any of my classes, although I do think it would be a good way to help fufill the whole “writing across the curriculum” thing that the college is pushing in some courses.

Comments on blogs are a mixed bag. Sometimes they’re excellent, as those at Crooked Timber almost always are, and sometimes they’re uniformly awful despite the quality of the blog, like those at Political Animal.

Sometimes you stumble on a real gem buried in blog comments, like this bit by Charlotte Pressler, professor of philosophy and English at South Florida Community College, at Matthew Yglesias’s blog:

I teach an introductory philosophy course in rural South Florida and so might be able to contribute some analysis (quickly, before Hurricane Charley gets here). Almost all my students are evangelical and/or charismatic Christians who believe in the literal truth of the Bible, and almost all believe that truth is relative. I found this contradiction interesting, and looked into it further.

It appears to have two sources. First, my students apply the word “truth” to all of the statements they believe, and don’t distinguish between claims of fact and claims of value. They are not encouraged to make such a distinction by the local culture; the local authorities frequently describe obvious value claims as “facts,” adding that “you can’t argue with facts.” “Truth,” in my students’ dialect, thus winds up meaning something like “my basic orientation to the world, the way I see things, my perspective”—which would be correctly described as personal, individual, and “relative.”

I might add that an article in the journal Teaching Philosophy (apologies to the author, whose name I can’t remember) argued that the beginning philosophy students who claim that “truth is relative” are really trying to say something like this: “I don’t agree with Mom & Dad any more about a whole lot of things, and I love them, so I don’t want to say they’re wrong, but I don’t want to give up my own point of view either.”

The second reason my students believe that truth is relative, however, strikes me as much more pernicious. They have grown up in small, tribal, tightly-knit, highly conformist communities that (needless to say) did not encourage free discussion or debate. In college, they meet for the first time people who do not share their presuppositions, and they begin to get an inkling that the wider world contains many more. They have never been asked to defend their own belief systems before, and, in all honesty, some of their beliefs are quite indefensible. When students in this position say that truth is relative, they are trying to exempt their own belief system from the requirement of rationality. They want to be able to go on believing whatever their local community has decided to believe, even though both argument and evidence are against them. Again, they are encouraged in this by the local authorities, who teach them to devalue reason and (especially) “book learning.”

The fact is that my students will be ostracized by their local communities (it’s called “disfellowshipping”) if they disagree in any point with their community’s creed. It is a public, brutal shaming, and any human who could avoid it, would. If this sheds any light on the “relativism” of the American public (or, perhaps, the persistence of “creation science” and other follies), I would be glad.

(Reproduced with permission from the author.)

Prof. Pressler really should be blogging.