I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I don't care what the context or who it is--prison rape is no laughing matter. This is especially true in the case of a person who, although a scumbag, has not been proved to be a murderer in a court of law.

Prisons are nasty, brutal places, and dehumanize all parties involved. I don't know that there's a viable alternative to prison--especially for hardcore violent offenders, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to figure one out. Jokes about prison life don't really make matters better, and the overall feeling that prisoners somehow "deserve" what they get (even though non-violent offenders are the most common victims) is nothing short of disgusting.

Happy blogiversary to me! July 18 marked one year of blogging here at Signifying Nothing for me. During that time, I’ve posted 144 times, which is an average of 2.76 times per week.

I’d like to thank Chris for letting me spout off on his blog, in spite of our substantial political differences.

I anticipate my blogging will become less and less political as the November election approaches, and I become more and more disgusted with the whole sordid process. I’ll be doing a lot more boardgame blogging at Settling Catan. And I’ll also be returning to my philosophical roots. I just received my copy of Donald Davidson’s first posthumous volume of essays, Problems of Rationality, and I’ll be posting a review of each essay as I read through them in the coming weeks.

Amber Taylor is soliciting votes in a face-off of The Volokh Conspiracy’s three worst guest contributors. As they say, vote early and often.

Update: One of Taylor’s candidates for “worst conspirator,” Cathy Seipp, has really gotten under Conrad’s skin with a fisk-worthy post accusing non-voters of being lazy and idiotic, a phrase Conrad would more likely apply to Ms. Seipp’s analysis of the issue at hand. Go away for a few days, and apparently all hell breaks loose in the blogosphere…

Also, Will Baude is running a web poll asking the same question. At present, Clayton “I'm a homophobe, and I'm OK” Cramer is well in the lead.

Uh-oh. It seems Laura and I are headed for a disagreement over the merits of Avril Lavigne. For what it’s worth, I do find “Sk8er Boi” to be a deeply annoying song. I realize this won’t really redeem me in Laura’s eyes, mind you.

More ammunition here. But if you really want to know what pop sensation I truly have a “thing” for, click here and forever hold your peace.

Dan Drezner ties together the twin themes of less-than-civil bloggers and bad comment hoodoo recently discussed in these parts.

One thing I will say, as a veteran of online fora in general (as an ex-MUD administrator and someone who’s been a part of Usenet since 1992), social problems rarely have good technical solutions. Technology can help—particularly when battling other forms of technology, like comment spam—but dealing with people and their idiosyncracies is a whole other beast.

As far as the negativity Dan has observed and been subjected to in academia, I have to say I’ve largely been spared it (although I will say I was deeply annoyed with the completely worthless one-line review I received for a manuscript once); I don’t know if that’s a function of one’s subdiscipline or perhaps just an example of my relative youth in things academic.

Update: More on this theme from Matt Stinson, who's strongly tempting me to join him in the media black hole that is mainland China.

James Joyner echos my month-old hypothesis on weblog comments, writing in response to the decision to shut down comments at The Command Post:

Unfortunately, there seems to be a strange variation on the Gas Law with regard to blog comments: As blog readership expands, the quality of comments declines geometrically. When OTB had 500 readers a day, the vast majority of the comments—whether from people who agreed or disagreed with me—were quite good. With readership in the 5000–10,000 range, most comments are crap. Reading—let alone policing—the comments gets to be more trouble than it’s worth.

For my part, at least, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the lack of acrimony and vitriol since enabling comments here at Signifying Nothing, but—then again—our little corner of the blogosphere only attracts about 1/40th of James’ daily readership.

Will Baude is doing his best to promote International Kissing Day, July 6, introduced to these fair shores by Amber Taylor (who, incidentally, only seems to get linked by Glenn Reynolds when posting in the realm of making out).

Laura of Apartment 11D is understandably quite annoyed at the public response that at least one (presumably prominent, although I haven’t seen the post in question) blogger gave to her survey.

I generally agree that, ethically, a good blogger will provide readers with an opportunity to have opposing views heard, at least in the form of trackbacks. It is disappointing that many “big boys” of the Blogosphere like Glenn Reynolds, Josh Marshall, the Volokh Conspiracy, and Andrew Sullivan don’t use “real” Trackbacks—Volokh relies on Technorati, which isn’t a proper pingback/trackback service, while Reynolds, Marshall, and Sullivan don’t even go that far; Sullivan accepts “reader mail,” but much of it is buried and all is stripped of any way to tell how authoritative the response is.

Laura cites Usenet as a more “democratic” medium; it is, in the sense that it does facilitate conversation more readily, but there are significant drawbacks to it—most notably, no inherent ability to enforce strong identities of participants in the discussion, which leads to the sort of trollish behavior that one finds at the comment sections of some prominent weblogs (or inmate-run asylums like Slashdot and K5), not to mention issues of spam, off-topic discussion, gratuitous vulgarity, and other vices large and small. The “decline of Usenet,” mind you, has been a staple of Internet discussion since at least 1992, when I was first exposed to it, so it has proven to be more resiliant than one might have thought.

It’s something of a cliche to say that someone has a spiffy new design for their blog… but Matt Stinson’s new design, coupled with a transition to WordPress, is pretty darn impressive nonetheless.

Robert Prather is retiring from the blog scene, due to him having a pretty full plate and losing the will to blog. Hopefully the blogging bug will bite again in the near future; if not, he’s certainly had a good run and most assuredly will be missed.

I’ve been remiss in not thanking Mike Hollihan of Half-Bakered for assembling the second successful Memphis Area Blogger’s Bash. While turnout was slightly lower than the last meet, some new folks turned out, which more than compensated for the slight decrease in attendance:

• The thoughtful AlphaPatriot, who somewhat reminds me of a younger version of Ole Miss criminal justice prof Chester Quarles.
• The lovely and intelligent Rachel in the City, who has some ill-defined off-camera job at WMC Channel 5.
• The vivacious Peggy Phillip, news director of WMC Channel 5.
• Birthday boy Mark Richens of The Memphis Scene.

Also present were Eric of the CA web team, WebRaw and Plug In (among other stops in his blogging empire), Len Cleavelin, Mr. Mike, and (briefly, as his D&D group was meeting Wednesday night too) Brock.

It was fun to see everyone out; it almost—but not quite (after all, I need to make enough money to eat)—makes me wish I wasn’t off to Jackson for the next year or so. I guess the social scientist in me was on display; Mike says I was “laid-back and watchful again.” I guess since my “day job” is to be the expert, I generally find it more pleasant to watch and observe than to be the center of attention.

More reviews: Len, Mike, Peggy, Rachel, and Eric.

Should I be available for the next bash, I second the suggestion that we should try to blog the next event in progress; Eric suggests Cafe Francisco in the Pinch.

Reminder: the second Memphis Bloggers’ Bash is tomorrow at the Blue Monkey on Madison (in the heart of Midtown Is Memphis), starting at 6:30 p.m. Be there, or, er, be somewhere else.

Will Baude still maintains his objections to comments on heavily-trafficked blogs, but concedes there may be some merit to comments in the less-traveled-by portions of the blogosophere. The interesting questions to me are: why do comment sections turn to sludge, and what’s the inflection point where sludge control efforts can no longer be fruitful?

Both Dan Drezner and Amanda Butler (Dan’s research assistant) respond to some grade-A dipshittery from commenters with ideological axes to grind who are pissed off that the empirical results of Dan’s survey don’t comport with their normative views of how the universe ought to be.

Russell Arben Fox gives some advance pub for the blogging roundtable organized by Dan Drezner at APSA in early September and ponders how the discussion will play out.

Of course, I’ll make a point of being there—assuming I end up going to APSA (I’m not presenting or anything, just going to play my designated role as meat for the job mill). I’m about 95% sure I will be there, but I should discuss it with the chair before upping that to 100%.

Anyway, it should be fun. Personally I’m curious how the panelists will reconcile blogs with the two-step flow of political information—is blogging expanding the access to be part of the elite or not, is it another avenue for transmission and diffusion of elite discourse, stuff like that. And it’d be nice to meet some more “scholar-bloggers” in person; as far as I know (for all I know, “John Lemon” could be in my department), Dan is the only one I’ve met in meatspace.

Pieter Dorsman has decided to start blogging again at Peaktalk. He returns with a sage philosophy of blogging:

So is Peaktalk back? Yes, I think so, tentatively. But with a slightly different approach. Content when I feel like it and when I have something to say, or when there’s really good stuff to link to. No more compulsion or posting for posting’s sake.

When blogging starts to feel like a chore, that means it’s time to take a break. Just remember to follow Pieter’s example and come back to us after a while ☺.

Oh, and Pieter—no pressure, but I’d love to hear your take on that minor skirmish going on north of the 49th parallel.