UPDATE!
Narcissist In Chief has been UPDATED.
Narcissist In Chief has been UPDATED.
“The Least Surprising Correlation Of All Time” has been UPDATED.
This post has been UPDATED
My online host is moving my account to a new piece of hardware, and it’s possible as a result that the blog road may be a bit bumpy over the next day or so. Any disruption should be short and mild, but do let me know by email if you have trouble with anything.
The comments have gotten a bit out of hand again — too much personal invective, too much ranting, too little relevance. I am not banning any individual commenters (which would be easy enough to do), but I will no longer post any comments that have personal attacks (I consider calling people who disagree immoral a personal attack), an undue amount of generalized invective, that are not responsive to the post on which they comment, or that for other as yet unspecified reasons I conclude simply fail to add anything worthwhile to the discussion here. I will not exclude on the basis of grammar alone — I make enough typos and similar errors that I could hardly afford to do that — but I will require at least a minimal level of coherence as well.
A White Scholarship In Boston has been updated, as has University Of Michigan: Scofflaw?, immediately below.
Some kinks resulting in the transition to a new server (but not host!) with an external spam filter are still being worked out.
If you have trouble posting a comment, please send me:
1. The error message you receive.
2. The time (and your time zone) of the problem.
3. The name of the entry on which you were attempting to comment.
These will help the Wizard in tracking down the problem.
If you get an “Internal Server Error” msg., send all the above info to me, but you might also try to post a liitle later. There may be a problem of that error msg being generated while the spam filter is busy deleting spam. (But we still need to know that, even if you succeed in posting shortly thereafter.)
Thanks for your patience, and please keep those comments coming.
ADDENDUM
The Wizard also asks:
One more thing to ask the readers/commenters (I know this is off the wall) but are they clicking the "Post" button from a preview?Consider yourselves asked.
The wizard in charge of the server that hosts DISCRIMINATIONS is performing some behind-the-scenes housecleaning this weekend, primarily adding a new high-powered spam filter on the front end. So far the spam filter in my MovableType has been catching them all, but I still have to pay for the bandwidth they take up, and then delete them. The new filter will, or should, catch them before they make it to the server.
There may be some delay in your comments being posted until all the kinks have been worked out.
After this addition, let me know if you ever receive a “505” error message, which would indicate that some word you’ve used is on the new blacklist.
Some of you have mentioned that TypeKey doesnt’ seem to “remember” you for two weeks after you sign in and check the “remember me” box, as it’s supposed to.
If you notice this in the future please let me know, including what platform you’re using (Mac, Windows, whatever), what browser, and what settings you have for “cookies.”
Thanks.
I mentioned below that DISCRIMINATIONS has been in the process of moving to a new host, JSW4.NET. The move is now complete, although there are still one or two minor issues to tweak. This transition has been about as painless as it could have been, thanks to both the prodigious efforts and uncommon patience of JSW4.NET’s John Walker. If you or anyone you know is looking for a host, get in touch with him.
Some of you will have noticed that at the moment your comments need to be approved, even if you have commented before (notwithstanding the statement in the comment box that only new commenters have to wait for approval). I am trying to come up with a method of posting comments that does not require my approval — what if I ignore my blogly, er, responsibilities for a day or so? — that does not open up a floodgate for spam. (I was accumulating about 6,000 spam comments a month at last count.)
One possibility, although not necessarily the best one, is for commenters to register with TypeKey, which would has the virtue of providing built-in approval not only on this site but also all others registered with TypeKey, which is quite a few. If I set this up and you register, your comments would be published instantly; if you don’t, they’d be published as soon as I approved them.
I am exploring other methods of allowing rapid publishing that would, I hope, also block at least most spam. But meanwhile, I’d appreciate any thoughts or opinions any of you may have. How about leaving them here as comments (!).
UPDATE
I will be installing TypeKey shortly. If you register with it, your comments will be published right away, not only here but on any blog that uses TypeKey.
You DO NOT have to register with TypeKey to comment here, however. If you don’t, your comment will be evaluated by the Movable Type spam filter. The theory, or at least the goal, is to have comments by previously published commenters published virtually right away. There are, however, various tests for spam, and thus it is possible that your comment may be held up for me to evaluate or sent directly to “Junk,” from which I could still rescue it.
It may take a little while for me to get this spam filter adjusted properly, so bear with me. Do let me know if a comment of yours doesn’t appear after a reasonable amount of time.
That light you see burning is at the end of the tunnel through which DISCRIMINATIONS has been passing in transition to a new web host, jsw4.net and its Kinetix Hosting service. John Walker has done a terrific job in welcoming DISCRIMINATIONS to its new home and helping it move in, and I’m sure he will continue to perform the yeoman service he’s been providing over the past couple of weeks.
The move is not yet perfectly complete, and until all the boxes are unpacked and their stuff put away you will notice (or, occasionally, not notice) that a familar item or two (such as the blogroll and your already-posted comments) are missing and some other items may look a bit different. Have patience; this will all be sorted out shortly. Meanwhile, if you notice some functional problem, please let me know.
A reader sent me the following inquiry. If anyone knows where to find what she's looking for, please post in comments.
I am looking for a copy of an essay I read possibly 20 years ago. It was written as a satire ala Swift's Modest Proposal, and made statements referencing ethnic, religious, etc. groups in what would commonly be considered an outrageously prejudicial way. At the end, the essay asked the reader to consider that many of those same statements were routinely made about women, without engendering the same degree of outrage.Have you come across such an essay? If so, would you tell me where it can be located?
Will, For Once, Takes A Wrong Turn, below, has been updated.
No, not the content (or not only that). Hosting Matters, where Discriminations lives, is apparently experiencing some sort of glitch or gremlin that is affecting a number of blogs in odd ways. Here, you may get an error msg. when you post a comment (or you may not), but I believe all the comments are still posting correctly. But the comment counter is not updating. So, don't assume there are no new comments just because the counter says nothing has changed.
Looking for a job? Cease and delete your blog.
Unlikely many of you will have noticed, but Trackbacks haven't been working here for a few days. Seems there was another of those recurrent massive spam attacks (and not just on DISCRIMINATIONS, although it would be nice to blame it on the vast preferentialist conspiracy), and the watchful folks at Hosting Matters turned Trackbacks off for a while. Now they're back on.
Peg at What If? noticed that I'd missed several days. For that (and other reasons, such as that she has a very good blog) she gets added to the blogroll.
If my posting is reduced for the next day or so it's because my wife Helene and I are off to Pasadena to spend Jessie's spring break (and a bit more) with her. Laptop, of course, will be going as well, and I'll try to pay at least some attention to what's going on....
For unknown reasons beyond my control (and that is not the fault of any commenters, no matter how verbose and off-topics your comments may have been!), Discriminations is currently experiencing a Comment Glitch. Will try to get it straightened out, whatever it is, ASAP.
UPDATE [5:15PM]
My hosting service, Hosting Matters, says that it has turned off comments because of a large amount of spam that has been coming my way, and that it will turn them back on when I "take the necessary spam prevention measures."
Since I have already taken all the prevention measures I can -- namely, installing MT-Blacklist (which now has about 2500 blacklisted URLs), I'm not sure what else I can do. Either they'll turn them back on promptly or I'll find another service.
Stay tuned.
UPDATE II [7:55PM]
HostMatters redeemed! Shortly after my last update (but too soon to be the result of it) HostMatters technical support wrote:
The disabling of comment scripts is a temporary measure, designed to prevent comment spammers from crashing a server by using up all available memory. The size/traffic of your weblog has absolutely nothing to do with anything, as a single perl script can bring a server down if it is hammered at often enough. Comment script re-enabledSo, once again you should feel free to comment away. (But not so free that you engage in ad hominem attacks, stray too far off point, introduce whole new debates (such as debating social security reform on a blog devoted to discrimination, although I admit I invited that by quoting George will comparing "Fix It, Don't Nix It" to "Mend It, Don't It." Etc.).
Having lost my patience, I've just announced a new comment policy, in the 59th comment to this post.
If you haven't scrolled down lately you may want to check out some recent UPDATES here.
In writing a regular expression to delete some 400+ spam comments that appeared here this evening I made a typo that I didn't discover until after the first pass, and it looks as though I deleted some not only legitimate but very welcom comments on several posts, including some recent ones. The typo was subsequently corrected and that won't happen again (at least until I do something similarly stupid in the future), but if you notice that one or more of your comments are missing be assured (well, maybe that's not exactly what you should be) that they were deleted in error and not as an exercise of censorship. I apologize for the resulting gaps in some of the comment threads below.
No, not the president (though him, too). Me. Some of you may have noticed (hope springs eternal) that my blogging has been reduced over the past several days. This was due in part to the lead up to and down from the election, but also because my wife and I traveled out to Pasadena for daughter Jessie's 18th birthday. (We got such a deal from Jet Blue that we couldn't afford to stay home.) I'll pick up the pace shortly.
Jessie, by the way, turns out to be perfectly placed at Caltech (first year grad. student in Applied Physics) but has more work than she's ever conceived us. Luckily she has a terrific roommate and very good new friends.
I welcome comments and disagreements, with me or with other commenters, but I do not welcome the increase in snide ad hominem attacks that have begun appearing here with increasing frequency. Be a vigorous as you'd like with your arguments, but please be civil or I will delete your comment.
UPDATE [23 Aug.]
Well, guys/gals, this isn't quite working. Luckily, or not, my wife, daughter, and I have been traveling, mainly through the Republic of California, for the for the past week (although this time we stopped just shy of the native habitat of the exotic tribe of Bayareans), and as a result I haven't been as attentive to this blog (or others) as I like to be. And as a further result, I read all fiftysomething comments to this request for increased civility at one rather pained sitting.
Since I remain displeased with the tone and non-responsive content of much of what has been appearing on comments here lately, this is a good time to recall the timeless and priceless comment of journalist A.J. Liebling: freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one. From now on I will exercise that freedom by deleting comments that contain what I regard as offensive ad hominem remarks, that are far longer than necessary, or that are not germane or responsive to the posts under which they appear. Since I have neither the time nor inclination to edit comments line by line for acceptability, the entire comment containing unacceptable content will be deleted. After a couple of such deletions that commenter will be blocked from future comments.
As for what is unacceptable, you'll just have to trust my judgement, or not. But one thing I will say is unacceptable here is questioning the motives of others, as in the claim that those who oppose racial preferences do so because they want to keep blacks from succeeding or that those who support them do so because they are lazy and want free government handouts. Deal, that is, with arguments, not with the personal character of the people making them.
A grayer area, but one in which my decisions will of necessity be no less black and white, concerns relevance to the post being commented upon and length. I am providing (which takes some effort, if I do say so myself) a COMMENT section, not a free platform for long discussions of alternate (or, for that matter, similar) views of the world. Feel free to disagree (but briefly, please; same with agreement). Feel free to link to other sources that disagree. But if you feel the need to expound upon your disagreement, do so by including a link to your no doubt valuable exposition on your own blog and invite people to comment there.
I will no doubt be accused of censorship. My first response to that is, So? And my second is, So? See A.J. Liebling above. More seriously, and beyond the obvious points that I am not the government and I am not restricting anyone's freedom of speech, the simple fact is that coming here and insulting most readers in order to provoke comment wars tends to suck up all the air in the comment section and changes the nature of what I intend to provide here, whether or not such wars have items of interest in them. There may be, probably should be, a place for such exchanges, but this isn't it.
As mentioned initially, I'm traveling now, and will be for the next couple of weeks, so I may not be able to implement these new guidelines as quickly as I'd like, but they are no less real for that delay. I am, of course, willing to listen carefully to any responses (temperate, brief) to the above, which I suggest you post here, and it is even conceivable that I'll change my mind. Stranger things have happened.
More UPDATES than posts today. Scroll down to find them.
I've been making a good bit of fun of San Francisco during and since our recent visit there. (And why shouldn't I? The little south Alabama town where I grew up had much more diversity [note the absence of quote marks] of opinion than, apparently the entire swath of California that stretches from Mendocino to Sacramento to Carmel. And yes, San Francisco, Berkeley, and Palo Alto, that includes you.)
But it's not fair of me to say that the whole region is of one mind. Helene and I did spend a little time with a delightful fellow, Rick Palmer, who doesn't fit the San Francisco mold. Of course it's no accident, as we conspiracy theorists say, that Rick is a Discriminations reader, which is in fact how we met him (and how we met Joanne Jacobs on previous trips, who also doesn't fit the mold). Indeed, one of the nicest benefits of blogging (it certainly beats the pay) is the opportunity to meet readers and fellow bloggers.
Although Rick seems perfectly happy, he is stranded in a sea of blue and thus needs some company. Accordingly, I encourage you all to stop by from time to time and take a look at his blog, Endnote. His recent post on "Conversations With My Sister" is a nice discussion of, and analysis of, the sort of conversations we've all had with family members or close friends who look at and listen to the world through the eyes of the New York Times and the ears of NPR.
After that, scroll down a post or two and look at his truly eloquent picture (with pictures) of Memorial Day on the Presidio.
ADDENDUM
Well, now I'm feeling a little guilty. I think all of us, Reds and Blues alike (I know that at least some Blues lurk here, and I encourage others to do so and even speak up) ... all of us need to fight against the tendency to stereotype and even demonize the other side. Thus I should have said that although the Greater Bay Area (that "swath" I described above) does seem to be strikingly of one mind, those minds can be quite sharp and some of the people to whom they are attached quite nice. I had a nice visit last June with one of them, Andy Lazarus, who does speak up quite effectively in comments here, and I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to see him this time. Alas, he has a day job.
We're leaving tomorrow to take Miss Jessie to Pittsburgh for the summer, where she'll be interning with Seagate Technology. And then it's on to San Francisco for a couple of weeks of house sitting, just like my wife and I did last summer. (It's nice to have a friend who leaves San Francisco in the summer!) The laptop will be along for this journey, but it will no doubt get less use than normal, especially for the next several days.
Since this blogging business is so highly unpaid (at least as conducted here), the currency most of us bloggers take to the emotional bank is "hits," the number of people who stop by to sample our free wares. We earn nothing from each visit but we make it up in volume, deriving great satisfaction from many visits. And the quickest way to be deluged with visitors, at least for a day or so, is a "plug," or linked mention, on one of the mega-blogs such InstaPundit, Volokh, or kausfiles.
Here at Discriminations the hit-o-meter was kept happily busy today, thanks in large part to a kind reference in a post by David Bernstein on Volokh. But there were two tantalizing near misses that, had they occurred and been added to the total, would have produced significantly larger totals. First, this appeared on InstaPundit today:
DAVID BERNSTEIN WRITES on "hostile environment blowback:"This was my bank shot. So close, and yet so far.
Now comes word, via John Rosenberg, that the University of North Carolina professor in question, Elyse Crystall, is, along with UNC, being investigated by the Department of Education for violating federal civil rights law by creating a hostile environment for white, male, Christian students. A conservative Republican Congressman, Rep. Walter Jones, helped instigate the investigation.I don't approve of such things, but there's no better way to put an end to this asinine speech-suppressing body of law than to start enforcing it evenhandledly.
And then this appears on kausfiles, added to the bottom of the Sunday, March 28, 2004, post discussing Richard Clarke's misleading, and apparently disingenuous, description of himself as a registered Republican.
Update: Clarke's scenario of 'asking for a Republican ballot' is a bit spun itself. It's not as if he was offered a choice of two ballots on primary day and picked the Republican one. As alert Virginia-based kf reader J.R. notes, there was no Democratic primary election in Virginia in 2000. Virginia Democrats held caucuses later in the year, in April--and by the time of the GOP primary in late February it was clear the Democratic nominating contest would be over by April. The Bush vs. McCain primary was the only game in town when Clarke "asked for" his ballot. Most of the Democrats I know would have done the same thing. (But then, most Democrats I know would happily vote for McCain in any election.)Yep, that's me, J.R., the "alert Virginia-based kf reader." And while I'm at it, since Clarke lives in Arlington County, which I believe has had voting machines in each precinct since right after the earth cooled, he would not have had to ask for a ballot of any kind even if there had been a Democratic primary.
So, I'm left with a solid hit on Volokh, a bank shot from InstaPundit (no direct link), and an anonymous near miss from kausfiles. Actually, now that I think about it, that's not so bad for a day's non-work. I suspect they will re-charge the blog batteries about as effectively as a stream of visitors would have done.
You will have noticed that the blogroll here has always been smaller than it should be. In large part the missing links result from there simply being too many worthwhile blogs to list. And thats only the ones I know about; listing a long list of recommended links would thus reveal how many worthies I dont know about. And then theres the real reason: laziness.
Neither of these is going to change, at least not any time soon, but for now I am adding two new additions you should add to your list of regular destinations, Dave Hubers Hubes Cube and E.L. Cores The Blog From The Core. Theyre both terrific.
Were heading up to Boston early Friday morning and will be gone for about a week. I will try to blog as time and access permit, but blogging will no doubt be light until late next week. I hope some of you are still here when I return....
Alice Weaver Flaherty, a neurologist at Mass General Hospital and a neurology instructor at Harvard Medical School, has an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that may suggest many bloggers are crazy.
Neurologists have found that changes in a specific area of the brain can produce hypergraphia, the medical term for an overpowering desire to write....Or people addicted to blogging. Any of you had your temporal lobes checked lately?
....
... One example of these changes is temporal-lobe epilepsy. Some people with epilepsy stemming from temporal-lobe damage have hypergraphia so strong that they will write on toilet paper or use their own blood for ink if nothing else is at hand. Their hypergraphia is usually linked to other personality traits, including unstable mood and motivation, and a tendency to ruminate on the philosophical or religious Big Questions. Similar traits are often seen in people with manic-depression during their manic periods. And there is evidence for selective changes in the temporal lobes of people with mania.
Kimberly Swygerts essential-reading Number 2 Pencil is having temporary (her loyal readers hope) server problems. If you need to reach Kimberly during her blogs time of troubles, or if you just want to send your condolences, she can be reached at her old email address: number2pencilblog@yahoo.com.
Ive just received a very nice email from Milt Rosenberg, the Univ. of Chicago psychology professor who hosts a well known and highly regarded interview/talk program on WGN radio in Chicago. Take a look at his impressive roster of guests and glowing comments.
Prof. Rosenberg has recently launched a new blog, Milts File, which is wide-ranging, informative, and very much worth your time to visit. Im adding it to my blogroll.
For the record: Milt Rosenberg and I are not related. Or if we are, neither of us knows it.
UPDATE I had a typo in the link to Milt Rosenbergs blog, now corrected thanks to the alert sent me by a kind reader.
Light Blogging because of no light. Actually, no power of any kind. If you looked at a map of Isabel's path from the weather service that was widely reprinted, the dot for "Friday 2:00AM" was sitting on our house. We had "only" 60+ mph winds, and were personally very lucky. Although our house sits among a large number of large trees, many of which look pretty precarious, we were spared any damage -- other than losing our power. It's coming on sporadically around the area -- Charlottesville still has pockets of no power -- and we've just learned that our little area, about 12 miles west of C'ville, may not get power until next Wednesday. I'm at a public library now, and will return as I can, but blogging will of necessity be attenuated until our power returns.
Blogging has been light (note the passive voice, which means its not my fault) the past two weeks because we went to Cambridge to get Jessie, and then she was home. Since we only get her a week or so at the beginning and end of the summer these days, other matters took priority over ye olde bloge. And now tomorrow, Friday, were taking her back to Bryn Mawr for her last year (!). I may have my laptop with me (but now that Ive become addicted to my new iMac I dont relish going back to the Dell), and if so I may look at it. But I may not. Anyway, Ill be back after Labor Day.
Were headed up to Boston to pick Jessie up from her ten weeks at MIT,
and thus blogging will be light, or even lighter, for the next several days. Enjoy your respite....
Well, here we are again, back online. Believe me, I'm sure I've missed being here more than you've missed me. Also, my wife, who used to complain about being a blogwidow, quickly discovered that was much better than having someone going through enforced blogwithdrawal hanging around the house.
Anyway, if you're still here, thanks very much for your patience (and if you're not, come back!). Also, many thanks to my good if unmet blogfriends Erin O'Connor, who posted something of mine here and here, and Dean Esmay, who allowed me to post here, for their generous open door policies for letting me post on their fine blogs. Finally, thanks to Robyn Pollman of Sekimori Design for all her help in a difficult time.
I've accumulated a few items to post over the past several blogless days, and I'll be adding them shortly.
Stay tuned.
Several days ago I posted a short notice of an excellent article by Roger Clegg on a pending Supreme Court case dealing with disparate impact. Today a party to the case added an interesting comment to that post. Where else could this happen but the blogosphere?
UPDATE - And now Roger Clegg has posted a comment to the comment. Click on the "Say what?" link at the bottom of the post linked above, and scroll down.