Waffle

Much as I dislike Little Green Footballs' comments policy, Brad DeLong shows that it's possible to err too far in the other direction.

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Crooked Timber's Kieran Healy catches Michelle Malkin being presumptuous and sloppy with the facts:

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Talk About Comics has come back online, and is now a blog. It's looking like a mighty good'un, except that for some reason I have posting privileges there so I will spoil everyone's enjoyment with my wittering.
Fearless Leader explains the change.
I'll add it to the blogroll, and maybe plug it into my blog, or plug my blog into it. Or I'll plug both into my webcomic, which is also a blog.

In the future, everything will be a blog. We will fly to our blogging jobs at McBlogblog using rocket-powered blogs strapped to our shoulders and wearing silver suits that will also have blogs on them. We will spend all our time plugging every blog we can find into every other blog we can find and then go home plugging the day's work into our Livejournals and vice versa. This is good, because we will still be able to find productive work, for a new and somewhat loose definition of productive, while robots do all the farming and building. Together, robots and blogs are the answer to all social problems.

There are still forums to discuss stuff on. They too are pretty good, and should now be a lot more stable, but they are not blogs, yet.

Update: Comixpedia has got in on this "putting stuff inside other stuff" act early. They've got the headlines from TAC on their front page before I'd even got it to show up properly in Bloglines.

If I had a linklog (which I will, soon), I'd simply put this in there, but until then, I'll have to comment a little bit. Teresa Nielsen Hayden discusses how online communities deal with spam, trolls and stalkers.

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Von of Obsidian Wings has a challenge to anyone willing to identify as a pro-torture blogger:

Resolved: As a matter of U.S. policy, torture should be used by the U.S. and its allies in fighting the war on terror.

If you are (1) a blogger, (2) support the foregoing position, and (3) you're up for a bit of fun, e-mail Obsidian Wings with your contact information (the e-mail is at the top of the front page).

I'll take the contrary position -- i.e., torture is not a wise and proper tool -- and debate the first serious respondent. For simplicity and my own sanity, I will only debate one person, and therefore will not respond to requests for debate via methods other than an e-mail. The debate will proceed, one post alternating and tracking the other, until one of us gets horribly bored. At which point it will end.

Incidentally, yours truly will be the sole judge as to who is "serious" and who is not. If I reject your challenge, I will explain why in an e-mail.

Before you send that e-mail, however, realize what this debate is not about:

1. It's not about the Geneva Convention, the Gonzales memoranda, or associated technicalities or legalisms.... This is a debate about policy; about what kind of country us well-informed citizens want.

2. It's also not about prosecuting soldiers on the battlefield, the ticking time bomb scenario, or what you saw last night on 24. If your position is going to be that torture may be defensible if minds are fogged by war, or if there's a terrorist ready to explode a nuclear bomb in thirty minutes and the guy you've just captured knows where it is and how to defuse it -- this is going to be a pretty boring debate because I'm going to largely agree with you. To paraphrase another, I can twist the utility knob and come up with a hypothetical in which most of us would enthusiastically advocate the slow torture and death of a seven year old kid. .... Rather, this is a debate about the wisdom of using torture as official policy where there is no apparent necessity.

3. Do not expect the debate to fall into the usual liberal v. conservative dog-and-pony show. ...Indeed, I'm relatively center-right; don't be surprised if, at the end of the day, you find yourself pretty far to left of me -- with other noted lefty torturers, such as Castro, Stalin, etc. [But I should keep the rest of my powder dry, no?]

Could turn out interesting...

I know my place.

Moe of Obsidian Wings has got the blog blues and is quitting. Personally, I think blogging is a bit like being in Fairport Convention - you can join but you can never truely quit.
I want to thank Moe for setting up one of the best political group weblogs I know. For all my partisan venting over the past couple of weeks (which, by the way, will be toned down considerably after the US election), I admire him for the good-humored, temperate way in which he ran things, and the focused, honest way in which he stuck up for his conservative politics.
Gosh, this is beginning to sound like an obituary.
I hope the website will continue. It's really really good. Three cheers for Moe!