Category Archives: Discourse.net

Depending how you count, I've been blogging for a year now. The first post, such as it was, is dated Sept. 15, but I started in earnest on the 20th. And I still think that one of the early posts was one of the best; it certainly hit the kind of issues I ended up blogging most about. (My eldest son, however, says that this one is the best of the early posts and maybe all time.)

I had thought when I began to take part in the life of the mind working out loud. There hasn’t been all that much of that here; my academic work tends to stay on academic pages where I can go on at sufficient length to be as precise as I feel a need to be. Instead, this blog ended up far more political than I originally imagined it would be. There's a reason for this.

I find it shocking and horrible that anyone running the government, anyone running the Justice Department, could argue for torturing prisoners of war, or any other class of person.

I find it frightening that anyone running the government, anyone running the Justice Department, could even entertain arguments that US Citizens should be held in solitary confinement, indefinitely, without charges or access to court and counsel. The assertion of this power strikes at the hear of our democracy. It is in my view many steps down the road to serious, genuine, good-old-fashioned tyranny, with or without raising the almost distracting issue of whether this is some nascent form of fascism.

(And the bankrupt-America policies of this administration, with many mainstream economists predicting a crash of the dollar or other economic disaster unless we change our policies doesn’t make me feel all that great either. Especially when I think about the political developments that often tend to follow an economic crisis.)

So, one reason I’ve kept on doing this is that I don’t want to look back in twenty years and discover that during the crunch time I was the modern equivalent of a ‘good German’—busy with the demands of family and career while ‘the great experiment,’ the USA, went down the tubes around me. Even bearing witness against these trends serves, I hope, in some small way to begin to roll them back.

As for the rest, it's part archive of interesting things, part sharing. The mix seems to work for some people. Your civil comments, public or private, are always welcome.

Continue reading →

[Update: I believe this is fixed now, thanks to Matt.]

Something upset rendering on Safari (the Mac browser) yesterday. In response I rolled back just about everything I could think of, except the Kerry-Edwards button in the left column, which I just can't believe is the source of the problem.

As a temporary measure, I'm also only putting one day's worth of comments on the 'front page'. Yesterday's interesting blog posts can be found here.

If you are a Safari user, please let me know if this page is now displaying properly.

Safari users have been writing in droves (well, small droves) to tell me that the rendering is messed up. Please pardon any oddness in the next hour or two while I try to debug this. If the blog looks messed up, give me 10 minutes then reload….

PS if you're a safari user and things look good at any point, please let me know.

update: I give up (for now). I can't fix this without access to a Mac. It's just possible there's some weird code in one of today's posts and it will fix itself after midnight. If so, please let me know. Otherwise, it may be a few days before I can get to a Mac, especially if we go into 'hunker' mode due to Ivan. Sorry.

Overall I'm pretty happy with my hosting company, Dreamhost. Tech support is very friendly, and responds to most requests within the promised 24 hours. I've asked for a ton of Perl modules and they have installed them all, globally, within a day and without demur—except for one, and they gave me good reasons why they didn't want to do that, plus gave me something of a hint how to install it locally.

Uptime is not 100%, but it has improved a lot from ten months ago, to the point where downtime is increasingly rare and increasingly brief. (Oh, I hope I'm not jinxing anything by saying that.) Server response is fast sometimes, and decent, but not spectacular, at peak hours. But then I'm not paying for a dedicated server. Instead I'm paying $20/month and sharing my machine with a lot of people. I would not recommend cheap, shared hosting at Dreamhost for a mission-critical application, but it's a very good deal for a blog. Their cheapest deal is less than $10/month if you only run one domain; I had to spring for $20 because I run several.

Hosting a number of different domains off one account is where Dreamhost excels: if you have a bunch of specialty domains, it is very easy to run them off a $20/month account, and I've done so happily for a year.

I mention all this because the annual bill is coming up to renew the sites, and in looking at the hosting plans I noticed that Dreamhost is having a sale. For $20/month you can get the code monster plan for which they usually charge more than $30. For a lot of people this may be overkill, as it allows you to host 15 domains, and 75 subdomains, store 2560 MB, and have up to 64 GB/month bandwidth (consider that this blog, by far the busiest of my sites, has never gone far over 2 G in a month, and that was one heck of a temporary spike). But as I was about to renew the already over-generous “Sweet Dreams” plan, and this didn't cost anything extra….

In the event that you should decide to host with DreamHost, please consider identifying me as your referrer so that I can collect the “reward” money. This costs you nothing and I am not going to keep the money. Instead, I will donate the reward money to a good cause.

Discourse.net gets interesting comments. This morning, someone purporting to be Sgt. Lee Buttrill from the great Moveon.org advert, posted this comment:

I just wanted to say that I am the same Marine who was on ABC and if I had the ability to travel back in time knowing what I know now, I would not have sounded so positive on ABC. I saw the happy people of Iraq that day and I shared their joy, but I was misguided as they were. There was no plan for their future and no justification for us to be there other than the lies I uncovered in the following monthes. I hope everyone can understand that my statements at the time were based only on the information I had and not he bigger picture I have come to grasp.
Seargent Buttrill, USMC.

I'd like to believe it's really him…Discourse.net is the second Google listing for “Sgt. Lee Buttrill”…but if it were him, would he spell as badly as I do?

Incidentally, whether or not this comment is really by the real Buttrill, isn't the genuine Buttrill doing something as courageous as what Lt. Kerry did when he came home and spoke out against Vietnam?

Light blogging forecast while I work like a dog for a few days.

Some political blogs that I read are especially good right now, including, in no special order, Hullabaloo, Brad DeLong, FafBlog, Is That Legal?, Whiskey Bar, The Daily Howler and The Cosmic Iguana.

And, I especially want to mention The Carpetbagger Report and TalkLeft, both which are going gangbusters this week, plus those other great blogs I should have mentioned above. Especially yours, of course.