Richard Bennett

— Biddle tells me he writes for Fortune magazine. I’d like to suggest that Red Herring would be a good market for his style of reasoning, given this definition:

A Red Herring is a fallacy in which an irrelevant topic is presented in order to divert attention from the original issue. The basic idea is to “win” an argument by leading attention away from the argument and to another topic. This sort of “reasoning” has the following form:
Topic A is under discussion.
Topic B is introduced under the guise of being relevant to topic A (when topic B is actually not relevant to topic A).
Topic A is abandoned.
This sort of “reasoning” is fallacious because merely changing the topic of discussion hardly counts as an argument against a claim.

Another example: Person A makes a claim about unwed births. Person B says person A has the facts wrong, and introduces data including marital births, independent of rate to make his case. When person A points out the fallacy in person B’s response, person B calls person A a “hair-splitter.”

Red Herring is the place for you, RiShawn.

— Don’t visit The Truth Laid Bear; the dude is suffering from Link Withdrawl ’cause he didn’t know the first one’s free.

Instead, go see this wacko, or The Fat Guy, who’s Not-A-Pundit: just a guy writing about food, music, books, and tractors. They make ’em weird down in Texas, which is why I had to leave – no way to stand out.

— Matt Welch has issued a call for blogger assistance with a worthwhile project:

A Call for Blogger Assistance: I am writing a book review of Noam Chomsky’s 9-11, and the lefty collection September 11 and the U.S. War: Behind the Curtain of Smoke. One of my sub-themes, especially as regards the latter collection (filled as it is with the work of Ted Rall, Marc Herold, Robert Fisk, Arundhati Roy and Barbara Kingsolver), is the extent to which many of these writings were debunked or challenged (on weblogs and elsewhere) before these books even went to press.

See what you can do.

— O’Reilly Network: Essential Blogging Public Review [May 24, 2002]

Please download the PDFs of the tech review draft of Essential Blogging and give it a read. Is it good? Did we forget to cover something? Did we talk about something that’s not really useful? Our goal isn’t to be definitive and show you everything that these tools are capable of, but instead to give the beginning blogger enough to be dangerous. Did I say dangerous? I meant productive.

O’Reilly’s blogging book is available for public review. It looks reasonably good at first impression: two full chapters on Movable Type.

— Virginia Postrel, the Dallas architecture critic who aspires to be the second coming of Ayn Rand, devotes her blog to slogging blogs today:

My challenge to bloggers who think the blogosphere is immensely influential is the same as it has been for months: Oh yeah? Then why isn’t anyone outside the blog world talking about Brink Lindsey’s book? Why hasn’t it been reviewed in the NYT Book Review? Why did The Washington Post kiss it off in one nasty paragraph? Why isn’t Brink on NPR all the time? Why haven’t Time and Newsweek quoted him? It hasn’t even been reviewed in National Review or The Weekly Standard. All these places have plenty of room for far less worthy authors. Check out the full list of reviews here. This is ridiculously scant treatment of a good and thoughtful book, the sort of serious work that public intellectuals are supposed to do.

And in the course of her march to the sea, she trashes Sullivan and Reynolds, and touts her blog hit counts, which aren’t at all impressive (lower than mine, for example.) So why does the poor dear have a burr in her blanket, trashing the blogs and announcing a summer hiatus while she writes her Very Important Book about Aesthetics?

Beats me, but it looks like she’s coming unglued. She’s always struck me as a snob, mainly because of her practice of separating links to “pro” journalists from “merely amateur” bloggers. In the Blogosphere, nobody knows you’re a celebrity, Virginia, we only care about the content of your content. And if yours sucks because you’re busily writing books, that doesn’t make you better than the dude whose blog sucks because he’s mediocre, trendoid and derivative. Write a blog with insight, clarity, effervescence, and wit, and the people will come; beat the same dead horse day after day, and they’ll check out.

The free market of ideas is a harsh mistress, isn’t she?

Editor’s note: As much as Postrel annoys me, I have to admit that she’ no more an elitist, or a dead-horse whipper, than Sullivan; her obsession with cloning and Sullivan’s with Krugman are of a piece. Maybe OCD blogging is a hazard for all Mac fanatics. But maybe not.

UPDATE: Eric Olsen writes a love-letter to Postrel.

— Andrew Sullivan takes Eric to the woodshed and gives him a mighty whooping today (In “The Frightening Reynolds”) for his various criticisms:

By the way, the tedious Eric Olsen has been whining that I’m not a blogging team player by responding to his every email (they come almost every other day and I got exhausted responding, especially when they keep having URGENT in the contents line). Memo to Eric: reprint any 1000 words you like from my blog for your warblog book. Good luck with the project. Now please stop spamming my email tray. But can I say a word about the notion of a “blogging community” to which we allegedly owe obligations, deference and respect? Phooey.

Worst of all, there’s no link to Eric’s blog. That makes Sully a BlogHole, one who witholds links. First rule of the Blogophere: you can trash anybody anytime, fairly or not, as long as you get the URL right. These pro journalists are so hard to housebreak.