A Flock o' Blog People...
Perry de Havilland of Libertarian Samizdata continues the ornithological theme with this interesting simile:
We blogs are not trying to replace the established media, but rather we have popped up to fill an empty but useful ecological niche, rather like the birds hitching a ride on the back of a hippopotamus and in return nibbling at unwanted parasites in the hippo's unscratchable nooks and crannies.
He also addresses the flagrant appreciative cross-linking (like, uh, what I'm doing right now) so assiduously ridiculed by that Cavanaugh fellow:
we can afford to be civil to each other because we are not all competing for a limited pool of jobs (no wonder he hates us)... we see each other as a resource rather than rivals, even more so when we disagree... Secondly, it is that 'hive mind' thing Glenn once mentioned. Someone picks up on a story and the 'hive' swarms together, dissecting it and commenting, with a slew of follow up posts as the hive's different 'takes' collide...such as the various 'interblog' gun wars or Enron debates (for that is what they are, debates).
Finally, in a move certain to infuriate Mr. C. even further, Perry has graciously cross-linked to my little blurb on Group Think (below.) He has some notes on the meaning of "libertarianism"-- a "non-statist vibe," which is an attractive formulation. Yet I wonder if there is anyone who would disagree that "at its core, society must allow individuals to make their own choices in the pursuit of self-defined ends?" I've never been able to understand how concerns--which I share, by the way-- about statist over-reach seem to lead some people who call themselves libertarians to oppose any but the most limited of military actions. How does a healthy skepticism about government motives transform itself into an unhealthy and irrelevant Raimondo-esque paranoia and dreams of isolationism? (I say "unhealthy" because isolationism in the present circumstances would be equivalent to a death-wish; I say irrelevant because it is now not even remotely possible.) Ambivalence about the exercise of power is understandable and often appropriate; but ambivalence when faced with such a clear situation as 9/11 seems very like indulgence in ambivalence for its own sake.
Apropos, perhaps, of that sort of question, Perry de H. has this comment, which I believe is right on the money:
It seems to me that September 11th was a watershed in that it resulted in an event so stark in it's moral simplicity and lacking in the ambiguity that shades Iraq, Israel, Kosovo etc. that the true nature of many was revealed in the shadowless light of the burning twin towers. Much to my astonishment some on the left, like Christopher Hitchens, turned out to be critically rational whilst many who I had thought far better of, were revealed to be crypto-subjectivists so emotionally attached to their unalterable world views as to be incapable of rational moral judgement.