Friday, October 18, 2002

Everybody's getting into the Supreme Court prediction game. See here (via Volokhs) and here (in which I fear that the computer may be cheating, by reading news reports of oral arguments before making its predictions). I am no longer avant-garde, but merely faddish.

Meanwhile, despite getting more pleasing links from more good people, I'm in a blog funk this morning and yesterday, oddly the result of the DC sniper and more precisely the rampant speculation in some popular corners of the blog world that it's one (or more) of them Arabs. As the police have now told us, this may or may not be true, but reports to that effect are unreliable and fixating on them is counterproductive. The lesson in this, to me, is that blogging is often an utterly useless activity -- useless to anyone but the blogger at least -- unless you actually know a good deal more than the average person does about what you're talking about, or are particularly good at writing in an honest and persuasive way about shared knowledge or insight. (The people in the left-hand column over there tend to fall into at least one of these categories -- particularly knowledgeable or particularly good at honest insight and expressive writing -- and often into both). So I find myself limited in what I'm willing to spout off about, because I am very aware of the limits of my own expertise (such as it is) and eloquence. Maybe something will happen today that I know something about ...

posted by sam 7:04 AM 0 comments

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