This next post will probably be of interest only for the blogging-obsessives out there, people who spend way, way too much time, at work and at home, crafting their own posts and scrounging for hits, hopping from blog to blog in search of that moment's zeitgeist; nevertheless, I'm going to write this for those of you who either visit this site regularly, but no other blogs, or those who have visited here by accident, in a forlorn attempt to pursue a Google search for "Nude Hayden Christenson" references.

As many of you notice, off to the side is a list of other web sites, predominantly bloggers, that I have sorted according to a very loose categorization (Politics/Humor/Misc). Those are called permalinks, and they serve a number of functions here. I visit each site at least once a week, and in effect, those sites get free advertising here. I do not endorse everything that gets posted on those other websites, but my criteria tends to be that if I consistently like what I read, and I agree with the blogger's politics, that site gets permalinked.

If I don't agree with the politics, but I find the blogger to be interesting, informative, and respectful of the opinions of other people, well, the same thing goes; they get included. I am still naive enough to believe that the most important political activity a free people get to participate in is the dialogue, where men and women of good will can debate issues and share insights developed from different experiences, without name-calling and slurs. Right now, just a little bit more than half the people in this country disagree with most of my views; two years ago, a little bit more than half the people in this country seemed to share my opinions, for all the good that did. Of course, such a belief has not dissuaded me from occasionally shouting when I should be arguing, but hopefully I limit my choice of targets in that regard to public figures who have access to much wider media than I have, and who can defend themselves.

Another reason for setting up permalinks is convenience. Just by visiting my own site, I have ready access to a few dozen favorite links, even when I'm away from my home computer. Moreover, a few months ago, I installed a code (called "Sitemeter") on my computer that allows me to track how many visitors I get each day, and how they were referred here. Wherein I discovered that many visitors were bloggers who had discovered my website from their own version of Sitemeter, or another related program, when I (or someone else) had visited. Instant Karma !! Permalinking another blogger's website was a darned effective way of advertising this site without having to spend a dime. I could also see whether other bloggers were permalinking my site; my philosophy in that regard is to link to anyone who links to my site first, just out of common courtesy.

So what's the point, you ask? Late last week, there was a blogging conference at Yale Law School, featuring many of the rather minor celebrities of this field, including Joshua Marshall, Mickey Kaus, and Glenn Reynolds (ie. Instapundit). From what I can gather, it was a largely uneventful seminar, but I was struck by a comment that Mr. Kaus made, to the effect "that among bloggers there is a 'Darwinian self-interest in being nice to each other and maintaining a civil discourse.' He may disagree with Andrew Sullivan but he doesn't really want to piss him off; it's about links; it's about traffic; it's about -- gasp -- community." (Sullivan, for those of you who don't know, is a former New Republic editor who has a popular, but increasingly erratic, far right blog) [Link via Eschaton]

While I have no doubt that such an attitude is all-too-common, being terrified myself that if I ever publish my true opinions of Bruce Springsteen, I will lose my hallowed position on Altercation's list of permalinks, I have to ask what the hell difference it makes how much traffic I get. Is there anybody out there who thinks he or she can make money off their blog if they get more links. Who cares if you have fifty hits a day or fifty thousand? Isn't your obligation to tell the truth still the same? In any event, what are you selling to your visitors, if not your own individuality? There might come a day when someone is able to do a blog for profit, or even make a living at it, but we haven't reached that point yet, so there isn't really a point to selling out.

So having said that, why do I even care if anyone links to this site? And I do care. I visit Sitemeter every couple of hours, just to monitor who's visited. I try to time my posts for the fifty-second mark each minute, so I am more likely to be listed on the Blogger.com role of recently updated sites, a dependable source for unique visitors. It does matter to me.

Well, as it turns out, it's all about high school. The same social hierarchies that existed in high school remain with us to this day, in the blogosphere and elsewhere, as James Capozzola brilliantly points out here. One of the ways these social cliques revisit themselves on us years later is our need to be popular, and the consequent need to make others less popular, lest we lose popularity ourselves. One can see signs of this behavior in the way Al Gore is covered by the media; the former Veep is an intelligent, handsome, and decent politician, who committed the unforgivable sin of having been born into some degree of privilege and being a person of substance. Having attended an all-male prep school, I knew guys like that, people who were rich, well-connected and intelligent, possessing an ease with the opposite sex that I never had, and who were nice guys to boot. I hated people like that, since it forced me to squarely confront my own mediocrity: I realized that no matter how hard I might work, I was always going to be a step behind those people, and that they actually might deserve their success.

Hence, we get to read article after article about how Al Gore "claimed" to have discovered the Internet or the Love Canal, or how he's constantly reinventing himself, all of which is bullshit. Pundits have the same view of Gore that Nixon had of the Kennedys, that it was so unfair that the Kennedys were born into privilege, and were so beloved for their public service, while he had to fight and scrape for everything he got. Doesn't Al Gore realize how intelligent they are, how worthy they are to be popular; unlike that rich idiot, George W., who gives them nicknames and goofs off on the campaign plane, Gore speaks in complete sentences, and treats the public like adults, truly insulting behavior for a well-born politician. And so, pundits quickly realize that the best way to get ahead is not to challenge the conventional wisdom, and to not do anything that would jeopardize their popularity.

To look at one example, take the case of Christopher Hitchens, aka Mr. Samgrass, self-proclaimed English "contrarian". For years, he was a respected if controversial columnist for The Nation magazine, and penned occasional screeds for leftish papers in the U.K. No cow was too sacred, and he wrote scathing pieces about Kissinger, Mother Teresa, the Royal Family, and just about every political figure in the US and Europe. As he got older, he began writing bi-monthly pieces for Vanity Fair, the unofficial journal of nouveau riche America, and became a fixture on the Washington social scene. Once he became more of an establishment figure, his obsessions changed, and his targets became easier. During the Clinton years, he became a one-man conduit for wacko Arkansas conspiracy theories, and has the distinction of being among the few people who still believe Dolly Kyle Browning, Juanita Broderick, and Kathleen Willey. He made the execution of a mentally disabled murderer in Arkansas in 1992 a cause celebre, but has never offered even a word of condolence to that person's victims(who were killed before the convict lost his mind). He testified against one of his best friends at the Clinton impeachment trial, because of a minor difference in recollection about whether the President had referred to Ms. Lewinsky as a "stalker"(as it turns out, accurately, albeit unfairly) . He later spoke at a rally hosted by a white supremacist website, FreeRepublic.com, and became chummy with an historian who denied the Holocaust. Today, he is as sycophantic to George Bush as he was to Kenneth Starr, and in the immortal words of I.F. Stone, will never need to worry about dining alone.

And, so it goes among bloggers. Mr. Kaus' point is that it is human nature to sell out your opinions, even on a form of communication which stresses individuality, and doesn't pay any money. The fact that he may not generate income from his site (which is a part of Slate, a much larger website) has little bearing on whether he is willing to publicly disagree with one of Andrew Sullivan's rants accusing liberals of being treasonous, or (more famously in Kaus' case), refusing to criticize or de-link Ann Coulter from his website after she published a book with fabricated footnotes, and jokingly supported the bombing of the NY Times. If you want the acceptance of your peers, you keep any non-conforming opinions to yourself, and spout the conventional wisdom. I hope that I will have the strength of character to quit publishing this site rather than follow that path, but I doubt it. Please keep me honest.