Just in time for Sunday: the newest chapter in the ultra-capitalist Gospel
One of the new things about tracking blogs through Google Reader is that you notice when people have made a posting that they subsequently delete.
For example, there are two entries on Greg Mankiw's blog. And they have both since been deleted.
The first link is to an article entitled "Mission Accomplished."
The second link is to an article entitled "Making Milton Proud."
Google Reader preserved not only the headlines, but the content of those articles too.
First article:
Mission Accomplished
from Greg Mankiw's Blog by Greg Mankiw
A reader emails me:
After nearly two years as your reader, you've pretty much singlehandedly made me a fiscal libertarian out of a former democratic socialist.
Second article:
Making Milton Proud
from Greg Mankiw's Blog by Greg Mankiw
From an email this morning:
After nearly two years as your reader, you've pretty much singlehandedly made me a fiscal libertarian out of a former democratic socialist.
Wow, I did not just see that. It looks like the Harvard economist was - this is just my hypothesis:
- Bragging
- Revising the brag to look a little less like a proud boast
- Realizing how bad it looked even with the revision, nuking both versions.
The other alternative is that someone hacked his site to do that. Since he's not a security specialist, I presume he would've actually announced he had been hacked rather than hiding the hack out of embarrassment. Which means that he probably intentionally wrote those two short articles before thinking better of it.
Well, good for him for realizing his mistake, I suppose. But I still find the bragging a bit weird. It's almost like a conscious Freudian slip, if such a thing is possible:
If there is a "vast conspiracy", though, the most fertile ground for documenting such a thing online, Wikipedia, has precious little content on the topic. Compare the above link to the Chicago School with the article about the Chicago Boys, who Klein cites in the Shock Doctrine. Of course, Klein's book got savaged by some for "a simplification of image and
presentation, rather than stressing the complexity, the details, and
the inevitable trade-offs of a particular product."
I think that Klein's book is a challenge to established thinking. Not a solid conviction of guilt, but a good place to encourage more thinking.
Speaking of thinking, the situation on Wikipedia goes to show that leftist activists have their priorities mixed up. Someone put together enough energy to compile a "Criticisms" section for Pope John Paul II, while Milton is basically gently caressed by his admirers in his Wiki entry.
Despite Wikipedia's "neutral Point of View" policy, if you see someone getting off scot-free, it just screams at you that people aren't looking very closely or being fair. Come on, they even attacked Mother Teresa on Wikipedia too. This paragraph indicates, basically, how much I dislike not only the ultra-capitalist crowds, but the ultra-socialist groups too. And also why I stopped spending as much time on Wikipedia as an editor/contributor as I did in the early days. There's just a few too many crazies for my taste.
Going back to Mankiw's stillborn postings, I think that the desire to avoid looking bad and to have more 'control' over what you're posted may be another reason why some blogs choose not to syndicate the content of their entire postings in their RSS feeds (technical term for how blog posts get sent to these automated "reader" programs). Some just post article titles or short snippets instead of the full articles. While the traditional explanation is that they want people to hit their site to view their ads or to just linger, this theory believes that they may want to avoid postings that they're going to regret making it out into the internet.
It's a silly reason - once you've hit "send" or "post", it's out there. I mean, you've got people like me wasting their time pointing these things out. There's no "cancel" or "undo" command online. There once was such a tool, actually, but abuse of it killed it a good 15-20 years ago. So maybe that theory doesn't stand up to much of an evaluation. If Mankiw were to change his RSS settings, though, then perhaps I'll be proved right on this guess.