Forgetting the "free" in free speech.
Mark Bernstein: The Blogosphere's Bad Behavior
I don't even know what to say to this, it's so smug, elitist and anti-free speech. This is the same gentleman who has recently advocated dropping weblog comments and trackback, so as to better promote "civility" in the blogosphere. Which is just another way of saying that he belleves in free speech, as long as it's speech he approves of. And as usual, any plan which posits that someone, somewhere gets to decide which speech is acceptable and which is not is inherently flawed and will be routed around as damage.
Again. Free speech is inclusive. It doesn't mean only things you like, agree with, or whose tone you find sufficiently "nice." I happen to find Mr Bernstein's smug, condescending tone irritating. But I would never presume to say that we should "pull the plug" on him. Get it? It's called the First Amendment. Some of us take it seriously.
Comments
I wish I even knew wtf "pulling the plug" on Slashdot would entail. Is it like that Klingon shunning ritual where you stand in a circle and turn your back on the guy in the middle one by one?
Or does a committee go and do like Steve Martin said and merely say "I break with thee, I break with thee, I break with thee"?
Inquiring minds wanna know.
Also:
"I assume that, when we blog, we're all looking to discover and explain important ideas."
Jackass would be assuming wrong. I'm in it to put up baby pictures and let everyone know I saw a pod of killer whales on Father's Day.
Prolly oughta pull the plug on me, too.
Posted by: mph | June 25, 2004 5:55 PM
Phil Ringnalda provides a startling demonstration of the problem I was discussing when he characterizes my writing as fascist twaddle.
It's not, of course. Twaddle is might be, but it's not fascist in any intelligible sense. (A lot of people have forgotten what fascism was, and suppose it to be a synonym for 'bad' or 'right-wing' or 'big-government'. But Phil is a very sharp guy, and he knows very well that online discussions notoriously end when one angry party calls the other a Nazi, and so he can't possibly mean anything he says: it's all a demonstration of Godwin's Law.)
Posted by: mark bernstein | June 26, 2004 9:37 AM
I think the conversation is well and truly dead when Godwin's Law is misread and misinvoked for the three-hundred-and-eleventy-millionth time as a cheap escape hatch.
I still want to know what "pull the plug" means, but since that's a direct question about the actual words in the, uh, "piece" in question, I'm guessing that's not gonna happen.
Posted by: mph | June 27, 2004 1:10 PM