You describe my description of your rhetorical strategy as a ‘rant that hardly bears any resemblance to what I’ve said.’ Let’s take a look at your rhetorical modus operandi in a recent thread href=”http://crookedtimber.org/2008/10/23/public-spheres-blogospheres/” rel=”nofollow”>http://crookedtimber.org/2008/10/23/public-spheres-blogospheres/. You start with a reasonably plausible argument – that blogging panels select on successful academic bloggers rather than unsuccessful ones (I would disagree with the conclusions you draw from this, but it seems not implausible). You then get drawn into a back-and-forth with Lemuel Pitkin where you claim that you are fanatically ‘PRO-Internet,’ but bitterly (your italicization and emphasis) opposed to ‘Internet evangelism.’ Next you come up with an analogy that blogging for academics is like ingesting narcotics, where 99% of the time you shouldn’t be doing it and may harm yourself in the long term even if it feels good in the short term. You get huffy in response to Lemuel Pitkin’s suggestion that you don’t distinguish between hucksterism and other stuff on the Internet, pointing to a couple of your columns as evidence that you do.

When Lemuel points out that these columns don’t offer much guidance, you say that you are constrained by word limits in them and can’t offer what you somewhat dismissively describe as the “extremely hedged and detailed sort of elaboration you seem to require.” You then say that you aren’t providing any lengthy rebuttal because you realized when you started to write it how lengthy the rebuttal would have to be and that your point is about mathematical skewing, which is independent of the triviality or profundity of your columns (which you only cited because they were high status or something).

Lemuel points out that rather than backing up your very strong claim that blogging was a DISASTER for academics (this may be an exaggeration – but you do seem to claim that it is harmful to academic careers in 99% of cases), you have only pointed to an extremely generic article about how ‘unspecified people are promoting unspecified “snake oil” about the political potential of the internet’ (you do also point to Jimmy Wales, but again the relevance of this to arguments about academic blogging is, to put it mildly, yet to be established). You tell Lemuel ‘Sigh’ that his comment encapsulates why you decided against a detailed rebuttal. And you claim that you are making a ‘mathematical point’ – that ‘if there are big winners, there almost certainly have to be big losers.’

I (reasonably politely; I have yet to lose my patience at this point) suggest that this is flawed reasoning – we have no necessary reason to believe that big winners imply big losers, and that my best understanding, from actually reading lots of academic blogs, maintaining the academic blogs wiki etc, is that most academics aren’t blogging for career related reasons. You describe this as ‘quack medicine’ – that drugs that have powerful effects also have powerful side effects (which I don’t attack, but which I will note in passing is quite untrue as a generality; some powerful drugs have serious side effects; some don’t, some weak drugs have powerful side effects and there is no necessary causal relationship between the two). You further respond that you have decided that ’ NO REALISTIC CONTRARY EVIDENCE WOULD EVER BE DEEMED SUFFICIENT. There’s people who in effect get paid to construct elaborate marketing for blogging. I don’t get paid to write book-length detailed academic dissections of their hype.’

You then revise your sweeping opening statement by saying that if ‘blog’ means ‘putting course material online’ then the results are unlikely to be dramatic (people like me might see ‘putting course material online is Teh Blog’ as a strawman argument, but since you are strawed against rather than strawing, that simply can’t be true). After a brief sidetrack on whether the conference is straying into blog evangelism, I tell you (again politely) that I would like to see some evidence to back up your claims. You say that this gets into naming of names and imply that you have given me such evidence in email – without getting into specifics, this evidence had diddly-squat to do with the specific questions at hand in this debate. You then refuse again to provide evidence, claiming in all caps yet again that NO EVIDENCE WOULD EVER BE DEEMED SUFFICIENT (completely ducking my question of ‘deemed sufficient by whom’) saying that for critics the bar will always be raised, and for evangelists a handwave is enough (again – you are completely silent as to whom this biased audience luvving the evangelists consists of).

You say that you will take this to email – again, without going into specifics, you don’t provide any evidence in email that bears on the specific topic under discussion. Lemuel asks you for evidence again, making it clear that he is not a blog evangelist. You refuse, yet again, saying (in block caps again) that ‘NO REALISTIC CONTRARY EVIDENCE WOULD EVER BE DEEMED SUFFICIENT and that you ‘lose again’ and are going to go away. Lemuel politely replies, saying he is losing because he thinks you have some interesting arguments to make and he wants to see them. Lemuel then points to someone who argues that while people may have said that Dan Drezner lost his tenure case because he wasn’t good, there’s good reason to believe that blogging hurt him, and says (to you) that providing evidence isn’t so hard. You respond by misinterpreting him, and suggesting that the Drezner comment was about the suspicion that he wasn’t very good. Lemuel says again that you don’t want to provide evidence. You respond by saying that you knew about Drezner, and could have cited him, but didn’t – and then create an extended mock dialogue between yourself and an ‘Evangelist’ (is the evangelist supposed to be me? Lemuel? ) in which the evangelist refuses to accept evidence, and starts ranting about elitist old-media etc (this is completely from outer space – how loons ranting about old media is supposed to be connected to the topic of whether blogs hurt academic careers may be obvious to you, but not to me or to any reasonable reader). ‘Sigh’ again (and there were more rhetorical sighs earlier that I didn’t bother pointing to). I Begin To Lose Patience and say that it isn’t Lemuel who is constructing straw men here. You after just conducting an extended mock-debate with a straw man who makes claims bearing no resemblance to anything that anyone has said in this comments section ‘rest’ your ‘case’ that ‘reasonable evidence will not be accepted.’ I (and a couple of other people) more or less say that you are full of shit. You riposte that Lemuel has been misrepresenting your arguments. The thread then breaks down into accusations and counter-accusations. And more rhetorical ‘sighs’ from you.

I’ve spent an hour of my life summarizing this rather pointless debate, which seems to me to distil exactly why it is that I don’t want to argue with you about this stuff any more (I prefer to argue with people rather than sets of evasive tactics). Let me make it more explicit why. You claim that I am unwilling to consider contrary evidence and that I construct straw man arguements. But in this thread, as in others, you never provide any evidence. Any time that someone asks you to, you demur, claiming that no evidence would ever be deemed sufficient. And when you are pushed on this again, you break out into an entirely imaginary arguments between yourself and a straw man ‘Internet evangelist’ (which you win on points, natch, but then when you are arguing against the voices in your head, you usually do). You have no argument or evidence whatsoever to support your sweeping initial argument besides a sloppy and incorrect mathematical claim. And when people push you on this, you refuse, point blank to provide evidence or arguments, saying you’re not paid to (which is true, but you’re not paid to hang around blog comments sections refusing to do so at inordinate and verbose length either).

This is a shtick, and an unhealthy one for debate, as well, I suspect, as being an unhealthy one for you. Every claim that you make about the self-insulating rhetoric of people like me who, you disagree with, or ‘Internet Evangelists’ (whom you seem to suggest I am numbered among, although I may be wrong here) is one which is true, and doubly so, of you. You have created a perfectly insular and self-perpetuating system in which you are the bitter Cassandra who is perpetually ignored. Except that Cassandra made her case to the Trojans – you one-up her by not making your case because you claim no-one would believe you if you did, and further claiming that when no-one does believe you, it only confirms you were right in your cynicism. It is a perfect self-referential system, which is beautifully insulated from any contact with inconvenient realities. The reason why I have taken the time to point this out at length, believe it or not, is because I actually care about what you have to say (I don’t write at this length when I don’t care). Or, to put it differently, I think that you not only can do much better than this, but that you owe it to yourself to do so. I’ve tried to be polite – but that hasn’t broken through (nor did it when Lemuel tried it, as he very clearly did in the above-mentioned thread). Therefore I’m being blunt and rude in the unlikely hope that it may be one small contribution to breaking you out of the trap that you have built for yourself. You’re clearly a very intelligent person who has many good and interesting things to say when you are off this set of topics (not that I agree with all of them, but that is obviously not the point). You seem to me to be someone who has gotten into a terrible rut, and is busy trying persuade themselves that the rut is not only the best place you can be, but the only place you can be. You can take my disagreement with this claim or you can leave it – but I wouldn’t be as pissed off with your rhetorical behaviour as I am pissed off, if I thought you were a simple troll.

You can call it shtick, but that strikes as a delegitimization strategy.

Much of your reply I’d contend is a rant that hardly bears any resemblance to what I’ve said. I can see some distorted reflections, e.g. that I refuse to accept the reversed burden of proof rhetorical strategy, where it is up to a skeptic to definitely disprove a handwave sketch by a proponent. You’ve already ruled out elsewhere the mathematical arguments I make. Combined with trivialize/dismiss techniques, that will then set up a system to deny anything.

In some senses, my perspective is indeed a lot harsher than Nick Carr or Tom Slee, for various reasons. That by itself does not make me wrong.

Regarding your last point, Crooked Timber posts are full of analyses of the political and financial pressures which lie behind arguments rather than the argument itself – often quite derisive. Obviously the writers think these are aids to convincing people. Why I should be denied such a mode of analysis on subjects such as blogs and Internet politics, indeed, have it taken as a shtick, well, one might look self-referentially at such reasons.

This isn’t a helpful or useful style of argument. It’s a shtick. I don’t get the impression that you believe that you can convince people, but instead this is a way of perpetuating the one-man myth of embattled truth teller Seth Finkelstein. And perhaps I am playing into this myth by persecuting you, through having the impertinence to tell you in comments that I disagree with you and that your claims are full of it. Note that I haven’t used the Feared Pulpit Power of denouncing you in a CT post, nor have I threatened to, or even hinted at threatening to. I’ve merely told you that I don’t find very much use in trying to debate you substantively, and don’t intend to do so in future. There are people who hold somewhat similar views (viz. Nick Carr and Tom Slee) whom I simply find to be a lot more nuanced and apparently interested in genuine argument.

This is genuinely something that I feel sorry about – I do think that you are a very smart, intelligent and thoughtful person, but I don’t get a sense of debating the person ever when you are on your particular hobby-horses; I get a strong sense of debating the shtick. And after a while it gets boring.

I’d suggest that if you do want to convince other people that you are right, you need to start from scratch again in how you argue, and in particular start thinking about things from the perspective of the argument itself, rather than the self-presentation of the person doing the arguing. Perhaps I’m unique in how I respond to this style of argument, but I don’t think so. As things stand, you perhaps inadvertently present the image of someone who believes that there has only been one successful exercise of collective political power on the Internet ever, and that was the collective decision to suppress the views of Seth Finkelstein. That surely isn’t what you believe or want to argue, but that’s the way that your arguments come across, at least to me. And I honestly can’t see how it is helpful, either to good debate on these topics in general, or to your views in particular.

Recursively, compare how you just characterized my views, with my own statement.

Note – I think that comment you made was a nasty snarky collection of strawman and distortions of my views. But I let it pass, again exactly for “more than my job’s worth”. Doing that – with an admitted bit of grouchiness – doesn’t make such an action untrue or even unreasonable.

Noted. I have no intention of pushing my luck to the point of getting attacked from “on high”.

A new instance of(3)!

Campaign finance laws are an especially insolent and hypocritical example. The less government does, the less reason for anyone to try to buy politicians via campaign contributions (and the less incentive for the ultra-rich to try to buy office as a vanity).

All I’ll say is that you should have no worries whatsoever – since I’ve gotten tired of long tedious abstract arguments about how it might happen, I have no intention of engaging you on this, or on similar topics. Public service announcement over.

What is of most concern, however, is wealthy individuals pooling money in a coordinated way. 50 people spending a million dollars each to pay for their own, individually designed ads to back the same candidate are of less concern than 50 people pooling a million dollars each so a candidate can pay for many, identically designed ads. The messages that individuals would deliver might undermine a candidate’s appeal v. messages that a candidate’s campaign would produce.

” in that the latter, very often, are just channeling donations that they have no direct control over, and hence can’t credibly threaten to withhold donations in future if the candidate doesn’t do what they want …”

Umm, Henry, I’m sure you know what Kos wants to do … Oh, hell, it’s not worth it :-(