Housekeeping

"It’s an inescapable truth that for some people, the most interesting way to participate in online discourse is to kick holes in the conversation. Others -- many of them young, but some, alas, old enough to know better -- have a sense of entitlement that leads them to believe that their having an opinion means the rest of us are obliged to listen to it. Still others plainly get off on verbally abusing others, and seek out conversations that will offer them opportunities to do so."

-- from Teresa Nielsen Hayden's "Some things I know about moderating conversations in virtual space"

OK, so, haven't done this before and not thrilled to have to do it now, but asking nicely didn't work and asking not so nicely didn't work, so I'm done asking. I prefer dialogue and a freewheeling conversation to censorship and comment-blocking, but dialogue and conversation require good faith and a willingness to listen.

Josh: I'm blocking your comments. An alternative you may prefer: public restrooms have lots of tile and great reverb -- they're an even better forum for someone so enamored of his own voice. My e-mail still works, so if you want to continue to ignore everything I write here while pretending to "pick my brains," you can do so one-on-one, in a forum in which you only get to call me, and not the other visitors here, a Klansman/Nazi for failing to live up to Martin Luther King Jr.'s clarion call for pre-emptive war.

Everybody else: If you look past his oceans of supercilious, faux-dim/real-dim sarcasm, past his sneering, and past his smug presumption of malice, you'll see that Josh is a guy who realizes that the world, as it is, is intolerable and earnestly believes that somebody (the church? the army?) ought to do something to change it as soon as possible. That much is admirable. So is the ambitious CPT-splinter effort he's hoping to organize. You can read all about that, along with all the Josh-a-riffic 'tude you know and love from his comments here, at his site: Generosity Without Borders.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled blogging.

Comments

[Peatey]

wow, I miss a couple days of slacktivist and I missed out on all the comments. I think Dwight Meredith (a lawyer) has a good perspective when he says that my favorite blogs are not a public utility.

I don't know about Josh's previous violations of Godwin's Law, but I wonder if the comment thread on "Rinse. Repeat" wasn't made longer because of a simple confusion: Josh, it's Walzer, not Walzner.

It does seem odd when Josh uses both Walzer and Walzner in the same sentence though: careful parsing, or learning disability?

###

Fred, is there a way to search your archives? I tried to google a portion of the Walzner quote along with "slacktivist" and got nothing. Or can you at least direct me to posts where you take a position on the questions I've asked? I'm genuinely not trying to make you repeat yourself. I'm interested in what you think about these key issues and, particularly when you, like Walzer, see a need to detour from the party line. I've been reading your posts for year now and I recall strong opinions but not through attempts to work through these issues.

My questions you quoted above are absolutely genuine. I don't know how you're discerning they are "lies". I also don't know how asking Fred to state his position on the criteria for just and unjust past and future wars causes any harm. Fred suggested I read Walzer - I did - but I still don't know if Fred agrees with Walzner or not (I couldn't find the post he referenced). Does Fred agree with Walzer's belief that Afghanistan was a just war, or Walzner's belief that the war in Iraq was caused as much by the reluctance of Germany and France to be more agressive as by the Bush administration. I don't know if Fred agrees with Walzer's critique of the new left - which is exactly the themes that most of my comments on this site focus on.

[Peatey]

Quick googling reveals some of the history between Josh and this blog. I marvel at Fred's patience.

[Michael]

I had a problem with a commenter at a group blog that I used to post at. He wasn't necessarily rude or anything, just excessively argumentative. No matter what I was going to post, if it had anything to do with politics, he was going to have something negative to say about it and it just got old after a while. And it was almost as if this guy had NOTHING to do all day except wait for me to post something so he could egg it. I was a very prolific poster but this guy could keep up with me easily. I won't say he was obsessed over my posts, but he sure did spend an extraordinary amount of time critiquing them.

It was pretty frustrating and I guess I could have banned the guy but I didn't. I thought about what I really wanted out of blogging and decided that for me, a blog is just my personal scratch pad, a place for me write down my thoughts and reactions to the day's news. So, I just left the group blog and started up my own, this time without a comments section. And, no, I'm not saying at all that this is what Fred should have done, just sharing my experiences.

[merlallen]

Pandagon has some trolls like that, it's really difficult to have a discussion on his board. Some punk kid named kieth is always there and everyone who disagrees with him is a faggot. I wish Jesse would ban the asshole but he won't.

[Thel]

Fred,

Thanks for doing that. Maybe I'm the only one, but I just avoided the comments section on your posts lately, knowing it would be a string of sneering from Josh derailing any attempt at conversation.

It's not censorship to ask a noisy, disruptive child to leave the room during a class discussion, and this seems much the same to me. I look forward to enjoying the thoughtful discourse here again.

[Donald Johnson]

I don't have any strong feelings about Josh one way or the other--in part because I've been guilty of going onto other people's blogs and annoying them. That's an etiquette problem people eventually figure out (sometimes when they are banned.) I don't put a lot of stock in the talk of blog community--truth be told, with rare exceptions, most blog "community" is among the like-minded and most of us eventually lose patience with people who disagree with us on what we consider to be obvious truths. I know I do.

I did look at the thread where Josh kept quoting Walzer and I have to say I think it's Walzer who is the truly annoying one. I don't much care for that lumping together of everyone to his left into an undifferentiated mass and then dismissing them. It's McCarthyism of the left, where someone on the left banishes people further to his left into the outer anti-American darkness. I've never had any inclination to read "Just and Unjust Wars" precisely because I've long had the impression that Walzer is an asshole. Though of course even assholes can write decent books, I suppose.

[Donald Johnson]

I don't have any strong feelings about Josh one way or the other--in part because I've been guilty of going onto other people's blogs and annoying them. That's an etiquette problem people eventually figure out (sometimes when they are banned.) I don't put a lot of stock in the talk of blog community--truth be told, with rare exceptions, most blog "community" is among the like-minded and most of us eventually lose patience with people who disagree with us on what we consider to be obvious truths. I know I do.

I did look at the thread where Josh kept quoting Walzer and I have to say I think it's Walzer who is the truly annoying one. I don't much care for that lumping together of everyone to his left into an undifferentiated mass and then dismissing them. It's McCarthyism of the left, where someone on the left banishes people further to his left into the outer anti-American darkness. I've never had any inclination to read "Just and Unjust Wars" precisely because I've long had the impression that Walzer is an asshole. Though of course even assholes can write decent books, I suppose.

[drieux just drieux]

Donald - help me out here - how does this 'mccarthy of the left' thing work?

And how is that you put josh out on the 'left' of fred?

What if the problem is really simpler? That after a really wacky collection of massive inconsistencies, and majorly weird efforts to try to work them out Josh just keeps ducking and dodging like all of the rest of the NeoCons and NeoEvangelicals who have decided that the "reality based community" is a threat.

[R. Mildred]

Donald was referring to walzer, not fred.

I think.

[Peatey]

Fred,

Perhaps drieux just drieux and Josh just illustrated the one fault of this blog: type-set. What's a newspaper man doing with single-spaced (150% for paragraphs) Verdana[1] and Courier for content text? :)

[1]: "Why you should avoid Verdana"

[Donald Johnson]

Yeah, I was referring to Walzer. You can kinda tell by the way I said Walzer was the really annoying one and then called Walzer an asshole and then mentioned his book "Just and Unjust Wars" in sentences bracketing that part about McCarthyism. Plus I referred to the thread where Walzer is quoted bashing lefties.

Sigh.