That blogging code of conduct again
Paulie over at Never Trust A Hippie gives a rather good response to this post of mine about Alastair Campbell and the idea of a blogger’s code of conduct.
Update: On the same subject, this is very, very good.
Posted on December 6th, 2006 at 4:13pm under Blog, bloggers and blogging
| Related posts... • We’ve had our fun. Time to move on. • Campbell’s end? • Pinning the blame on Alastair Campbell |
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Everything old is new again: this meme about blogging ethics started in America yonks ago (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrios#Examples_of_content and “Time for a blogger ethics panel”)
If you read Atrios (http://atrios.blogspot.com/), even the shrill thing Matthew Taylor came out with is very old – here
Its almost like they are taking the piss…
(Sorry I don’t know how to do links prettily)
Justin edit: That’s cool – I’ve just tided the looooong link up.
whenever I hear the word “progressive”, I reach for my revolver. I thought that we had tried “making the world a better place” in the 20th century and a hundred million dead bodies later we were beginning to realise that “letting people get on with their lives” was actually not as bad as it had previously seemed. My way of “making our political culture better” would be to harass and bully the likes of Campbell, Clarke and Prescott out of it, in which capacity I would say blogs are doing their bit.
(I’d add, classic nutter-style, that it’s no coincidence that both Melanie Phillips and Polly Toynbee self-describe as “progressives”. It is a political term meaning “somebody who knows better than you do”).
Well he said it, not me. And he did prefixed ‘progressive’ with ‘fairly’ so I’m not the full monty. I merely acquiesced as it’s generally a cuddly, vaguely positive term.
I’d forgotten that it’s a word Blair sprays about willy-nilly – although I’m not entirely sure he’s mined all the meaning from it – and I’m now checking the wiring on my alarm bells.
It is a political term meaning “somebody who knows better than you do”.
That rules me out then, really.
No absolutely Justin; I think you are 100% in the right on this one. A simple glance at history would reveal that obscene and scatological political polemic is not exactly new in British political culture.
I also think that it’s completely untrue to say that CY in particular and blogs in general are not “offering solutions”. “Don’t invade Iraq” is a solution for a way of improving things, as is “Don’t ban protest marches”, as is “Sack Prescott, he’s useless”. The idea of “negativism” is completely false; any policy can be portrayed as “positive” and opposition to it as “negative”, usually on no better criterion than who spoke first.
Getting rid of bad ideas and people is a contribution to the public life; if there is a fly in your soup, do you listen to the guy who says “get rid of the fly”, or the one who says, “no, what we need is more soup”? The most obvious translation of your post is the Campbell does not come to the debate with clean hands; he is someone who has helped to carry out a monstrous fraud on the British public, and so his call for less cynicism is clearly hypocritical. Or perhaps, that the fact that Campbell and Blair were allowed to get away with it is decent evidence that British political debate is far too trusting of politicians, not too cynical.
At the end of the day, as far as I can see, Paulie’s point of view is that all this arguing about specific politicans and laws is not the real point and that what we really need to do is change people’s consciousness so that we can all work together in a respectful way to make the world a better place. I’m sorry, who exactly is the hippy here? maaaan?
As I’ve pointed out in the comments on another blog, when a representative of the government blames journalists and bloggers for the poisoning of public trust in our politics, it’s perfectly reasonable to point out the monstrous hypocrisy of their doing so, when any objective analysis would conclude that it’s the public perception that Blair lied to support an illegal war, for example, has been a far, far bigger factor in that disconnect – whether you think he did or didn’t, and whether you supported the war or not.
There are worse ways of pointing up this hypocrisy than with the observation that “650,000 dead is more offensive than a few swearwords”.
I don’t think Justin’s blog is “obscene and scatological” in any way – and certainly not compared, ahem, to some – but either way, I don’t see why using the word “erection” immediately disqualifies you from being taken seriously.
Hell, this government seems to have made it policy to leave the public as ill-informed as possible at all times. See the continuing obstructionism over FoI requests, PFI accounting, the Friday surprises, Legs and Regs, “commercially sensitive”, staged “meet the public” events, etc, etc.
And yes, dodgy dossiers, of course.
With a government so intent on stifling informed debate, it becomes impossible to offer credible, reasoned alternatives. Hence David Cameron.
Even more obvious in American politics, of course. How many still believe Saddam sponsored the 11th of September attacks?
Never Trust A Hippy?
Never Trust A Euston Manifesto Signatory more like!
Also… never trust a hypocrite.
In defence of hypocrisy
That’s a good article Jim, and a good point. But I think there are two sorts of hypocrisy: the “falling short of one’s own high stands” type covered in that piece, and the plain old double-standards type, which is harder to defend. I’m calling Paulie here on the latter.
The whole thing was something of a mugging. I didn’t even warrant the condescension of a reply to my comment on Paulie’s blog.
It’s all misdirection – don’t look at what I’m saying, look at how I’m saying it. It’s been a ‘Decent’ trick since they invented themselves and indicative of their hivemind (unless Paulie and Pootergeek put their heads together beforehand over all this).
It’s a question of them aggressively framing the debate in their own terms. Stray from their stipulations and you’re not worth talking to (hence Paulie fobbing Larry off). It might be the inverted snob in me but talk of ‘logical fallacies’ and the like comes across as nothing more than wriggling and backsliding.
Ah well, twice bitten and all that.
Justin,
I’m sorry if you got the impression that you were ambushed – if you were, I didn’t plan it.
And the reason I didn’t give you an immediate reply was partly because you didn’t say anything that I objected to that strongly, and partly because others were keeping me busy with stuff that DID. I had actually planned to round off the thread with a constructive response, picking you up on the minor issues I did have with what you wrote – when my ‘blogger’ system froze on me. You will see that I’ve only just started posting again today, having been locked out since Friday (as have commenters on the subsequent thread that I wrote on this subject on Friday).
So, as an aside, tell your readers to hold off on the blogger upgrade if you can!
And I did try to take the heat out of the argument by posting something on what a code of conduct COULD look like.
I ‘fobbed Larry off’ because I’d provided what I thought was a fair definition of ‘negativism’ and then – when Larry put a comment on my site that conformed to that definition so strongly that it was almost eye-watering, I said words to he effect “you are a negativist, and your concerns are shrill, over-inflated and boring.”
I had linked to a post already saying that I thought that the obsession with political mendacity (as opposed to the real elephant in most rooms – administrative incompetence) is shrill and boring. I went on the radio in a head-to-head with Guido Fawkes and others and said the same thing again – in the post that I linked to.
Larry thinks that I insulted him. Now if I’d taken the lead of other bloggers and called him a see-you-next-tuesday, THAT would have been an insult. But what I did instead was provided a definition that I would apply to people who used a particular formulation.
Larry popped up almost immediately and used exactly that formulation. The post he commented on included an undertaking on how I would respond to that formulation.
And it is not an insult to say “I think that your concerns are over-inflated, shrill and boring” – it is fair comment. If I’d said “YOU are shrill and boring…” THAT would have been an insult.
Larry also seems to ascribe to me a view that robust debate is corrosive. I don’t. I don’t even mind profanity (er… for fuck’s sake).
And I don’t care how you say things either. I care what you say (how did you draw that conclusion, by the way?). Pootergeek’s point about the ‘fallacy in media and politics’ (with a wikipedia link, no less) was the thing that I lighted on. I wanted to contrast my own thoughts when I heard about the notion of a ‘code of conduct’ – I thought that it was an idea that you could hang a constructive post about the nature of interactive discussion on. That’s why I responded to you initially in the way that I did.
I do, however, think that the obsesssion with surface narratives and the negativism (or as Orwell called it, the ‘neo-Pessimism’) in public life is very dangerous indeed. The nihilism of other commenters in this thread is something that needs unpicking – and I’m suprised that you let dSquared’s gibberish about progressives and revolvers go uncommented on.
And I also think that you and I don’t fundamentally agree on this question. But it’s not because I hate you and want you to die.
I hope that clears things up.
“gibberish”? bit negative there Paulie. Libertarianism isn’t “nihilism”, and the fact that you progressives want to pretend that it is, is *precisely* why I’ll be hanging on to that revolver.