There’s still plenty of that out there. I comment with much less restraint at The Yin Blog, because Prof. Heller is far less restrained himself. I’ve found that the best rule is to venture in slowly, read, and learn the terms of engagement.

Wise words, there at the end. I’ll start reading the Yin blog, thanks!

That’s something that’s been on my mind lately: I’m wondering if the culture of academic freedom in which legal folks are steeped doesn’t make us overly reluctant to draw lines.

Yes! Just so. If anything, I would have hoped that academic freedom would have made us more free to draw lines, because we are insulated (to a degree) from the consequences. But how insulated are we, really? Tenured professors became tenured professors largely by learning how to give their professors what they wanted to hear on an exam, then learning to tell hiring committees what they want to hear, then learning to tell tenure boards what they want to hear. By the time they get tenure, how has that process changed them? And practicing lawyers, naturally, have it little better. The judge is always right, the client is always right, don’t say or do anything that would reflect poorly on this firm. The distinction between private life and public life is nonexistent in this profession. There are probably good reasons for this, but it is still unfortunate.

I’ve enjoyed reading your thoughts, maybe I’ll stop by your website from time to time after all, despite my reservations.

Ha! I know! When I lived in China, I learned any number of tricks for finding public proxies and disguising my IP address (to evade the Chinese national firewall). I even wrote a short manual on the subject, for other foreigners. So if you see an uptick in Chinese visitors, you’ll know what’s going on. ;-)

Here’s the difference in a nutshell. On Anthony Rickey’s site, one of his commenter’s defends Anthony in this way:

“Yeah, good call dude. You show up at a random site and accuse its author… [the rest doesn’t matter]”.

The assumption is “you don’t know Rickey, you have no right to be here, how dare you show up here and start an argument!” But, to me, that’s why I write: to be accused of things! To be argued with! How else will I know if I’m right or wrong, if my ideas stand up to criticism or they don’t? There are lines, obviously, and reasonable people can disagree (perhaps even vehemently) about where those lines should be drawn. But, fundamentally, I write for feedback: good, bad, or sarcastic, as long as it’s thoughtful, it’s all good. Why else would you do this?

I see weblogs as argument, or as conversation, as thinking out loud. Many people (most people?) see them as exhibition, as a soapbox from which to speak. Each to his own, I suppose.

I do miss the old days, when the internet was just a place for freaks and geeks, when speaking truth was more important than avoiding offense.

There’s still plenty of that out there. I comment with much less restraint at The Yin Blog, because Prof. Heller is far less restrained himself. I’ve found that the best rule is to venture in slowly, read, and learn the terms of engagement.

Different strokes and all that. ;)

In that vein, I will refrain from debating the details of the situation regarding your commenter, as I suspect you would perceive such a discussion as an unjustified attack on what you did with your private webspace.

Not at all: it’s your blog, after all. If you think I did wrong, hey, I might learn something. I’m not about to put myself forward as the Debretts of blogging. It’s all a matter of have certain respect for lines.

That’s something that’s been on my mind lately: I’m wondering if the culture of academic freedom in which legal folks are steeped doesn’t make us overly reluctant to draw lines. You think I’ve done wrong by anonymous bloggers? No reason I should be upset to hear it. There’s a big difference between that and implying I’m either 23 years old and afraid of getting raped by any homosexuals I come across. One is a discussion, the other’s an insult, and it’s not tough to figure out the difference.

Anyway, that’s part of a broader collection of thoughts that will have to become a post on my own site…

It was not an act of treason, nor possibly even of defiance. But it was a calculated withdrawal, from the life of the Republic, from its machinery. Whatever else was being denied them out of hate, indifference to the power of their vote, loopholes, simple ignorance, this withdrawal was their own, unpublicized, private. Since they could not have withdrawn into a vacuum (could they?), there had to exist the separate, silent, unsuspected world.

– Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

UPDATE: But then, maybe that’s one of the advantages of being anonymous. I don’t have a reputation to consider, so even if one were inclined to judge me based on another’s comments, they wouldn’t be able to connect that judgment with my real life.

FURTHER UPDATE: It occurs to me that, while I have related experience in other areas of the web, I haven’t had to deal with trolls and abusive comenters in the context of a weblog, especially one to which my name was personally attached. Maybe I should be viewing this one incident within it’s larger context, and maybe I should therefore have more sympathy with Anthony’s position. I do still disagree, vehemently, with his position, but I apologize for any judgment or condemnation I might have conveyed. It was premature, even in my own view.

On reflection, this makes things much clearer for me. I’ve wondered at times why the tone of the comments on so many weblogs seemed so… restrained, disengaged. Now I understand why. As blogging has become more popular, it’s brought with it the standard, popular social rules. Strident challenge, heated arguments, and other provocative statements that wouldn’t be appropriate at a dinner party among acquaintances aren’t really seen as being all that appropriate in the comment section of a weblog. That seems, to me, to be your position, at least, and it tracks with the results I’m seeing in other weblogs.

I do miss the old days, when the internet was just a place for freaks and geeks, when speaking truth was more important than avoiding offense. But then maybe I’m nostalgic for a time that never really existed. C’est la vie.

In that vein, I will refrain from debating the details of the situation regarding your commenter, as I suspect you would perceive such a discussion as an unjustified attack on what you did with your private webspace. Fair enough. It is enough to note that, while I respect your position, I do disagree with you strongly enough that I will not be visiting your weblog in the future. Both for my own sake, because I do not understand where you draw the line, and also because I believe that your actions towards Alex were simply inappropriate.

I have enjoyed reading what you write, as I suspect we agree on many other subjects. I wish you the very best.

In a similar clarification, the “public bloggers who are used to taking rude pot shots from the anonymous” was certainly not a reference to you. I see it as a selection problem: most anonymous commentors are not a problem at all, but almost all commentors or bloggers that I have problems with are anonymous.

I’m not surprised you couldn’t find the entry on my blog. Because MT’s built-in search engine doesn’t search comments, it took me a very long while to find the post myself.

First, let me explain that I disagree with anonymity mostly because it fosters a feeling among the anonymous that they can behave with impunity. I don’t blog anonymously because I’m happy for what I say to be associated with my name. I’m happy to respect anonymity so long as the anonymous respect the fact that I am not, and what they say affects my reputation.

Now, the case I linked to above is a singular case, and relatively extreme. A visitor to my site decided to write the following:

It’s difficult to explain to a 23 year old male that he DOESN’T know everything about the world just yet, especially when it comes to matters of his still evolving sexual personality. Don’t worry, in a few years you’ll come to realize that gay men do not want to rape you and that the ability for two people of the same sex to settle down and live a rather mundane life together is not a tremendous threat to our society.

(emphasis added) Not only does that mischaracterize my point of view, but it gets my age wrong by quite a few years. This in the middle of a discussion that had been, prior to his arrival, very civil.

In turn, I left a comment asking if he really worked at a given law firm. I didn’t give enough information to identify him, but left just enough to indicate to him that it was possible. It was meant as a shot across the bow.

Now, perhaps you think that I treated an anonymous commentator unfairly. Me, I treat commenting on a blog much like I do speaking at a dinner party: I’m free to say what I like, but there are social consequences to being rude. In this case, he was making a very rude accusation on a site that is read by not only strangers who may judge me on it–employers, for one–but also by my family and closest friends. As I said when I closed the thread:

If you decide to come in throwing about unfounded insults (and getting my age wrong by over half a decade) and trying to embarass me in front of my family, my friends, and my colleagues, don’t be asking favors of me as a guest later.

You may think it fair, or you may not: that’s up to you. I will say that your expectation of being treated as you wish to is probably not a very good idea on the internet, which has a loose set of social norms to say the least. My feeling–although this is far from scientific–is that anonymous bloggers want very strong rules on anonymity, and public bloggers who are used to taking rude pot shots from the anonymous aren’t that inclined to provide it. But in any event, the rules are different wherever you go, and “fair” is generally in the eye of the beholder.

Nevertheless, I don’t think the event chilled conversation on my site: most of my readers took it for the aberration that it was. That’s the explanation I can give you, and I thank you for giving me a chance to provide it. I really don’t think you have anything to worry about, but if you feel that my policy towards anonymity is too harsh, well, I’m sorry we disagree.