Posts by Russell Brown
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Or when someone disagrees with you.
Ron, people disagree with me all the time. Sometimes they're even right.
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On the other hand a close friend who's a palynologist (with impeccable left wing credentials) and researches past climate change was a climate change skeptic for quite a while. I'm not sure of his position now. It's not hard to see how people who have studied the history of the earth, like geologists, could be skeptical.
Yes, it seems that some of the scientists with informed objections are paleoclimatologists and geologists, but there seem to be valid rebuttals to their arguments. I'm clearly in no position to adjudicate there.
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OTOH, and with the standard disclaimer (I know Jordan, think he's an awfully nice chap and despite our obvious political differences you can't say he's hiding his partisan light under a bushel), I don't really have an excess of sympathy for bloggers or commentators who are either bear-baiting (which I must admit can be a most guilty pleasure) or remarkably tone deaf, and get a response.
Granted: Jordan does sometimes bring it on himself. But in the thread someone linked to earlier, his provocative wording was of the order of "I'm off to the South Island for a holiday, see you."
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i mean 'fire' in a crowded theatre. if you just shouted 'theatre' in a crowded theatre people would look at you funny.
But you might get an arts grant ...
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Although I have this recurring nightmare that a month out from the next election, Rodney Hide wins Celebrity Treasure Island & his & his party's popularity soars when the sex tape featuring him, Rebecca Loos & Nicky Watson is leaked to a hungry media.
Eeew.
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Just let me saddle up my hobby hose... :)
I'm sure you didn't mean to say that, but as neologisms go ...
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I sense that over the last six months or so, and more since PAS started, there has been some questioning amongst the broader pol bloggers about the value of comments sections that just rapidly descend into madness. Maybe the scene is maturing? I don't really know.
I've sensed that too, although it seems like tempting fate to claim any credit.
There was a storm over at Sir Humphreys when AL banned Redbaiter (now there's a troll) for what seemed to me to be eminently justifiable reasons involving defamatory abuse. Lucyna got the pip and went off to start her own blog, but I've always found her very strange anyway.
SH can be okay when one of the authors actually mulls over an issue, but it's more often stark monochrome and lately it just seems to be Adolf in raging fits of denial about climate change.
I've enjoyed having the likes of Craig and Graeme Edgeler come over here and argue the toss, I have plenty of time for Peter Cresswell, and I'm grateful we don't see the kind of mass trolling that Jordan gets. It seems to be the Act-aligned kiddies who display the worst behaviour.
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I do find it strange that SH commenters haven't flooded PA with trolls yet. I notice dad4justice comes here sometimes and is mostly civil, a strange mindfuck since every time I go to kiwiblog the threads are littered with his abuse. I find it hard to believe they're *scared*. Russell, are you censoring a lot?
Almost never. What seems to be the case is that people, d4j included behave differently here than they do on other sites. Which is nice.
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At the risk of sounding snarky, I bet Howell Raines and Piers Morgan were saying the same thing until they were fired.
In a specifically New Zealand context, arguing that your commenters own their own words isn't likely to get you far either. People running online forums have fewer legal protections in that regard than those in the US or the UK. Which is one reason big media has been so slow to launch real forums.
Since DPF has been brought up, I've said both publicly and privately that he puts up with more crap from nutsacks and flame-trolls (both of the loony left and rabid right) than I would. That's his call, but he's got to accept the consequences.
In the end, all any blogger or bulletin board has to trade on is their credibility and their ability to attract eyeballs. You want to run an on-line psych ward, so be it. But what you can't do and retain any credibility in my book is say it's got nothing to do with you. I'll call bullshit on anyone who trots out that weasel argument, on-line or dead tree media.
I'm actually feeling a bit sorry for David - as someone else noted, sometimes it seems like all that's left is the same people having basically the same shouting match every day. It's quite hard to find a sensible discussion. But he indulged it (and occasionally encouraged it) for too long and now it looks quite hard to turn around.
Speaking for myself, I can make a fool of myself without any outside assistance. :)
Oh God, I've just had the misfortune of listening to myself speaking into a microphone near the end of a long night with the Wellingtonista. And you think you sound silly ...
WRT the code of conduct , I think what I was trying to say this morning was that a prescriptive code like that doesn't really work for me -- like I'm actually going to ban someone for trademark infringement, FFS -- and I'm better off simply knowing what I want, and to the best that I can gauge it, what the community wants. I'm not much bothered about swear-words, for instance, but boneheaded sexism will at least score you a warning.
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Aghhh Post-Colonial, arrrrrr, run's screaming from the room, ears hand-cupped, and not quite sure why...
Normally my reaction, but I watched part one of the BBC's serious new doco, Racism: A History, last night, and it made me think poorly of colonialism. I was moved to silently blame colonialism for a number of things.
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