Posts by BenWilson
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My feeling all along in this debate is that your last post [edit: Danyls attack on the PAS culture] was the entire reason for the last 8 pages of this thread. You deliberately picked something you knew was against the "gestalt consensus", scorned it, and waited to see where that would lead for several days. Eventually someone bored decided to have a go, a few more people chimed in, and you reappeared with more scorn. Yes, you have been insulted in a number of ways since then.
Is this really the debate you want to have, that you've been angling for for months? That the polite culture of PAS can harm robust debate? Be honest now, no polite tricky games, or that makes you a hypocrite.
It's a much better debate, I think, than "what is the value of the humanities?", and is in some ways appropriate to it too, since similar questions can be asked of academic politeness - does that harm those disciplines some?
A useful preparatory experiment for anyone wanting this debate would be to consider the times on this site that you have held a reasonably strong opinion against the consensus. What happened? Did you say what you thought or hold your tongue? If you held your tongue, how did that make you feel? If you didn't, what happened? How did that make you feel?
For myself, the last major time that it happened was during the discussions around the anti-smacking law changes. I felt quite strongly at the time that it was a very foolish move by Labour, and did enormous damage to what I perceived as their general cause. It tore the solidarity of the Left apart. It smacked of major hubris, and the party not giving a flying shit what the population really wanted, just doing what they felt was right. Doing, in fact, exactly what I fear National will be doing next term.
I don't really want to have the debate again, I'm just saying how I felt about it. But what I do want to talk about is how debating the subject here made me feel. There are many elements of it that strike a chord with feelings emanating from Danyl. Essentially I felt isolated and disrespected, and I simply disappeared from here for about 6 months, no flouncing, just gone. It was quite a major bumout, since I had a developed a lot of interest in, and respect for the regulars here. It was not my only bumout at the time, either.
But during that 6 months I had time to consider the extent to which the way I felt had resulted from the way I had acted. My debating style originates mostly from formal debating, in which rhetoric and insult actually take quite a large part, and also the Socratic method, which is actually quite a disingenuous process if used to argue with people (although it is quite good for teaching people). Also my ongoing fondness for Popper meant that I believed in the "bold claim" method, which pretty much means "taking a stab in the dark" a lot of the time. Popper would most likely be pretty angry with me to distill it so, nothing worse than seeing someone taking a good idea and using it badly.
I figured in the end that half the problem was the internet in the way, that if I was going to reengage with PAS, I would have to meet the people, to display good faith by my actual presence, and to discuss personal matters that I had never even raised before, in order to contextualize myself for people. It was a valuable experience, and I kicked myself for not having done it years earlier, for having maintained deliberate aloofness out of mostly erroneous opinions on the purity of my rational discourse.
Having gone through this, though, I now do find it a lot harder to raise robust disagreement. Essentially, I don't want to hurt people that I consider to be friends, where in the past I would often not give a crap if what I said hurt (viz, the awful debate on obesity). So to disagree involves a lot more preparation and care, and in many cases that just means it never happens, it's too hard, and I don't have the time.
I could go on, but I seem to have hit the PAS word limit! Right ... um ... yeah .... somewhere near here ... here!
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to David Winter,
In science, there is certainly a feeling that we should 'stick to data', and leave the debates to politicians, as if quietly collecting more and more evidence that the climate is changing, or genetic engineered crops aren't "frankenfoods", will be enough to settle the debates.
Yeah, I was thinking that non-Humanities most likely suffered from exactly the same problem, but for some reason they get a free pass when it comes to "public accessibility".
I know most scientists aren’t particularly good at communicating to the public
It's a mistake to think this comes naturally to anyone. You only get better by doing it. I know many scientists who are perfectly articulate. And Chomsky would have us believe that they are much better at communicating than postmodernists! As if there aren't any postmodern scientists. Some might even accuse Chomsky of being that, considering the extent to which he has analyzed how language is used to protect power structures....
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I'll say this for Redbaiter, his insults had a certain poetry about them. I often wondered if he said them out loud beforehand, just to sound-check them.
I'd be willing to bet, if you ever met him, and didn't know who he was, that he would seem like quite an ordinary person, quite possibly personable, probably a bit shy. If his real personality were anything like as nasty as his online one, he'd have nothing to lose by people knowing who he is. He's no Whaleoil, IMHO.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Megan Clayton,
Yes, public discourse in NZ has twisted to the point where it's seen as wrong to have any outspoken opinion at all, if you are ultimately deriving most of your income from the government. For some reason, Governors of the Reserve Bank are excluded from this.
It's pretty fucked, and I think it's self-censorship in many cases, people refusing to speak out in fear of losing jobs. It's a fear that naturally afflicts the left more than the right because left wingers are much less likely to have independent means.
And when you have fear, and you don't want to admit it or face it, it's easy to dress it up as something bigger than that. People don't like to feel disempowered so they sometimes cope by acting as if it were a conscious choice, that their valuable thoughts are not for public consumption because the public can't handle them.
Snap, Gio. Some of it is definitely down to cowardice.
ETA: And/or laziness.
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My God! Part of the blogosphere I discovered before Russell! I found this site something like 6 months ago, had a bit of a chuckle, then felt mean and thought "Good on old Redbaiter, finally giving away full time trolling to make his own site". I think it will be very good for him, because he struck me as a sad and lonely person without a worthy goal. He'll still be a crazy wingnut until the end of his days, but he might be a much happier one.
FWIW, I don't think he's a New Zealander by birth. Subtleties in the way he uses language have always made me think he's Australian originally.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Megan Clayton,
I do my thinking on the internet.
Best place for it, and you raise the point Danyl should have been making. That a cultivation of private intellectualism is much harder to prove to be in the public good, and I think it's also a lesser form, and does indeed ask for the lampooning that Danyl was giving. But it's no surprise that it arises in the same places that the public stuff can happen, since it concerns the same subject matter. It also doesn't really form any barrier to public intellectualizing. I well remember such brilliant people as Marcus Lush on talkback when I was a boy, who had extremely insightful intellectual points, but was outspoken about his lack of Varsity. Good on him, but wasn't it ironic that his platform was campus radio, and his audience mainly students? And, as with Russell, aren't such people like him really quite rare? It's the funny thing about brilliant people, rather like rich people. They think everyone can do it, just they way they did. What really happens is that only a small number of people take inspiration, and do it. And most of them fail. Which is the reason most people didn't do it, and why when they are to rise to higher talents, most of them need help.
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Southerly: A Tsunami False Alarm at 2.00…, in reply to Glenn Pearce,
LOL, those guys could probably extort money from Governments to just stay away.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Neil Morrison,
why would public intellectuals necessarily have opposed Rogernomics?
I expect the main reason would be because they disagreed with it. And they most certainly did disagree with it. Rolling Back the State stood out for me as a powerful critique at the time, and I attended many Kelsey lectures, despite never even considering to actually study Law. At that time, I was an ACToid, and disagreed with Kelsey, but the seed of her ideas took hold and tempered a lot of my more ideological views at the time. Eventually, though, it was the anti-intellectual (and anti-everything else too) culture that formed the basis of ACT's support that put me off the most. I could see what a destructive mentality it was.
It was kind of interesting that I was alerted to her views by my Mum who was doing a Masters in Politics at the time. As part of a research paper, she wanted some more detail on a Chomsky article, and in desperation called MIT in Massachusetts. She was put straight through to him, and when he heard where she was calling from he mentioned that he'd just finished reading a Kelsey article, and wanted to hear about Mum's opinions on the state of NZ politics which he then listened politely to for some minutes, after which he sent her the details she was wanting for her paper. My opinion of the man leaped from "Hokey Left Wing Conspiracist" to "Pretty Good Bloke, with incompatible Politics". So anyway, it's not like "public intellectuals" aren't out there doing their best to make a difference, both in NZ, and outside.
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So the guys tearing off next door were probably firemen?
Nice to hear from you again, the bach sounds like just the ticket for disaster recovery. Sans false tsunami warnings, of course.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Russell Brown,
He just behaves oddly when he comes here.
It doesn't seem that odd to me. He just refuses to adopt the manners of the culture because he wants to remain something of an outsider, possibly for the purposes of legitimacy of his own blog. I respect that, but I'm still going to fight anything stupid he says. Sometimes remaining aloof can help you keep perspective - there are taboo subjects and lines of attack here, which can be cloying for many people who still have good points.
The funny thing about this debate, is that it actually lay fallow for quite a while. I opted to wait for Danyl to return, and I think others had similar wariness. But then it kicked off again, and practically the moment his name was mentioned, Danyl was back, throwing the word "hysteria" around. Considering that his comebacks got more and more half-arsed as the debate progressed, I'm more than 80% sure his heart wasn't really in it.
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