Actually, Godwin's Law just says that the longer an online argument rages, the more likely someone is to bring up Nazis.
Scraps: I really don't see "disingenuous" as an attack on the person. I've always seen it as more of a debate technique ("giving a false appearance of simple frankness").
Mike Harris, you called Patrick disingenuous, and now you're crying ad hominem...
Ad hominem is attacking the person and not the argument. He's now attacking the people making the argument, and not the argument itself. So, yes, he's making an ad hominem argument.
Don, he's not making analogies ... he's bringing up examples of prior op-eds in Boing Boing that advocate transparency, etc. that BB is now acting in an opposing manner. You can't prove or disprove hypocrisy without citing to past behavior, since same is an essential component one way or the other.
Damn, Patrick, shame you fell to ad hominem so quickly. Now, it's just that we're "trying to take Boing Boing down."
Really, man, you're a professional editor. I expected a hell of a lot more class.
By the way, not a company?
Check the footer of BoingBoing, and look at the last three letters of who owns the Boing Boing trademark.
Happy Mutants ...
... LLC. Limited Liability Company.
Patrick, you're being disingenuous in working this latest response off the false precept that BoingBoing is the expression of any of its editors' personal lives, or the personal website of any of the editors.
It's a business. It has hired employees. It sells merchandise. It sells advertising space. Yes, it contains the personal opinions and expressions of its creators. So? Many "old media" publications have opinion columns. That doesn't make them personal and not professional. You and I could quibble all day about the difference between a personal website and a professional website, but when you hire someone to help with your website and you are making a very considerable sum of money from it, I think it falls very squarely into the professional side of things.
There are no doubt great amounts of personal details about the lives of Cory, Mark, David, and Xeni which are and very much should remain utterly opaque. However, removing blog posts doesn't fall into the "personal life" supportive rationale.
You summarize my argument as so: "People who venture to criticize businesses, governments, or organizations are required to live their lives without the flexibility and slack that get extended to everyone else."
In doing so, you substitute two straw men that make the argument fallacious.
People who venture to criticize business, governments or organizations in an online media website business for which they hire employees and make revenue from advertising and merchandise should be considered hypocritical if they don't run that business in accordance with the same principles they believe said businesses, governments and organizations should operate their businesses by.
By the way, BoingBoing has, in the past, quite transparently and openly handled the problem of disappearing one of its posts.
Scraps, you neatly changed at least one thing I said 180 degrees. To recap:
(1) BoingBoing's under no obligations.
(2) One of the premises Patrick predicates his argument on is that BoingBoing has preached openness, transparency, etc. only of public agencies, monopolies, and beneficiaries of public largesse.
(2a) They've not. They've preached it of all, including many, many private entities that don't match those three categories.
(2b) Few people are saying BoingBoing has a legal requirement not to practice censorship.
(2c) MOST people are saying that it's the same as the stuff they criticize. Not few. There are no differences between BoingBoing criticizing private entities, people, and blogs for not being transparent, and who they are themselves.
(3) As is frequent in these arguments, one of the lowest-hanging fruit you chose to pluck, even if it really has nothing to do with the argument at hand. I did indeed type "hypocritism" instead of "hypocrisy."
There are a multitude of problems with the rationale behind your argument, Patrick, assuming it's what most people are interpreting it as, regarding Boing Boing's removal of Violet Blue's posts:
Persons who are against political censorship and corporate malfeasance are not for that reason obliged to live their entire personal and professional lives in a goldfish bowl.
The vast majority of commenters on this article not speaking about obligation, i.e., most everyone recognizes that Boing Boing has no obligational requirement foisted upon it. They are speaking about hypocritism as it relates to morality. In short, if you consistently advocate against censorship and for openness and transparency, to engage in clandestine editing of your past (especially when you have specifically argued for the maintenance of archives, i.e. last year's archivsts listserv story) is hypocritical and as such is morally wrong. I do not need to know the intimate secrets of Cory, Mark, Xeni, David, or Teresa. I do expect that if they stand up and say, "An organization should be run in such-and-such a way," that they run their organization in accordance with those same principles.
Believing that public utilities ought to be accountable to the public does not make one into a public utility, no matter how hard anyone tries to spin it that way.
Boing Boing has consistently advocated for private agencies and companies to be accountable to certain things it felt to be morally good, i.e., transparency, openness, and not disappearing things in the middle of the night. As said above, few are saying that BoingBoing is a public utility that is legally required and obligated to keep its archives untouched. If that's all you're arguing, you're merely saying a statement most people already agree with. What the vast majority of the extant criticism is about is that the action of "disappearing" Violet Blue's posts from the archive with no transparency, notice, or openness is an action directly contrary to several principles BoingBoing has routinely advocated and epsoused over the years, and as such is a highly hypocritical action that deserves scorn.
Advocating “transparency†for government proceedings, or for the beneficiaries of chartered monopolies and public largesse, doesn’t oblige the advocate to be “transparent†in every personal or artistic decision they themselves make.
Again, a substitution of a straw man for the real argument. Boing Boing has not, over its past, solely attacked governments, "chartered monopolies," and "beneficiaries of ... public largesse". They've criticized authors, leaders of professional organizations (SFWA, etc.), non-monopoly companies (Apple and MS are big but each is not a monopoly, especially given Apple's relatively small market share), and many others.
Boing Boing has, over the years, earned a great deal of respect, supportive cheers, and agreement for its actions of criticizing all — not a strictly limited subset of individuals legally obligated not to practice censorship, but all — of those who would be opaque and censorious and practice actions that alter records in the dead of night. Yet they themselves are, when it is convenient for them, being opaque and censorious and altering records in the dead of night.
They may not have any legal requirement that they not do what they're doing, but to suggest that what they're doing is not laughably hypocritical nor morally wrong is a highly difficult argument to make, and you've made nowhere near a convincing case here.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2008 | 9 |
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