Stardate 20021026.1025

(On Screen): I've mostly been staying out of the Anil-versus-LGF tussle. I'm firmly on Johnson's side in it, and I probabably visit LGF more often than any other blog. I hardly ever read the comments on the site because I find the vast majority of them to be useless, but Charles' posts are usually excellent. It's true that they have an edge to them, but there's nothing wrong with that. (It's known as "an editorial voice"; it's part of writing.)

I'm sort of indirectly pulled into it by Tom Coates, a British blogger who writes, more in sorrow than in anger, about how appalled he is by what blogging seems to have turned into. He was inspired to write because of what he'd read on Anil's site. (He refers to certain things as "attacks on Anil" which is odd because it was Anil that picked the fight by characterizing LGF as "hate speech".) I in turn write because Tom refers directly to me as a bad example, or perhaps as a bad experience.

To my shame, only once did I make any kind of stand. I sent an e-mail to Stephen Den Beste about (what I considered to be) his overblown anti-European rhetoric - and he responded. I got a fair amount of short-term fallout in the form of highly unpleasant e-mails and comments posted on people's sites. And I think at the time I decided that several things should stop me continuing with any kind of debate on these issues in public. Some of these I think are still valid, some of which I now think I could characterise as cowardice or laziness, nothing more...

Tom writes:

I don't know how to say it in any other way except to say that as an episode in web history, I personally believe that Warblogging has been shameful, horrific and a stain on us all. The escalation of warblogs is a disaster for development of personal publishing, and a crippling blow to the individual integrity and worth of weblogs and weblogging. This whole media - a media which was supposed to be about freedom of expression, allowing everyone to have a voice and a space to talk openly and honestly - has turned increasingly into the worst kind of soapbox punditry, witch-hunting and as a platform for violent warmongers and nationalists. And I'm afraid I feel partly responsible...

Am I the only person who sees the fundamental internal contradiction in this paragraph? Tom says that he believes in freedom of expression and allowing everyone to have a voice – and is apalled to discover that a lot of those voices are saying things he doesn't like. But that's what happens when people are free; invariably some of them will do things their neighbors disapprove of.

This site is for me exactly what Tom says: it allows me to have a voice and a space to talk openly and honestly. And what I'm talking openly and honestly about is my firm belief that we are in a war and cannot prevail in that war without actually fighting in certain places. Tom characterizes those like me as "violent warmongers and nationalists" – but violent warmongers and nationalists can be open and honest and sincere about it. Why is that manifestation of free expression any worse than any other kind?

Tom voices an opinion held by many of the first wave of blogging: "This isn't what we had in mind!" They think they created this medium (a claim open to severe doubt) and somehow feel as if everyone who followed them had a moral obligation to not only use the form, but also to stay true to the philosophy of content. But it doesn't work that way.

It's really this simple: they hate the message that me and people like me are delivering. They despise it, but they are mostly unwilling, perhaps even unable, to actually engage in debate on the issues. They just wish it would all go away. (Tom even says he thought that would happen spontaneously.) And what they most hate is that the medium they (think they) created has become a conduit by which me and the other villains can deliver information they wish wasn't being distributed; they feel complicit somehow in the crime.

They say that they believe in "freedom of expression" but they don't truly believe it.

I think that there's something deeper, something more basic going on here. There is a fairly clear delineation between elitism and populism, which can most easily be demonstrated by a small test. Do you agree or disagree with the following?

When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas -- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market

OK, the language is a bit florid. It was written by Justice Holmes in 1919, and is quoted by Judge Dalzell in his opinion as part of the Third Circuit Court's CDA decision. Dalzell continues:

For nearly as long, critics have attacked this much-maligned "marketplace" theory of First Amendment jurisprudence as inconsistent with economic and practical reality. Most marketplaces of m