Stardate 20030304.1833

(Captain's log): The process of learned discourse and intellectual debate is reasonably well understood now, as a result of centuries of experimentation. When several men of good will disagree with each other on some issue of great importance, they can engage in debate on it. The assumption is that they do so in good faith, and that all involved have a primary commitment to try to find the best answer available, though differences of opinion may exist about what that will be.

Different advocates will thus present cases for their points of view. But there's a kind of scrupulous honesty involved in this, and each advocate will in a sense work against himself. He'll make their case, but he'll also do his best to make it easy for his readers to shoot holes in that case. When he cites evidence, he'll tell where it came from, so that the readers can consult primary sources to determine if the evidence doesn't really say what is claimed. He won't just present conclusions, he'll provide the logic by which the conclusion was reached so that readers can determine if there are fallacies of reasoning. If he is critiquing a case made by an opponent, he'll try to make a fair summary of the other guy's case, and he'll provide access information (e.g. book name and publisher and ISBN, or a web link) so that readers who are so inclined can actually go look to see if the summary is indeed fair.

And then he will try to show weaknesses in the other guy's case, either by challenging the other guy's evidence with other evidence which contradicts it (and with references for where it came from) or demonstrations of where the logic failed, or perhaps information which shows that the other guy's evidence was badly collected and is actually useless.

There are a lot of benefits to this process (which was best justified by John Stuart Mill in "On Liberty"). First and foremost, if you don't actually understand your reasons for holding an opinion, you'll have a hard time presenting a convincing case for it. The process of writing such advocacy forces you to methodically examine your position, and in doing so you may yourself discover flaws in it.

When you present your case, your opposition and your readers will also look for weaknesses and let you know. In the resulting give-and-take you may be able to rework the case to make it tight, or again you may come to realize that you were wrong.

By reading someone else's case presented in this way, you'll be exposed to new ideas and new evidence which may alter your view of the situation. You may even come to be convinced by him.

And indeed it may turn out that everyone was wrong, and that no one has the right answer; it may be that the real answer being sought is some sort of synthesis of several positions being advocated during this process, or it may be something else entirely.

As a general rule, the more people who scrutinize this kind of presentation, the more likely it is that weaknesses in that case will be identified.

All of this requires a form of intellectual integrity, as well as a certain humility. No matter how certain you are, you must at all times keep in mind that you could be wrong. There may be something you didn't know which is critical. Your evidence may be faulty but you weren't aware it had been debunked. You might have a hidden assumption and not be aware of it. By presenting your case honestly in this way, you have the best chance of someone finding any or all of these things and helping to make sure that the group as a whole doesn't end up selecting a policy which is based on incorrect evidence or flawed reasoning, whose chance of success is therefore little better than sheer luck.

By doing this you also demonstrate good faith. You are saying to the audience, "I am confident that my ideas will stand up to your criticism, and so I'm willing to show you everything I used to reach that conclusion. If I do turn out to be wrong, I'll welcome that knowledge. And I respect you, the audience, enough to believe that your native intelligence and good sense will permit you to listen to all the sides in this and come to the right conclusion."

But for all of this, it's essential that you actually be dedicated to trying to find the best answer, even if it doesn't turn out to be the one you originally advocated.

Of course, it's not a foregone conclusion that you actually are intellectually honest. You may be convinced that you're correct but not believe that you can actually prevail in this process. If you're dedicated to winning, rather than to finding the best answer, then you fight dirty.

In honest debate, each debater assumes that all readers will read all the cases and decide between them. But maybe you don't want that to happen.

For instance, you may be contemptuous of the mental capabilities of your audience. You may be afraid that if they read your opponent's case that they'll be swayed by it. Even though you're sure your opponent is wrong, the population isn't smart and is gullible, and his argument may seem convincing.

Or you might be certain of your conclusions and not really know where they come from, or even care. Perhaps they came from God, possibly via some holy book. Questioning God's edicts is heresy. What God commands doesn't need to be justified; it's a priori correct.

Perhaps your beliefs were given to you by a very wise man; perhaps he never fully explained them, or the explanation was too complicated and you didn't really follow it even though it sounded plausible. Thus you can't justify your opinions to anyone or explain them, but you don't really feel as if you need to; you have faith that the wise man didn't lead you wrong, so the answer is right even though you can't actually prove it to anyone.

So you're certain that you have the right answer, and the process of convincing the public is a barrier preventing implementation rather than an essential process of confirmation and checking. Indeed, in this case the process of convincing the public is fraught with danger, because they may become convinced by the wrong argument and thwart you in your attempts to implement the right answer.

In such a case, if you have the power of government at your disposal then you can use censorship and repression to prevent the people from seeing the other guy's case at all. He's wrong, of course, and you're sure of that; but letting the people hear what he has to say can only stir up trouble. You're right, of course, so if the people only hear your side of it then they won't be misled. So you wield the power of the state to make sure the people never hear anything except what you want them to.

The majority of the people on this planet live in societies where "dangerous ideas" are suppressed to some degree. All societies engage in at least some censorship, but the degree to which they do so varies hugely. At one end of the scale are the US and Canada, where even "hate speech" is constitutionally protected unless it actually represents a clear and immediate danger to someone. At the other end of the scale you have nations like North Korea where repression and indoctrination are truly horrific, and where the penalty for doubting the official line is torture and death. (Most of Europe is close to the US and Canada on that scale but not quite as free, and unfortunately getting less free as time goes on.)

When you're in a nation which legally protects the right to hold and express differing political opinions, then it's a lot harder to keep the gullible from seeing dangerous ideas. The only thing you can do is to convince them not to look.

So you fight dirty. The message you deliver is, "I've looked at what he's saying, and it's worthless and wrong. There's nothing of value in it, so for you all to read it would be a waste of your time. Just take my word for it and don't look at what he's trying to tell you."

How to do this? Well, there are a large number of tactics which can help. Strawmen are really useful in this, for example. You can put on a semblance of pretending to follow the intellectually honest approach, and include a summary of your opponent's case. But you lie about it; you deliberately distort it so that what you present as his case is actually easy to argue against and demolish. And then you wave your hands really fast and hope like hell that none of your readers actually bother to check to see if your summary was fair and honest.

If you're particularly good at this, you may even fool your opponent, and con him into trying to defend the strawman.

One particularly nice kind of strawman is the quote out of context. Take one sentence or a key paragraph out of your opponent's argument but select it in a way so that when it stands alone it seems to say something entirely different than it did in the original. The nice thing about this is that you seem to actually be using his words, instead of providing your own summary; it seems more convincing to anyone who doesn't actually look at the original since you don't seem to be paraphrasing.

But a much more versatile approach is ad hominem. As a general principle, it means "if you can't answer the argument, discredit the advocate." The basic idea is to work in every possible way to make it seem as if the advocate is not worth listening to.

Ridicule and scorn work pretty well, though more able practitioners of this art tend to consider such approaches as being pretty crude. Supercilious condescension is also effective, especially if you can make your audience feel it with you. Criticizing his credentials can be helpful.

Making fun of how someone looks or how he dresses, or of the way he forms sentences or the way his voice sounds amount to cheap shots, but you'll still see a lot of that kind of thing even though it really has nothing to do with whether he actually has a good case to make. Of course, you're not interested in that since your goal here is suppression.

It's always handy to be able to attack his ethics. Perhaps you can find some small statement he made about some particular subject which makes him look really, really bad; if so, then you can get publicly irate about it and raise a stink, and try to wreck his character. (Think of this as the "Trent Lott" gambit.)

Projection is really handy. If you are aware of what seems to be weakness in your own case and fear that your opponent might point it out, then accuse him of it first. Then if he tries to bring it up, it will look lame.

Revelation of youthful indiscretion is very popular. That one gets a lot of mileage.

And if you can't come up with anything else, simple mockery may save you.

Remember, you aren't interested in honest debate about the issues; your goal is to bypass that and to force your own position through by hook or by crook. The end justifies the means; your goals are worthy but the process itself is flawed and can't be trusted. And in any case the populace don't know what's good for them because they're greedy, stupid, uneducated, unsophisticated and easily misled. You're smarter than they are, and at a higher moral plane, and far more sophisticated and enlightened; they wouldn't even understand the issues if they were exposed to them, so there's no point in trying. It's better that they not be involved, but if you can't prevent that through force, then what you want to do is to fool everyone, and get your program through without bothering with the formality of actually explaining and defending it, or really considering any other points of view.

After all, you're certain that you're right so no other point of view is worthy of consideration.

That just happened to me. Some guy in London named Daniel Davies decided to take me down. I'm afraid his execution has been more than a bit inept. His motivation seems to have been a mixture of a simple wish to try to bait me, as well as a deeper wish to discredit me so that his readers would feel no temptation to bother actually reading what I say.

Of course, cockroaches don't like the light of day, and will scurry away when you pick up whatever it was they were hiding under. By the same token, Davies has been most comfortable with what he's been doing due to the fact that I seemed to be ignoring him. Last weekend I finally responded in kind, and Davies demonstrated his true character (as will become evident). My reaction to it all was to use my best John Wayne voice to mutter, "Yer yella!"

In fact, Davies has demonstrated a clear dedication to double standards, revisionism and outright lies. When I finally decided to directly respond to a couple of his posts, he removed them the next day. When he learned that a debate about this had begun over on Asymmetrical Information, he participated and did his best to feign innocence and surprise at my response, and talk about how everyone should just get along.

And the email he sent me was really quite remarkable. He told me he'd removed the two posts, apparently thinking I would greet this positively. In fact, I condemn it. (He also didn't do it right; they continue to be accessible online, which is just as well.) He asked me to remove something from one of my posts in my archive, and I refused.

He was stunned that I'd actually been offended. He didn't understand how that could happen. He wanted to understand my anger; there was a clear implication that my anger was incorrect and unwarranted and that if I was only actually willing to just talk it through with him, he would be able to figure out where I'd gone wrong, and convince me to release the anger.

He wanted to feel my pain. I declined with thanks.

His letters sounded uncannily like what the HAL 9000 said to Dave Bowman while the latter was headed toward the computer room with tools in his hands. I almost expected Davies to start singing "Bicycle built for Two".

Unfortunately for him, he made two mistakes. (More than that, actually, but two in particular.) First, he assumed that he was right and that I was wrong and that my anger was unjustified.

Second, and more important, he assumed I was angry. It's become blatantly obvious through all of this that he doesn't have the slightest idea how Americans think, for it clearly didn't occur to him that I might be doing something entirely different, namely applying this principle:

Don't get mad, get even.

I realized after a couple of exchanges of email that he wasn't living on the same planet as I was. I offered to debate him about the war, but he wanted to psychoanalyze my anger. Of course, sneakily hidden in that would have been the implicit assumption that the anger was unjustified and to even discuss it on those terms would be to grant him a victory; and given that I wasn't angry in any case, I felt no urge to continue the discussion and didn't answer his last letter to me.

The gulf between us became evident when he made clear that he had no idea what I was talking about when I mentioned that I thought he'd been fighting dirty. He seemed to think that I might be reacting specifically to some particular word, and hinted at an apology if so.

The idea that his entire campaign, from first to last, every single word of it, was intellectually dishonest never seems to have occurred to him. But postmodernists don't generally engage in anything similar to the intellectually honest open debate I described above.

In the mean time, there were two posts he made on his site which were particularly egregious which inspired me to decide that enough was enough, and to answer in kind. He deleted those from his front page, but didn't seem to remove them from his archive. However, if he becomes motivated to do so, they may vanish from there as well, removing vital evidence needed by you, dear readers, to make an honest evaluation of the situation. Since in both public discussion and in his letters to me, you could virtually see his halo, I came to the conclusion that I could not trust him to not change the past. To pomos, revisionism is a way of life; it isn't wrong because it serves a higher good of making sure they win the battle.

So I spent most of this afternoon compiling a local mirror of all the posts he's written about me in the last two months, which can be found here. Throughout this discussion, when I cite things he's said, I'll provide both links to where they should be on his site and to my local mirror which he can't change. And when it seems as if I'm making a brief quote, then if you have a suspicion that I might myself be engaging in "quoting out of context" I strongly urge you to go read the original in one place or the other. (Of course, now that I have this archive, there's no longer any benefit to him in changing his archives, so I suspect he won't do so and indeed will disclaim any intention of doing so despite the fact that he's already done it.)

So let's go back to the very beginning, shall we? All his public proclamations of innocence belie his original intentions, which he was unwise enough to actually describe on his site.

What he's been doing for the last month is to post "shorter SDB" summaries. What that means is that he takes an entire post of mine (often running to thousands of words) and distills it down to a single sentence. But there's never been any claim that this was fair (even if it were possible at all); his intentions were dishonorable from the very beginning and were openly stated as such.

Shortly after New Years, he posted (original, mirror):

I'm bored. I want to launch a jihad against someone. Any suggestions? I thought about taking on the weblog that this young chap's parents write for him, but it kind of seems like bullying. Not saying that I'm not going to do it, just making conversation; it seems like bullying. Also, I don't really care about Israel all that much, though I do note that it would be really quite funny for anyone who doesn't like the proponent of "benshapiroonline" to continually post sharply worded critiques of it every Friday evening to see whether his religious faith in keeping the Sabbath is greater than his desire to shoot his mouth off. Anyway, I don't think I'm going to, no matter how much fun it would be, mainly because there's something weird about that "benshapiroonline" site. When you click on a link to one of the articles, something about the way that the site loads means that it shows you the picture of Ben for a fraction of a second before scrolling down really quickly to the article. Which means that I've got a retinal image of Ben floating over the page as I read his writing, and it's rather disturbing. Thank God subliminal advertising doesn't work, or there's no telling what I might do.

But anyway, impossible as it sounds, unassuming chap like myself, I find that I have run out of enemies. I suppose I really ought to continue my lifelong crusade against Eric Raymond, but frankly, can I be bothered? If anyone can come up with a suitable target, I will award a small prize (please note; I amusing the word "award" here in an extended, metaphorical sense which does not carry any implications that you'll actually get anything). Otherwise, I guess it's going to be Den Beste, without any great enthusiasm.

About a month later, he finally got on with the job (original, mirror):

As part of my New Year's Resolution to pick a really nasty fight with someone, and as a potential supply of more regular updates, I've decided to become a "watcher". I believe that this was all the rage in weblog circles about a year ago.

Anyway, I want to do it, and nobody convinced me that there were better targets for a jihad than Stephen den Beste, so I picked him. It also helps that, as far as I can tell, he's incredibly thin-skinned (see my comments board somewhere for proof). Now, I thought of doing "Smarter Steven den Beste" (note that part of my strategy is not to use a consistent spelling of his first name), but that would probably completely dominate my blog, and besides "fisking" is like so five minutes ago. (Being a "watcher", however, is retro and cool).

Besides, people don't necessarily want a Smarter Stephen den Beste. Part of the joy is watching a man who knows nothing about anything except the innards of mobile phones trying to understand a complicated world around him with no sources of information other than the Internet. What people want is a Shorter Stephen den Beste; one that doesn't take about ten thousand words to get from A to halfway through the downstroke of B. So I'll be posting one-sentence summaries of posts on the USS Clueless, on a reasonably regular basis, until I get bored.

At which point he kicked in with the process. I won't be quoting his other comments at such great length, but I thought it important to show that his initial goal was not to actually engage in anything resembling honest debate. Indeed, considering his comment about "thin skin" (which, based on his behavior over the last few days is incredibly ironic) it is evident that one of his goals was make me angry (which makes his letters to me earlier this week even more blatantly hypocritical).

You can read the entries for yourself; the arrogance and condescension shine through constantly. But if you read the entire record, something else becomes evident. As time went on and I didn't seem to be reacting, the initial good humor subsides and his comments become more and more nasty.

As the process went on, he never abandoned the publicly declared intent to fling mud in my direction. For instance, in response to a comment by me to the effect that the headlights on my car never went out he suddenly decided I owned a Volvo, and was delighted (original, mirror):

Den Beste is a Volvo driver!!!!

Unless anyone knows of another marque where you can't switch the headlights off, I'm going to assume that he's a Volvo Driver, providing a rich further vein of mockery for me to mine, without heed to the environmental consequences.

He was therefore disappointed when I left a brief message in the comment thread to the effect that I actually own a Chevrolet.

His next post (original, mirror) on the subject was actually global commentary and he actually said some rather nice things about me. Sort of, anyway; something along the line of "After reading him for a while I've discovered he wasn't as vile as I thought a conservative American would be. On the other hand, I suspect he's on drugs." (His speculation foundered on the unfortunate fact that I ceased working on cell phones three years ago.)

The crisis came on the 28th, when he pulled out the stops (original, mirror). At that point I decided it had gone on long enough, and decided to give him a taste of his own medicine.

I must say I was disappointed at how he responded; he turned tail and fled. He "doesn't need the hassle". He seems plenty able to dish it out but can't take it in response. He wanted to "pick a fight"; he wanted "jihad", but only against a target that didn't fight back.

And he turned dishonest. He said he didn't want to continue, and then proceeded to do exactly that in the lengthy discussion thread on Asymmetrical Information, where he spent an exceptional amount of time trying to convince them that I was indeed unworthy of any support and was vile because of a joke I made, among other things.

And even as he was doing that, he was also sending me email trying to hold out an olive branch. It was downright French in its hypocrisy. And he posted this (original, mirror):

...I don't see any point in stirring up shit for the sake of it.

Then what the hell was he doing all this time?

The reality is that game was only fun as long as I had my back turned. What he wanted to do was to pick on someone without any risk of reprisal.

In our private correspondence two days ago, I attempted to convince him to actually engage me in a real and honest debate about the political issues. But he wasn't willing. What he was trying to do was to put me back to sleep again, so that he could go back to heaping abuse on me without risk of reprisal.

And I was struck by the fact that in a microcosm, what just happened was very much like what is happening to my country. We're angry because we were attacked and we want to make sure it doesn't happen again. Lefties, especially in Europe, are trying to convince us that we have no cause for anger and thus should not go to war. Equally, Davies tried to convince me that I had no cause for anger against him personally.

We deserve what we're getting; we have no right to respond. That's their message.

They're all wrong; this isn't about anger. The war isn't about anger, and my response to Davies wasn't about anger. It isn't revenge. It's prevention.

We're fighting this war to prevent future attacks. I toasted Davies in a flame post in order to dissuade him from future use of the kind of vehement abuse he'd been piling on me.

Was that censorship? Of course not. I have no power to use the long arm of the state to imprison him for what he said, nor would I even if I did. What I was trying to do was to make clear to him that there are prices to be paid.

He thinks that is censorship. He refers to it as "stifling opposition". No, I don't stifle opponents if they debate me honorably about the issues. And I can't stifle anyone in any case if they have the backbone to ignore me. In any case, would his posts over the last month count as exactly the same kind of thing?

And not only is this war about prevention, it's also about justice and honor. But I'll never succeed in explaining either of those concepts to Davies, so I won't bother trying.

I tried to explain to Davies what I was doing with a quote from Mead's article about Jacksonianism, as well as encouraging him to read the entire thing:

Jacksonian America has clear ideas about how wars should be fought, how enemies should be treated, and what should happen when the wars are over. It recognizes two kinds of enemies and two kinds of fighting: honorable enemies fight a clean fight and are entitled to be opposed in the same way; dishonorable enemies fight dirty wars and in that case all rules are off. ...

Adversaries who honor the code will benefit from its protections, while those who want a dirty fight will get one.

Then I told him I felt he was fighting dirty, and thus I responded dirty. Sauce for the goose...

No, that won't do. What Davies wanted was for me to be polite and calm while he continued to abused me. Sorry, not in the cards.

As the discussion thread on Asymmetrical Information lengthened, several people began to point out the inconsistencies in his point of view. And suddenly he excused himself and fled the field of intellectual combat again.

As Pej pointed out, it wasn't even clear why Davies had any right to make those kinds of judgments of me or anyone else. Who is he to decide whether my anger is genuine or feigned?

Actually, by my lights anyone and everyone is entitled to make such a judgment. After all, I could be lying about it. I might well be trying to use that event for some private agenda. That's one part of that open debate process I think is vital for a free society, and my defense against such claims is to engage in the kind of cards-on-the-table honest explanation that I do, so that my readers may come to accept my integrity. But that has to be earned, and I've been working hard to do so.

But within Davies' view of victimology, his own rules disqualified him from expressing the very things he was saying. This doesn't seem to have occurred to him, or perhaps he didn't think it was true. After all, he's one of the elite, the exalted. The rules don't apply to him the same way they apply to people like me.

Was I angry when I wrote that post on Saturday? No. More bemused, really, and per