Stardate 20040415.1331

(Captain's log): I'm still seething about this, so I'm going to share it with you all. In this article I mentioned an old story about the Chevrolet Nova, by way of establishing background for the point I really wanted to make. As it turns out, the story was an urban legend, and Snopes was on the case quite a while ago.

Almost immediately the letters started flowing. Despite the fact that it was not the main point of the article, and that it ultimately didn't affect the main point whether that story was true or not, and that the main point itself was not very important, I started getting letters. I suppose I should be used to that by now.

So after the first letter arrived which included the link to Snopes, I posted an update with that link. But after I did, further letters containing that link kept arriving.

My policy is that even when I make egregious errors in posts on this site, I do not go back and rewrite the body of the main article in order to correct the error. What I do is to add an update with the corrected information, but I leave my original text intact. I leave my mistakes in place. I consider that to be intellectual honesty; I don't rewrite history to make it seem as if I was invariably right.

There have been a few cases where I have made small changes to fix careless mistakes which were unimportant. For instance, in this article about the superb film Spirited Away I had originally described Kamaji as "a grumpy ugly old man with eight arms". During a later viewing I noticed he actually had six arms, so I changed it inline.

But nearly always, even if the mistakes are small and unimportant, I leave them in place and add a correction as an update.

Sometimes I make major mistakes: seriously underestimating American energy use, incorrectly claiming that napalm was considered a "chemical weapon" banned under the Geneva Convention during WWII, completely screwing up a description of how shaped charge anti-tank rounds work, seriously botching a description of the Thirty Years War. They're all still there, where you can all see them.

I'm afraid I find it very annoying when someone sends me a correction after I myself have already posted such an update.

That means is that the helpful reader was too quick on the trigger; he spotted the error in the article body and leaped into his email program immediately without even checking to see if I'd already added a correction. That seems to have been what happened in this case.

Somebody who only identified themselves as "H." was among those who sent me the Snopes URL long after I'd already added it as an update to that article. (His words and my words will be color coded.) His first message consisted only of the URL of the Snopes article along with a full copy of what it said, so I won't quote it here. I responded:

Right. And I added a link to exactly that Snopes page more than two hours ago. Did you check the "updates" at the bottom before sending this email?

Him:

Just trying to help. Won't bother in the future.

Me:

I appreciate help, but it would be nice if it was not help I had already placed on the web page myself. That's all.

Him:

Of course. But when someone is working FOR you, the proper response begins with "thanks." Then you follow with "but." The recipient then says "mea culpa" & tries to remember to read down the line before being "helpful."

Me:

Cut me some slack. That's how it looks from your end, since from your point of view it looks like a one-on-one relationship.

It isn't one-on-one for me. What I get is lots of letters from a whole lot of people who say essentially the same thing. Bad enough when I get the same criticism from a lot of different people and it's legitimate, but it tends to get really annoying when I get the same criticism from a lot of people after I already posted an update correcting it.

That doesn't feel like "friendly help". Care to see what it does look like?

Almost all of these letters were friendly and helpful. But the cumulative effect of them is like a piledriver, especially when I'm not 100%. A friendly slap on the back can be bracing and supportive, but a thousand slaps on the back will probably kill you, and certainly leave you black-and-blue. None of these people know each other; none of them knew what anyone else might have been writing to me. But I receive them all. (And I'm supposed to answer them all, too; otherwise people feel slighted.)

Him:

Point taken, but I still think the proper response - if you make a response - begins with "thanks." (And maybe it ends with that. That's the way Reynolds & Volokh operate, in my experience.)

My email to you is a case in point. No, I did not read down the to the bottom. I took a look to see what you had posted, & decided that it was not on a topic that interested me enough to read in its entirety. But I noted that the first thing you said was something I knew to be wrong, so I sent you a brief message quoting from the source of my knowledge & giving you the url. I didn't criticize you, or comment in any way. I just sent you the information.

You've chosen to become a new kind of public figure, & part of the deal is that hundreds or thousands of people read your words. Multiple emails to you saying essentially the same thing just go with the territory. I can understand that the cumulative effect of such emails - particularly if they are wrong in some fashion - can in some cases be to irritate you, & it's fair enough to ignore such emails rather than answer them.

But it seems to me that if you are going to answer them, your policy should be to do so in a friendly manner so long as you are not dealing with an obvious jerk. (Jerks you should just ignore. Life really is too short.)

Me:

>But it seems to me that if you are going to answer them, your policy should be to do so in a friendly manner so long as you are not dealing with an obvious jerk. (Jerks you should just ignore. Life really *is* too short.)

Why, exactly, do you feel you are in a position to tell me what my policy should be?

And why, exactly, should I give a damn what you think my policy should be, or what any of the hundreds of other people who also offer me unwanted advice think it should be?

The entire point of this medium is that it places essentially no encumbrances on an author, permitting him to write what he wants.

>You've chosen to become a new kind of public figure, & part of the deal is that hundreds or thousands of people read your words.

I have chosen nothing of the kind.

I have chosen to write, because I enjoy writing, and have chosen to put what I write online and offer it for free to anyone who wants to visit and read it. And part of why I do not accept any contributions is precisely because I do not want anyone to feel they somehow have cause to tell me what to do.

If thousands of people read what I write, it's because they like the kinds of things I say. And part of what makes it something they seem to think is worth reading is because I do what I want with this site and am answerable to no one. I bought my own server, and I pay for all my connection expenses, and I will make my own policies.

And that's why "part of the deal" is that I make all the decisions about the site, how it's run, and what gets put on it. For any given reader, their only decision is to visit and read, or to not do so.

>That's the way Reynolds & Volokh operate, in my experience.

And I don't give a damn what they do, either. They run their sites, and I run mine, and that's just the way I like it.

That's what this country is about: liberty. I am not obligated to act in a particular way just because others act that way, or because others think I should. I am free to make my own decisions, and to act on my decisions, even if I decide wrong. The liberty I treasure most is the freedom to make mistakes -- or to do things which others think are mistakes.

If I am only free to do things others approve of, I am a slave.

>I still think the proper response - if you make a response - begins with "thanks."

I'm happy for you. When you run your web site, I assume that's how you'll deal with this kind of thing.

But what has that got to do with me?

At such time as I decide I need your advice, on this or on anything else whatever, please be assured that I will ask you.

He was right about one thing: "Jerks you should just ignore". So I've added him to my Bozo Bin.

There are Americans living in Europe; born there, raised there, yet out of place there. And there are Europeans living in the US. Born here, raised here, yet totally out of tune with what makes America what it really is. Here's how I described one aspect of it in 20021104:

...the American principle of liberty is that it's better to be free than to be correct. I would rather have the liberty to make mistakes and to act in ways that others consider damnfoolish than to have others dictate to me the right way to act because they're more wise than I am. The ultimate principle of liberty is that if I am only free to do that which others approve of, then I am not free at all. The measure of my liberty is the extent to which I can say and do things which others despise.

H. is far from being the only reader who somehow decided he knew better than I did how I should manage this site, but he may well have been among the most insistent I've ever encountered. His first response was snippy, and that should probably have been the point where I let it drop. But I wanted to try to get across to him that helpful help was welcome here but that unhelpful help was not. It seems I didn't succeed, and what became clear by the end was what I had suspected at the beginning: his letter wasn't about giving me help; it was about scoring points and proving (at least to himself) that he was up one on me. So after it turned out that he didn't really score points on the facts, he wanted to score points by getting me to apologize.

What is this obsession with apologies? It wasn't just him; though many letters I receive are truly helpful and informative, a lot of them are clearly motivated by some need to one-up me.

And it isn't just me. Why are so many people suddenly demanding that the President and/or various top officials of the administration publicly confess to various sins and failures?

Likely it's a mix of motivations. Some of it is disgruntlement, for instance. I can list a bunch of other reasons.

But one in particular I think is clear: if the administration can somehow be convinced to confess to mistakes/errors/misjudgments, then it means they admit that those who disagreed with those m/e/j were right, and smarter/more wise.

And therefore they should be consulted and obeyed on all future decisions. It's part of a naked grab for practical power; and it's a way of getting that power that bypasses the electoral process.

Ever since 9/11, the powerless Left in the US, and "allies" in Europe, have been trying to set themselves up to be able to say I Told You So, but the catastrophes they predicted have universally failed to manifest. It's been a frustrating time for them.

Has the administration made mistakes? Of course it has. Has it confessed to doing so? Yes, but not the way the Left wants it to. The Bush administration acknowledges its errors through actions, not words. When it recognizes that it's done something wrong, it tries to fix it. For example, the first administrator sent to Iraq to supervise the rebuilding process was a dismal failure, and after six weeks he was politely kicked upstairs and Bremer was sent to take over.

But that's not what the Left wants. What they want is a public mea culpa, a humble abasement, delivered in somber tones with eyes downcast, after which the administration would voluntarily submit itself for flogging. That's because they want the administration to acknowledge as mistakes some major decisions which the administration clearly still thinks was right.

This isn't about "honesty" or "openness" or "accountability" or any such drivel; it's about serious disagreements regarding major political policies, and the Left has utterly failed to prevail on those issues on the political level. So they are trying to gain through the backdoor what they cannot win legitimately.

Hence the attempts at the Presidential press conference to try to badger Bush into admitting mistakes and to apologize for them.

If you can get someone to formally and publicly abase themself, then whenever you disagree with him in future you can throw that in his face: "Remember how you were wrong thus-and-so time? I Told You So then and You Didn't Listen To Me. So you should listen to me now."

That's their ultimate agenda. It's not that they want the administration to be self-critical and willing to correct the mistakes the administration itself recognizes. They want the administration to yield on major policies which the administration does not think are wrong.

Of course, it probably didn't help matters any that H. wrote from an @mac.com email address. Red flag in front of a bull, and all that. [DWL: bulls are color blind.]

Update 20040417: Kevin Drum comments, from his new digs.

Update 20040421: Francis W. Porretto comments on this post and on Kevin Drum's post.