Personal attacks
Today, dogpossum posted what is, so far, the most antagonistic comment related to my site that I’ve yet received. Her blog doesn’t have permalinks, so you’ll just have to search for 17 March 2005. Currently, though, it’s at or near the top of the blog.
I don’t mind antagonism. In fact, I know that just by putting forward my opinions on some issues, I’m going to bait people. Possibly everyone. My post on Australia Day baits jingoists: but being mostly acquainted with people of the university set, I don’t expect many jingoists to be reading. My post on arts funding has attracted a lot of comments, most disagreeing with me forcefully. I knew it would bait those kind of responses. That’s not why I write things like that, though: I hope I do so because I have good reasons for my views, and I want to express them, to open up debate. So they have. I enjoy this. So, I hope, do you, my readers and correspondents, most of whom (and possibly all) are of the university set. “University set” isn’t meant to be an insult, by the way: I’m a member of the same cultural milieu, and though it irritates me some times, I still feel at home in it.
Dogpossum’s post seems to be a fairly visceral reaction to my politics, and except where she points out that I don’t know much about Australian cinema (touché), it’s not a good example of a contribution to debate. It shows a common tendency of writers who identify with a leftist politics, and who imagine those who disagree with them are all contemptible rightists. Its response to me is almost entirely to attack my person: to call me a “fool” and an “imbecile,” to ridicule my recording, in my resumé, of my intelligence percentile, determined by a psychologist-administered test, and to “mock” my “turn of phrase”. It objects to my politics without specifying grounds for objection, and without even identifying what my politics are.
For the record, I’ve met dogpossum at least once in RL, where our disagreements were not apparent, and where I found her very likeable. I enjoyed meeting her.
Dogpossum, you owe yourself better than to be so uncivil in writing. I don’t expect you to disagree any less forcefully: but if you can’t say anything nice about my person, you maintain your honour better by not saying anything at all.
Dogpossum’s personal attacks are symptomatic of a tendency that I’ve noticed in my interactions with Cultural Studies academics generally, particularly where political matters are involved. There’s a set of people and beliefs that they assume everyone agrees or disagrees with (i.e. we are all ‘left’; capitalism is immoral; everyone who disagrees with you is a right-wing bastard, especially people who criticise identity politics or French pseudo-philosophy; logic is a tool of oppression; and so on). If you challenge one of these, you get hammered with personal attacks. For an example of what I’m talking about, have a look at the threads resulting from my recent intervention on the CSAA email forum. (Note that the thread goes on into subsequent weeks). Here it’s not me who’s the subject of the attacks (in the main), but rather so-called “right wing jocks” who dare (often very unskillfully) to criticise Cultural Studies. The sad thing is that Cultural Studies practitioners attack these people personally when they could have targeted the gaping holes in their opponents’ arguments, which end up going unmentioned.
I believe this kind of behaviour (and it seems to come from multiple sides) is extremely damaging to the intellectual climate wherever it occurs. Intellectuals should be debating each other’s ideas, not calling each other fools and imbeciles. We can leave that to those who don’t know any better.
Dogpossum, I believe you do know better.
In a comment on dogpossum’s post, I’ve invited her to discuss her objections with me. I hope she’ll take up my invitation, hopefully here, because of the lack of permalinks on her site. I would expect our words to make for interesting reading.
well, i’ve finally solved my template issues and have time to respond to this issue.
1. my entry on my own blog were not intended as a clever contribution to academic debate. my dogpossum blog is very much a personal journal-esque bit of work. lower your standards. my work blog, however, (www.dogpossum.org/worklog) is where i get ‘clever’. it’s also where i’m more likely to get into the articulate. as a consequence, it’s no doubt far less interesting. and far less likely to showcase shitfights.
2. my comment on your blog, ben, was intended as a comment on the one key point i thought was worth addressing on your site (with you) rather than in my own domain.
3. i do remember meeting you, and i’ll echo your sentiments:
. i also enjoyed meeting you ben. i had no idea you were ‘little benni’. but that doesn’t mean i don’t stand by my critique of your politics…
4. i promised myself i wouldn’t backpedal on this, but my mother would have told me off if she’d read my blog, and told me to apologise. sure, it was a visceral response. but it was also a spontaneous response. and one i certainly never would have made in person. or even if i’d thought anyone was reading. so i apologise for the nasty personal attackness. i do not, however, withdraw my concerns about cultural studies as a discipline at unimelb, my frustration with your politics or my appreciation for your site’s fine design.
5. the permalinks issue was fixed on dogpossum during my recent (kind of catastrophic) tinkering.
6. this is crazy talk: “if you canât say anything nice about my person, you maintain your honour better by not saying anything at all.” i argue that it is a matter of honour to speak up when you take issue with someone’s politics. the bits about your person i reserved for the ‘privacy’ of my own blog. this is the sort of comment i can’t abide: ‘if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all’, and it’s pretty much antithetical for academia, right? aren’t we all about critical thinking? chalk it up to my feminism. aren’t we supposed to be profoundly lacking in sense of/good humour?
7. baiting = provocation. best to watch your fingers.
9. the iq thing. sure, i bet you’re a smarty. but the point that made me laugh (and to which i referred on my blog, rather than here) was your feeling it was important enough to note it in your resume. maybe i’m a bit silly to have read your resume as ‘serious’ (despite the contextual evidence supporting that reading), but heck. dood. those iq tests measure one thing: your ability to take particular types of tests. you know those things are culturally specific, arbitrary and ultimately fairly useless for proving anything other than a deep desire to be better than the other kids? your references to your IT skills, your teaching, your publishing, your academic record more than prove your intelligence. i just thought it was funny (though kind if in keeping with the general theme of your blog) to note it in your resume.
10. don’t go quitting your opinion pieces. just be prepared for responses like my own. particularly from the ‘university set’. or even from those who are into the whole empathy thing.
[my lefty politics are born from my own university learning (ie learning about social stuff) and my family’s long history in social work and activism (ie we have always gotten off our clacks and done something about the shitty stuff we see in our communities, whether that was protesting about battery hens (thankyou nanna), starting playgroups in the 60s (thankyou mum), running women’s support groups (that’s me) or helping out families (thankyou brother))]
phew. that’s enough. i have other things to do.
(honour? is it so important? not to me. not really)
dogpossum
26 Mar 05 at 14:58
Thanks dogpossum (I finally remembered your real name in conversation with Chris Hill, but it’s probably taboo to mention it). Now I have the warm fuzzy feeling that I get from dialogue.
Thanks for numbering. Now I can do this, point by point:
1. Fair enough. I looked at your worklog and, yes, it is less interesting (no offense intended, it’s the “my research area doesn’t really intersect with yours” thing). I didn’t know you were writing about dance… Is that the topic you had three years ago?
2. Point taken and conceded, re: cinema.
3. I had no idea I was ‘little benni’ either. :-)
4. Okay, there’s a few points here. No apology is necessary, though your mum and mine both might feel differently about such things. But I would like to hear more about your frustration with Cultural Studies at Melbourne Uni. What is it that frustrated you, exactly? I ask this because it frustrates me, too, but my reasons are no doubt very different. My “fine design” is very much the work of Michael Heilemann, author of the wonderful Kubrick blog template.
5. Hooray! Permalinks! I’m glad to see you got your CSS issues sorted out. The site was looking pretty weird for a while there.
6. If you interpret what I said as “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” then you’re right, it’s antithetical to the kind of critical thinking that academia is meant to (but that I would argue it very seldom does) foster. But I wasn’t referring to saying nice things in general or nothing at all, just things about people’s personal characteristics etc. Ad hominem attacks are logically fallacious and they just don’t contribute anything to discussion. I’m still waiting to hear what your issues are with my politics, specifically, since I can still only guess at this point.
7. Indeed.
8. What happened to 8?
9. Listing my IQ kind of is serious, but I do have a sense of humour about it. There’s a whole bunch of issues I could raise about how Australians tend to treat intelligent people (badly), but another time… No doubt it will come out in my blog sooner or later. I do disagree vehemently with you on your characterisation of IQ tests, though. I’ve done several tests, from the MENSA ones, to online ones, to the phony Scientology IQ test, and they can differ greatly. Some, but not all, of the tests are culturally and linguistically specific, and some test very narrow areas of human intelligence. The one I referred to in my resumé is the Weschler test, and is administered by psychologists, one on one, in person. It isn’t terribly culturally or linguistically specific, it tests a very wide range of abilities, and people who take the test get a breakdown of their strengths and weaknesses in particular kinds of cognition in the report they receive. Arguably, its main value is diagnostic. My parents had me do the test so they’d have some evidence to show people when they were trying to get me accelerated in school. It is also used to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease, since it can isolate disintegration of mental function in particular areas. I write my percentile on my resumé for two reasons: 1. it’s very high, and I think that’s impressive, perhaps more to employers than to my peers; 2. I do think that the Weschler IQ test is a good measure of general intelligence and cognitive function, and it gives a scientific measure of my ability to learn and master new skills effectively.
10. I don’t intend to quit my opinion pieces. There’ve been less of them lately just because I’m busy. I’m totally prepared for antagonistic responses, and, in fact, I like them. I changed my blog title in response to your post mostly because it gave me a good (and slightly amusing) idea. I think the activist background you mention is admirable, even though I might not agree with some of the politics behind it any more. I know some of the things I write here make me sound like a bastard, but there’s a subtle point that runs behind it all that’s worth noting. I’m not against helping people. In fact, I think it’s really important, and I’ve done a disappointingly small share of volunteer work and donating to causes as well. All I’m against is the state making decisions on individuals’ behalf as to who they will help, by taxing their income and then letting politicians and bureaucrats distribute it. Maybe you’re happy with where your tax dollars have gone (if you even pay any: I haven’t since I’ve been on my APA). But maybe you’d be happier still if the government gave some or all of them back to you and let you spend them on causes you chose.
Finally… Honour. Honour is important to me. Ultimately it’s just a concept, and it has no real existence. But I think the idea of honour is a valuable one for regulating our own behaviour and for thinking about our relationships with others. These days we call such things “reputation systems”; an example would be the feedback system on eBay. A person’s reputation gives us an idea of how much we should trust them and how much we should value their opinion. There’s one person on staff at Melbourne Uni, for instance who’s lost so much reputation/honour in my eyes that I no longer care a jot for anything he has to say. He probably wouldn’t care, but knowing that such can be the consequences of dishonourable conduct, doesn’t it make sense for us to preserve our honour?
Ben H
27 Mar 05 at 12:45
8 is so last millenium
dogpossum
27 Mar 05 at 17:43
The crazy thing about the CSAA threads on writing and argumentative style is that so much of it seems to be blindingly obvious long-standing grudges than relative newcomers like you and I stumble into. I’m happy to disagree with you on a lot of that stuff, but when there’s these odd emails in my inbox saying “yeah yeah, I agree with you, that X is such a so-and-so”, its like hanging out at a goth club. Except less intellectual work is getting done. I feel like changing sides just to stay off mine. I couldn’t disagree more about the type of conduct academics should have, but I do want intelligent, useful debates – even if they are about having intelligent, useful debates. As such, I’m more inclined to trade comments with you than those who share my opinions because you know what to bring to the ring.
I got a great email from a well-known Cultural Studies person who implored me to continue my unsalient point-making, giving me a number of new points to bring up, as if I could be the jizz-mopper for their arguments that could not be attached to someone with more precious dreams for career. But we ressurected Craig Bellamy!
I dunno who you think is honourless on the Melbourne Uni staff – but I haven’t met anyone on campus that I think qualifies for more than a shred of the stuff! If its me, then awesome, mission is a go.
Christian McCrea
5 Apr 05 at 17:44