nourishing obscurity

Any headline:

The stench from the blogosphere

… is going to attract attention and after all, that’s what newspapers are about – selling newspapers.  The online editions harvest readers.  It serves me right for even bothering to read Yasmin Alibhai-Brown at the Independent and as one commenter stated about her charge of gutter journalism in the sphere:

And you don’t?  Your column’s usually renowned for vacuous stupidity and venom in equal measures.

In a rant about Guido Fawkes whom she sees as representing the blogosphere,  over the issue of Hague, she does raise one or two points for discussion:

We of the old media can be unfair and prurient ( I have been both) but we are accountable and do have to control base instincts. Freedom of expression, an inviolable right, depends on an ingested understanding of how far to go. The outlaws of etherland have thrown out decency, fairness, self restraint and feel bound by no rules. Without rules there is only chaos and pain. Some constraints have come in, but not enough.

It’s not going to make me too popular but she does have a point in that so many bloggers come in thinking they can just “get it off the chest” on their sites, without any serious scholarship and that drags down the overall seriousness with which the sphere is taken by people who like to conflate all opinion and lump all bloggers in the same basket, just as those who oppose “religion” place all faiths and systems, efficacious and totalitarian, on the same footing.

It’s fine if the site is for the purpose of rants in earthy language, not meant to present serious discussion but any who do fancy themselves as purveyors of sense and sensibility need to jealously guard their scholarship at the same time.

You’ll find some of the latter on my blogrolls.

It doesn’t take an Einstein to realize which sites tend to have huge readerships based on tits and bums, which on Westminster scandal, which on gardens, food or fine photography and which on their claim for serious scholarship.  Despite his bizarre stance on the EU referendum, limited political acumen and gratuitous insults sprayed around with no basis, this blogger is one known for his scholarship, i.e. readers do not seriously challenge his carefully constructed pieces, despite an ego of Guido Fawkean proportions and the narrow focus of his concerns.

The main strengths of the sphere are diversity of opinion and freedom of expression.  The sphere does that which the MSM cannot afford to do – treat its readers as intelligent and capable of thinking for themselves, capable of discerning gems of gold from the garbage.

What the sphere does not do is protect its “members” from comment without basis and here we move into another difficulty – the amateur position of the blogger, i.e. he often has a job elsewhere, he’s not paid for his blogging and thus he has limited time to research in depth, should he wish to.  Yasmin Tea was right in that she said the MSM is accountable, on the grounds that a libel is of far greater consequence there than on a minor blog which few take seriously anyway.

Another good thing is that the blogosphere does not tend to litigate unless its members:

1.  have some pre-connection with the MSM in the first place;
2.  are recognized by many as prats

… e.g. Neil Clark.  This makes for far more rollicking and exciting reading than the MSM and the only recourse of the attacked is to answer the criticisms with facts.

The need to reply

With the sphere having established a freewheeling atmosphere of gonzo journalism, then if a blogger wishes to maintain a reputation for scholarship, he really must be able to defend his statements with data and really should not let direct challenges go by without comment*.

In this comment, for example, on Islam, the commenter mentions “real research”,  as distinct, supposedly, from that in the post and this “real research” requires the writer “to read everything written at that time and everything written about that time later”, as supposedly the commenter claims to have done – the entire wealth of every pamphlet, every book, every original text ever written around the topic – and you know my opinion of that claim made by anyone, even a historian.

This “real research”, according to the commenter, “focuses on one question- were Muslims tolerant of other faiths in the time of the Quran and answers it using evidence.”

The answer, by the way, is that they were not tolerant and there is a confusion between two types of states here -  Mehmet, the Ottomans and other communities where dhimmitude and jizya existed plus all the other apartheid that was practised and the out-and-out modern Shari’a state, which you can see in current day Iran.

You can take your pick of sources and historical incidents, say the Muslim predilection for building mosques on top of other people’s holy sites, e.g. the Temple in Jerusalem or the sad fate of the Hagia Sophia, you can look at the Coptic Church and what it’s suffered over the centuries.

So what the point was of focussing on those incidents, I fail to see – they further reinforce what was, after all, just a summary in a short videoclip.  In fact, it throws into sharp relief that there are two situations in Islam – jihad and holy war on the one hand and if it is victorious,  shari’a  and dhimmitude for the vanquished, only if they are “of the book”, on the other.

Nice stuff, eh?

The point

The main thrust of this post is not about Islam – that was just an example – but that the blogger who values his scholastic reputation needs to answer spurious comment with further evidence of his own.  When he doesn’t have all bases covered, then he gets into a situation such as the two occasions where major bloggers managed a UK TV interview and were taken apart both times by interviewers who had done their research.

A provocative political blogger is not there to be loved – and I fear this is a major chink in the armour with certain statpornists – but to be correct in his statements close to 100% of the time.  If he’s proved not to be right on a particular statement, then he needs to be flexible enough to revise his stance and become 100% right.

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[* The exception is where a recognized nutter carries out a campaign of character assassination against a blogger over several years - that sort of thing answers itself and is best ignored.]

Here is another take on the topic of the net.

Filed under: Blogging