Angry in the Great White North

From Adam Radwanski's July 31 column for the National Post:

The blogosphere is good for music and trading notes on pop culture. It can be great for sports commentary. It's a way to pass time for those interested in reading the mundane details of strangers' personal lives.But what it is absolutely lousy for is political debate -- mostly because what it encourages is not debate at all, so much as support groups in which the converted preach to one another about the evils of some dark and mysterious enemy.

Those frequenting blogs don't learn much and their views are rarely challenged. What they get out of the experience is having their own views reinforced over and over again, until even relative moderates are converted into hard-liners.

This can certainly happen. People tend to go places where they feel comfortable, and that means where they are treated with some respect. The problem is that political debate tends to be very personal. Everyone engages in ad hominem attacks, it seems. Go to rabble.ca discussion forums to get a taste of how contrary positions are treated. Generally the person is told to f*** off and then is banned by the moderator.

It's not much better on the right.

That's why my tag line has always been "Taking sloppy liberal thinking and tearing it a new one -- but always with a touch of class." I expect the same in terms of polite behaviour from everyone here. I want people to have the courage of their convictions, but I don't want people to engage in name calling. I've stepped in on occassion to warn people off attacks that were getting personal.

Invariably, the offender apologized and the discussion continued.

Why do I make that effort? Radwanksi explains:

Here, the right is a little more organized than the left - the "Blogging Tories" group creating a community of hundreds of like-minded blogs with similar obsessions (the liberal media, pacifists, etc.) to the ones found south of the border. But it's the Canadian left that has actually shown the biggest crossover into mainstream media, courtesy of Antonia Zerbisias - a media columnist and blogger for the Toronto Star whose main job appears to be attacking conservative commentators on both sides of the border.

True, we don't yet have entire TV programs devoted to advancing an ideology. But with commentators increasingly emulating the zealous partisanship of the online crowd in the hope of eliciting similarly strong reactions, it might not be long. It's a trend that should remind us to hold ourselves to a higher standard, to seek out dissenting views and think critically about the perspectives being sold to us...

I protect everyone who comes here. I try to read all the comments posted and try to jump in if things are getting out of hand. I might miss the occassional insult, but in general, I think I've been successful, if only for the lack of cursing that I see. As for seeking out dissenting views, I've always insisted on carrying the blogrolls of the Liberal blogs, the NDP blogs, the non-partisan blogs, and so forth, along with the roll of Blogging Tories. I was once given some heat for that, told that I should not be directing traffic to these other groups. I stood my ground and insisted that this was not about the flow of traffic, but about the flow of ideas. I have no problem whatsoever to have someone read something here, then click over to an NDP blog to comment on just how foolish I am. Because when someone does that, the readers will click back here and read my foolishness for themselves. Maybe one or two might see a tiny nugget of wisdom in my foolish scribblings.

Recently Deb Frisch posted a phony suicide note on this blog, signing the name of a conservative American blogger. It was quite the event, and I seriously considered banning her. I elicited a lot of responses to the question of whether I ought to ban her, and I'll share my decision now because it seems relevant to Radwanski's point.

I did not ban Deb Frisch's IP address, though with her legal troubles, the issue might be moot. In any case, as nasty as her original suicide note was, the fakery was quickly spotted, and she was immediately taken to task by the readership. I don't need to protect my readers from Deb Frisch. They're smart enough to deal with the likes of her.

Nor do I need to protect them from ideas from the right, centre, or left. I hope my blog, though the readership is generally conservative, is a place where ideas are welcome, not just a particular brand of politics.

This is the reason why I've been worried that the Liberal Party might be on the verge of being destroyed. Like my blog, a country thrives when there is a wide range of ideas vying for support of the populace. I'm a conservative, yes, but I'm also a Canadian. Though my party my benefit in the short term from a Liberal Party falling apart, my country as a whole will suffer if conservative ideas are not being tested again the best that the left side of the political spectrum can offer.

I suppose that non-partisan view of blogging is why Adam Radwanki addressed the Public Affairs Association of Canada (PAAC):

Blog Jam: How the New Media is
Quickly Getting Old

Adam Radwanski

National Post Editorial Writer and Noted Blogger, offers his take on the Blogosphere which he appraised critically in a July 31 Post column

August 23, 2006

11:45 a.m. Registration 12:00 p.m. Lunch

Sutton Place Hotel, 995 Bay Street at Wellesley Street West, Toronto

The PAAC covers a wide range of functions, across the political spectrum:

The Public Affairs Association is a premiere forum for interacting with those whose professional interests or responsibilities lie in the areas of issues management, government relations, trend analysis, policy development, strategic planning, audience or constituency relations -- including public, media, labour and investor relations -- and communications specialists in areas such as advertising and constituency marketing.

There is nothing right or left here. It's about ideas, about presenting them, about understanding their effect on people, and about evaluating their worth. Ideally, the chaotic democracy of the blogosphere can have a role in that too, but only if ideas are given the widest possible exposure to a group with the greatest amount of freedom to think.

That's why I try to run a nice place at Angry in the Great White North, where everyone is welcome to think.