You made it about me when you associated me with his name. You should apologize.

Maybe nardo and nabs can claim joint coinage?

FDB, having ‘thesis’ written on the front is all very well but the real question is this: did it have a dead duck stapled to it?

“These topics have resulted in practically the entire femisphere finding ourselves being accused of actively going about looking for teenagers to sexually assault and babies to murder.”

Oh really? Us in the blokpsphere had to cop shit like this: http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/05/30/do-the-right-thing-mainstream-media-disguise-the-faces-of-the-minors-in-your-reproductions-of-the-henson-images-now/#comment-473391

Warning: I indulge in meta-pwn at #1060.

Or, obviously I did, but with only as an aside. I actually just wanted to say how much I enjoy reading a CT thread like this, when you have some knowledge of the posters, nobody is arguing a particular ideological position, it gets a little whimsical… I like these blogs, it’s a taste of an intellectual life that is otherwise mostly absent from my life in rural Australia. Anyway, I just felt I should say, on the off chance that anyone cares, that I reckon Club Troppo is really a great community. Or something like that.

It should be obvious by this point that I’m avoiding studying for uni exams by any means possible. Blokosphere. I really liked that, even if it was a typo. And femisphere too.

Ken, and Robin if you’re reading, do you think that the specific presumptions you’ve listed - and the broader problem of people not listening to or reading [or not confining themselves to] what has actually been said or written - is notably worse in the blogosphere?

Maybe it’s just more visible here, because of comments and trackbacks, and maybe slightly exacerbated by the combination of unseemly haste and what I think of as Lady Catherine De Bourghism - “I MUST have my share of the conversation!”

But I suspect people are probably just as bad at listening and reading in other media. It’s only aggrieving where there’s a lot of commenting going on.

A bad joke, in other words.

The Lady doth protest too much, methinks.

On nuance and polarisation, a further thought — I constantly see in the blogosphere a high-speed, simplified version of something I observed on a major public scale twice when living in Melbourne: once when Geoffrey Blainey made his fatal remarks about Asian immigration and again during l’affaire First Stone, when, in defending what they had originally said, both Blainey and Garner gradually moved towards a (rhetorically, at least) simplified and more entrenched position as more and more people aggressively piled on, accusing them of things they hadn’t done and forcing them to defend positions they didn’t actually hold. In both cases their original positions were far milder and more nuanced than some of the things they ended up saying later in self-defence. Most people know from experience that it’s very hard in an argument, and sometimes doesn’t even occur to you, to say ‘Hold it right there, I don’t accept the terms of your question.’

In the blogosphere this means that fights get more and more intellectually boring and more and more viciously personal as they move inexorably closer to violating Godwin’s Law. Two examples: abortion and Bill Henson. These topics have resulted in practically the entire femisphere finding ourselves being accused of actively going about looking for teenagers to sexually assault and babies to murder.