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Blog Rondo a la Turk

Well, it’s short work week for a lot of people here in the U.S. We’re going to take a half-day here at the ol’ blog.

- From Techdirt comes the news that the publication of a Catcher in the Rye “sequel” has been blocked. They ask, since when did he U.S. ban books? There you have it: What obscenity couldn’t do, copyright can.

- On second thought: From Slashdot comes a story of a couple who’ve been sentenced to serve a year and a day in jail for distributing obscene materials on the Internet.

- But it’s not all bad news at Slashdot; they’ve also got a story about a giant, world-spanning colony of ants.

- Meanwhile, over at The Awl, they celebrated the birth of Franz Kafka, and mourned the death of Mollie Sugden, this week.

- Well, the big story on a lot of blogs this week was of course the death of Michael Jackson. We’ll only link to two posts that relate, because you’ve probably seen as much as you’d ever want to about MJ, over the past week. First, Jezebel asks, Was Michael Jackson More Normal Than we Thought?

- Also, the increased traffic from web surfers looking for Jackson news nearly crushed some major news sites. (Via.)

- And, finally, This Recording has posted a piece from the J. D. Salinger of Comic Strips, Bill Watterson; an appreciation of the classic strip, Krazy Kat, from the forward of a new collection. (Via.)

| July 3rd, 2009 | by BCSilvia | Categories: Blog Rondo | Trackback | No Comments »


De Botton & Crain: Further Remarks

[A follow-up to this; related to this.]

After reading Ed Champion’s interview with Alain de Botton, and the essay that accompanied it, some reconsideration may be in order.

De Botton makes it clear in both essay and interview that his remarks to Caleb Crain were intended as a private communication, and that the public display of that communication was a mistake. He also makes it equally clear that any sense of regret he might feel is over that mistake, rather than the content of it.

It is good that de Botton has clarified his position a bit, though some take issue with it. Of the mistake itself, some find it laughably implausible that he wouldn’t have understood the public nature of blog comments. And with regard to his attitude, where he seems regretful only about the fact that his comments we delivered publicly instead of privately, some perceive that tone as proof of an unforgivable lack of contriteness.

For myself, I don’t know quite what to think (but please, keep reading anyway). In the first objection, we have no way of knowing Mr. de Botton’s level of technical knowledge, beyond his own testimony; as for the second case, our own individual mores determine just how sorry we think he should be, and precisely what it is that he should be sorry for-so, while I might touch upon this subject in the present essay, I will mostly pass over it for now. For the moment, let’s address the intent of private communication.

Private communication has become something of a deprecated concept, and this is especially true of electronic correspondence. Over the past decade or so we’ve become accustomed to seeing public tweets, blog posts, comments, forum entries, and so on; but we’ve also seen many, many examples of emails that have been made public, of private chat logs being posted in public spaces, of private, real-life conversations being transcribed in blog posts.

While even the most sophisticated Internet users may occasionally forget themselves (though these missteps are often ameliorated by the victims’ obscurity), the common sense of electronic communication is that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. Acting as though one believes otherwise is often seen as naive-or foolish. This should explain some of the disbelief with regard to de Botton’s assertion that he though his communication would be private. But perhaps he was honestly mistaken?

The question that follows from this is: How does an expectation of privacy justify the vitriolic nature of de Botton’s comments? In other words, what’s the difference between wishing ill on someone in private, versus in public?

Well, private insults at least suggest that the person doing the insulting is not attempting to publicly shame his or her target. That’s got to be a positive-if not necessarily noble-thing, surely. Contrast this with the Alice Hoffman situation, where an author clearly intended to seek revenge against a reviewer by attempting to rally the public to take punitive action, while also publishing that reviewer’s personal information. Private humiliation can hurt a person’s feelings. It’s public counterpart, however, may have far more serious repercussions.

Another advantage to blowing one’s stack over private channels is that it’s much easier to apologize, if one feels the need to so. Insulting someone where no one else can see it provides an opportunity to later smooth things over with one’s target, to assuage hurt feelings in a low-stakes arena. If my personal pride has been hurt by someone behind close doors, a sincere apology will suffice to repair it. In public, however, my pride may require an eye-for-an-eye in order to be satisfied. Such arguments may never be resolved.

Of course, this is not to say that de Botton’s actions are admirable, exactly. He let his rage get the better of him, there’s no doubt about that. Also, he never explicitly stated whether or not he believes that Crain’s review was motivated by stupidity, infernal malice, or both. (One suspects both. Certainly, any other options de Botton dismisses out of hand.) In the first case, well, de Botton is hardly impartial; in the second, we’d need to see some evidence that Crain really does harbor evil intentions against goodness and value generally, or de Botton personally, before we could really credit such an argument.

In the end, though, perhaps it doesn’t matter. If de Botton was out to repair the damage to his book’s eventual sales goals that might have been caused by Crain’s review, perhaps all this publicity will be worth it. In any case, it’s hardly likely that Crain will ever be paid to review any future works of his (unless there’s some desperate editor out their who might be willing to try such a stunt), which I’m sure pleases de Botton.

I look forward to seeing Crain’s side of the story soon, but unless some wild new revelation is forthcoming, I suspect that my interest in this specific conflict will begin to wane. The question of whether or not de Botton should be forgiven is not mine to answer, since he hasn’t done anything to me. That’s going to be up to Crain. Or vice versa. Or something. I don’t know-I’m even boring myself, right here.

| July 2nd, 2009 | by BCSilvia | Categories: Books & Literature, The Internet Will Shame You | Trackback | 2 Comments »


More Tales of Super-Maturity

Update: Ed Champion gets de Botton’s side of the story in an interview and also posts an essay from the man explaining his actions. Highly recommended, as both go some way towards address the WTF-ness of this whole situation.

Update #2: I’ve posted a few further remarks on this topic.

The Telegraph has more info on the Alain de Botton maelstrom of rage that we briefly mentioned in a previous post.

Alain de Botton, the philosopher and author, has launched an extraordinary internet attack on a book reviewer, telling him: “I will hate you until the day I die”.

The outburst followed a poor review of de Botton’s book The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, by Caleb Crain in The New York Times.

For our thoughts on this sort of thing, please refer to that previous post we mentioned up near the top, there. We would add, however, that we find it immensely useful to know just how easy it is to tip de Botton into a fit of reckless anger, should the need ever arise.

Bonus Round. Spot the irony in the following de Botton statements:

1. “In my eyes [...] it is a review driven by an almost manic desire to bad-mouth and perversely depreciate anything of value.”

2. “The accusations you level at me are simply extraordinary.”

| July 2nd, 2009 | by BCSilvia | Categories: Books & Literature, The Internet Will Shame You | Trackback | No Comments »


Tales of Jurisprurience

From Techdirt — Turns Out It’s Not Sex Discrimination To Get Fired For Looking At Porn Sites:

Eric Goldman alerts us to an appeals court ruling finding against a guy who claims that his firing was gender discrimination after the hospital he worked for found that he had been surfing porn and "hacking" sites. The guy’s entire case seems like a huge stretch.

Litera-I mean, indeed!

| July 1st, 2009 | by BCSilvia | Categories: Miscellaneous | Trackback | No Comments »


Right? Right?

More from that one philandering governor (okay, not really):

So, yes, I lied to everyone. But so what? Who hasn’t pretended that they were hiking the Applachian trail when they were off having an affair in South America? Can you honestly claim you haven’t? And who among you hasn’t stolen a paper clip, made a personal call, left the office to have said tryst without telling a single soul?

So, we good? We’re good, right?

| July 1st, 2009 | by BCSilvia | Categories: Miscellaneous | Trackback | No Comments »


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