Everyone, including DeFazio, wants to know who is attacking them,
offending them, spreading untruths about them, or otherwise being
uncivil. Who wants to be verbally or physically "engaged" by a masked
person? That mask is much more complete when the attack arrives across
the airwaves. No matter what one's opinion is on particular matters
of civility on this list, we can all thank God and our lucky stars the
list isn't anonymous, because that would feature incivility on
steroids whenever it touched upon political matters.
Liberty isn't supposed to mean License, but anonymity makes it so by
disabling the social structures of interaction that keep people
behaving well most of the time.
Those non-legal social structures are already heavily stressed between
political factions, who often have feelings bordering on or
constituting hate of the other side. Given the lengths to which the
Constitution sought to limit the destructive power of political
factions, it's not surprising to see the extremely high levels of
rational discourse in the Federalist Papers (even if by
semi-anonymous pen-names). But today, approximately NONE of our
mainstream political discourse is at the level of the Federalist
papers, that self-restraint is gone together with intellectual rigor
in public discourse. Certainly, no TV political ads reach that level.
Anonymity would destroy all remaining peer pressure or social pressure
to behave one's self, because with anonymity nobody suffers in social
reputation for being uncivil. Except with people who are relative
saints, anonymity creates a world dominated by anonymous harassment
and/or incivility. (See flame wars on the Internet under screen names)
How ironic that anonymity purports to be justified in the name of
avoiding harassment?
I asked yesterday if there was a proposal to make posting on this list
anonymous. If not, why not? No one answered. I think we all know
discourse would decline and perhaps moderators might quit in disgust,
their intent of Madisonian discourse defeated.
In the long run anonymous attacks deter all but the wealthiest and
hardened from being candidates in the first place, and the more one's
political positions offend those with money, the more money one will
have to raise larger sums of money in order not to have their campaign
pronounced lethargic by failure to aggressively respond to the latest
round of (anonymous) attacks.
Paul Lehto, J.D.
On 9/26/10, RuthAlice Anderson <rutha@wscpdx.org> wrote:
I don't complain about tone and violating the listserv rules. I think we
are all adults and know how to use the delete key. Nonetheless, when James
Bopp, who has complained about incivility time and time again, decides to
exempt himself from list guidelines and post one bilious email after
another, the hypocrisy of it is irritating beyond belief. I have often
thought the tone of his emails is unnecessarily nasty, especially from
someone who takes umbrage at others so quickly, but I just deleted and moved
on. However, he the past two days he keeps posting again and again and again
with his discourteous and malignant tone. It would tiresome from anyone -
but from someone who whinges so much about incivility, it's outrageous.
RuthAlice
--
RuthAlice Anderson
Admin & Finance Manager
Western States Center
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Portland, OR 97240
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fax: 503-228-1965
e-mail: rutha@wscpdx.org
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