Dum Pendebat Filius

Back in July, I commented (twice) on a very bad article from the Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled “Bloggers Need Not Apply.” The upshot of the article was that it’s a real bad idea to write a blog under your own name, because academic search committees might read your blog and then decide you’re a freak, a tool, and/or not committed to your field of putative expertise; and no job for you.

My own reaction was, basically, “Good lord, if it’s like that for academics, what about those of us in other lines of work, in industries that don’t even give lip service to personal free-time free speech?” This was one big reason why I decided to quit signing my own name to my posts and just use the fig leaf of my Internet persona. I don’t care if somebody who reads my blog finds out who I am in “real life” (and it would take about five seconds to do so: I’m not exactly hard to find), but I’d prefer that Google searches on my name not reveal this blog. It’s a little late for that, obviously, since I’ve had various blogs under my real name for several years. Occasionally somebody links to this site and uses my real name, too. The fact is, my occasional salty language and my left-wing political views might offend a potential employer. That’s just something you gotta live with if you write stuff on the Internet.

Anyway, the pseudonymous assclown who wrote that wretched article is back, with an even worse article entitled “They Shoot Messengers, Don’t They?” Har de har har, readers! All the people who didn’t like his original article? Crybabies. No one should have been mad at him… he was just tellin’ it like it is.

You ought to read Scott Lemieux’s commentary at Lawyers, Guns and Money. He gives the tool “Ivan Tribble” what for:

And then he engages in the rare Level 5–or “Christopher Hitchens”–category of strawman demolition. Needless to say, he doesn’t cite any actual criticism, but makes up some criticism he can easily respond to instead. “Among the more outraged responses to my column,” he claims, “the biggest issue seemed to be freedom of speech.” This is simply dishonest. Perhaps somebody made this argument, although I certainly missed it in my extensive reading about the controversy, but to claim that it was the “biggest issue” is just a flat-out lie. Of course Tribble’s search committee did not violate anybody’s constitutional rights; that’s not why most people found his arguments objectionable. The issue was his irrational Babbitry, the fact that he seemed to regard a search committee not as a serious job vested with the responsibility of finding the best candidate but as a vehicle he could use to assert his petty and conformist aesthetic prejudices.

There are, no doubt, “Ivan Tribbles” everywhere, in academia and in HR departments all over the corporate world. Blog at your own risk.