Oliver Kamm

Blogging's curse

The weblog of Commentary magazine refers American readers to a recent amicable exchange:

A contretemps about the value of political blogging is currently taking place between Oliver Kamm and Norm Geras, two British intellectuals who have vigorously opposed what today passes in Britain for mainstream liberal commentary - and, as it happens, two formidable bloggers. Kamm, a leftist in domestic politics, vocally supports a neoconservative foreign policy; Geras is a Marxist political philosopher and a co-author of the Euston Manifesto, an online statement denouncing the growing alliance between the European Left and radical Islamists that has garnered dozens of signatories.

So what, you might ask, are they arguing about? About this puzzling statement from Kamm in the Guardian last week: "Blogs are providers not of news but of comment. This would be a good thing if blogs extended the range of available opinion in the public sphere. But they do not; paradoxically, they narrow it. This happens because blogs typically do not add to the available stock of commentary: they are purely parasitic on the stories and opinions that traditional media provide."

This was a curious lament from one who not only has his own blog but who sees nothing but political tendentiousness on display in such "old media" outlets as the BBC and, indeed, the Guardian.

I said I would respond to Norman's argument, and do so in this post. But first I should point out that our American observer, Michael Weiss, is mistaken on one point. I am very far from seeing "nothing but political tendentiousness on display" at the BBC and The Guardian. I am critical of the BBC's journalistic standards, but I don't take the view that the corporation's news output is politically biased. In my opinion, its principal fault is the opposite: in trying to avoid any suspicion of bias, it ends up pursuing equidistance from contending parties' interpretations and confusing it with objectivity. The Guardian, conversely, is a good newspaper whose values I share. I have many differences with its editorial line - though on important issues in my adult lifetime, such as Nato's deployment of Cruise missiles in the 1980s and Milosevic's aggression in the 1990s, it has been right, in contrast to significant bodies of opinion among its readers. I regard with scepticism certain of its regular columnists (one in particular, who is a resolute foe - as I am not - of "Islamophobia", a concept I consider bogus). But I am a fan of The Guardian's news coverage, which is generally successfully kept separate from the paper's opinion columns.

These are, after all, news organisations. They strive for accuracy. My ire is reserved for the absurdly-termed "blogosphere", which has no editorial control and operates by different standards. When I wrote my column for The Guardian about this damaging phenomenon, I added a footnote to the version I posted on this site, to include links to Norman's criticisms along with those of Daniel Finkelstein and Stephen Pollard. I did so because these are more serious arguments than most defences of blogging.

(By contrast, see this blog, previously unknown to me. Its author states: "Oliver Kamm, who describes himself as left-wing, has very right-wing views about the great unwashed: 'the problem with this [poor] section of society is that they don't have a culture of responsibility', unlike he says, those whose 'parents were respectable people'. [from BBC Radio 4 Talking Politics 14 April 2007]" The blogger then draws an analogy - I think - with my supposedly snooty attitude to the blogosphere. The first quotation he gives is in fact from John Rentoul of The Independent on Sunday, who was also on the programme and is well able to speak for himself; the second is not from me either, and nor can I identify its source. As an important part of my argument was that the blogosphere diminishes policy debate, I was pleased to see this and very many other involuntary confirmations of my point. [UPDATE: The blogger who imagined he was making a clever analogy between my views on the blogosphere and my views on social policy has now discreetly deleted his post.])

In short, my friends whom I've linked to observe that there are good blogs and bad blogs, and that it makes no sense to talk of a homogeneous medium. I disagree. There are good blogs, but it is an act of faith to suppose that good blogs will determine the practice of the blogosphere. I see no evidence that this is true and some evidence against. If you want a cautionary tale, look at the example - which I've raised once or twice on this site - of Wikipedia. Supposedly the wisdom of crowds will enable incremental improvements in which good practice will in the end supersede the bad. You can quite as well argue - and certainly observe in practice - that a Web-based encyclopaedia with no standards of expertise will exhibit a decline in quality. As one of Wikipedia's founders observed recently, Wikipedia is "broken beyond repair" owing to its determined refusal to discriminate between expertise, and it must "jettison its anti-elitism".

As contributions to public debate, blogs are like that. The blogosphere isn't a single site, of course, but it does tend to exhibit some common characteristics that damage the quality of public life. Take an example that is fairly trivial and that to some readers will seem quaint. I share the view of Noam Chomsky that if you write to someone seeking his views then you should treat the reply as private correspondence rather than post it without permission on your blog or on a message board. From my experience - and I am not comparing my public following to Chomsky's - bloggers collectively have no notion of this principle. They have never heard of it and wouldn't understand it if they had. Their practice is an innovation, made possible by the instant character of Web-based publishing, and one that in my view corrodes the quality of public debate.

On a far more important point, I have much sympathy with the views of the novelist Howard Jacobson in The Independent :

There are reasons, in most instances, why some people achieve distinction as commentators and others don't. Reasons not unconnected with clarity of mind, soundness of judgement, patience, reason, acuity and the wherewithal to express thought.

Every man has a novel in him, the saying goes. No, he doesn't. Very few men have novels in them. What they have in them is idle inclination. And so it is with articles, reviews, blogs, and even letters. Very few people have one in them. Democracies insist that every dog must have his say, but our society is dying not of suppressed opinion but an overproduction of it.

We professionals are partly to blame for conniving in the fallacy that everyone's views are worth listening to. Some of us append our email addresses to the bottoms of our columns as though we cannot wait to be engaged in corrective conversation with those of our readers we would least like to run into in the park. Others agree to blog for their online newspapers though they know their blog will only initiate streams of bile. Indeed, you wonder whether the bile isn't what the newspaper are really after, and the occasioning essay merely bait.

The overproduction of opinion is the most debilitating of the blogosphere's effects on our political culture. In my article I pointed out that, in the conversation that blogs conduct, you need no competence to join in. To that, Norman replies: "Well, so you don't. Neither do you, to join in political discussion at a public meeting." Indeed; but the comparison I was implying was not with the individual voter. It was with the press and broadcasting media. Bloggers do after all consider themselves to be engaged in "citizen journalism"; and they are not journalists of any kind, because they do not operate under the same constraints as journalism does. What they are instead is a self-selecting sample of political activists untrammelled by editorial standards of quality or factual accuracy. And these are the people - as I demonstrated with reference to a dispiriting speech by a senior Conservative, George Osborne MP - whom political parties profess to be listening to. Bloggers ought not to be listened to, but, like any other lobby, politely discounted.

There is an additional constraint which, because it's a big subject, I shall devote a separate post to. It was raised tangentially in a recent article by the Sunday Times columnist India Knight about two recent legal cases:

There's nothing pleasurable about being defamed, although it comes with the territory if you're even remotely successful. Even if you aren't, blogs are so plentiful and, for the most part, uncensored that everyone will soon have experience of this, whether they're an A-lister or a plumber....

Both these cases set an interesting precedent - if it's simply not worth suing bloggers, will bloggers become self-moderating, or wilder and wilder in their allegations?

I have an interest and some experience of the issue of blogging and libel law, and so may be able to give a better informed judgement on this, at least, than other bloggers. (As some readers will recall, last year I defeated a purported writ that had been issued with high ineptitude by someone who sought, and was never going to secure, the excision from this blog of fair and true comments, such as these, on a matter of public interest.) In that unsought capacity I shall try to answer Ms Knight's question shortly.

UPDATE: One point I ought to have made clear and didn't: as in my Guardian article on this subject, my criticisms relate not to blogging in general but to that small subclass of the medium that is political blogging. One of my regular correspondents, who is among the most distinguished academics in his field, points out the range of expert blogs on, say, physics written by physicists, linguistics written by linguists, and so on almost indefinitely. That point is well taken; my criticisms don't apply to specialist blogs whether written for scholars and practitioners or to communicate scholarship to a more general audience.

Gun debates again

The carnage at Virginia Tech is horrifying; I have no idea what, if anything, might prevent further such horrors. So I haven't weighed in with helpful suggestions from a continent away.

For all the ties of history and values, there are certain aspects of American culture that even Atlanticist Europeans find difficult to adjust to. These include attitudes to violence within national borders - notably gun control and the death penalty. I am with the pointy-headed, liberal, European sophisticates on these issues. But I don't necessarily assume that the type of society I prefer is one in which lone misfits with mass murder on their minds would be thwarted in that aim. There is something futile, if not indecent, in Europeans offering sage advice on this point - especially those of us in a city where half a dozen youngsters have been shot or knifed to death in well publicised cases in recent weeks. Common sense on this point comes from Magnus Linklater in The Times:

Would gun control in America have prevented the carnage at Virginia Tech university? Probably, yes. Does that mean that tighter controls will reduce gun crime? Almost certainly, not. That, simply put, is the dilemma that confronts us each time we listen to the grim, but all too familiar, details of a school or college massacre, the planned, methodical preparations for an apparently deranged act of revenge, the shock experienced by a small and peaceful community and the soul-searching that comes in its aftermath.

Welcome back, IMF

The Guardian reports:

Tony Woodley, general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union, said the surge in inflation was eating into Britons' take-home pay. "This bad news underlines the importance of pay improvements to secure proper living standards for ordinary working people."

Fantastic; why hasn't anyone thought of this remedy before?

Irving accuses

I won't provide a link to his website, but I ought to record that the Holocaust denier David Irving takes strong exception to the reference to him in my article for The Times this weekend about the late Kurt Vonnegut. He hypothesises that the article was commissioned by the newspaper after pressure had been exerted upon it by an external body whose identity (or at least ethnicity) you will be able to guess immediately. It ought not to need saying, but I am in a position to know that Mr Irving's speculations are unfounded. The judgements expressed in the article are mine alone; they were not dictated to me by anyone else. It is perhaps worth commenting - purely for the record, and not because Mr Irving's remarks have any merit - briefly on the complaint.

Irving accuses me of "smearing" him by referring to his 1963 book The Destruction of Dresden as discredited. In addition, he accuses me of "real holocaust-denial" (his italics) for stating that there were not 135,000 deaths in the firebombing of Dresden. He states further:

My "number," as Kamm calls it, came from Hanns Voigt, after February 1945 the director of the Dead Person's Section of Dresden's Missing Persons Bureau. That might seem a not unreasonable source.

TRUE, Professor Richard "Skunky" Evans, another historian who lives by the smear, ignorantly dismissed Voigt in his High Court evidence (on oath) as being a "virulent fascist". What else could he say? In fact we now know that Voigt was a trusted, highly esteemed, and much decorated, member of East German society in the 1950s and was allowed by the Communist regime to emigrate without difficulty upon his retirement to West Germany. These true facts on Voigt will be another dossier on this website, later.

Irving's writings on Dresden were considered at length in the trial of Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt for libel, in the case brought against them by Irving seven years ago. The defendants presented them as evidence that Irving distorts historical facts in order to make them conform to his ideology. The judgement is reproduced in its entirety here, on the Nizkor website, and the section on Irving's book about Dresden is here.

The judgement is a rewarding and important read. I will not try to summarise what is already a cogent and succinct statement of the issues, but would direct you in particular to paragraph 13.126. There Mr Justice Gray states: "In my judgment the estimates of 100,000 and more deaths [at Dresden] which Irving continued to put about in the 1990s lacked any evidential basis and were such as no responsible historian would have made." A few sentences earlier in the judgement, he says: "[Irving] relied on the estimate of Hans Voigt ... that 135,000 had been killed. But, as stated in paragraph 13.126 below, none of this material casts significant doubt on the accumulation of evidence that the true death toll was within the bracket of 25-30,000." Further: "Voigt's evidence was uncorroborated and unlikely to be correct in the light of the number of deaths recorded on the official cards [that tallied victims according to garments, personal belongings, personal papers and wedding rings recovered from the corpses]. In my view, Irving should not have quoted numbers based on this evidence."

Incidentally, Professor Richard Evans, who was the principal expert witness for the defence, does indeed cite the phrase "virulent fascist" concerning Voigt in his book Lying About Hitler (2001, p. 152) - but it is not Evans's own description. Evans is explicitly quoting the judgement of the Mayor of Dresden (in what was then the GDR) in 1962, Walter Weidauer, and he clearly warns the reader that "this was typical of the language the Communists used for people who proved a nuisance to them". That example on its own is a nice illustration of the difference between a scrupulous historian such as Evans and a man who, in the words of the Court judgement, "has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence".

Catastrophic visions forged in Dresden

This article appears in The Times today.

Kurt Vonnegut anticipated his death in an article in 1972: “I don’t console myself with the idea that my descendants and my books and all that will live on. Anybody with any sense knows that the whole solar system will go up like a celluloid collar.” His talent as a novelist was to tell of bleakness with mordant humour.

He expressed the sensibilities of a generation in a style that, in economy of structure, alluded to popular art forms such as cinema and graphic novels. Throughout his life, he decried America’s social ills. “One wonders how many of the obituaries will note that he was a loudly self-proclaimed socialist?” wrote one commentator this week, describing Vonnegut as a “writer for our times”.

I am guessing but probably most of them. Aesthetic quality is independent of politics, and it is a vulgar error to suppose that a character necessarily speaks for the author. With Vonnegut, however, the authorial voice is hardly subtly disguised. “Everything is going to become unimaginably worse, and never get any better again,” he declared in 1970. The constant insinuation of catastrophe, leavened by dark humour, is present in much of his work. The inventiveness of the early novels will long retain their capacity to stimulate and surprise. But a writer for our times? No. He was a writer for a time that has been and gone. His appeal rested in large part on a view of history that deserves to be treated as a period curio.

Vonnegut experienced one of the great traumas of 20th-century history. As a prisoner of war in the Second World War, he lived through the bombing of Dresden. He survived through being incarcerated in an underground locker in an abattoir. When he emerged he found “135,000 Hansels and Gretels . . . baked like gingerbread men”. The event became a central theme of Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and suffuses much of the rest of his work.

Another celebrated work, Cat’s Cradle (1963), concludes with the extinction of life on earth by the spilling of an imaginary substance that solidifies water. The memorable closing image is of the founder of the imaginary religion of Bokononism “lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who”. Bokononism is founded on what Vonnegut calls “foma” — lies that make us happy. In Vonnegut’s scheme, the universe is indifferent to our concerns. His play Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1970) imagines the afterlives of two American pilots who dropped the A-bomb on Nagasaki. Deadeye Dick (1982) depicts the accidental destruction of an Ohio town by a neutron bomb — a US one, so it was no big news story as it did not start WWIII.

The novel’s closing words are: “You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages — they haven’t ended yet.” To coin a Vonnegut-ism: so it goes. But ultimately the simplicity is not deceptive. Vonnegut’s philosophy and history are simplistic. Dresden was hellish — but there were not 135,000 deaths. The true figure was probably no more than a fifth of that. Vonnegut’s number came directly from the now discredited work of the Holocaust denier David Irving. (In Slaughterhouse-Five, Irving is cited by name, and a long passage, by a retired air marshal, from the foreword to Irving’s book The Destruction of Dresden is reproduced.) To a PoW digging up cadavers, accurate numbers will ever after seem pedantic. But the issue is important to historical truth and also to the ideas that Vonnegut dramatised.

Dresden, whose beauty Vonnegut likened to Oz, became a sacrificial myth in a litany of Western crimes, unrelated to its industrial and political importance to the Nazis. In arguing in 2003 that “people are lying all the time as to what a murderous nation we are”, Vonnegut cited Nagasaki as “the most racist, nastiest act by this country, after human slavery”. Yet, as an outstanding new book, Hiroshima in History, demonstrates, contemporary Japanese government records and memoirs confirm that the dropping of both A-bombs, Nagasaki as well as Hiroshima, was crucial to Japan’s decision to surrender.

These were catastrophic acts committed under the necessity of defeating barbarism. But man is not equally culpable, and history not a record of symmetry in brutality. It merely seemed that way to a particular generation at a historical moment: the Vietnam War. The critic Robert Alter in 1975 presciently attributed Vonnegut’s popularity to “the need of many readers over the past decade for a novelist who could write away history while seeming to write about it”.

In his great work Vonnegut depicted the sombreness and absurdity of human existence. Beyond that work came a coarsening of his art into caricature. The line dividing bleakness from cynicism is thin. Unfortunately, Vonnegut never made the return journey.

The spilt milk of human kindness

This article appears on The Guardian's Comment is Free site.

Oxfam's report A Fair Foreign Policy is a waste of moral authority. The agency does important work in interceding for the vulnerable and the victimised, and its analysis of conflict has much justice to it. But that analysis is tarnished by political assumptions illegitimately smuggled in.

First, here are the report's apt points: Oxfam rues the indifference and ineptitude of British policymakers through the catastrophes in Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s; the report inelegantly and haltingly commends the early years of Blair/Cook foreign policy; it anticipates that the traumas of Iraq may turn foreign policy away from the principles of humanitarian intervention; and it insists that it "would be disastrous if that failure led the UK and other governments to stand back from trying to help resolve the world's most difficult conflicts".

All true. Defending human rights abroad is not the easiest policy to sell (though Oxfam rightly points to public support for stopping genocide in the Balkans in the 1990s). It is important, though, for strategic as well as ethical reasons. The traditional simile for a realist foreign policy is to compare states to billiard balls. A ball's internal composition is opaque and in any case irrelevant; what matters is how it interacts with other balls on the table, because foreign policy needs to deal with all manner of states, many of which may not share our democratic values.

The great flaw in this analogy lies in paying inadequate attention to the power of ideas. Oxfam, too, fails to comprehend the role of ideology in the international order. Extraordinarily, its report makes not a single reference (bar quoting Tony Blair obliquely on an "arc of extremism") to the rise of Islamist militancy. And in its desire to extend the concept of security to non-military threats, Oxfam gives an obviously tendentious account. No mention is made of the rationale for military intervention in Afghanistan, let alone Iraq. To read the presentation, you would think violence had been unaccountably introduced into a pacific country by the presence of foreign troops.

You cannot sensibly proffer advice on UK foreign policy while discounting altogether the view expressed by the prime minister that "deluding ourselves that [Islamist] terrorism is an isolated series of individual incidents rather than a global movement and would go away if only we were more sensitive to its pretensions ... is a policy that is profoundly, fundamentally wrong".

Afghanistan - as Oxfam may need reminding - was run, in effect, by a transplanted group of foreign Islamists that committed mass murder in American cities. Its creature, the Taliban, is "back" not because of its popularity but because it was allowed to maintain control of its Pakistani hinterland. In the interests of the people whose cause Oxfam pleads, very little can be done till these fanatics are decisively repelled.

But if Oxfam's analysis is partial, its policy conclusions are feeble. Cast as "general principles", they lack any sense of how to reconcile conflicting goals. The report's supposed guidance to government for the conduct of foreign policy is useless.

Of course, the government has, as Oxfam urges, a responsibility to protect civilian life and consistently to challenge human rights violations. It would be good also to strengthen multilateral institutions and enhance the effectiveness of the UN. But what happens if those same institutions prove inadequate to the requisite tasks, as they did in Kosovo?

The answer is not obvious. So Oxfam deals creatively with this non-trivial weakness by inventing an extra general principle. The principle is - so help me - to "make all of this effective". Ironically, the report counsels that government should adopt a "humble style of leadership"; clearly Oxfam believes different standards apply to itself.

International law is a vital construct. It has done discernible good in such varied fields as trade in the products of manufacturing and the trade in arms. But there is no supranational institution that exercises the sovereignty necessary to implement that body of law. That is why governments, singly (as in the Falklands) or collectively (as in Nato's intervention in Kosovo), sometimes need to exercise military force to uphold civilised standards of international conduct. If they did not, then the world would be a more violent and oppressive - and lawless - place.

It is by that standard that Oxfam's disinterested moral urgings yield to an urge to propagandise. The report has much to say in criticism of the government's stance in the Lebanon crisis last summer. I supported the government, for the reason you would have thought an agency asserting the importance of international agreements might appreciate. A UN security council resolution adopted in 2004 required the disbanding and disarmament of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias. That resolution, clearly, had not been implemented, as far as Hizbullah was concerned. In those circumstances, Israel was entitled to defend her citizens and territory.

Oxfam asserts that the government's initial opposition to calls for an immediate ceasefire was perceived in the region as one-sided. That was indeed a widespread view. It was wrong. The proper question for humanitarians was whether Israel's force was too little, and exercised for too short a time, to contain the threat from a militia backed by a theocracy, Iran, whose puppet president gleefully anticipates the extinction of the Jewish state.

I would not expect Oxfam to enter these debates, which inevitably require political judgments. I would, however, expect it to uphold disinterestedly the causes of humanitarian law and human rights: that, after all, is what it urges the government to do.

On the evidence of this report, the government, for all its faults and failures, manages greater consistency and evinces better judgement than Oxfam.

Repeats and ads

Harry Barnes is an excellent man, with whom I've corresponded. He was Labour MP for N.E. Derbyshire from 1987 to 2005. Now retired, he writes a blog here. Of Harry's support for the Government over the military intervention in Kosovo, Tony Benn (also sitting for a Derbyshire seat) wrote in his diary on 14 April 1999: "He is a very muddled man." Oh no he wasn't. He could recognise a xenophobic aggressor in Slobodan Milosevic, and urge what needed to be done to stop him.

In his capacity as a blogger, Harry criticises my piece for The Guardian this week on the curse that is political blogging, and also gives his opinion about this site.

Oliver Kamm's attack on political blogging is strange. Not least because he is a (restricted) form of political blogger himself. His limitations as a blogger are (a) that he doesn't engage in debate with his readers even via a managed comment box and (b) too many of his posted items are just repeats of his various newspaper columns or are adverts for his coming radio and TV appearances.

True enough, I'm afraid. You can hear me on BBC Radio 4's Talking Politics programme at 11.00am on Saturday, where I shall be a guest along with Nick Cohen, John Rentoul of The Independent on Sunday and Fraser Nelson of The Spectator. We are discussing welfare, especially in the context of a new book by the American libertarian Charles Murray and an interview with Frank Field MP. At one point the presenter, Dennis Sewell, asks for our view on Liberal Democrat thinking on the subject, to which question we respond with unanimous derision. That's what I call a balanced panel: accuracy in reporting, regardless of our differing ideological premises.

When you've done that, you could switch over to the BBC World Service Politics UK programme on Saturday at 11.30am, where I shall be discussing two new books with John O'Sullivan of The National Interest, David Green of the think-tank Civitas, and libertarian activist Brian Micklethwait. The books are On Fraternity: Politics Beyond Liberty and Equality by Danny Kruger, who is special adviser to David Cameron; and O'Sullivan's own book The President, the Pope and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World.

Darn it. There I go again.

Civility codes

There is controversy about a proposed code of conduct for blogs, described in The Guardian:

It is the combined work of Tim O'Reilly, inventor of the phrase Web 2.0 to describe the next generation of interactive communications, and Jimmy Wales, founder of the communal encyclopaedia Wikipedia. They have posted a seven-point programme that would attempt, they say, to address the plethora of abusive comments on the web, while preserving the free spirit of the medium. Point one of the code is that anyone signing up to it would commit themselves to a "civility enforced" standard to remove unacceptable comments from their blog.

Unacceptable is defined as content that is used to abuse, harass, stalk or threaten others; is libellous or misrepresentative; or infringes copyright, confidentiality or privacy rights. Anonymous postings are also to be removed, with every comment requiring a recognised email address, even if posts are made under pseudonyms.

Point six encourages bloggers to ignore "trolls" making nasty comments that fall short of abuse or libel. "Never wrestle with a pig," is the advice. "You both get dirty, but the pig likes it."

To back up the code, they propose a "civility enforced" badge marking sites which subscribe to the guidelines, and an "anything goes" badge to denote those that do not. The proposed guidelines can be interactively amended by web users, until a final version is agreed.

The excellent Index on Censorship has emailed me and a few other bloggers with some questions on this, for publication as a straw poll on its site. The questions are:

What do you think? Is this something you’d sign up to? If yes, why? If not, what’s your objection? If you don’t have comments on your blog, why did you take that decision? Is it really fair to say that a code of conduct like this is ‘conducive to freedom of speech’, or is that mere lip service?

My answer is this. I would not sign up to this code of conduct. Here are three reasons, in ascending order of importance: I do not believe it could be enforced; I take exception to the notion that I require someone else's imprimatur as evidence of my civility; and I am opposed in principle to speech codes, which have the characteristic of extending without warning their remit to a new set of perceived slights and insults. There is, for example, increasing use in public debate of the term Islamophobia to denote sentiments supposedly prejudiced against Muslims. I find this concept question-begging and illegitimate. I know how to speak and write in a way that is not personally abusive and is not racist, and I should rightly be held accountable to those standards by people I know (i.e. not a "badge" issued by someone I don't know). I do not propose to tailor my speech to avoid offence to Muslims or any other group of religious believers. All they are entitled to, qua Muslims or any other religious group, from me is a recognition of our common humanity and equal citizenship, and an insistence on their right to religious liberty. To the extent that it encourages avoidance of offence, a code of conduct is not "conducive to freedom of speech". Its corrosiveness lies in the self-censorship that it almost inevitably encourages.

There is, however, a good deal of misapprehension of what support for free speech involves. When I started my blog I did enable comments for its first year. I found that the comments included, and were sometimes dominated by, the type of contribution that characterises the comments threads on The Guardian's Comment is Free site. As Jonathan Freedland notes of reading those CIF threads: "It won't take you long to run into some serious vitriol. Even a brief, light piece can trigger a torrent of abuse, usually directed at the author and rapidly diverted by the commenters to each other." From my experience, that is an understatement of the problem with CIF. In one article I contributed to The Guardian's Comment page last year on the Lebanon crisis, the volume of overtly antisemitic comments (one, which is still there, referred to "sick-minded Jews who can't accept TRUTH, as they never did with Moses or Jesus!") appended to it genuinely surprised me. CIF's comments are an extraordinary phenomenon, and I'm certain the site's founders can't have imagined how bad it would be.

I thus shut down the ability to post comments a long time ago. My rationale drew on a story given by the late philosopher Sidney Hook about a conversation he once had with Bertolt Brecht. Hook was a socialist who did much to expose for American audiences the fraudulence of the Moscow Trials. When Brecht paid a visit to Hook's New York apartment in 1935, the two men discussed the issue . Of Stalin's victims, Brecht said: "The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.” Having checked he had heard Brecht correctly (Hook was fluent in German), Hook brought the man his hat and coat and showed him the door. My attitude to an indefatigable Holocaust denier - and not only to him - who used to litter my blog with his comments is like that. I hold left-wing opinions and libertarian social views. I am close to being an absolutist on freedom of expression (I strongly opposed the gaoling in Austria of David Irving, for example). But I see no logic in the notion that defending freedom of speech requires me to extend a platform of my own - my home, my dinner table or my web site - to others to use as they will.

NOTE: This vexed subject relates to the broader issue, which I raised in The Guardian yesterday, of the value of political blogs. Having described the blogosphere as a reliable vehicle for poisoning debate, I was mildly gratified to find quite so many correspondents willing to provide a practical substantiation of my point. For rather weightier criticism of my views, I gave at the end of my post links to three blog posts by writers with much experience of, respectively, journalism and academe. They are also friends of mine and declare themselves mystified at my criticisms of political blogging. In the next post or two, I shall oblige them by explaining why they're all wrong.

Mediums

Daniel Finkelstein's column in The Times is deceptive because it's very funny while expressing a monopoly of good sense on legislation concerning, of all things, spirit mediums:

I can’t help feeling that the slightly tatty nature of the “psychic” industry is a bit of a giveaway. There was an outlet near my home that appears to have gone out of business. Surely a well-organised clairvoyant would have been able to avoid such a fate.

This is not an area in which law should intrude, for reasons Daniel argues. It is of course impossible to distinguish between genuine and fraudulent clairvoyants, because on all the evidence available there is no difference. In the absence of any convincing evidence of psychic phenomena, the most economical explanation is that all mediums are either deluded or fraudulent. But the proper legislative response is the libertarian course of repealing the antiquated Fraudulent Mediums Act - not least because you are unlikely to have been aware of it before reading Daniel's article.

But the business of mediumship is not merely tatty. Watch this CNN debate between a medium, one Rosemary Altea, and the incomparable James Randi, magician and sceptic. Or at least, watch the first minute. It includes television pictures, which are hard to watch, of a TV psychic, Sylvia Browne, telling the parents of a boy who had disappeared that he was dead. In fact he wasn't dead; he had been abducted and four years later was rescued unharmed. It is impossible to find words adequate to the disrepute of giving such a "reading". If you think the business is preposterous but harmless, you are only half-right.

A parody of democracy

This article appears in The Guardian today.

Political blogging has come of age. At least, that was the idea behind the BBC's Newsnight screening of a report by a high-profile blogger who writes under the pseudonym Guido Fawkes. His film argued that blogs provided more acute and independent political analysis than traditional journalism, owing to the absence of an editor, proprietor or regulator. Theatrically insisting on being filmed in darkness to maintain his supposed anonymity, "Fawkes" debated his thesis with Michael White of this newspaper.

It was a catastrophic performance, mainly because the blogger required continual correction on points of fact. He thereby illustrated blogging's central characteristic danger. It is a democratic medium, allowing anyone to participate in political debate without an intermediary, at little or no cost. But it is a direct and not deliberative form of democracy. You need no competence to join in.

To some, that is a virtue. In a recent lecture, the shadow chancellor, George Osborne, pointed to the proliferation of blogs and enthused: "In politics and in the media we've both assumed that we do the talking and the people listen. Now the people are talking back. It's exciting, liberating, challenging and frightening too."

Such is the ideological chaos of modern Conservatism. Osborne invoked the notion of the wisdom of crowds: knowledge emerges in a collaborative process rather than being dictated by experts. But political bloggers are not the required type of crowd. They are, by definition, a self-selecting group of the politically motivated who have time on their hands. In his speech, Osborne commended the work of Conservative-supporting bloggers. The notion that a political party becomes credible by being responsive to its activists is an error that Labour disastrously adopted in the 1980s. Political blogging is a new vehicle for an enduring force: what James Madison, in the Federalist Papers, termed "the mischief of faction".

Blogs are providers not of news but of comment. This would be a good thing if blogs extended the range of available opinion in the public sphere. But they do not; paradoxically, they narrow it. This happens because blogs typically do not add to the available stock of commentary: they are purely parasitic on the stories and opinions that traditional media provide. If, say, Polly Toynbee or Nick Cohen did not exist, a significant part of the blogosphere (a grimly pretentious neologism) would have no purpose and nothing to react to.

The great innovation of web-based commentary is that readers may select minutely the material they are exposed to. The corollary is that they may filter out views they find uncongenial. This is a problem for a healthy democracy, which depends on a forum for competing views.

In its paucity of coverage and predictability of conclusions, the blogosphere provides a parody of democratic deliberation. But it gets worse. Politics, wrote the philosopher Michael Oakeshott, is a conversation, not an argument. The conversation bloggers have with their readers is more like an echo chamber, in which conclusions are pre-specified and targets selected. The outcome is horrifying. The intention of drawing readers into the conversation by means of a facility for adding comments results in an immense volume of abusive material directed - and recorded for posterity - at public figures.

The blogosphere, in short, is a reliable vehicle for the coagulation of opinion and the poisoning of debate. It is a fact of civic life that is changing how politics is conducted - overwhelmingly for the worse, and with no one accountable for the decline.

UPDATE: Daniel Finkelstein, Stephen Pollard and Norman Geras all criticise my argument on the grounds that it's wrong. The Newsnight debate between the blogger Guido Fawkes and Michael White of The Guardian, which I refer to in the article, can be seen here.