Should bloggers shut the fuck up (apart from expressing sympathy with the victims) when people are dying from terrorist vileness?
Michael Brooke has a good response to my post against Harry’s Place removing comments on the current Russian disaster, pointing out that really, really, stupid people tend to say really, really obscene things about terrorist outrages on Harry’s site, and that it would be tactful to kick them out (and equally, for the less mad of us to also be quiet for a bit) until the fires are out and the bodies counted.
I’m not sure. The most important thing in a situation like this, as any kind of pundit, is not to be an arsehole to people who are close to the victims. Another September 11th could be directly relevant for bloggers in this context (a September 11th-scale attack on London, for example, would almost certainly involve someone I know dying). But the chances that a relative of someone in a remote bit of Russia would be browsing the English-speaking blogosphere today, unless they were actually trawling for punditry on the attacks, are low.
I also agree with Michael that there are seemlyness issues going on; it *is* tasteless to be punditing while people are still dying. I’ll leave open the question of why this doesn’t apply to Darfur, and move onto what – to me at least – is more fundamental.
The death of about 250 children (I hope to God the toll doesn’t rise any higher, although it is below what I was fearing when the army moved in this morning) isn’t a tactful or tasteful occasion. It’s a fucking disgraceful occasion. We *should* be angry about it. We should be fucking angry with the terrorists, and even though I disapprove of extra-judicial killing, I’m glad at this moment in time that the Red Army slaughtered most of the bastards. We should also be fucking angry with everyone else who created the situation in which this happened, from Stalin through to Putin.
And I win the award for overuse of ‘fucking’.
I don’t know. If I had arseholes like Nazi Rasta Dave visiting my site, maybe I’d delete them. Maybe I’d even close comments. But on some levels, I’d rather keep them there and keep them open: at least that gives us an insight into the whiney, self-justifying, nonsensical mindset of the people who actually commit these outrages.
It’s a tricky one – while Dave’s comment was undoubtedly stupid, insensitive and offensive in the extreme, it was nonetheless rather more directly on-topic than quite a few others, and so there’s no obvious reason for banning it except on the grounds of taste (which I think is a dreadful reason for imposing bans, as it involves subjective value judgements). This is quite apart from the fact that I completely agree with your "insight" reason!
So I think Harry’s decision to suspend all comments for the moment is the most practical one – there’s no finger-pointing or accusations of trollery, and we all get a chance to actually think about what we’re going to write for when the comments get switched back on. Or at least I imagine that’s the theory…
John, if what is bothering you is the fact that you personally commented before I closed down the comments then be assured that my decision was not a reaction to your points.
I think it is fairly obvious why comments were turned off and it is also obvious, to me, why most of the British blogosphere has been very quiet for the past 24 hours.
John, if what is bothering you is the fact that you personally commented before I closed down the comments then be assured that my decision was not a reaction to your points.
Don’t worry, I wasn’t worried about that.
I’m now not quite sure whether your reasoning was general taste and decency (‘how can we talk about the causes when children are dying?’), which seems a little self-indulgent to me; or to stop specific horrible people from being horrible. Earlier I’d forgotten the extent to which the latter happens on your site, so had assumed the first.
Michael:
Banning a comment on the grounds that it tries to justify the deliberate murder of innocent people does not involve a "subjective judgement of taste."
I don’t understand the passing statement about Darfur. Don’t you have to talk about things like that to raise awareness?
There’s a dilemma there – on the one hand yes, on the other hand it is doing the same thing (speculation about why what happened happened before the bodies are even buried) that people tried to avoid doing in Beslan.
I’d argue that talking about Darfur in this way is in poor taste but necessary; I’d also argue the same was true for Beslan.