In case you were wondering why Vox Day is trolling the heck out of John Scalzi (other than the known fact that Vox is a hateful human being who trolls in the same way he takes a dump: regularly and pungently), all is now made clear.

Scalzi is the current president of the Science Fiction Writers of America. Theodore Beale aka Vox Day is now running for office. He’s got to make himself known to the voting public, and since his sole talent is to be an embarrassing sphincter, he’s going with his strengths.

By the way, that link will take you to Jim Hines blog, who does a marvelous job of documenting Vox Day’s revolting ideas.

One of the points made in that discussion yesterday is sometimes the “trolls” are just people trying to make an argument contrary to our own, and that they should have a right to express themselves; I was also told that dismissing disagreement as stupid or wrong was a prejudicial value judgement.

I would agree that there certainly are boundary conditions where that might be true; we’re looking at a continuum, not a sharp black and white world, where one side is uniformly bright and stellar and the other is dark and dim. But even on a continuum there are extremes; sometimes one side really is stupid.

Free speech is not an automatic good. Stephanie Zvan has done a fabulous job of documenting the tactical mode of some of our opponents, the ones who claim to dwell in “a bastion of the most free of free speech”, where they are totally free to say whatever they like, and where the shoddy operations of their lazy, slimy brains are openly exposed for all to see. These are the people who think the argument “YOUR FAT AND UGLY” is cogent, and who think spicing it up with a photoshopped image makes it more persuasive.

There’s a reason I automatically ban those people. They’re assholes, as they demonstrate over and over again.

At 4pm Eastern today, I’m getting into some kind of online discussion with these guys:

These are the questions we’re supposed to address:

1. The role trolling has played in what the internet has become and what it will one day be (with the caveat that we must first define what a “troll” is).

2. How free is our speech on the internet and how free should we expect it to be?

3. Who should be behind determining how free our internet really is?

I’ve got a good idea of what I’ll be saying, but I thought I’d throw it out here and steal see what great ideas you all have.

Oh, and this will be a Google+ hangout, live streaming, all that, and they will be taking questions on youtube while it’s in progress.

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Here’s the final video. For some reason, I didn’t get the invite, so I don’t show up until about 15 minutes in.

BoraZ has done another of his magisterial overviews of the blogosphere, this time focusing on the state of blog commenting. It’s an interesting picture that I mostly agree with, but some of it not — partly because he’s making a general survey, and Pharyngula is a weird beast. This bit I’d like to tattoo on a few people’s foreheads (backwards, so they could read it every time they looked in a mirror.)

Free Speech is a very American concept. Most of the other 200 nations on the planet do not provide constitutional protection of free speech. And Internet is global.

And even within the USA, the concept of free speech does not mean everyone has the right to say everything everywhere. It does not mean you have the right to say your stuff on my blog. It means you have the right to start your own blog. Just because I have commenting functionality on my site, does not mean you have the right to post whatever you want on it. Every host of every site has the right to delete, edit, or modify any comment in any way, to ban users, and to implement whatever moderation norms and techniques one wants.

Commenting is a privilege, not a right. You have to earn it.

That should be easy to understand, right? Yet there are so many people who wax indignant at the thought that I might actually tell them to go away.

But there are other things that I found odd. He claims blog commenting is down overall; I haven’t seen that at all. Commenting keeps sliding upwards here.

There’s also this, again a generality that may not apply everywhere.

While early bloggers were generous, giving their rare online spaces up to public discussion, there is no need to feel so generous any more. Starting one’s own blog is easy these days, and ranting on social media is even easier. There is plenty of space for people to discuss stuff, and that does not have to happen on your site – the era of such generosity is mostly over, and most veteran bloggers have severely tightened their commenting rules over the years.

I’m a veteran blogger, I think, and my rules haven’t changed substantially over time. I’m not banning more people or editing more comments; if anything, as a proportion of comments made, I’m doing less of that.

I also don’t think that tightening up commenting rules is detrimental to the quantity of comments. One thing I’ve done that complicates his analysis is that Pharyngula has evolved to have one social thread that is more heavily moderated (and just the existence of dedicated social threads may confound some of his interpretations), and another that isn’t moderated at all, that I actually encourage annoying pests to infest. I think those contribute to overall activity that spills over into other threads, and vice versa.

A relevant datum here, though, is that the moderated thread is much, much more active than the openly unmoderated thread, usually. Sometimes the jerks are just wearing, and having a thread where they’re excluded can be enabling to more discussion.

Also, one obvious point: science posts get fewer comments than other kinds of articles. I think that’s because they require more specialized knowledge to assess; maybe Bora is seeing a decline in the science blogs he reads because the ecosystem is shaking out, and people are specializing more — many blogs are less widely discursive now, and that’s another area where Pharyngula is weird. I’m just as scattershot and flibbertigibberty as ever.

The threads that go on the longest are the ones where some obtuse nitwit comes in and stubbornly sticks to some stupid point, and everyone has to show up and take a whack. I’m often told that controversy draws in more traffic; I disagree there, I think good writing and provocative thinking contribute far more, but I know that controversy definitely stirs up more community engagement, which can lead to the formation of a solid base of readers. And yes, that’s another place where Pharyngula is deviant relative to other science blogs out there. Kids nowadays just seem reluctant to pick a fight.

The other day Paul Fidalgo asked permission to quote something I said on our super-secret backchannel (there is no backchannel, no, we do not talk to each other on FtB; it’s all a lie, pretend no one said anything about it), and I got the distinct impression that he was going to pick a fight with me over it. So I said yes, because I enjoy a good argument. Imagine my disappointment, though, because he ends up agreeing with me, mostly.

So now what do I do? I’m disarmed, I’m helpless, I’ve got nothing to lash out against. Now I’m very uncomfortable. What a devious move!

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A certain philosopher who will not be named has taken exception to Fidalgo’s post (he’s “very angry”!), calling him a “bully enabler” who has “written a piece justifying bullying” which makes the “situation much worse”.

What? Telling people they should shut up and listen to other people’s arguments, especially when they have more experience in the subject than you do, is now “bullying”? That makes no sense at all. So now if someone yells at me that I’m totally wrong, and I sit back and think about it and listen to their case rather than instantly barking out a rebuttal, I am engaging in bullying?

I don’t get it. I really don’t.

I’m also baffled by what “the situation” might be. I fear the situation might be something as awful as someone sometime listening to that asshole Meyers again.

If you’re feeling generous, you might send a few bucks Avicenna’s way — he’s an impoverished blogger whose laptop just died. What good is a blogger who can’t blog? He’d have to just do that doctorin’ stuff for a living.

[Revised at the request of one of the subjects.]

Imagine all these people in the same room. It would be a madhouse, I tell you!

• Stephanie is cringing at some very bad acting.

• Avicenna is inviting gays to a dating site.

• Aron is mystified by the Texas educational system. Aren’t you?

• Ashley is playing the ukulele.

• Heicart doesn’t think it makes sense.

• Hank is being operated on by a robot.

• Ophelia is going around in circles.

• Ed is outraged that everyone is outraged at the wrong stuff.

• Dana is laughing at men in agony. Laughing! Oh, these feminists.

• Greta is arguing about the harm done to atheists by prejudice.

• Jason is mangling text on the web.

• Reasonabledoubts is not preoccupied with sex, no sir.

• Mano is marveling at people’s excellent gun-handling skills.

• Darksyde is bragging about how his heart attack was bigger than yours.