civility
sastyk | November 28, 2011So I've been offline a lot the last few weeks - as you know we had 10 kids in our house for a couple of days the week before Thanksgiving, and I was out of town until yesterday. While a few posts have gone up, I've spent absolutely no time on anything other than absolute necessities online.
So it was something of a shock to me to find in my comments thread a bunch of accusations that I'd been removing comments.due to my disagreement with them. This frankly pissed me off, since I absolutely do not censor or remove comments routinely - or generally at all. Despite a general tendency of…
jstemwedel | March 11, 2010Back in January, at ScienceOnline2010, Sheril Kirshenbaum, Dr. Isis, and I led a session called "Online Civility and Its (Muppethugging) Discontents". Shortly after the session, I posted my first thoughts on how it went and on the lessons I was trying to take away from it.
Almost two months later, I'm ready to say some more about the session and the issues I think it raised.
My space, your space, our space.
To my mind, civil engagement is only an issue if you are engaging with other people. If you are conducting a soliloquy, rather than a colloquy, it's hard to imagine where you'd run into…
jstemwedel | February 28, 2010I take it that a good number of animal rights supporters feel that their position is philosophically well-grounded, intuitively appealing, and compatible with the flourishing of humans as well as of non-human animals.
As such, I would argue that animal rights supporters can, and should, advance their position without resorting to tactics that depend on harassment, intimidation, or violence. (At least some animal rights supporters agree.) Especially since the hope is to win the hearts and minds of the larger public to the cause of animal rights, supporters of this position might want to hold…
jstemwedel | February 27, 2010Earlier this week, I related a situation I found alarming in which a scientist and his children were targeted for harassment because he dared to express the view that research with animals plays an important role in answering scientific questions that matter to scientists and to the public. I was not alone in decrying these tactics. At least one animal rights group also condemned them.
Given that the post was pretty clearly directed at the question of tactics, I am frankly puzzled by this comment from Douglas Watts:
When I see mainstream "science" commit itself to a program which phases…
jstemwedel | February 24, 2010We don't have to agree about whether animal research is ethical or scientifically valuable to agree that some tactics for pursuing your view are harmful to civil society.
Bruins for Animals, the student organization at UCLA that was instrumental in organizing the recent dialogue about the science and ethics of animal based research, understands this, and they are not afraid to call out the people "on their side" who opt for threats and intimidation:
Joint Statement by Bruins for Animals and Pro-Test for Science
In an effort to establish a dialogue between those holding different opinions on…
jstemwedel | February 24, 2010When I told you about the infuriating tactics extreme animal rights activists are turning against Dario Ringach for even daring to express his view that animal research can be important, a number of you asked in the comments, "What can we do besides signing petitions and writing blog posts?"
David Jentsch offers some concrete ideas about where to start making your stand:
For those that support research or researchers, I offer a number of possibilities that will allow you to become involved in this struggle:
1) Participate however you can in supporting science and scientists. This may…
jstemwedel | February 23, 2010I need to share with you a situation that is infuriating.
It's infuriating to me, and I believe it should be infuriating to anyone who values a civil society worth the name.
Harassment drove UCLA neurobiologist Dario Ringach out of primate research in 2006. This was not just angry phone calls and email messages. We're talking about people in masks banging on the windows of his house in the night, scaring his kids. Without support on this front from other scientists or from UCLA, Dario abandoned research that he believed to be important so that he could keep his family safe.
Since then,…
jstemwedel | February 13, 2010I'm not looking for a general theory of what sets up the right room for dialogue as opposed to an argument, nor even for a fine grained analysis of whether dialogue or argument is what most blog readers and commenters are looking for.
If you're reading this post, I'm interested in knowing what you prefer.
First, a quick poll (where you can choose all the answers that apply):
I'm unlikely to comment on a blog post where(polls)
What puts you off of commenting on a blog? What conditions make you feel welcome to comment -- indeed, set up an irresistible urge to jump in and participate?
Or, is…
jstemwedel | January 21, 2010In a comment on a post at Henry Gee's blog (I'd link the comment itself, but for the life of me I cannot figure out where the permalink is), Ed Yong offers his view on the relation between politeness and civility. Quoth Ed:
My objection comes when people mistake politeness for virtue rather than what it actually is - artifice masquerading as virtue. Politeness is what you teach children to tell them when and how to speak and behave before they are fully rational and capable of thinking through the moral consequences of their words and actions.
Adults, being (technically) able to do this…
jstemwedel | January 20, 2010There was one session at ScienceOnline2010 which I did not Tweet as it was going on -- the session I led with Sheril Kirshenbaum and Dr. Isis. Here's how that session was described in the conference program:
Online Civility and Its (Muppethugging) Discontents - Janet Stemwedel, Sheril Kirshenbaum and Dr.Isis
Description: Janet, Sheril, and Isis regularly write about the role of civility in dialog with the public and other scientists. In this session, we will discuss the definition of civility, its importance in the communication of science, and how the call to civility can be used to derail…