Importing my catfight with Richard Bennett
October 1, 2006 – 2:58 pmAt this Public Knowledge post by the ever-insightful Harold Feld, Richard Bennett posted a comment that twice accused Feld of willful ignorance. Harold and I both responded, and Bennett spewed–uh, I mean wrote–another reply to me. I’m dragging that fight here to avoid cluttering the PK boards.
Bennett has a pattern of dropping ad hominems which reaches back years. (Really; follow this link. It’s disturbing.) He denies it, but here are just a few of the easiest examples from his network neutrality writings:
On Lawrence Lessig: “Fear-and-smear is what he does for a living”
On the American Electronics Association’s research team that studied network neutrality: “It’s amazing that the primary trade group for the electronics industry would employ a ‘research’ staff that’s clearly out-of-touch with reality and the concerns of its membership.”
And, perhaps my favorite:
This is just a sample of Bennett’s long and distinguished catalog of ad homs. (Again, follow the historical link above.) All I ask is that he devote more of his online writing sharing his sizable understanding of network engineering (pdf) and less of it accusing everyone he opposes of being stupid. Even though he’s on the other side of the debate, I want to know more of what he knows and why he thinks it matters.
P.S. In my comment, I also pointed out (in passing) that Bennett’s blog is incorrectly billed as the “original blog”. Immediately after denying his role as ad hom dropper, Bennett shares the following gem:
And BTW, I put up the first political activist blog in the world in 1996, and I figure that entitles me to call my current blog any damn thing I want. No go do your homework and stop being such a pest.
“I don’t drop ad homs, you non-homework-doing pest.” Uh, Q.E.D, Richard.
This retort to the contrary, it is still false advertising. First, “political activist blog” is just a subset of “blog,” and as I pointed out in my last post about Bennett’s pattern of ad hominems against net neutrality advocates, weblogs date at least as far back as 1994. Even if Bennett did write the first political activist blog (he didn’t; see below), that’s not the same thing as having the original blog. NASA doesn’t claim to have launched the original manned space mission, Harvard doesn’t claim to be the original college, why should Bennett claim that he had the original blog when others beat him by at least a year or two?
Second, follow this link (provided by Bennett on his current blog) to the archive of his original “blog”. To call this a blog is generous, to say the least. There are no dated entries. It looks like a static page that had exactly a dozen updates of a few sentences each. If that’s a blog, the threshold for blog-ness is set too low. Importantly, it trivializes the heart-and-soul posts by some of the true early bloggers.
Based on a quick noodling around, it appears that nobody else actually credits Bennett as a founding blogger. If I’m wrong on this detail, please correct me, and I’ll post an update of a sentence or two (not to be confused with a blog entry per se).
Quick summary: I’ve accused Richard Bennett of dropping years’ worth of ad homs. In responding, he’s called me some more names. Thus, I’ve documented some of his worst net neutrality-related ad homs and provided a link showing a long history of much worse name-calling. I’ve also provided further evidence for my demonstrably true argument that his is not the original blog.
None of this is to be confused with calling Mr. Bennett names. If he begins dropping more networking knowledge and less hatred, I for one will be happy to listen to–and engage–his arguments.
5 Responses to “Importing my catfight with Richard Bennett”
I forgot to mention: considering the list of people Richard has dissed in the network neutrality debate, I am honored to be in their company.
By Bill Herman on Oct 1, 2006
I see logic isn’t your strong suit. This post says, in essence, “don’t listen to Richard Bennett because he says mean things,” but it’s full of links to all things Richard Bennett. Hilarious.
Let me see if I can advance your education by one little bit today. An “ad hominem” argument has the form: “X is a moron or a liar, therefore X’s argument is wrong.” An argument that has the form: “X is wrong about this because of that, and that other, and that still more other, therefore X is a moron or a liar” is not an ad hominem argument.
There are subtle differences in these two constructions, which any person with a brain can see. Because you don’t see them, well, QED.
PS: I liked that business about moving the cat-fight here from PK in order to save PK from nastiness. There is no debate on PK at all except when I comment there, so it’s obvious that your real motive is just to get some attention for your blog. Well, here it is.
By Richard Bennett on Oct 2, 2006
Thanks for the lesson on ad homs. But Copi and Cohen (Introduction to Logic, 9th Ed.) actually provide a better summary. (I suspect they were also philosophy majors, yes? I’m not appealing to authority, either; this summary stands on its own as an eloquent explanation of both what ad hominems are and why they are bad.) They elaborate:
“[T]he character of an individual is logically irrelevant to the truth or falsehood of what that person says, or to the correctness or incorrectness of that person’s reasoning. To contend that proposals are bad, or assertions false, because they are proposed or asserted by ‘radicals’ or ['assholes'] is a typical example of the fallacy ad hominem, abusive.
Abusive premises are irrelevant; they may nevertheless persuade by the psychological process of transference. Where an attitude of disapproval toward a person can be evoked, the field of emotional disapproval may be extended so as to include disagreement with the assertions that person makes.” (p. 122)
In other words, attempts to discredit people based on hostile rhetoric will generally qualify as ad homs.
Bennett, you claim to substantiate your claims that X, Y, and Z are morons and liars. Essentially, you are claiming that what I have identified as premises are actually proven conclusions. They are neither your conclusions nor are they substantiated.
Surely, you’re not spending all this online energy with the primary intent to prove claims like “David Isenberg is an asshole and a moron.” Quite the contrary, your regularly personalized attacks on net neutrality proponents are consistently couched within calls not to enact neutrality legislation. (Exception: the above comment. The personalized attack therein is couched in a defense against the claim that you make too many personalized attacks.)
If you’re willing to claim that the ultimate goal of your posts—your ultimate conclusions—is to show that people are stupid, then you are right that I have premise and conclusion reversed. Yet even if you prove that all of your opponents are morons–even if you pull us all into an educational testing lab and our collective average IQ is 64–using this demonstrated conclusion in building the case that we are wrong about network neutrality is still a fallacious ad hom. You are still building your “don’t regulate” case, at least in part, on attacks on other people. Even if the attacks are carefully proven, they are still ad hominems.
(If I thought ad homs were worthwhile, I’d say, “Who doesn’t understand logic now?” But I would never say such a thing!)
Additionally, if these claims that X is dumb and Y is a liar really are your conclusions, they are not proven very well, to say the least. If your conclusion on June 8 really is that “fear and smear is what [Lessig] does for a living,” the premises in that post are wholly inadequate to demonstrate the claim. Considering that you cite, at best, two examples (the second being an appeal to the authority of commenters on Lessig’s blog), this is a fallacy of hasty generalization.
Ditto the attacks on David Isenberg; “asshole” and “moron” are large claims, and these small examples come nowhere close to the requisite number of examples. The AeA post is entirely dedicated to bemoaning this single research report, making it an even hastier generalization. And you never, in any way, substantiate the claim that Jon Stewart sells “the cynicism of the stupid to the clueless.” If these really are your intended conclusions, you have done a terrible job proving them.
But even if they are proven to be true, all these arguments stand as examples of ad hominem attacks in the broader network neutrality debate. Combined with the examples in the link (and the response to this blog post, to boot), I’ve established that “Bennett has a pattern of dropping ad hominems which reaches back years.” That, sir, is a conclusion about a person, and one that I have demonstrated.
Once I realized that was my thesis, I decided it would be of little value to PK’s readers and brought it to an appropriate place for demonstrating it–my own blog. (When I want to shamelessly plug my blog using PK’s blog, I’ll login to the blog and make a real post, and I’ll announce that it’s been cross-posted here.) Once it’s personal, why pretend that it still has value to the NN debate? Remember: attacks on the person (“Bill Herman has no brain” or “Richard Bennett drops too many ad homs”) do not affect the truth or falsehood of a conclusion (“Congress should enact legislation to protect network neutrality.”) That’s why I wrote this post in the first place, and I repeat my plea presently.
Listen, Richard, you know a lot about networks and the networking business. I’d like to know more about why a reasonable person would apply that knowledge to building a case against network neutrality. You can do more to help this cause. Rather than urging everyone to ignore you (I cite your resume in a positive way), I’m begging you to use your knowledge of networking to engage the substantive debate. Don’t call me dumb. Don’t call Isenberg an asshole. Don’t accuse Lessig of wearing white shoes after Labor Day. Demonstrate why network neutrality is a bad idea using the facts of the case, gleaned from your years of experience.
Then, I’ll either respectfully respond to your arguments or, if you convince me, concede. I’ll retract my forthcoming Federal Communications Law Journal article on the subject. I will even log on to the PK boards to amplify the volume of my conversion.
By Bill Herman on Oct 3, 2006
I’ve written dozens of blog posts, some very detailed, and engaged in countless discussions with partisans on both sides of the net neutrality debate, and after all of this certain things stand as proven conclusions in my opinion. So I’m not going to run down all of the issues each time I add something to the mix.
If you want to know why I consider the Snowe-Dorgan and Markey amendments short-sighted and destructive, you have only to read my blog. If you want me to write a customized summary for you, you’ll have to do more to motivate me that to say I’m a meanie. I’ve seen this type of critcism before, and it doesn’t impress me.
It’s an easily provable fact that the vast majority of people writing in favor of these regulations don’t understand their technical or economic significance, but only to people who do. And that’s the problem. We’re all entitled to hold opinions, but our opinions don’t hold equal weight.
By Richard Bennett on Oct 4, 2006
I am not asking for a customized summary, and I do read your blog, as well as those of other neutrality opponents–TLF and FreedomToTinker prominently among them.
I have never claimed that you had nothing persuasive or informed on the subject, either; quite the contrary, I have honestly asked you to improve the quality of your discourse so that I could learn more . If this last post is any indicator, you have already been somewhat persuaded; you didn’t say “Bill, you are a drooling moron beneath contempt.” That’s a start.
If you fill in more of your assumed premises with information from your decades of networking experience, or even links to where you or others have done so in the past (rather than ad homs), perhaps you’ll persuade more people to come to your side. Even if you invented the internet and I’ve never turned one on until this week, your opinion won’t hold much weight for me until and unless you can connect it (in writing or via a link) to some facts about networking.
No ad homs, no appeals to authority, and no hasty g’s. Then, maybe you’ll persuade somebody.
By Bill Herman on Oct 4, 2006