Yeah, this shows that you want it all to rest. Right. (Updated)
1. JG:
But does it follow, then, that I wasn’t eager to help out nonetheless?
Because that is what Haggerty is trying to suggest here by noting the
“fabrication.”
Jeff and his commenters were the only ones who ever cared about the IP address crap. After being pissed off for about an hour, I deliberately tried to keep the comment about my daughter from being an issue, as even comments of mine at PW will show. (Anyway, Blogger doesn't give out IP addresses for comments, not without subpoenas. Go ask them yourself, if you don't believe me.) I never asked for his "help"; I didn't really want to know the name of the commenter (though I was briefly baited into saying I would, and then contacted Blogger, and hence found out about the subpoena thing.) Anyway, the chronology and references provided by Bas-o-Matic in Balloon Juice comments here show what happened, and when, with references. Bas also quotes what I had hoped would be my final comment on the matter, closing it:
Upon final thought I do think it was one of his commenters who said it,
but that’s not reflective of anything or anyone beyond the fact that
whoever said it is a sick little bastard who deserves scorn. And I have
no desire to think about this any further.
And I still don't want to think of it. As Bas showed there and here, though, it was Jeff and the PW people who kept bringing it up, accusing me of using it against them -- even after the quote above specifically said I did not hold anyone but the specific person who said it responsible for it. (And I still think it was a PW person who went overboard and said it. But so? In context, I was very clear that that is speculation, though it's actually pretty likely, and I was also clear that it means nothing beyond that as far as reflecting on JG or anyone else. He could have let it drop. He didn't.)
2. JG says;
I’d
like to point out that Dr Haggerty doesn’t seem to couch his very
public concerns over comments made about his daughter as “victim-playing.” But then, such are the pitfalls of engaging in selective outrage.
See above. I myself have never referenced the comment after I deleted Metacomments, and never asked anyone to do so on my behalf. (Email NTodd: he posted something about it at the time, and I asked him to pull it down.) Whenever anyone does post about it, I link to Bas-o-Matic's Balloon Juice comments, because those lay out what really happened and show that I don't want it discussed. My hope is that this gives people the hint.
3. JG writes:
I’ve said, simply, that Haggerty allows the story to circulate
uncorrected. And by directing this comment to me rather than
correcting Ferguson, he is continuing this practice. He just doesn’t
like to get his hands dirty.
Again: I've linked to Bas-o-Matic's posts in comments wherever this comes up. This usually takes care of it. JG is usually there first to continue to spread his inaccurate version of the comment story, though. These two posts I've found correct misapprehensions on the part of people who take "my side," and also effectively rebut the slander that I've ever used the comment to tar JG. I continue to be grateful to Bas for taking the trouble to write them.
If JG wants me to email every blogger in the world about a comment I wanted forgotten after about an hour of being totally enraged, though, he can forget it.
As for the "hands dirty" bit: no. I'd be much happier if this were never mentioned again. JG should feel free to use Bas-o-Matic's links (which are not just his opinions, but include references to my old site) to clear the air.
3. JG writes:
Dr Haggerty was the first to appeal to credentials as a point of art in our debates (he denies he did this, but I certainly seemed convinced at the time that he’d done so, as did others;
and now that his site is gone, there is no way to prove it one way or
the other); I simply complied with the terms he established—and in fact
was more than willing to do so without bringing his name into it. This
is what Haggerty is getting at in his comment at Firegodlake when he
writes, ominously, that I made the “decision to solicit information”
about him.
No, I never mentioned my credentials on my site, and I also never disparaged JGs. JG's evidence that I did so is that he thought I did, and so did so many of his commenters.
Again, I can’t prove or disprove this, because I don’t have his
original posts—but if he didn’t introduce this information into the
debate, I’m certain one of his commenters or defenders did—and as a way
to try to cow me into bowing before his credentials—else where would I
have gotten the idea, and why would I have referred to it in my
commentary at the time?
Huh? This isn't a convincing argument. The "credentials" issues belong to JG alone. Myself, I can't really begin to express how little I care about "credentials" of any sort in any way, except perhaps when it comes to medicine.
I see also that JG neglects to mention, again, that at my site he asked for the credentials of MY WIFE. This is important, first, because it's a scummy thing to do: aside from a few posts at my old site, she had no role in the "debate." And, second, the way to get my information publicly was through her site.
JG most certainly did egg on his commenters to find our information, helpfully providing the CC clue -- he explains himself how he got it, through Yahoo and Google. He set it up pretty nicely, really, keeping his hands as "clean" as possible. But he did it. (I especially enjoyed the "redaction" that became an "unredaction" in a few hours.)
The only thing I'm still really angry about in this whole stupid spectacle is JG's decision, and it was his alone, to bring my wife into this. That remains a despicable and inexcusable act.
4. JG writes:
As for his info NOT being available on NTodd’s site, I don’t know what
is available there now (his link proves nothing of what was available
back in May of last year). I do know, however, that I emailed him
noting that I broke a link to his picture on that site—and were you to
read the comment threads in the posts that I linked, you’ll find that
his story doesn’t seem to jibe with contemporary accounts.
NTodd can answer this in more detail if he wants, but please do look at those "contemporary accounts." They make my case, not JG's.
The email JG refers to predates this encounter, and anyway was not to one of NTodd's picture sets (it was someone else's). JG took down the link because I emailed him and told him that while there were pictures of me up there and he wanted to make fun of my personal appearance, there were also pictures of my kids there. I'm still glad he did it, for the sake of the little ones, but the original link was still kind of an asshole thing to do. (He'd linked to pictures of me before and encouraged his commenters to mock me -- so no, I don't like JG, and he's hardly the innocent he sometimes likes to play.)
5. JG writes:
If my readers “deluged Thers with hate mail and threats,” why haven’t we seen them? Cite them. Give names.
Why would I keep that shit around? The really creepy one came in the form of a comment on Whiskey Ashes that, as far as I could tell by a rough correlation with Site Meter, came from a foreign ISP that was probably hijacked for the purposes of the threat. Mentioned my kids, in a freaky mobster "and how are your children?" kind of a way. Blogger, again, wouldn't help me find the comment's origin (and this one was to my mind far more serious than now notorious "comment," because it rang like a direct threat.) That's why I'm at TypePad now.
But hey, nobody called me at work. So I'll give the PW folks that much.
6. JG writes:
were you able to read through the entirety of our “debate” exchange
(something you cannot do, unfortunately, because Haggerty removed his
posts and comments), you’d see very clearly that it was I who was arguing
in good faith, and Haggerty who was trying to incite his readership
into ad hominem attacks, so willing was he to engage in them himself.
Um. Well, not exactly. Scott didn't like my tone, for which I don't blame him, as he didn't know the history (JG directing his readers' attention to photos of me, for instance), and also by his own admission wasn't familiar with political blog invective. But he also made the mistake of assuming I was attacking "intentionalism," when I was attacking the JG version of it, "radical intentionalism." He also didn't read all of my posts on the topic. No blame to him, again. But the correspondence between conservatism and intentionalism was something he read into my argument, not something I said. As I told him in email, I could see how he got that impression, but it wasn't my argument.
Two parts of that Valve thread are worth pointing out -- one, a reference to a comment Scott left on Lindsay Beyerstein's blog, where he said "'intentionalism' is shorthand not for an interpretive apparatus, but
for a particular orientation toward a text, one commonly associated
with Walter Benn Michael and Stephen Knapp’s “Against Theory” essays." To which DB replies:
The thing is, for Goldstein, intentionalism is indeed an interpretive
apparatus. He’s not following anybody into an intentionalist debate,
and merely delights in knocking down school after school of literary
theory.
To which Scott didn't respond, because he hadn't read JG's "notes." This point though, is exactly the one I was hammering: treating intentionalism as an "interpretive apparatus" leads to ludicrous results. And that's what JG does, all the time, though much more so on his blog than in the notes.
The other is John Holbo's point:
The real problem with Goldstein’s position is his claim that, if you
read while ignoring intention this would be irrelevant to the question
of meaning. This flagrantly begs the question. The question is whether
there is a distinction between what we might call ‘speaker meaning’ and
‘sentence meaning’ (to pick a likely pair of tags.) Searle and others
(including myself) say yes. Knapp and Michaels say no. What Goldstein
is doing here is conceding that the distinction may be real but
insisting on not calling the second thing ‘meaning’. We’ll do the
analytic philosopher thing, then, and humor him by granting that it’s
‘schmeaning’, instead. A related concept. Now we have ‘speaker meaning’
and ‘sentence schmeaning’. Two things, not one. ‘Sentence schmeaning’
refers to the very thing that Searle and others call ‘sentence
meaning’. It’s got propositional content and all the good stuff that we
associate with ‘meaning’, and ‘meaning’ is the ordinary word for it, so
there really doesn’t seem to be any good reason to deny it this title.
But if you really really really don’t want to call it ‘meaning’, then
fine. Have it your way. It’s ‘schmeaning’.
So Searle (and I) are right that there are two things, not one. And
Knapp and Michaels are wrong that there is only one thing, not two. But
by restricting ‘meaning’ to only one thing - the intentional thing -
Goldstein has written a formula for a merely verbal victory for the
Knapp and Michaels side. ‘All meaning is intentional’ has been made a
trivial truth that doesn’t really touch the real issue.
Make sense? To put it another way, Goldstein is hitching ‘meaning’
very strictly to a certain sort of intepretative activity. This seems
to me a completely arbitrary - and quite confusing - restriction of the
use of ‘meaning’.
Understand my point about algebra now? To be sure, JH doesn't use words like "paste eater." I also assume JG didn't make any "pepperoni pizza" jokes about JH.
I will admit freely that a lot of what I was doing in that exchange was baiting JG. The quote about "literature" Scott took exception to is a paraphrase from Language and Symbolic Power. My sense was that JG had one theory and was overcommitted to it, and wasn't aware of other approaches to the issue. His response to that post confirmed that, so I used Bourdieu, who provided a lot of the theoretical framework for my dissertation on modern Irish censorship. Mean, yes. Oh well. No, I wasn't playing nice. Oh well.
But JG recently quoted Bourdieu at me in a rather bizarre TBogg thread, so I assume he may now be up to speed. The point remains though that the flaws in JGs approach are obvious.
7. JG writes:
At the end of the day, Andrew Haggerty is, for all his pretensions,
nothing but an associate professor at a community college—one who
pretends to great erudition but who, when challenged, resorts to
launching juvenile ad hominem attacks from behind a pseudonym that he
argues should shield him from responsibilty for his own words.
I like my job. I like teaching, and I like my students. If someone feels that teaching at a community college is somehow embarrassing -- well, that's their issue, not mine. Mostly I like to use the pseudonym because I don't really want my students to know about my politics. I don't discuss politics in the classroom except in a neutral fashion, as issues for the students to debate, if they're relevant. I don't want a student to worry about being graded down because of what their opinions are as opposed to how they express them. Whether or not anyone believes me about this, I don't care, but that's why I use the pseudonym.
8. JG writes:
And please, do click the link he provides
to “Tac,” and see if you giggle at “Tac” having “caught me out in a
direct lie.” Because again, the mere fact of a link doesn’t make it so.
Especially if you don't read it. JG said Tac said something in an email which Tac was forced to admit wasn't true.
9. I will never again mention JG on this blog, ever, or anywhere else. After I submit this post, I have no memory of this nonsense. If pressed, I will link to this post. But that's it.
If JG wants, I will say here: "JEFF GOLDSTEIN BEARS NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR THAT COMMENT ABOUT MY DAUGHTER" and he can link and quote it if it ever comes up again, which I hope it doesn't.
But I'm not discussing this further.
UPDATE: The Kenosha Kid makes a useful intervention.
UPDATE: One but needs to go check the links JG provides in his green update to see that they support my case, not his -- not least in his obvious and indeed bizarre overinvestment in this nonsense. Nice try, though. Say good night, Gracie.
