Online Blogintegrity

There is apparently another blog like ours, one that comments upon not merely Integrity but Online Integrity. That would be Drawing the Line; they call themselves

a group of (mostly liberal progressive) bloggers who endorse the Online Integrity Statement, and agree to abide by these principles. This group supports the OIS and actively encourages others to do the same. [The] With Online Integrity blog started just today as a result of recent events.

The "recent event" they have in mind would seem to be the Armando affair: "This site was started on June 13, 2006 in response to some changes occuring on the net and within online communities."

OK: all well and good. We here at Online Blogintegrity never really opposed the OI Statement of Principles in and of itself; we had some fun with it, sure, but by and large, you know, we actually abide by it. We've never outed anyone. We've never threatened anyone. We've sung, we've danced, a little seltzer down the pants, and so on... (Armando did at least at one point say that our first post was kinda funny.) But we have no problem with the words or the sentiment. Hell, it never even would have occurred to any of us to "out" anyone even if OI had never existed -- even Ripley would never, ever have done such a thing, and he's a complete bastard.

Our beef all along has been that it is foolish as a purely practical matter to try to cut deals with people you should perfectly well know will try to twist the words into a cloak to disguise as righteous the noxious shit they were always going to pull anyway. I'm not going to rehearse the whole Case Against Tacitus here, though I will if anyone wants. More to the point, recently we've seen a pretty blatant violation of the Sacred Integrity Principles by a certain paste-eating wingnut moron, and the reaction has been, well, jack shit from the signatories of the pledge -- all we've heard is a lot of silly wanking about why they don't need to live up to their own sworn word if it is to their advantage not to do so. So what the hell do the words mean without the will to back them up? What the hell is the point of discussing integrity with people who obviously don't have any, but who are more than willing to use the fact that they signed an online petition to pretend that they do?

So that's the first issue I'd put to the Drawing the Line folks.

The second is that I think Suskind, who seems like a thoughtful, intelligent fellow, reads far too much into OI statement. He says the following "should do a lot of good":

* Violations of these principles should be met with a lack of positive publicity and traffic.

To me this means do not link to what is defamatory, what is not true, what cannot be sourced or backed up, and to what gives support to people and sites who do not respect the dignity and rights of others. Do not link to a person or to material with the intention to aggravate a negative situation and cause more harm. It is a preventative measure to stop the creation of "google bombs" for the far-flung stories that become urban legends, and it stops the personal and baseless attack on persons.

Uh, that's not what it says. If it were what it said, that'd be great, but it isn't.

But if it were: aren't you really just asking the whole right wankosphere to simply pack it in and go home...?

Anyway they seem like nice folks over there, and we should have them over for coffee and lemon squares.