One of the great joys of the blawgosphere is the ability to have conversations across borders, one blawger addressing another’s views.  Of course, this is always more fun when there’s disagreement, spicing things up a bit and creating enough lively controversy to wonder whether it will come to blows.  Sometimes the disagreements are over obscure or trivial points.  Sometimes we square off nose to nose, taking diametrically opposed views on fundamental issues.  Often, there’s a tinge of political perspective infused into the fight, especially with those smug libertarians.

In the course of these battles, however, it’s often necessary to let readers know what the other guy (you know, the one who’s wrong) is trying to say.  There are two ways to do this.  First, there’s quoting the wrong guy, allowing his or her own words to state the position.  The other way is to characterize it, recreate the message in your own words.  I’ve got a problem with this.

Some have wondered about what they’ve called my liberal use of quotations in posts.  It’s not that I’m too lazy to paraphrase, or try to beef up my own posts with the words of others.  It’s that the actual words of others are both a stronger way of offering someone else’s position and avoids the tendency to conveniently create a strawman, a mischaracterization of another person’s point for the purpose of making it easier to beat them to a pulp.

It’s not that I’ve never characterized the words of another person, and it’s not that I haven’t done so and gotten it dead wrong.  I’ve done it, and I’ve done it poorly at times.  When my error is pointed out, I try to correct my mistake.  That’s not to be misunderstood that someone who is merely embarrassed by espousing some dumb position gets to change it in midstream, or clarify it after the fact to eliminate or alter the ugly part, but that something already said should stand or fall on its own.

It annoys me when it happens to me.  When I read someone else telling me what I said, but demonstrating either a misunderstand or creating a strawman, and it fails to capture my point, nuance or meaning, I get pissed.  Not so much that I’m afraid that they might win the argument, but that there’s a statement attributed to me that is false.  I didn’t say that. I don’t mean that. It doesn’t reflect my thoughts at all. 

There’s a blawger who was active in the early days of Simple Justice who would regularly riff off my posts to provide fodder for his own.  He would “tell” what I said, and then write about his own thoughts on the subject.  It wasn’t that he tended to disagree with me, as he often agreed completely with what he said that I said.  It was that he invariably got it wrong, misunderstanding my point and attributing statements or ideas to me that weren’t mine and with which I did not agree.  It was my ideas as filtered through his mind, and his mind was a dark dank and smelly place.  I eventually informed him that if he ever wrote about my posts again, I would pay him a visit and rip his sphincter out through his nostrils.  He gracefully stopped, and has never mentioned me again.

Sometimes, I read someone writing about what I said and find that I don’t have the slightest clue what he’s talking about.  The characterization of my words takes on some form that’s totally unrecognizable to me, and I’m not sure if he’s got the right person at all.  Other times, the words sound familiar, but the context is changed such that it gives the impression that I’ve expressed an opinion on something that I’ve either never considered, or that is inconsistent with something that I have written but isn’t included.  Either way, the attribution comes off wrong, and it’s just not accurate.

As much as I hate it when it happens to me, I hate it when I do it to others.  None of us are entirely guilt-free, despite efforts to be as accurate as possible.  Let’s face it, the blawgosphere doesn’t lend itself to the level of detail that is found in media where the writer has weeks to ponder and fact check his work.  We’re flying fast here, and clarity occasionally suffers. 

If I attribute words or ideas to you, and you feel that I’ve either missed the point or blown in completely, let me know.  I’m not trying to mischaracterize your words, and I can appreciate the annoyance of seeing someone mangle your thoughts into oblivion.  And if you’re telling the world what I think, I would appreciate your trying to keep it reasonably true as well.  Especially if you’re going to argue that I’m a blithering idiot and got it dead wrong, at least give me the courtesy of being wrong on my own and not because you’ve reduced my point to the absurd, incomphrensible or trivial.