A debate can be an investment. It can air ideas or it can try to change minds.

It's silly to debate fly-by-night trolls (tho' it can be done), but people who use consistent registered nicknames and have a good track record here cannot be rejected merely on that ground. It seems the argument is that if you don't have some personal bet in the game, you cannot enter the "game". That's elitist at best, cowardice on the flip side. Note that I'm not calling anyone in particular out as a coward.

Of course there are numerous idiosyncratic reasons to refuse debate, too.

Maybe you can get Dean Baker or Mr. Reich or some other nominal Name to post a debatable comment in re such a post ... I imagine it would be ignored unless it's seen as an overt test (and maybe even then).

Could this be he? "Amitai Etzioni (b. Werner Falk, 4 January 1929, Cologne, Germany) " - wikipedia

So, just what is a "real name"?

Maybe if you spelled out "Twenty-three" he'd think it was your real last name.

Don't recall him ever responding to those of us using our real names. I could be wrong, but the easy assumption is that it was simply a snarky escape route, ad hoc and not principled policy of any sort.

Destor,

First I want to get this out of the way: I agree 100% with you that bloggers who say they will only talk to people with real names are being ridiculous as well as naive, the latter because they are showing they don't understand how easy it is for people to create fake identities on the internet.

Now that we have the agreement out of the way, I would like to give you my interpretation, as a long time member, of what happened with him here. And I tell it only because I find it interesting. If I come off as judgmental because of how I happen to phrase it, I don't meant it that way (sometimes my writing seems to hit people that way, and my flaw is I can't really figure out how to fix that.)

You say

I've been writing critical comments on Amitai Etzioni's posts since he started here. Some of them were probably immature and stupid.

What I saw in some of Etzioni's earlier posting here (and I must say my memory is that you were the least of them, unlike several others often being apologetic after the fact,)

is a small gang of liberal internet hecklers descending on the threads of a courtly, elderly, old school intellectual professor type trying out posting on the internet. They attacked because he had hawkish views and Bush was president, and hawkiness was the liberal blogosphere enemy.

He didn't get many other comments besides the hecklers, I think most other people probably simply appreciated reading his posts like you would go hear a professor give a lecture, but that they did not inspire commentary.

What therefore only saw was the ugly, ganglike side of the internet forums. As a student of history, and having lived a difficult bit of it as well, I am sure he recognized the ugly behavior from "meatspace" past and found it very distasteful. And I am also pretty sure that he has learned that the best way to react to such things, as an old style courtly professor type person, is to ignore, not dignify it with a response.

DanK says he thinks he doesn't read comments. I don't think is always true. I am sure he has read them sometimes because in a couple of posts (never in comments as I recall,) he tried out responding by making a new posts, giving the names of some commenters, and responding to them.

But I sensed he felt this was not a worthwhile exercise, that he would rather spend his time thinking and posting on ideas. I suspect he probably reads other bloggers more often than he reads blog commenting. It is related to the professor thing, to academia. Debating commenters is like teaching students using Socratic method. He'd rather not spend time doing that in his old age, paid his dues on that front. Writing blog posts after reading other blog posts and pundits in other media is more like doing further academic work and publishing in your field.

I suspect if someone regularly did very serious full blog length responses to his posts, he would be interested in interacting with that person. But he is not in the least interested in the more adolescent "fun" side of forum blogging, including tit-for-tat debate. See, he think that's "silly."

Now you can mock him about being pretentious all you want, someone like him will simply not care, he set aside "childish things" long ago. It's just the way he is, take it or leave it. He is not a good fit for internet culture, and people like him are going to slowly disappear. I feel in a way melancholy about that, because I've met a fair share of them. And that's why I find it interesting.

Also, I would add that responding via blog post to blog post rather than in comments is old school Blogging, where the commenters are the peanut gallery and the "big guys" only talk to each other blog post to blog post. It started that way because of how the blogosphere developed, with cross-linking and the use of "blogrolls" to set up networks of like minded people. And Josh Marshall himself still seems stuck in that paradigm, he doesn't even seem to feel comfortable doing the peanut gallery thing. Same with people like Steve Clemons and Matt Yglesias. Early adopters of blogging seem to go by the rule of "stay out of comments except for rare occasions,"

Etzioni, as an acquaintance of these people, and not a natural denizen of internet culture, naturally follows their lead. He's not stupid, he knows how to pick up on a system, and he can see the system in the circle he knows is that you don't go down in comments, though you might read them.

---------

Ok, the interpretative me ends, here comes the rant on meta :-).

Now that whole thing of communicating blog post to blog post is one of the main things about blogging culture that has always irritated me. I want to scream: can't you see how dumb it is to respond blog post to blog post as if the person was not able to be there in real time? As if you don't have comment functions?

It's a very poor form of communication and I think it is partly being retained for the cross-linking benefits, partly for the ego benefits, and partly because they don't want to do the work of moderating an audience of high enough caliber to make their interaction in comments worthwhile. They want their cake and to eat it too this way: have the benefits of the mass audience but be able to ignore them. That's too bad in my opinion, because if they used the post/comment software to have interaction with who they considered equals, that could have considerable benefits for new journalism. Let blog posts be the place where those you don't want to interact with spout off, and make commenting back and forth the place where the quality interaction is.

(In that vein, I really don't understand why they insist on still using email for tips here. Software with anonymous comments capability is ideal for the type of "group research" on something like a document dump that Josh Marshall thinks is the bee's knees. If one tipster can't know what another tipster is saying because it is in Josh Marshall's email, you are wasting valuable brains.)

No problem, and I never do expect a response. But I'm not deferential either. I figure conventional wisdom and complacency have been our enemies for a long time. So if I'm not a heckler, I do aspire to be an instigator, a peaceful one, of course.

My favorite post of Etzioni's was the recent *one in which he tried to sell the PSI (a proposal launched in 2003 by John Bolton legitimatizing air & sea piracy by "certain" nations).

Evidently Etzioni, or one of his assistants, thought that the TPMCafe audience was persuadable by waving the "progressive" freak flag in order to line up the troops behind this supremicist notion.
*
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/06/12/why_not_love_the_psi/

Etzioni is a piece of work and his carefully contrived persona as the wise old fusty perfessor is a joke.

I suspect a peek at the real Etzioni is more likely to be found in his JPost rant about the play, "Seven Jewish Children". In a piece titled "Seven British Children", Etzioni attempts to rewrite the play by citing the familiar litany of rightwing hardcore zionist hasbara nonsense as teachable lessons. Pretty much of a yawnfest, but this revealatory bit caught my eye as a "lesson" for American Jewish kids:

Addition for Jewish-American children: Tell them to be careful not to support Israel too openly because some of their best friends are not going to like it, and Jews should not make waves when they live in someone else's country.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1238562915671&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull

It would no doubt surprise the vast majority of Jews born in the US of A that, according to the influential Amitai Etzioni, they live, love, play, work, vote and die in someone else's country.