Maybe it’s a club; maybe it’s a neighborhood, based on common interests.

The blawgers I know are very welcoming to the new kids on the block, but if you think it’s too incestuous, bringing in some new genes will do more good than pretending you don’t know who the baby’s father is.

Ideas matter; personalities do not. There is an emerging clubbiness on the net and a corresponding snarkiness. I find discussion of ideas interesting, stroking of egos or castigation of outsiders or those different does not interest me. To the degree we endlessly talk about one another it starts to feel like an exploration of ideas than a family reunion.

Unlike plagiarism, in which a person adopts the ideas of another as his own, a practice I abhor, I see nothing objectionable about discussing an idea that has been placed in the public domain by another and not attributing the source. I’ve become so disgusted by the snarkiness of some pages and authors that rather than disengage from the Internet entirely, which I have from time to time done, I am picking what is good, the intellectual content, and ignoring what is bad, the silly sarcasm and bluster of a few.

But, I suppose, that just makes me eccentric in my own right.

N

Norm

As for what you say linking, you lay it out so nicely, I’d love to disagree. Instead, I find myself agreeing with you, and for the reasons you describe. I’m sorry if I got lazy or sloppy. I’ll do better in the future.

I chuckle at the term “victimocrat.” It’s pretty clever, and probably true. But don’t many criminal defense lawyers have this very same weakness/tendency? You know, the whole underdog thing.

I’m struck by the coincidence of timing between this discussion and the article from Sunday’s NY Times on the increasing prevalence of student plagiarism. The failure to engage directly isn’t the plagiarism of copying without citing. But it is the plagiarism of taking ideas without crediting them.

Reputation is something other people give a person, deserved or not. Nobody has control over their reputation – all a person can do is to continually do their best.

Broadly speaking, based on a mere Google, I have greater exposure than do you, and by far. Most of what you would read about me that is posted by others is less than complimentary. However, there was absolutely nothing that I could do about it. I will not recant the tale that I had to tell.

What you would not find on Google is what has disappeared about me, among which items would be an online legal periodical that had been available for a couple of years prior to me relating what had actually happened. The online periodical, I recall as being associated with a Washinton DC university, had a section titled ‘Student Cases in the News.’ [I actually have the periodical downloaded in a file somewhere.] This periodical had referenced my civil action in the same section following a report of a civil action by a student against a law school. The article reported that this other student had threatened to blow up the career counselor’s office or something along those lines. They may as well have labeled the section ‘Nuts in the News.’ Thankfully, the online legal periodical was taken down within a few months of my beginning to post my chronicle.

A coincidence about another ‘legal’ oriented site – JDJive I think it was. Somebody posted on JDJive, in reference to my story during the ‘discussion’ of it, ‘no wonder Hillary Clinton is so hot for this swamp rat.’ Soon after this somebody bought the site for I believe $25,000 and took it down. Another coincidence: a local judges’ son who was in the same law school as I at the same time had worked for the Clinton’s. This same young man now works for President Obama. If there weren’t houses in the way I could see their house from mine.

The point is, you can do something about an apparently negative online reputation – sometimes it may take a while to determine how to do it.