To: <anthroposophy_tomorrow@yahoogroups.com>
References: <20040305231555.29294.qmail@web14427.mail.yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [anthroposophy_tomorrow] Morality and Racism - Selective quotation
Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2004 20:56:33 -0500

Hi Daniel, you wrote:
"But you didn't respond to what I was talking about, you selectively snipped and then talked about something different. When I try to point this out, you reiterate that you were, indeed, misquoting me. Thanks."

Peter Staudenmaier:
I didn't misquote you.

Daniel:
Really? The record indicates otherwise.

For review:

Peter Staudenmaier wrote:
"Selective quotation is only a bad idea when others do not have access to the original. That is obviously not the case on a public email list. Everybody reading your reply to me has already read the post that you're replying to, and so forth. In these circumstances it makes much more sense to quote the specific portion you'd like to reply to. The rest of us can always go back and check the earlier post for the full argument."

Daniel replied:
Now that is an interesting position. Essentially, you state that you are justified in selectively quoting statements of others, even if this then alters the original meaning, because theoretically anyone can go back and look at the original statement to catch you at it. While this absolves you of any requirements to be fair or accurate, I have to point out that the logic of this justification will not fly among historians. In history, quoting sources out of context in a way that alters the original meaning is a cardinal sin and something than no historian can do and hope to be taken seriously. Completely independent of the question of the ethics of such a stance, I would suggest that as a habit it is dangerous. If this is consistent in your writing here, are you really sure you can successfully switch modes and go for strict accuracy when writing formally for publication?

If you are known to employ this technique here, we may quite rightly suspect that you employ it in your other writings. You may respond that you write polemic, not history. If you'd do take that stance, then you are essentially telling all your readers that they cannot actually trust anything the you write, for at any point your examples may not actually support your argument as they may appear to, and the summaries and explanations that you give may intentionally not accurately represent the things are describing at all. Of course, all your sources are theoretically public, and anyone could go out and acquirer four-foot stack of books and spend a month or two checking you (provided, of course, they read German). But certainly you don't expect to a majority of your readers to do this, so essentially you have put us on noticed not trust anything you say. Perhaps you might consider being upfront about this in your articles, and lead off with a disclaimer of some sort.

Peter Staudenmaier snipped this to:

"Of course, all your sources are theoretically public"
And then Peter responded:
You are very much missing the point. On an email list like this one, every post you reply to is not just "theoretically" public, it is actually public, with no need to buy any books or visit any libraries. All you need is a click of the mouse. Anybody reading this post has already read the previous posts in the thread. If you think this is an unreasonable approach to email discussion, could you perhaps explain why?

Daniel responded:
Chalk that up as a distortion. I was talking about both your e-mails and your articles, and not jsut your e-mails as you reply would suggest. By shortening my original quote, it is not clear what I was actually writing about. This is exactly what I am suggesting you could avoid by longer quotation. Everything you say is true about an e-mail list. But it does not help the readers of your articles, whether they read them on the web or in a magazine, and that was the entire point of my original paragraph.

Peter Staudenmaier then simply said:
"I was talking about emails."

And Daniel said:
And I was talking about emails AND articles. But you didn't respond to what I was talking about, you selectively snipped and then talked about something different. When I try to point this out, you reiterate that you were, indeed, misquoting me. Thanks.

Peter Staudenmaier responded thus.