Muddles, Anonymity, and Scholars

I note that the “muddled” site has this to say for itself:

In response to a prior restraint order requested by a university close to government, this blog will be shut down. The owners and contributors will do their utmost to resist this form of censorship.

Thank you for reading, and for the emails of support.

In other words “The lurkers support me in email.”

Yeah. Right.

And I was expecting Godwin’s Law to appear in the next post, too . . .

It’s terribly disillusioning to see that academics, scholars at the height of their profession, are just as idiotic and cowardly as the dweebs I deal with in my non-scholarly geek life, like the anonymous cowards who attacked Kathy Sierra.

This particular incident though, has very much affected my own thinking about scholarly blogging/academic blogging that’s anonymous. The “Muddle” is the first such attack blog I’ve seen in academe, and I confess to being very much disheartened by it, both as a geek and as a scholar in the very early stages of my career.

I expect better, from scholars, particularly from established scholars who ought to be mentors and positive examples, instead of, well, standard, typical Internet trolls.