Emergent YES

Justin Baedar, one of the bloggers at Radical Congruency, went out last spring and bought the domain names "emergentno.com" and "emergentyes.com". Justin is also the prankster behind the mischievious JordonCooper NO pseudo-blog, which also debuted (briefly) last spring.

Anyway, to make a long story short, Justin decided to launch Emergentno.com a couple of days ago, which of course is a very similar name to one of the more "creative" anti-emerging blogs. The owner of the original site wasn't too happy, but when Justin added a second RSS feed from ANOTHER (much more hysterically-paranoid conspiracy-theory-driven website), the "poop" really hit the fan. You see, both of the anti-emerging blogs make a regular habit of banning comments from people who are (A) profane, vulgar and nasty (which is fine, of course, except I've noticed that being nasty to emergents is acceptable), and (B) anyone who biblically and thoughtfully disagrees with them (this applies more to one of the websites than to both of them).

There are occasional points that they bring up that we need to think and talk about, but because they won't allow comments from people who aren't just like them, there's nowhere to really discuss this. That's where Justin's blog came in.

However, since they're threatening to take legal action against Justin and called him (and the rest of us unsuspecting emerging conversationalists) things I wouldn't say to a cockroach, it's gotten really, really ugly. I like Justin's idea of having a forum to respond thoughtfully to what they're writing (when it has some merit), and so I posted the following at his new blog:

Justin,

For what it's worth, I think you should re-work this whole thing, and use the "EmergentYES.com" instead. Here's a few thoughts (again, for what it's worth...)

1. If these guys sue you (successfully), they win and can triumphantly congratulate themselves on crushing you and your RSS blog.
   
   They've already decided you're not a Christian so it's okay to sue you, and in the comments over at Slice for this very post we've all been labelled "probably demon-possessed", evil unrepentent sinners who are in a cult. That makes it okay for them to do whatever it takes to destroy you.
   
   For example, while objecting to the whole RSS thing is HIGHLY debatable, Jim Bublitz from OldTruth.com (who also has his blog RSS enabled and encourages people to RSS his site) has published all of your private, personal online information in the comments. That's just plain illegal, but Ingrid doesn't seem to mind, because she's let that comment remain.

   Update: in a phone conversation with Justin last night, he told me that his information is publicly available. So, it is technically not illegal for Jim to have done this, although the words "tacky", "irresponsible", and "slimy" come to mind.

2. If you take this blog down voluntarily, they'll still triumphantly congratulate themselves, but so what? I'm not sure this is a battle worth fighting on these grounds.
   
   
3. Switch to "EmergentYES.com" for a number of reasons:
   
   
   
   • It's a focus on the positive aspects, not just reacting against the negativity and (for the most part) the mud-slinging tabloid journalism approach.
     
     
   • If you link to their posts instead of RSS'ing everything they write, you can elimate a lot of the drivel that doesn't really amount to much beyond hysterical paranoia; just link and/or quote them ("fair use", as Ingrid says is legal and acceptable to her) on posts that actually have some critical merit; then we can discuss them here
     
     
   • this would keep the discussion here focussed on the parts of anti-emergent critique that you feel might be helpful for us to discuss, which I believe was your original intent in the first place, and I think is a good idea

Again, Justin, that's just my two cents and a couple of loonies (Canadian $1 coins) of input. There are other ways of achieving your goal for this site, and I think it needs to exist, but you don't need this kind of "attention".

Grace and peace,

robbymac