What a Label Does

A label is real information. Leaving out the true labels so that readers cannot put you in a category is a kind of dishonesty, and readers recognize it as dishonesty. A page with no affiliations anywhere on it still tells you something: it tells you that the person who wrote it was trying to control what you would think of them.

The effect of a label depends on when it arrives. When the label comes first, the reader no longer treats it as information and treats it as an instruction for how to read the rest. The reader then counts everything after it as evidence for or against the category, and decides which category the person belongs in well before finishing the reading. When the same word comes after the events that produced it, the reader takes it as a conclusion the reader had already partly reached.

So the affiliations stay, and each one is placed after the material that supports it. What I hold politically is a separate page, and a reader gets to it only by choosing to open it. The arguments underneath those positions are on twenty-two more pages. A reader can find all of it, and none of it is placed at the start.