I Demand a Recount.


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For Those Of You Wondering

Yes, I am aware that I have a grossly unfair charactature of anti-war liberals. Please note that in my introduction I clearly announce it as such. Those that read the new Peace in Our Time parody blog also ought to note the obvious comedic intent. Same with those that read Oliver Willis's Warbloggerpundit when it comes out. Meanspirited? Sometimes. Meant to convince people or inspire people into political action? Get real.

The Erosion of Discourse

I haven't commented on Jane Galt's temporary (we hope) departure from the 'sphere. Jane is my favorite political blogger and the reason I never linked to her much over at RAWbservations was merely because I didn't have much to add. She's thorough, thoughtful, and approached issues from a fresh perspective. What more can a reader ask for?

The first thing that tempted me to say something was Ted Barlow's post on the subject:

Speaking personally, there is no more effective tool to drive me away from the right than hate mail from conservatives. I strongly suspect that this is a leading cause of creeping polarization in the blogosphere, a subject that's been on my mind recently. It's hard enough to change people's minds using reason and evidence. Attempting to change people's minds with hateful emails is not only abusive and uncivilized, it's utterly counterproductive.

He demonstrated the class I've come to expect from him. I hit the comment button to express my appreciation, then read the replies. From the liberals, nearly all of them came in defense of those that sent the letters or, at best, said "Yeah, well, she had it coming." Others accused her of lying about the letters. D-Squared suggested that this was all a ruse to have an excuse to take the post down. "Thumb" suggested that it was a fundraising effort to buy a new computer.

The general response was that the right does it more.

"I know you are, but what am I?"

Ted states that retarded immature actions like hateful emails "push people away" from the side of the sender. Let me elaborate on how that is true, for those of you who think that anyone who would be driven further away are already on the other team.

Before RAWbservations shut down, there was a post by Tacitus demanding that anti-Iraq marchers denounce ANSWER, who lead the protests. I wrote a response to the nature of the question, basically saying that Tacitus was out of line in his tone and that by de facto comparing anyone on the opposing side to its worst element only drives the debate further and further away from civil, rational discourse. To make a long story short, I took my own side to task for its verbal excesses.

I am now less inclined to do so in the future.

Not because I suddenly agree with Tacitus's tactics, mind you. But rather because I wonder what the point is. If Jane Galt deserved to be bullied into hiatus because she is on the same side as Rush Limbaugh, then maybe you believe I should be so bullied, too. Jane suggested, in passing, that protest vandals (and she limited this to people who destroy other people's property) should be stopped with physical force. When Mark Kleiman said that was illegal, she made the argument that it was. Jane is a generally hypothetical thinker much of the time and those that suggested that she was going to lead a goon squad to do this were, in my view, taking her words out of context.

In a way, it's tit-for-tat, though. Galt took unseemly joy at the prospect of whacking a protester with a 2x4 (which is really what got the left riled up) and Atrios mused that Galt's "goons" were responsible for a crime hundreds of miles away without specifying that he was being hyperbolic or otherwise unserious.

No harm, no foul.

But once the obviously hurtful and personal letters were sent, the response to it should have been pretty obvious. Ted, as you see above, got it. So did Mark Kleiman. The commenters in Ted's comment section, quite obviously, did not. For Ted's trouble, he got a response by Martin Wisse saying "Why are you always more willing to defend bullies then their victims, Ted?"

We are bullies, of course, because we are on the right. We are the party of Anne Coulter and Sean Hannity. Because I believe in lower taxes and school choice and Jane muses that people who vandalize private property are subject to a whack by a 2x4, we are all inherently bullies. Any attack on us and on our character is therefore justified, allusions that we are fascist or that we lead a secret army of vigilantes with two-by-fours that are taken seriously are, well, our fault. Why? Cause of Rush Limbaugh.

I saw something interesting on Pejman's site that sent off a red flag in my head:

It's tempting to appreciate the fact that Atrios is trying to put on pretenses to humility--after all, he has much to be humble about. The most overrated and one of the most demagogic bloggers on the Internet, Atrios is clearly no thinking person's epitome of opinion-dispensing talent. Basically, the vast majority of his posts are made up of the same kind of throwaway invective that he used to attack Jane, and that he used to dismiss Kleiman's charges without answering them. It doesn't take more than two brain cells to put out this kind of puerile output for the unthinking and knuckle-dragging masses that frequent Atrios's site and nod approvingly at any and every inane and asinine thing he has to say--it certainly is a hell of a lot easier than actually constructing an argument (and God forbid that anyone should call on Atrios to do something like that--assuming that there even exists a brain inside the anony-blogger's head, we wouldn't want to be responsible for inducing either an aneurysm or an inadvertent and embarrassing bowel movement by making the poor little sap do anything as complicated and stress-inducing as thinking).

But Atrios's sudden embrace of the "Little Ol' Me" defense belies the fact that in perhaps one of the greatest instances of shame to afflict the human race since the French swore off bathing on a regular basis, Atrios is a popular fella in the Blogosphere. And that means that when Atrios decides to smear someone, the unfortunate target of his infantile rage is sure to receive a storm of idiotic and intemperate commentary--much as Jane Galt has found out.

When I read this, I knew that I'd heard this before. It took me a second to place it. If I weren't so lazy I'd look up recent words by Bill Clinton and Tom Daschle regarding Rush Limbaugh. Exact. Same. Argument.

Atrios is a partisan warrior. Fine. But it's not his fault if anyone takes him seriously, right? Rush Limbaugh considers himself an entertainer. It's not his fault if anyone takes him seriously, right?

Atrios isn't Limbaugh - he just links to them. I link to sites I disagree with regularly and those who use tone and language of which I do not approve. I also have people who agree with me and then expound on it in a way that I wish they didn't agree. That doesn't make me responsible for them (nor Charles Johnson for many of his undesirable commenters). If I were in his shoes, though, and some offhanded and comments intended to be humorous lead some people to make real asses of themselves, I'd be damned angry. I wouldn't issue a weak non-apology apology and then say it's all okay cause the opposition does it, too, or does it more often (of course they do so to me cause they're the ones that piss me off).

Is that what we want, though? Do you want people like me that are more interested in exchanging ideas rather than insults to reconsider that? Is that how you hope to win?

It's not a left problem and it's not a right problem, but it is a problem and not one anyone should be proud to be a part of.