Partisan football

The more exposure you give links like these, the more of an “issue” it becomes. Wizbangblog’s entry is an exercise in pointless carping at its pettiest, but a whole CT blog entry dedicated to whining about Wizbang’s carping is even sadder. Why do *you* care what he thinks?

Delete this comment if you are offended, but IMO you shouldn’t have posted the entry in the first place.

What are the odds that either blog entry will do anything other than arouse the righteous indignation of the faithful on its side of the aisle? More remarks of “Heh, indeed” from CT’s conservative brethren, and cries of outrage from the liberal crowd is par for course, I would think. Hardly worth the extra exposure Wizbang is getting.

All I can find at his LGF link is bemoaning the characterization of PowerLine and ranting about Ramsey Clarke being one of Saddam’s lawyers.

From Wizbang’s, er, analysis, I would have thought they would be posting a new charity–ICRC, anyone–on the hour.

d-squared:
And what would be the point of naming and shaming? Do you think that will stop this behavior? Tactics like that haven’t worked before. The blogosphere is a human insitution, and loutish behavior will always be part of the human story.

I agree with you guys that that post is disgusting. But this simply gives it more exposure. And the decision to link to and write about it makes me think about the old joke from Northern Ireland about the guy who drives a hundred miles out of his way just to receive an insult.

Just ignore this …you know… with his stupid scorekeeping.

I know I’m an idiot for saying this, because it has zero to do with the point, but this:

It translates, in the mind of the offender, to a) a sign of weakness on your part, b) an encouragement to do it again because c) there was no negative consequence.

..is absolutely not true in the case of dogs. There are lots of behaviors that, if ignored, go away. The negative consequence is the ignoring. For many dogs(and a good lot of humans too), ignoring is much worse than negative attention (okay, maybe it does have something to do with the main point).

Fantasia:
This is just nonsense. You aren’t offering any credible or meaningful threat or punishment here. This post is probably exactly what that guy was hoping for. He wanted to get a rise out of the CT crowd, and now he has confirmation (message received, zero distortion). And herd behavior is not in fact guided always and everywhere by such easy principals.

I have no idea what you are talking about in the second half of your post, but have you heard of any of the powerful and safe new anti-hubris medications on the market? (That was meant to be a good natured joke.)

Look, this is just silly (delusions of power): we have no credibility to punish, and if this guy had any shame he wouldn’t have published that stupid post to begin with.

Peter: I have no illusions about whether we can exercise any influence over what this chap puts on his blog and it would probably be a bad thing if we could. But that’s not the only reason for simply saying “we’ve got you sussed”. There is a cumulative effect here that in general, if partisan bullshit goes unchallenged it will proliferate. At least the thinking kind of person will be reminded of what they knew anyway; that posts of the sort that Henry links to are best left unwritten, and that is the only kind of person one can realistically regard oneself as writing to influence anyway.

dsquared:
I think we are on the same page in terms of our feelings about the Wizbang post. I want to be clear about that. But there is no cumulative effect here. There just isn’t. He won’t shrivel up in the light of our annihilating contempt. He’ll just feel warmed by it.

He has one of the diseases (and it is found all over the political spectrum) that humanity will never cure.

This isn’t like some vicious physical action (Hitler invading Poland, for instance) that *must* be met with a forceful reaction. There is no consequence to ignoring him. None. In fact, to the extent that his behavior has any power at all, it is defined completely by its power to provoke a response from us.

May I offer a quote from Lincoln:
“No man resolved to make the most of himself, can spare time for personal contention. Still less can he afford to take all the consequences, including the vitiating of his temper, and the loss of self-control. Yield larger things to which you can show no more than equal right; and yield lesser ones, though clearly your own. Better give your path to a dog, than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite.”

For those of you who are interested, that is from the Captain Cutts letter, Oct. 26 1863.

Henry: I agree with you 90%. For the same reason, I though that Washington Post article criticizing President Bush for not making public comment sooner (cited by Eric Alterman and others) was rather shabby. Bush (or more likely his staff) was clearly doing something; that 4-nation coordination group did not come together out of thin air.

But there’s also a grain of truth in what Wizbang says. The numerous times Glenn Reynolds linked to the Amazon Red Cross donation page doubtless led many people to give — as have your posts on the topic here. Atrios raised quite a bit of cash for various political candidates; how much could he raise for this effort?

The Wizbang post strikes me a bit like those articles about how little various billionaires give to charity — one of which, IIRC, may have helped trigger the creation of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Certainly it shows poor breeding to criticize another’s empathy or charity. But if it redounds to the greater good, where’s the harm?

I’ve notice quite a number of blogs — be they left, right, or whatever — that have posted about the disaster and linked to ways to help, if only by giving money (which is the only way most of us can help). I have no time for Glenn Reynolds, but if he has done so too, then fair play to him. Surely a calamity of this sort transcends any left/right/whatever divide.

If this Wizbang bloke wants to make this a partisan thing, Henry is right to call him on it. And surely everybody who sees the matter for what it is – whether they call themselves left, right or whatever — should treat Wizbang with the contemptuous silence he deserves.

I agree with Henry and Daniel that denouncing this icky behavior is a worthwhile exercise. The value is not necessarily in causing the fellow to feel ashamed of himself (as others have rightly noted, he may well be impervious to such feelings), but in informing other people that this blogger is not worth serious attention.

Being of two minds about this as about so many things, I agree that calling someone out for impugning someone’s compassion for political ends is worth doing, but I’m also reminded of a phrase of (dare I mention her?) Mrs Thatcher’s about denying an enemy “the oxygen of publicity.”

Someone like the person cited (who I had never heard of) will enjoy having tweaked the CT crowd: he likely won’t understand the arguments against such a cheap stunt (scorekeepers aren’t that subtle).

I don’t know what I would do differently: do you? Would more posts equal faster or better relief?

Have a look at alicublog’s latest shorter lileks on the tsunami for more of same partisan hooliganism (the honourable art of futbol is another thing). Meanwhile, other websites (buzzmachine for instance) seem to think the purpose of those lists of initially pledged aid by nation published in papers is to start a big macho contest to declare which country has the biggest penis, sorry, generosity. Obviously girly hypocritical France loses pathetically while the US, in spite of ‘stingy’ predictions, remains on top. The forces of nature are clearly not powerful enough to drown the need to frame everything in ideological terms. Let’s just hope and pray when the next big one comes, the internet will be the first thing to go. And the media. And the press. News will have to travel slowly by word of mouth and people will have time to think about what they say and no instant mass audience to sermonise to. That’s my dream disaster scenario – no victims and no damage except to push button fatwas.

While waiting for that day of peace and quiet, I have vowed to avoid all political blogs from now on, except the fun and satirical ones. Nothing personal, I just have a weak stomach and it does not improve by following the political blogosphere equivalent of usenet flame wars on any given topic. Farewell everyone, and have a good 2005.

While waiting for that day of peace and quiet, I have vowed to avoid all political blogs from now on, except the fun and satirical ones. Nothing personal, I just have a weak stomach and it does not improve by following the political blogosphere equivalent of usenet flame wars on any given topic.

I’m in a very similar place right now. I’ve scaled back my blog reading (and commenting) enormously in the last 2 weeks and I feel much better for it. I’m trimming my daily intake down to an essential half-dozen or so, which as of now consists of CT, Wolcott, Berube, Majikthise, Body & Soul, and a few others.

X’s Usenet analogy is increasingly apt, I’m afraid.

Speaking of partisan football, didn’t we just witness the comments section of a blog you’all might know about (Crookedtimber.org) turn a story about the tsunami into an 50+ comment whine fest about American TV by people who apparently didn’t realize that FoxNews had reports on the disaster almost immediately?

So what the hell did you want or expect instead? A hundred posts all following each other saying “This is awful”, “Yes, it is awful”, “Indeed it is awful”?

On the one hand you have a leftist blog that discusses TV coverage, with people disagreeing with each other without insult. On the other, you have a rightist blog that attempts to relate the number of meaningless posts (and every post on this subject is meaningless, except those saying how to donate) to “compassion” to score partisan points, with rancour and flamewars in the comments threads.

The left side of the blogosphere is interested in ideas and talking about how they see the world around them. The right side is interested in winning over their self-perceived “enemies”. That says it all, really.

The link I provided (to crookedtimber) was not principally about a discussion of ideas any more than the wizbang post. The tone set immediately was of insult. It was also wrong in that it ignored the fact that FoxNews covered the tsunami immediately and with as much depth as was available at every moment along the way. The confusion on that score is especially funny considering that FoxNews is generally considered by people on CrookedTimber to be the most right-wing and least useful news station. To have a post almost immediately afterward which decries partisan point scoring about the tsunami but which ignores the same on one’s very own blog, is a bit rich. It lends the impression that one uses the phrase ‘partisan point-scoring’ in a rather partisan point-scoring fashion.