Don’t let the posts fool you

Apparently he’s never read the cesspool known as LGF. One wonders what Instapundit would be like if Reynolds had coments.

Indeed. heh.

Also from my browsing of comment sections, most bloggers are into ‘cool sites’ that are about viagra and internet poker.

Well, that’s an unusually bad reading of what Dean says.

Kos doesn’t hold itself out as a “blog”, but says it is a “political community.” So, to understand it as a “political community” one presumably would look to see what the participant say in the comment boxes.

And that’s what Dean did. And that’s why he concluded not with any statement about Kos, but with this:

“The energy and direction comes from the bottom. This is what real grassroots activism looks like. To flash back a bit to our internal exchange over the YouTube Debate, the reason the Democrats have such an advantage in on-line organizing and energy is because they have hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of people who angrily obsess about Iraq and George W. Bush on a 24/7 basis. Let’s face it – if a bridge collapsing in Minnesota makes you angry at George W. Bush, the results of your political Rorschach Test are conclusive. You’re a nut. But a useful nut; you’re the kind of nut who probably opens your heart and your wallet to the causes that strike your fancy.”

Thomas, you can’t see what a stupid thing that is to say?

Italics not off, I guess. Too bad.

But, … but … MoveOn compared Bush to Hitler. I read about it on the web.

“you’re the kind of nut who probably opens your heart and your wallet to the causes that strike your fancy.”

And the alternative is, I don’t know, to open your heart and wallet to causes which _don’t_ strike your fancy? Or _not_ to open your heart and wallet to causes which _do_ strike your fancy? Or…?

Mark Kaplan hit the nail on the head: “Emotion –your opponent is necessarily and invariably ‘excitable’ ‘agitated’ ‘animated’; you, by contrast, are immobile, impassive, devoid of emotion – a computer imbued with consciousness.”

Sometimes, these “even-handed” commentators try so hard that you can tell they’re faking it.

And a bridge collapsing in Minnesota, global warming, Iraq, and all that? Blame anyone you like, I don’t care. But if you blame George W. Bush, may the fleas of a thousand camels infest your groin! Now _that’s_ even-handedness.

Bill O’Reilly’s idea of “hate speech” is finding a comment on DailyKos that called the pope a primate. Leave aside the fact that the pope is the primate of Rome: Carl Linnaeus assigned humans to the primate order two hundred and fifty years ago, arrogant Swede that he was.

Perhaps, out of a sense of decency, we ought to be especially careful not to mock people with such thin skins and scant education. Yeah, right.

Dean Barnett should be more worried than he is about the implications of his admission that Kos symbolizes a nascent mass movement that doesn’t exist in the same way on the conservative side.

It’s as if he’s given away his Queen in chess and complained that the Rook which captured it is overly fanatical — so thank God we don’t have any of those either.

John, I’m not that familiar with Kos, nor with Dean. I don’t know if most of the participants at Kos are nuts or not. It isn’t my sort of place, so I just can’t say.

I’m just in favor of an accurate reading of the post. If Dean’s offering a bad argument–as you suggest–it can still be described accurately.

I think this is one of those areas of evolving convention where there is a lot of bad practice by some bloggers and writers. I agree there’s an interesting question about the relationship between main posts and comment threads: how and when the posts condition or invite the responses, about how a site creates a characteristic discourse for which it is in some sense responsible. But then there’s people who run around cherrypicking the worst or stupidest comment out of a 100+ comment thread and acting as if it represents the main author or owner of a blog. Worse still is when some of those critics have comment threads at their own site about a thousand times worse. I can think of a few serious offenders of this kind who get involved in some of the long-running snipefests about the politicization of academia, etcetera: always looking for the beam in the commentariat’s eye of one of their critics while never looking in their own.

I do think it’s unfair to judge a blog by its comments. One example I noticed recently was Tyler Cowen’s blog, which has attracted a reserve army of IQ/race cranks who miss no opportunity to come out of the woodwork and lecture all and sundry on the details of their fascinating “hobby”. Cowen, to his credit, appears to find it as creepy as anyone else and has tried to put his foot down at least once, but apparently to no avail.

so I’m sure Mr. stormcrow won’t take the delete personally

That is of course what you would think. Here we had a subsversive meta-level commentary about power and control in the blogosphere via a “seemingly inadvertent” tag lossage attack, but of course The Man has the controls and in the end The Man gets to do do what he wants. Are you guys scared of your own commenters or what?

[faux bluster off] Your welcome, and wipe out the prior failed attempt at comment 4 while you are at it. In 4, I just flat out forgot that angle-brackets would be interpreted as tags, in the next one, it looked like I had corrected it via using & lt ; and gt, and it previewed OK in IE7, but had different lossage when posted it (no italicization). Didn’t have a chance to look at it in Firefox, I suspect that those who saw everything italicized were using Firefox – and I half think it was the & lt ; right before an “I” that somehow got interpreted as an italics tag without a close – but am taking pains to not test it in this post. Apologies

And back on topic. Details of Barnett’s post aside, (or John’s characterization of it), I do think that O’Reilly’s attack on DailyKos and the whole resulting scrutiny on the nature of blogs and online communities will come to be viewed as a watershed event on the path to the mainstreaming of Internet discourse. I do at least hope that in the end it will result in a diminished ability for fatuous liars and propagandists to propogate BS like we saw with the MoveOn/Hitler ad accusation that I mention above.

I actually do hold bloggers responsible for their comment sections. I think they have created a forum and that forum reflects on them. If they are willing to host vicious bullshit, they are fundamentally not so bothered by vicious bullshit that they will solve the problem. They have the power to moderate their comment sections and they don’t. That makes them complicit, far as I’m concerned.

Let’s face it – if a bridge collapsing in Minnesota makes you angry at George W. Bush, the results of your political Rorschach Test are conclusive. You’re a nut.

Quite right–if a bridge collapses, you’re supposed to blame Ted Kennedy.

All snark aside, note the employment of the familiar rightwing tactic of ruling whole continents of sensible argument pre-emptively out-of-bounds. We needed to invest in infrastructure, but the president thought it was more important to cut taxes for his wealthy supporters, and spend every cent we could borrow for futile military adventurism. But don’t blame the president if bridges collapse–that’s just nuts.

My take is that comments are the intellectual property & responsibility of the folks that make ’em, not the folks that host ’em.

Whatever a comment says, the only person who deserves the credit/recrimination & blame is the person who posted it. If someone wants to make a case that offensive comments don’t always get the response (that recrimination & blame) that they should from the rest of the community–including the blogmaster, that’s one thing. But to blame the owner for the content of their comment section is kinda silly, in my humble…

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“cherry-picked for a few nuts”

Mmm… nuts & cherries…

As a preface, I’m not much of a member of the Kos community, so maybe I just don’t understand the difference, To me, Kos is just another blog, albeit one that has come to represent a community political movement due to sheer size and the influence of some very good writers & diarists.

That said, I guess I see your point… Just like in any other large group online or in the world, we’re going to have our share of those with less desirable views on one issue or another…

Also, it tends to be a place where those on the left are going to air our interpolitical differences for all to see… (Any party that claims Kucinich & Lieberman as members is bound to have some interparty strife… …and that doesn’t even include Greens like me, with still another take the issues…)

It has to make for bad PR, from the standpoint of Kos being held up as representing the liberal/progressive political community. The fact is though, we are that messy, and I’m not so certain that’s a bad thing…