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Tuesday, January 08, 2008
The Puny And The Great
There are few widely-agreed-upon facts about the Blogosphere and the relative importance of its denizens, but this one is likely to go unchallenged: Steven Den Beste, the proprietor of the now-defunct USS Clueless, was one of the most important of the Blogosphere's progenitors, a serious man with a powerful mind and a willingness to tackle any topic whatsoever.
At about the same time as Den Beste was showing the Web what "a thinking man" really means, there was another fellow by the name of Kevin Drum, who ran a site called CalPundit. Drum didn't much like Den Beste. For one thing, they were ideologically opposed. For another. Drum couldn't hold a candle to Den Beste, either as a writer or a thinker, on his best day. Needless to say, that bothered Drum a lot more than it did Den Beste.
Drum, by a path unknown to your Curmudgeon, eventually moved to the Washington Monthly, where he runs a blog called "Political Animal." Den Beste, because of health issues he'd refrained from mentioning during his time of activity, gave up blogging soon thereafter. But a little before that, there was a memorable incident in which Drum decided to belittle Den Beste, from his perch at the Washington Monthly, over what your Curmudgeon considers a matter of basic courtesy.
Your Curmudgeon expressed his opinion of that sort of envy-powered boorishness at the time. In his opinion, both then and now, it made Drum look by far the smaller man -- and the majority of prominent bloggers at that time agreed.
It should have been a lesson to anyone with three functioning brain cells. But some people are irremediably slow on the uptake. Perhaps one must make allowances for the mentally challenged, but forbearance at such times does little for their educations, and less for their prospects in life. They need to be whacked across the snout, for their own sakes.
Today's candidate whackee is a pygmy named Glenn Greenwald, whose name has figured in a few unsavory blogcidents in the recent past. His target? The Blogfather himself, Professor Glenn Reynolds, for daring to cite and agree with columnist Jonah Goldberg thus:
JONAH GOLDBERG ON OBAMA AND DISAPPOINTMENT: "Imagine the Democrats do rally around Obama. Imagine the media invests as heavily in him as I think we all know they will if he's the nominee — and then imagine he loses. I seriously think certain segments of American political life will become completely unhinged. I can imagine the fear of this social unraveling actually aiding Obama enormously in 2008. Forget Hillary's inevitability. Obama has a rendezvous with destiny, or so we will be told. And if he's denied it, teeth shall be gnashed, clothes rent and prices paid."He's right. And as I've noted before, Hillary runs a smaller-scale version of this risk in the nomination battle -- if she outmaneuvers Obama rather than beating him straight-up, that'll probably alienate a lot of people and cause them to stay home in November.
Greenwald accused Reynolds -- and Goldberg, of course -- of racism for these sentiments. The post at issue is behind Salon's pay wall, but many persons have linked to the accusation above.
Well, if you're going to go elephant hunting with a pea-shooter, it probably doesn't matter how big an elephant you stalk. But as numerous InstaPundit readers will attest, Professor Reynolds doesn't have a racist bone in his body. He's been the target of previous accusations of racism, but all have come from persons so obviously motivated by envy and leftist ideology that no one in his right mind would believe them.
The persons who level such attacks have to know they're going to be laughed out of court, if not worse. So why do they do it?
Your Curmudgeon doesn't have all the answers. That's one of the missing ones. Perhaps even a fatuous attack like the ones linked above makes the attacker feel, for a moment, as if he shares the stature of his target. It doesn't make sense, but then envy -- a desire to wound a more successful person, so strong that damage to oneself seems an acceptable price -- has never made sense.
Envy is rampant on the Left. Leftist politics, from the "moderates" of the Democratic Party out the the looniest of the fringe loonies, is a politics of envy: a politics that knowingly takes from Smith and bestows it on Jones even though the transfer hurts them both. Leftist political obsessives are nearly always consumed by envy, and can seldom conceal it.
There's no Last Graf coming. The story has no moral other than the obvious one. But a man concerned with his moral standing, which surely describes the typical reader of Eternity Road, should be aware that persons inclined to this sort of thing are numerous. More and worse, the temptation to emulate them can be unexpectedly strong. Consider this snippet just one more caution added to the pile.
Comments
The post-modern racism charge serves the same function that racism itself served back in modern times. People try to elevate themselves a little by defining a part of the population as sub-human inferiors. The way that expresses itself now in people who are wired that way is “People who differ with me politically (or Southern/rural people) are racists”.
Posted by Dave M on 01/08/2008 at 08:00 PMPerhaps the motivation for such absurd attacks is a sort of “million termites” strategy. Sling enough mud, and eventually (so it is hoped) some will stick. At the very least a pall is cast around the victim, which will hopefully translate into a “where there’s smoke there’s fire” feeling in third parties who are unaware of the spurious nature of the attacks.
Posted by on 01/08/2008 at 08:30 PMReading this morning about both the Gleens and the Drummer Boy (as well as other microbes such as Alexander Cadwallader-Cholomdolay Wollcott), I can’t help thinking perhaps that the assertion that an ad hominem attack is invalid may be over-hasty.
How many times must a man tell a lie before you are justified in automatically gainsaying anything he says on the sole basis of his character?
M
Posted by Mark Alger on 01/09/2008 at 10:13 AMMark, that is a valid question about an important subject. It’s been on my mind for years. I don’t have a hard-and-fast answer, but I have noticed that a habitual liar will usually have a constellation of other unsavory characteristics:
-- Laziness,
-- Petty dishonesty of the non-verbal sort,
-- Chronic, unfounded suspicion of the honesty and motives of others,
-- Unwillingness to assume responsibility for his own fortunes.I’d say that if you detect any two of those (plus repeated verbal mendacity), you’ve got grounds for assuming that the bloke ought not to be believed on any subject of importance. You’ll be right far more often than wrong.
Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 01/09/2008 at 12:01 PM
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