Entries Tagged 'blogosphere' ↓

I’m not in the business of educating whippersnappers—at least not online. (I’ve got a life, you know, and it happens to have lots of young people in it.)

This commenter at Matthew Yglesias’s site, however, is very interested in taking the fight to the whippersnappers. He takes exception to Yglesias’s habit of staking out the proper “progressive” line and claiming (for it, and for himself) the moral high ground … without ever backing it up [e.a.]:

[Y]ou utterly void your argument of any intellectual content when you restort to logical fallacies — in this case, using ad hominem semantics to tar the opposing argument. When you say, “requires people to temper the natural human instinct toward moralistic posturing” you make two ad hominem attacks on your opponent, 1) arbitrarily labeling opposition to international bad actors as mere “posturing” without substantive value (you give no rational argument why this is should be so a priori or otherwise; 2) that your opponents must be resorting to these actions out of “intemperate instincts” rather than on rational grounds - again you give no argument (other than a vain implication of false consciousness). These tendentious characterizations of your opponent’s position give the impression that you have little interest or confidence in arguing the issue on the actual merits.

Your argument claims that your position is moral because the outcome is moral, but you specifically void your position of any morality or rationality when you insist that opposing wrongs is not moral but mere posturing. Perhaps opposition to a bad actor must be curtailed for realistic reasons, but this does not make your silence or the bad act thereby good, merely an unfortunate, unavoidable, but immoral reality.

You also make a generic implied assertion which is demonstrably false historically, that “maintaining a good relationship” will inexorably or even predominantly lead to cooperation and commerce and away from violent conflict. These kinds of things need to be decided case-by-case, on the merits, and can never be decided with certainty. Taking a stand, symbolically, diplomatically, or economically, is not always mutually exclusive with “maintaining a good relationship.” Depending upon its effects on opposing regimes, it may or may not be effective, while “maintaining a good relationship” may or may not turn out to incite conflict more directly. Likewise military intervention is sometimes the path to the least overall violence. It depends.

Since these outcomes cannot be known — either way — in advance, it is wise to be cautious. But your dogmatism on which choices are generally optimal regardless of context, made plain by your unwillingness to state your argument merely in rational terms, totally ignores the fact that there are also moral costs, and often long-term costs to “peace and commerce”, to saying and doing nothing (be it symbolic, diplomatic, economic, or even military).

At least try to state your argument in ways that appeal more directly to reason and less to tendentious semantics.

But Samantha Power reviewed Yglesias’s book, so he must be a very important thinker, right?

Maybe!

Not to get all Gawkerish and conspiratorial about it, but one hand washes the other inside the Beltway, too—even if one hand belongs to a mere blogger and the other to a Harvard professor and journalist. Ms. Power might merely have been acknowledging Yglesias’s defense of her after her “Hillary is a monster” remark was dutifully reported by The Scotsman.

Just sayin’!

It was Michael Blowhard (whose 2 Blowhards site is one of the best treasure troves on the internet) who first suggested*** that bloggers are performance artists and that those of us who “follow” blogs are in fact following serial dramas [scroll down to the comment posted at 3:29 a.m.] [e.a.]:

If you follow blogs, you’re checking in on “characters” — Terry Teachout, Neil Kramer, Alice in Texas. (Each of whom is, to some extent, a kind of performance artist.) And stories semi-sorta evolve out of this. If you’ve got a circle of blogs (and bloggers) you follow, it can almost be like being a fan of a soap opera — all these familiar characters, going on and on …

If “Blowhard” is right about blog readers being voyeurs and bloggers being a species of exhibitionist—and he is—then Andrew Sullivan must be the undisputed barometer (or performance artist) of the political blogosphere. Everyone is watching Sullivan’s political journey to see where he goes next.

Last night, Sullivan quoted one of his readers, who is hanging on his every move:

Herewith, a prediction: by Labor Day, you will have long since given up on Obama and will be advocating the election of McCain. For all the reasons the various villains of the Republican Party hate him, and for the fact that he more closely matches your policy wishes than Obama does or ever will, he will be your man.

I have a feeling, once the prospect of Hillary being president is safely foreclosed, so will your support for Obama be. At least I hope so.

But it’s not just Sullivan’s readers (as well as yours truly, a devoted if often frustrated and irritated fan) who’s   are addicted to the drama queen’s arias. George Packer, who just wrote a piece for the New Yorker dissecting the death of the conservative movement, is also a Sullivan follower:

I read Sullivan every day, partly to find out how far his disenchantment will carry him in the very strange direction of Obama-style uplift—how long his temperament will win out over his ideas.

Wherever Sullivan goes, we follow along (which is different from following, of course). But still …

Hats off!

———-

***I’m not an internet scholar, so I don’t know if “Michael Blowhard” was actually the first to suggest this. However, he’s the first person I read who suggested this, so he’s first in my book.

While we’re waiting for a John Le Carré -caliber*** thriller writer to emerge who is talented enough to address the war on terror, let me direct you toward two posts (and their comments sections) over on the Belmont Club.

Long live the blogosphere!

————-

*** Le Carré has turned into an anti-American political crank, but his Smiley novels were deeply satisfying entertainments. And The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is one of the most astute books ever written about the moral compromises foisted on people by Soviet-style totalitarianism.

Ron Rosenbaum says that blogging is best—and also riskiest—when it comes from the gut!

I agree!

That’s why I continue to read Andrew Sullivan long after haven having*** given up on him as a serious political thinker: his passion is unmistakable!

That’s what I love about ETP’s Rachel Sklar: she jumps in with both feet!

And Mickey Kaus: he throws caution to the wind!

And Jeff Jarvis: he lets it all hang out!

————

*** passion=lots of typos

As regular readers know, I’m on vacation. Till mid-October, posting will be irregular, infrequent, and not pegged to up-to-the minute events.

If you’re in need of sustenance, check out some of these links:

Back Talk, where the casualty count in Iraq is measured scrupulously as a means of determining the results of the surge—and where Engram provides the logical evidence that Al Qaeda in Iraq is a huge factor in our troubles there (contrary to what you hear from the intellectually lazy and/or politically insecure members of the MSM).

Martin Kramer on the Middle East, a treasure trove of up-to-the minute geopolitical/political news links, among other valuable links and essays.

Arts and Letters Daily—the website I cannot do without.

Jules Crittenden unloads on Columbia University’s Lee Bollinger for inviting the monkey to ape some words. Then he comes up with a brilliant idea:

I think the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or maybe the Simon Wiesenthal Center should invite Ahmadinejad to speak.  Pack the hall with Auschwitz survivors … Encourage them to show up in stripes and shaved heads. Entitle the forum, “This Is What We’re Talking About.”

Then Crittenden gets down to talking about his favorite newspaper:

Every morning I get down on my knees and thank Allah I don’t work at the New York Times, and don’t have to call terrorists and murderers “Mr.” Supposedly the pinnacle of my profession.  Never mind the shoddy reporting and shameful editorial positions. It’s hard to pinpoint any one thing, but all the ass-kissing kowtowing to convention has to really suck the brains and the soul right out of you. …

I am blessed to work at one of the last great American newspapers [the Boston Herald].  Every day, we fight for our very existence in shoddy digs.  We don’t have the resources to do the things we used to do. …  They call us hacks and sneer at our sensational headlines.  That’s OK.  Let them.  At least we’re honest.

Indeed.

Hello, ETP readers!

Have a look around. We’re non-denominational and inclusive: All wrists—broken, strong, limp, or sprained—are welcome here.

I’m sick of the blogosphere—or sick of the popular political hangouts, at any rate. They have no perspective, no knowledge, no experience, no wisdom, no drive to understand what is happening, to discover the truth. They have no mission beyond scoring cheap political points. They have no heart and no soul.

Except when they do.

Here’s Wretchard, of the Belmont Club:

I think a fairly large percentage of people see the world according to preconceived notions and are impervious to arguments to the contrary.

Sometimes the biases stem from bitter experience and thus actually have some basis. I knew from an early age how murderous Communists could be and therefore the arguments of people like Noam Chomskey have no effect on me whatsoever. Occasionally I worry about that. Sometimes I ask myself whether it is always true that communism is murderous and intellectually I must admit it doesn’t always follow they are evil or wrong. But I will candidly admit that experience has colored my view.

Jose Maria Sison was recently arrested in the Netherlands and now it is coming to public light that he ordered the execution of thousands of activists, workers, farmers, etc in his mad purges and in his efforts to maintain a grip on his organized crime network which styles itself as a communist insurgency. But to many persons who know only what they read in the papers, Sison remains a “revolutionary hero”. Sison — or rather the Sison they imagine — is their kind of person, of a piece with their world of radical literature, plays, activist songs, and the distant romance of revolution which is romantic only alas, when distant. They can hardly accept, though facts now being covered in the papers make it inescapable to avoid, that their support of Sison indirectly resulted in the murder of thousands. Sison’s “killing fields” are a miniature replay of the Cambodian killing fields, which the antiwar generation can scarcely admit it facilitated, even after they piled up the skulls. It’s not something antiwar generation would have caused knowingly, you understand. They meant well but it all went so wrong. That was the trouble.

And in the debate over whether to Surge or Retreat I think the sides are squaring off according to temperament more than logic. Some people hate the sight of war — and rightly so — so much they are willing to take it from sight at any cost. Even if the consequences are greater than the war’s. That’s why cost/benefit is not an issue. Aesthetics is.

Maybe the only meaningful persuasion is aesthetic persuasion. Teaching people to see the evil they do even when they mean well. Teaching them to count the cost by showing them those who bear it. Teaching them that it is not enough to say “sorry”; to engage in “healing” or to move on. That it’s unacceptable to smash things up and retreat “into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” But it’s hard. Maybe it’s impossible.

Wretchard, who is dedicated to seeking the answers and whose site is suffused with poetry, was of course quoting from Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby:

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy––they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

Yes, Wretchard, the only meaningful persuasion is aesthetic persuasion. Indeed one of Bush’s speechwriters (I really wonder which one it was) recently tried that gambit with Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. It foundered, unfortunately, on the shores of American ignorance and insensitivity, if this is any indication.

Greene doesn’t really help the White House’s argument. Indeed, most people would read Greene’s novel as a refutation of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. And why draw attention to a fictional character who has been used to outline Bush’s alleged flaws?

Actually, I’d hope that “most people” would read Greene’s novel for the story, and that perhaps they would have some of their preconceived notions challenged. That’s what happens when people read novels or watch movies: they let down their defenses, and they empathize with the myriad variations of the human condition, which does not fall neatly into categories like “dove” or “hawk”; “wingnut” or “moonbat”; “conservative” or “liberal”; etc.

The person to invoke Fitzgerald most persuasively recently was Azar Nafisi, in Reading Lolita in Tehran, a work of dissident literature and aesthetic persuasion—for those who would be persuaded, that is. By describing daily life for herself over the course of 18 years, Nafisi makes it crystal-clear that Iran is indeed totalitarian: that is to say, to live there is to experience totalitarianism.

Try explaining that to someone like, say, the whippersnapper Ezra Klein, who has a following in the leftosphere and no experience of the world and yet is convinced that he has all the “correct” opinions, and of course all the answers:

Iran is a repressive country. It is not a totalitarian dictatorship, no matter how many people want to simply assert otherwise. And that’s really all there is to the contrary: Assertions. In his post on the subject, Kevin Sullivan wrote, as a parenthetical aside, “(and [Ahmadinejad] is a totalitarian, Ezra),” an odd argument given that Ahmadinejad isn’t even the most powerful person in the country. Elsewhere, Ken Baer told me that he didn’t think such arguments even needed to be made, which shows how safe folks feel in the Iran-is-totalitarian-consensus, but struck me as unsettling.

Then there’s his whippersnapping twin Matthew Yglesias, whose taste in literature runs to Harry Potter, with the occasional Chabon novel thrown in (with which he seems disappointed because it doesn’t have a clear political message) and who reveres TV dramas. With that aesthetic diet, here’s no danger of his expanding his imagination beyond America (which, one would think, would be important for a writer who writes about foreign policy to do). Yet Yglesias too disdains the label “totalitarian” for Iran, and has promoted the notion that anyone who calls Iran totalitarian is just a warmonger.

[W]hile you’d certainly rather live in a liberal democracy than under the Iranian political system, this is no kind of totalitarianism and the many people throwing that word around are just warmongering ignorantly.

Six months later, he’s hammering away at the same theme:

Iran is often characterized in the American press as a “totalitarian” regime, by both conservative and liberal hawks. Leading Democratic Party political operatives like Ken Baer will call you an apologist for the Iranian regime if you dispute this “totalitarian” concept. Thus “you” may well think that Iran is, in fact, a totalitarian society.

Which it isn’t. The Iranian regime, though harsh on political dissidents, isn’t Stalin’s Russia or China during the Cultural Revolution.

Dude, you are wrong. Grow the hell up. What you learned in poli sci is but a framework for trying to come to grips with—or attempting to control—messy, messy, uncompartmentalized, mind-blowing reality. Feed your head. With poetry. With accounts of what it’s really like out there in the wide world beyond your complacent notions of it. You’ll be a better man, with better ideas. And maybe you won’t be so disappointed by Obama, who has already fed his head with poetry, and who has come out a better man, with better ideas. (Not perfect. Better.)

In an interview, Andrew Breitbart describes the real impact of the digital revolution:

The Internet has created raw immediacy and raw connectedness to anything and everything.

It seems that if you’ve ever felt constrained by the bureaucracies of the world — whether it be government or corporations — it seems that now any individual can do anything that they set their mind to. A person can create a Web site that looks as if it’s a multinational corporation. You can go to GM.com or you can go to MG’s blog, and MG’s blog is 10 times more compelling. You can pretty much do anything. You can start your own T-shirt company, you can cultivate an audience, you can create a business from scratch. ….

Yep. It’s pretty goddamn cool. Not to mention that it’s a bonanza for us news junkies who’ve got something to say:

I’m a news addict, news aficionado …

The idea now, on the Internet, that I can read everything that’s being read inside the major newsrooms in the country — I’d pay top dollar for that, back in the day. And now it’s all there.

You know that you’re seeing the same exact information that the Dan Rathers, the Peter Jennings, the Tom Brokaws of the world are seeing. You’re like, “Wait a second. Why did you choose that to be the No. 1 story?” And you start gaining a level of confidence that there’s a conventional wisdom out there, set by people with a very parochial sensibility.

Given that anything’s possible on the Internet, you kind of feel motivated to say, “Let me have my say on this. Let me try and counteract the effect of there being a machinery that creates conventional wisdom without taking into consideration alternative viewpoints.” …

That pretty much describes my experience, and the long, long road I’ve traveled on the Internet, of which I’ve been an officianado aficionado since 1993, when I signed up for my first Pipeline (a local NYC ISP) account, up until today, when I mark sixteen months as a blogger (averaging four link-and content-rich posts a day).

Once, in response to a post by Jeff Jarvis on the topic of who we bloggers are, I left the following comment:

We are longtime thinkers and readers and writers who went to the same schools as MSMers (No insult intended. Some of my best friends are MSMers.) but decided to pursue careers and professions other than journalism. We make our living doing other things, but we continue to read and to be engaged by the dynamic world around us and by the world of ideas. We like to read. We like to write. We like to make fun of what we observe in public life, like in MST3K. We like to debate. We understand rhetoric. We know how to check facts and sources.

It’s not journalism, though–few of us are out there bearing witness or interviewing people or acquiring other primary-source material (although with the advent of podcasting and various blogging consortia, that may be changing).

It’s…I dunno. Maybe blogging is “opinion reporting.”

We’re different from journalists, because we seek to mix it up with our readers. We’re looking for conversation and debate. We want to be involved in the intellectual/cultural life of our country (such as it is). Some of us are tired of shouting back at the talking heads on TV and NPR and at editorial writers and columnists. We have areas of expertise and opinions, too.

The blogosphere is where thinking people go to debate the politics of the day, the ideas of public intellectuals, and the opinions of paid opinion writers. It’s where the national conversation is taking place. Be there or be square.

Here’s more from that inspiring Breitbart interview:

Q: You create your own news wire.

A: There are people who can go out there and become a creme brulee blog and obsess on creme brulee and have strong opinions on creme brulee, and which is the best type of creme brulee. They can fight against the creme caramelle people who don’t have the hardened sugar top. And eventually, people who like creme brulee will migrate to this place and that person will become the creme brulee spokesperson. And then maybe a dessert company finds this person, says, “You know more about this than our president does,” and hire them for $75,000 a year.

It seems that there’s been, across the board, a democratizing of everything. It seems that the American spirit of freedom is being exported. In a MacLuhanesque way, the medium is the message. The freedoms that we see online in this country — there’s no taxation of it — all these things have all benefitted from the growth of the Internet.

It’s very difficult to sell to totalitarianism in the Internet age. Do you want a free Internet? Do you want absolute control of your Internet life, or do you want to put that in the control of others? And I think that if people were to start taking away your freedoms online, you’d see a bloody revolution.

Q: People would fight for their online freedom.

A: Right. To many people, it’s everything. I think people take it for granted. I think people should be jumping up on top of their beds, thanking God every single day that this thing was invented.

Well, I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s pretty goddamn cool. And it’s definitely liberating.

General David Petraeus, writing the words that so many people have ached to hear, makes it plain what is expected of American military personnel—namely, honor:

10 May 2007

Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen serving in Multi-National Force—Iraq:

Our values and the laws governing warfare teach us to respect human dignity, maintain our integrity, and do what is right. Adherence to our values distinguishes us from our enemy. This fight depends on securing the population, which must understand that we—not our enemies—occupy the moral high ground. …

I fully appreciate the emotions that one experiences in Iraq. I also know firsthand the bonds between members of the “brotherhood of the close fight.” Seeing a fellow trooper killed by a barbaric enemy can spark frustration, anger, and a desire for immediate revenge. As hard as it might be, however, we must not let these emotions lead us—or our comrades in arms—to commit hasty, illegal actions. In the event that we witness or hear of such actions, we must not let our bonds prevent us from speaking up.

Some may argue that we would be more effective if we sanctioned torture or other expedient methods to obtain information from the enemy. They would be wrong. Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary.

We are, indeed, warriors. We train to kill our enemies. We are engaged in combat, we must pursue the enemy relentlessly, and we must be violent at times. What sets us apart from our enemies in this fight, however, is how we behave. In everything we do, we must observe the standards and values that dictate that we treat noncombatants and detainees with dignity and respect. While we are warriors, we are also all human beings.

Read the whole thing (at Balkanization, where Marty Lederman, thinking conspiratorially—and probably correctly—says he detects the hand of Cheney in Petraeus’s use of the qualifying adverb “frequently.” [ you have to follow the link and read the whole letter, because it's not in the passage I copied and pasted .]

 Whatever. What’s important about the letter is that, finally, it’s out there in black and white: “While we are warriors, we are also human beings.”

Soldiers kill. They’re engaged in combat. They pursue enemies relentlessly. They must be violent. They are warriors. They are also human beings.

Via Andrew Sullivan, who missed the parts of the letter about the warrior ethos and skipped right to the part about torture, and ludicrously and pompously titled his post “Petraeus Comes Through,” as if the honor of the American military and the American people had gone missing until Petraeus wrote and published these important and valuable words. (Does he believe that—abracadabra!—said lost honor will just as magically be restored?) Two hours later, a very impatient Sullivan, having seen no reaction from certain quarters in the blogosphere to Petraeus’s letter, uses it as a cudgel with which to bash his real enemies—his former pals on the right. So juvenile and so tiresome.

But Sullivan is now among those who are paid to provoke (at least I’m assuming he’s being paid, since his new Atlantic Online colleague Matthew Yglesias, who is also quite the provocateur, says he’s being paid).