One may be keen as mustard and still be a dishonest partisan hack.
Henley on the Jimmy Johnson rule: Those who claim they're too nice are never nice at all.
He's not as keen as mustard. I believe that he just does not know how to read.
This handwringing is too much. Acting like Israel or the U.S. has become too lilylivered to beat terrorists because we are attempting to have some regard for human life is rather like complaining that your exterminator isn't serious about killing the ants in your house because he didn't commit arson. We don't need to pull out the nukes to fight effectively or slaughter an entire country to beat a terrorist group.
Reynolds and Podhoretz are genocidal fucks, and should be shunned in civilized company. And I mean genocidal; here's Glenn, and J-Pod asks "Wasn't the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?" Which seems to indicate that his preferred course of action would've been to kill all Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35. (Seriously; does he think that if we had killed, say, 10% of them, the rest wouldn't all be fighting us?)
J-Pod also asks:
If Lebanon's 300-plus civilian casualties are already rocking the world, what if it would take 10,000 civilian casualties to finish off Hezbollah?
Gosh, there's an easy answer: THEN YOU AREN'T ALLOWED TO FINISH OFF HEZBOLLAH. Hezbollah has killed how many Israelis? By what calculus would it be OK to kill 10,000 Lebanese civilians to take care of that problem? Making an eighth of the Lebanese population refugees: also unacceptable.
Writing more than seven words qualifies as a long post for this guy. Is there any reason to think he gets past the first paragraph of any post he links to?
Reynolds and Podhoretz are genocidal fucks, and should be shunned in civilized company.
Agree entirely. These people do not have the same understanding of "American" or even "decency" that the rest of us do. They are simply bad people.
You can't say that unless you've been in a genocidal relationship yourself, Tim.
Matt, in fairness I think JPod hasn't really thought about the answers to the questions in his column; I think he's just musing stupidly.
There have been a lot of trial balloons up about 1.) thinking about a scorched-earth policy in the Middle East and 2.) militarizing American society to a much greater extent, by instituting a draft and suppressing dissent. When discussed, the question is always whether it can be pulled off, not whether it's a good idea.
These baloons ar eput up by "marginal" PNAC types -- Ledeen et al. (We have to remember that "marginal" doesn't mean what we think it does. Not marginal = Ledeen, Falwell, Podhoretz. Marginal = us.)
Rove and Bush have a very successful strategy of leveraging very small margins of victory into enormous policy changes. World War III is next on the list. The fact that it will be hard to pull off, given public opinion right now, will not faze them. They thrive on this kind of challenge.
If Glenn or J-Pod showed up in comments regularly, everybody would be up in arms about their being called "genocidal fucks," or about certain commenters' apparent unwillingness to be open to being convinced to embrace genocidal fuckhood.
I think JPod hasn't really thought about the answers to the questions in his column; I think he's just musing stupidly.
Oh, Labs, you really are Pollyanna, aren't you?
There's genocidal fucks, and then there's genocidal fucks.
Yes, because we never have heated discussions on Unfogged, Adam.
If you commit genocide, sometimes it's better not to reveal it. Especially if you have kids.
If Glenn or J-Pod showed up in comments regularly, everybody would be up in arms about their being called "genocidal fucks," or about certain commenters' apparent unwillingness to be open to being convinced to embrace genocidal fuckhood.
This is why it's bad to bond with someone in a comment section. Internet camaraderie encourages us to go soft on people we might otherwise find, quite rightly, morally reprehensible.
Does this mean I get to make fun of you in good conscience, SJ?
Podhoretz's programming is stuck on the Sneering Rhetorical Question sub-routine of Wingnut XP. Someone should hit him on the back of his head to jar him out of his loop, so he can proceed into Preposterously Indignant Victimhood, or Barely-Veiled Threat of Jackboots, or Irrelevant Reference To Jane Fonda.
Edit:
These balloons are put up by "marginal" PNAC types -- Ledeen et al. (We have to remember that "marginal" doesn't mean what we think it means. "Not marginal" = Ledeen, Falwell, Podhoretz. "Marginal" = us.)
Thank you. It was bugging me.
Adam and I were just talking about Unfogged's hatred-deprivation, which stands in sharp contrast to Adam's own Christian site, with its institutionalized weekly hatred.
15: If you think I'm morally reprehensible, go for it.
Emerson, I would have said that the militarization of American culture was already underway, in a softer sense than the specific measures you mention. Billmon's been on about it since 2003, with coverage of Christian-Soldier conventions to boot.
I can't really concentrate on the phenomenon too long, though I know that's cowardly of me; it does worry me.
SJ is definitely prehensible, but doing it twice would be disproportionate.
Limited agreement with 14. Bonding with people is good in general and a part of human flourishing. But it's important not to let that mean going soft on their reprehensible positions.
A big part of the problem with the media, I think, is that non-partisan media folk have bonded with power players and just can't bring themselves to see the awful things they do. Hence Howie Kurtz calling Limbaugh mainstream and basically a teddy bear, and Ann Coulter not being shunned after repeatedly calling for murder, and anyone ever reprinting anything that anyone in the Bush Adminstration says.
Cala, Obviously heated discussions happen, but always accompanied by "someone" policing the appropriate level of courtesy owed to those advocating reprehensible things.
23 et al.:
Look: when Reagan was elected, I thought he was the sole champion of democracy's survival in a world otherwise doomed. Yes, I was in middle school at the time; but I'd been reading the newspapers for nearly a decade, so that's no excuse. If kind and rational people hadn't been willing to argue with me until I saw for myself that I was embracing a nearly clueless would-be dictator, I might be a Republican still.
When we say of our opponents that they must submit to the rightness of our moral calculus or be judged evil, we merely perpetuate the same blindly metastatic evangelism that has poisoned so much of the Christian faith.
I understand that there is a real urgency to debates that involve the potential deaths of innocents and even graver consequence. I'm not saying we should forego (sp?) opprobrium entirely, especially in response to those directly backed by powers (in the Administration or elsewhere) that have frankly oppressive or malicious agendas. BUT: absolute refusal to engage in meaningful dialogue with those whose moral calculus differs from our own is exactly the same as the position that makes the Bush Doctrine an incipient justification for genocide.
23,24: Can't we say something like:
"Look, you genocidal fuck, I have a number of reasoned arguments to convice you, to wit... [etc]"
And btw: Yes, I am entirely willing to keep making this argument every damn week. If a smart and diverse community like the Mineshaft can't deal with discussion of moral issues, then the world is probably doomed after all.
Would "discussion of moral issues" mean not telling people who advocate mass murder of civilians that it is reprehensible to do so? Is that a refusal to engage in meaningful dialogue with people whose moral calculus differs from mine?
I maintain that certain views are absolutely impermissible, and that society suffers greatly because people who know how reprehensible these views are treat them as acceptable and worthy of debate.
Moral calculus confuses me. I'm never certain which books of Nicomachean Ethics need to be integrated, and which books need to be differentiated.
29: Replace "mass murder of civilians" with "abortion" or "gay marriage" and you'd find a bunch of people you don't like applauding your sentiment. I try to keep in mind that this is the country that holds up WWII as a grand moral achievement. It involved a huge amount of mass murder of civilians.
25:
Not to hijack the thread, but yes, I support pungency of expression in support of priciples. Ridicule has its purposes & is cracking good fun. I just believe it's important to fight fair. Once the need to fight fair goes by the wayside, it's no long journey to utter barbarism.
For example: JPod's apparent underlying position (that we can win this thing if we just start killing indiscriminately) is indeed reprehensible. But that's obvious to us because we see the inevitable consequence: the USA as a true Evil Empire.
Nevertheless, his actual evaluation is not entirely dim-witted: however much wrong has been done by the Administration (or the state of Israel), it still appears that at least some of the opponents are willing to do worse. I believe that if our democracy (and Israel's?) can be motivated, we must demand that our leaders give more than lip service to the goal of settling differences through non-violent means. If the only way to preserve one's "way of life" is through continuing acts of brutality, then any escalation promotes a spiral that can only end one way.
32:
"win this thing" should totally have been in scare quotes.
But there's a lot of people who just aren't going to change their minds and with whom debate is fairly useless. I was a teenage right-winger, too; it happens, you grow out of it. That's different from being Glenn Reynolds or John Podhoretz or James Lileks. We're living in extreme times. What can I say to a well-informed, internet-savvy Republican to convince them not to be a Republican this far into the second Bush administration? They know about torture, they know about the war, they know about the NSA and the "unitary executive" and the rest of it, and they either think it's not a big deal or they reject the facts or they think it's great. At some point constructive debate becomes impossible because you're simply dealing with wildly different worldviews.
14 is wrong. You can't really bond with people who are incapable of self-deprecation. Do the bloggers in question have that capabitily?
32: I'm not getting his underlying facts. It looks like he's arguing that if one side of the war is brutal and the other is restrained, the restrained side will always lose. But I doubt this as a generalization about military history. At least I'd like to hear Rob Farley's opinion.
31: They're wrong, though. That makes a difference. Seriously, it's good to be able to persuade people, but the people I find arguing on the internet just aren't open to being persuaded about this. Do we have to give a respectful hearing to pro-slavery folks? To folks who think that the Jews are responsible for the majority of the wickedness in the world? To folks who think that the media are concealing the good news in Iraq, and so are traitorous and should be shot? There needs to be a medium between total closed-mindedness and leaping halfway into the abyss. Your approach lends itself too much to having people piss in your face and convincing yourself that it's raining.
The thing that burns me up is that people speak to John Yoo. He's in Berkeley, he argued that the president has the power to crush a child's testicles if he deems it necessary to fight terror, if he can't at least be informally shunned then everyone can be totally confident that their crimes won't have repercussions.
34 is right of course, & I realize we've treaded? trodden? this ground before. But we're not debating with JPod here; we're debating about JPod. As suggested in a thread I'm not clever enough to look up, it's people who express agreement with the JPod column who are (potentially) capable of participating in actual debate. That's why it's important to accompany our earthier sentiments with some indication of the principles at stake. Outright trolls can be identified by their own style of argument easily enough.
Most Americans hate thinking about politics (even many who talk about politics all the time). Hell, most Americans hate thinking altogether. We live in dangerous times; winning elections is not enough, especially if we do it merely by getting our opponents so disgusted with the state of things that they stay home. That's the Karl Rove strategy, and last I checked it was destroying our democracy. We have to win people over to support our principles, and that's not as easy as getting someone to listen to a new band. Changing their political loyalty may require going against decades of indoctrination and generations of family tradition.
A part of me wonders: would Bush gotten enough votes to win make off with the 2004 election if the American mainstream hadn't internalized the idea that antiwar citizens "irrationally hate" the Administration?
When I hear someone say "You're either with us or against us" as a means of avoiding an argument, I assume the worst until persuaded otherwise. If I know what you believe, of course I'll be either with you or against you; if you don't feel the need to say what you believe, I'll assume you're just a bully.
("You" in the preceding paragraph is used generally for purposes of argument, not for singling out anybody in the thread.)
HaHa! Apparently I am The Threadkiller! Rahhhh!
38 -- sorry, I'm claiming that distinction for myself.
I tend to figure that people posting in comments on Unfogged are posting because either a) they agree with the topic, or b) they disagree with the topic, but are at least open to being persuaded. Otherwise, I can't see why they'd be posting on a political thread on this blog, and I don't think Reynolds or jPod would get a welcome reception here.
I'll admit that my first response is to try to figure out what that person is thinking rather than just blatantly condemn or assume the other side is just morally bankrupt and I've liked Unfogged for allowing that to happen. There's plenty of places to go 'red meat! RARARARAR. wave flag! burn flag! EAT flag.'
Anyhow, I'm not sure what prompted this. Adam, you've called me out personally on this before, so if by 'someone' you meant 'Cala', just say so and bear in mind that I don't actually get a say beyond my opinion in what others are allowed to post.
If you meant that Reynolds' position is eminently reasonable and we'd agree with him if we liked him, I think you're nuts.
One of the best things about the archiving of old threads was that it ended once and for all the "Who can post last on 'Innocence'?" contest.
(Why am I being so hurtful lately?)
they disagree with the topic, but are at least open to being persuaded.
After the 75th argument about whether Saddam was a few years from getting nuclear weapons, I begin to look for a tertium quid.
41 -- I am dreading the day, now fast-approaching, when I will no longer be able to post clown porn poetry.
BUT: absolute refusal to engage in meaningful dialogue with those whose moral calculus differs from our own is exactly the same as the position that makes the Bush Doctrine an incipient justification for genocide.
No, it isn't. Think about what you said and get back to me.
Sometimes you're dealing with well-meaning people who are misinformed, and you should be patient with them. Other times you are dealing with a well-informed person who is firmly determined to do something you regard as horrible.
Everyone has their limits as to what is permissible discussion. For example, I think that for everyone here "No Israelis, no problem" is not a permissible discussion point -- someone who said that would be shunned and probably banned. "No Arabs, no problem" should be equally impermissible, but many on the right come very close to that. (They actually say something like that, and then back off saying "just kidding, ha ha", but their **actual** policy proposals are bloodthirsty too).
39:
Fuck! You clown!
42:
My schoolboy Latin fails me. But I grasp your point I think, & I understand that patience has its limits. Sometimes we have to say to ourselves, "I will not be this person's teacher today." And that's O.K. Why? Because we're good enough, we...[slaps self upside head]
Sorry, tertium quid means "third alternative" (to "agree" and "open to persuasion"). I don't know any Latin other than the parts that have become philosophy jargon.
It's not wrong to not agree and not be open to persuasion; ogged wasn't going to wi anyone over here. There are other cases where I think the underlying position is morally wrong, but I mostly I just wanted to counterexample Cala.
Agree with Emerson that there are settled questions, and that we ought to be able to simply ignore those who are trying to revive settled questions. The problem is that the revivers won the last two Presidential elections. So we've got to engage with someone on the other side.
43: I am dreading the day, now fast-approaching, when I will no longer be able to post clown porn poetry.
I expect I'll just keep going anyway, writing them on little pieces of paper and nailing them up around the neighborhood, or handing them out on the subway, until someone comes to arrest me.
the revivers won the last two Presidential elections.
One of two. But your larger point is correct.
44:
We have to avoid confusing policies with principles. My point is that some (i.e., not all, but some) people advocate policies that seem expedient, because those people fail to understand the implications of the policy. Assuming every supporter of a given policy is Eeevil effectively guarantees that any attempt to end the policy requires disempowering (less politely: beating down) those who support it. Sometimes that's the case, as with Naziism; but it's worst-case, not first-case, thinking.
In other words: where possible, I believe its best to ask those who have a different moral calculus than mine to be willing to check their math. That's my general political philosophy, such as it is.
I understand the specific situation on the ground in Lebanon is a crisis, but I'm not there, and nobody likely to listen to me has any actual pull with the Powers That Be. One way or another, the Crisis in Israfghyianon... seems forever to abate and then boil over anew; willingness to work toward better understanding seems better to me than giving up in disgust or giving myself a stroke. YMMV.
we've got to engage with someone on the other side
I have lately been wondering if this is true. I have gotten awfully tired of explaining that there are not actually two sides to global warming, that you can think Saddam was a baddie and still not support the war we launched, that.... well.
I think that the reason I'm tired is I feel there's no support from the people whose job it is actually to make these points---you know, the Democratic Party.
So I wonder if our energy isn't better spent talking to the people allegedly on our side and getting them to be actually on our side.
About 50% don't vote. A lot of the Republican success comes from a masterful high-tech strategy which combines get-our-the-vote and voter suppression. Democrats have been moving to the right to appeal to the voters for at least 18 years now, when what they should have been doing is getting their message out and finding new voters. A friend of mine in the biz say that the Republican operation is exponentionally better than the Democratic operation.
Reynolds' representation of Josh's position seems seriously dishonest to me.
Well, he's a seriously dishonest person. What exactly do you expect from him?
Josh Marshall not pleased at all, calls Reynolds out and cites Labs getting his back.
Objectively pro-awesome! I'm glad Josh called Reynolds on that, apart from the linking. It's totally BS on Reynolds' part. And his dean thinks that's scholarship?
Doc Marshall wrote about Reynolds:
"...what he claimed I did was call for the mass and indiscriminate killing of civilians at the outset of the Iraq War, ..."
I'm sorry, that's hyperventilating hysteria - willful and dishonest. In short, bullshit. It's a gross mischaracterization of what Marshal originally said - which I read at the time.
I've got my maple syrup ready. Also I've got some apricot jam for the croissants. Mmm, pastry & baked goods.
Dude, you're 'fact-checking their asses'! Advantage, blogosphere! (Well, disadvantage also blogosphere, but the point holds.)
Instaputz doesn't like declarative sentences. They're so...declarative.
Yes! Crepes! I don't have to fix dinner now! Thanks, Labs!
They never give us crepes. Hell, I haven't even seen one muffin out of this.
Fuck, that means I'd better go figure out what I'm going to cook then.
Reynolds is appallingly mendacious.
(a) So what if the post linked contained a lengthy in-context quote? His new post said outright that Marshall was worried that we weren't killing enough civilians. That's an insane misrepresentation.
(b) "Lengthy In-context quote" doesn't seem to mean "containing enough context that you can tell what Marshall's position is." Reynolds never quoted the part where Marshall said "we're rightly unwilling" to kill lots of civilians.
(c) The burden is on Reynolds to exhibit basic reading comprehension the first time, not on Marshall to correct him when he doesn't.
(d) The burden is especially on Reynolds to go back and read Marshall's post now. It would make clear that Marshall has been saying this all along, not that he's "more worried about sounding bellicose." In March 2003 Marshall was against the war. He's not as intellectually dishonest as Reynolds.
(e) Reynolds does this all the time. Somehow the ass-fact-checking nature of the blogosphere has left his popularity intact.
Yeah, I didn't note the Glennuendo in the update (he must've agreed then, because he never said he didn't) but it's pretty weak.
Seriously, Matt, could you imagine if we tried this in articles? Scholarship my ass.
Somehow the ass-fact-checking nature of the blogosphere has left his popularity intact.
Has there ever been a single prominent blogger within the Self-Correcting Blogosphere that's taken a serious hit in popularity because of intellectual dishonesty or consistent misrepresentation of facts? I see the trophy wall proudly hung with the scalps of various Dan Ratherses, but there's not a single Glenn Reynolds up there.
65: Didn't someone on the right who had attacked Kos about a disclosed consulting relationship just admit that he was being paid under the table to blog? And no one on the right could say anything other than, "It was probably not a good thing, but he owned up to it manfully." More or less as they did with BenDo.
The right has a very different moral code than the rest of us. It's a Red thing, and you wouldn't understand.
Wait, is the troll saying that Marshall's characterization of Reynolds' paraphrase of Marshall is hyperventilatingly dishonest because it is a gross mischaracterization of what Marshall originally said? I think he's skipping a couple of steps.
There's a reason why the term 'disenglennuous' exists. It's because he's perpetrated that sleazy brand of horseshit for far too long, and deserves never to be mentioned without that being mentioned too. Ideally, it should be thrown in his smug fuckhead face on Howie Kurtz's show, for maximum effect.
Also, as long as we're on the subject of faux-centrist pundits who invariably spout Republican talking points, could it be any more obvious that the current driving force behind Mickey Kaus's punditry is the urgent need to get into Ann Coulter's pants?
Indeed, that is what the wee troll says, CA. This is what happens when they forget to bring dessert; low blood sugar levels cause poor typing.
65: Who is going to fire a blogger? Aren't we mostly self-employed (in our blogging capacity, I mean).
I suppose the proper analogy would be a massive dropoff in readership and linkage.
Who is going to fire a blogger?
That's the whole point. Reynolds and various other blog evangelists - more often on the right than on the left - have maintained that blogs are superior to standard media because the blogosphere is "self-correcting," i.e., that blogs stay more accurate and honest than the dreaded MSM because other blogs keep them honest (through delinking and fact-checking of asses and so forth). But this turns out to be crap, because at least in the political blogosphere, bloggers look out for their own more than they police their own side, so you're not going to see, for example, Hugh Hewitt telling people to stop reading Instapundit. So there's much less accountability, and Glenn Reynolds can be as much of a dishonest gasbag as he wants without really losing his status as a heavily-trafficked, widely-read eight hundred pound blog gorilla.
M/ac Di/va/J. of Sil/ver R/ights lost a lot of readership over some incidents that included some misrepresentation of facts. Sean-Paul Kelly took a big hit for plagiarizing Stratfor reports at the beginning of the Gulf War. I was going to say Ben Domenech, but it looks like he's still on the masthead at RedState. There may a case on the right of someone taking a hit for intellectual dishonesty as opposed to political disloyalty, I don't follow them enough to know.
But overall 73 is right, right, right.
You've got to understand, Glenn doesn't usually read the stuff he links to -- he just accepts what the people who send him e-mails about it say.
Back a couple of years ago when I used to routinely rake him over the coals about the inaccurate and disingenuous stuff he posted about lefty bloggers, it became very obvious early on that he seldom read the stuff he linked to, he just took some knuckle-dragger's word for it.
How do you think he puts up so many posts? He doesn't read everything he links to, that would be impossible.
And yes, it's lazy and irresponsible. It always has been and always will be.
And Insty has always been lazy and irresponsible. From the very beginning to the end. Apparently being a law professor doesn't really take that much time. He still hasn't published a book by himself after all. At my little regional teaching university we have to publish a book for tenure and promotion. Apparently my little regional teaching university is more rigorous than the UTK law school is as far as tenure and promotion requirements are concerned.
Boy and if Glenn's dean accepts blogging as scholarship, he's a bigger fool than Insty.
74: I don't think Ben Domenech would fit anyway. He didn't get burned as an independent blogger; he got fired by the Washington Post when it became clear he had plagiarized material in the past. His fellow RedStaters supported him throughout it all, and only when Domenech admitted that he'd swiped material did they change their tune from "Our boy's getting smeared!" to "Tough luck, old son - but good on you for manning up to it!"
You're right on the others, though, which I'd pretty much forgotten about. But on the whole the blogosphere is very lax in actually enforcing its storied online integrity.
73: The thing is, though, that political blogs in particular mostly preach to the choir. Which, if talk radio is any indication, means that no one cares about accuracy.
Yeah, if Domenech had been bounced from RedState there might be a case for him as an example. Or maybe only if some of his pals had actually evaluated the evidence before he got fired and admitted what he'd done. The others, I consider it a minor sickness that I can remember them. (And I think Mac/J only got taken down when she started going after he co-bloggers.)
Certainly the blogosphere is very far from my epistemologically ideal society where people keep track of the truth of what other people have said, and discount what they say accordingly.
hey commie,
gun rights ARE civil rights. at least in this country.
anon: House style here is to preface your comment with the comment number it's responding to, so we can figure out what the hell you're talking about. And to bring pastry.
Ah, I see it there in the main post. Most people don't use "civil rights" to mean "the rights enumerated in the Constitution," otherwise the phrase "civil rights for gays" would be pretty much meaningless. And there are lots of good arguments against employment discrimination that don't extend to unlimited gun ownership. Which is why Reynolds often fails to make sense, but now I'm just repeating Labs.