This pretty much sums it all up:
Jonathan Bernstein thinks that this somewhat bizarre post by McArdle, in response to Julian Sanchez’s posts on the conservative cocoon, is an attempt to hijack the thread. Matt Steinglass engages respectfully. Chait goes after Jonah Goldberg, who leans heavily on Megan’s post….Friedersdorf also responds to Jonah. And to Megan.
What is it about the internets that makes sane, intelligent people think it is a good idea to engage with people who are crazier than shithouse rats?
JGabriel
Your asking us based on our obvious expertise?
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ruemara
The altruistic urge to kick some sense into them. SATSQ.
jeffreyw
I have a rather witty comment, but your question gives me pause…
DougJ
I thought it would be presumptuous to describe myself as “sane, intelligent”. I’m not sure that’s even true.
norbizness
Burn it all, start from scratch. In the alternative, quarantine all people for whom this is some sort of calling.
Ash Can
It works faster than Metamucil.
cleek
look at that conversation go! ping! pong! boing! bounce!
it’s like a giant pachinko machine of I Don’t Give A Fuck!
(odd that FireFox doesn’t know the word “boing”. and its first suggestion for correction is “bong”)
Svensker
Are shithouse rats crazy?
jl
Speaking of internet madness, I inadvertantly caused strikeout hell in the previous thread. Now I cannot edit my comment to get rid of it.
Please don’t sic Tunch on me. Please, Balloon-Juice Lords of the Universe.
eric
You besmirch shithouse rats everywhere.
this is a game to all of these people. it is not about reasoned discourse; it is about points scored and names dropped and other assorted Villager sundries.
Most of these people are immune from the harsh realities of our current world, so there is no real world urgency to their writings.
BenA
What’s depressing is all these people get paid to do this… We just do it for “fun.”
Morbo
@Svensker: Wouldn’t want to run into a brick shithouse rat in a dark alley.
Bill E Pilgrim
That McCardle piece was crazier than anything I’ve seen by any of these people. I can’t believe anyone is discussing it seriously.
Oh and both the airports here have closed because the sky has been blotted out by a black cloud of ash the size of Europe.
But you go on with your discussions about tea bags and people wearing funny hats and your petty bickering about dirty forks and all the rest of it, we’ll be fine.
norbizness
As for the question, I’m more worried about the constant links to shithouse rat-crazy people, as if there’s some sort of implied mutually assured destruction or violation of the Blogging Style Manual if one doesn’t.
The explanation based on self-interest makes the would-be left-of-center fiskers of craziness little more than remora fish on inexplicably popular reactionary idiots. That’s not something I’d want etched on my tombstone.
JGabriel
DougJ: I think I do it for the comedy. But I’m pretty sure I don’t exactly count as “sane” either.
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Martin
Fixed for DougJ. :)
licensed to kill time
Gads, do I have to read the “somewhat bizarre post by McArdle” to make sense of all this? I (do not) want to go to there /Liz Lemon
Bill Rutherford, Princeton Admissions
God, I’m sick of the rest of the Atlantic writers fellating Jane Galt, particularly Sully and TNC. “Somewhat bizarre”?! Sure, like the Sahara desert is “somewhat dry”
Prof. K&G
That’s just perfectly phrased. I’m all for discourse, but we’ve had the internet for a long time now, and there’s just really no excuse for feeding the trolls.
The number of opinions on the internet is so large, it’s hard to keep track of who has interesting things to say. So, if someone says “Bill Ayers wrote Obama’s book” or “barry soetero HUSSEIN watermelon hitler fartbama”, then rejoice! They’re either crazy, stupid, or trolls – you don’t have to pay attention to them.
beltane
Lets hope that Jonah Goldberg didn’t lean too hard on Megan’s post. He is rather heavy, and her post was rather flimsy. Bad combination.
JGabriel
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Damn, that is big.
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licensed to kill time
@jl:
I did that last week by using a hyphen before a word (NOT a del tag) and I have avoided using hyphens ever since. Abandon hyphens, all ye who comment here!
Calouste
@Bill E Pilgrim:
It’s the whole of Northern Europe that’s shutting down airspace. Ireland, the UK, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, Belgium and parts of France. I guess most transatlantic flights will be affected as well, at the minimum they have to take a far more southern (and thus longer) flight path.
Will
These people are almost all Very Serious Opinion Leaders at Very Serious Publications. Once upon a time, people at such places were the ones who drove all public discussion.
That’s fading, but we’re still living in the afterglow of those days.
jl
@licensed to kill time: Yes, that was the problem. I forgot about avoiding hyphens. And remembered to open the blog with Firefox (not MS) too late to edit the comment. It probably messed up the thread for everyone using MS. Sorry.
JGabriel
Svensker:
Nominally crazier than a cheese shop rat, one would assume.
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robertdsc
Teh yummy, she is.
MobiusKlein
We engage because sometimes we can rescue one or two from the cliff’s edge.
See our esteemed host, John Cole.
Martin
@licensed to kill time: Man, after Cole’s ban on sexist periods during the primaries, how much punctuation will be left to us?
MikeJ
People in yurp wanted Iceland to pay them back, well here it is bitches!
Comrade Jake
I’m not sure that pointing and mocking is quite the same thing as engaging.
Zifnab
It’s not a bad idea. It’s just… kinda… fruitless.
But then, you’re not really always arguing for the benefit of the author. You’re arguing for the benefit of the readership. If the author puts up a post that says, “President Bush cut the deficit by 20% and we should praise his deficit hawkishness”, the commenter isn’t stepping in to make the author change his mind on how great the President is, he’s stepping in to refute the ridiculous claim and set the audience’s record straight.
That’s why bloggers who don’t have comments sections are some of the most disappointing (I’m looking at you Andrew Sullivan), and deleting a blog comment is such a controversial act.
The purpose of blogging is to inform and debate. It’s not much of a debate if you refuse to address anyone too far out of your agreement zone. And the crazy shit house rats are usually the lowest hanging fruit when it comes time to correct misinformation.
Also, the crazy rats tend to have really fucking big microphones.
licensed to kill time
@Martin: wewillbetypinglikethisgoodbyeandthanksforallthejesuskeys
DougJ
I make that distinction too.
Steve Balboni dba T.R. Donoghue
Said the same thing earlier when I noticed people were still “debating” Marc Theissen. The guy is a sociopath and trying to parse his arguments is to give them far too much credit. Sometimes it’s better to just let the arguments of a sociopath stand alone, noted but without comment. People will recognize how despicable he is, if they don’t then we’re not going to change their minds.
Getting down in the dirt arguing the particulars of torture is nonsense, it’s wrong and those who advocate it are amoral monsters – enough said.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Calouste: Yeah I know, I’m in Paris, I didn’t realize our airports were included until just a while ago.
I once lost a trivia bet with my friend from some quiz we saw in a magazine I think, about whether Iceland is considered part of the continent of Europe. (It is)
Not that you can actually see the sky blotted out of course, but it did seem a little hazy today.
Brick Oven Bill
Me, I’m mostly looking for a lunch date with Rachel.
de stijl
Sadly, No!’s shorthand for this always serves me well: Don’t get off the boat.
On the odd occasions when I get off the boat (i.e., click on a link to an obviously crazy person’s blog) I inevitably end up getting mauled by the crazy shithouse rat-tigers.
DPirate
I wonder about this every time I come here…
Bob K
What is it about the internets that makes sane, intelligent people think it is a good idea to engage with people who are crazier than shithouse rats?
Maybe we’re sure that we can make them see reason. Not realizing that once Faux/Pravda gets into their brains there is no going back – They are now Rupert’s children – they are dead to us. Kind of like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”
Bill E Pilgrim
@DougJ:
For me and my fiancée it was, pretty much.
arguingwithsignposts
Man, Conor Friedersdorf shoots his argument in the head in the first sentence:
What kind of insane person says that?
Tonal Crow
You forgot the “Blogospheric navel-gazing” tag. I don’t really dig meta posts.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@Svensker:
Yes, it’s the smell that gets to them.
LuciaMia
Yup, see, who needs something crazy like funding volcano research?
Always wondered, why are shithouse rats crazier than the regular kind? You’d think they’d enjoy that milieu.
licensed to kill time
@Bill E Pilgrim:
The news about this was all that was on CNN Int’l this morning. They showed a clip of the pilot on a British plane in the 80’s that had all four engines shut down because of flying through volcanic ash. He said they basically just glided for 15 minutes, at which point he got on the loudspeaker and said:
British understatement of the year.
Bill Rutherford, Princeton Admissions
@42 – I’m hoping, praying to every God I know that Conor was being tongue-in-cheek.
Delia
It’s the persistent delusion that you with your brilliant words can knock some sense into the idiots. My first introduction to the vast internet traditions came well over a decade ago on a site devoted to a musical artist. There were many witty and intelligent discussions. There were also trolls. And it didn’t matter how many times people said “don’t feed the trolls,” they always got fed.
There needs to be a new internet law promulgated: that the discussion on any thread rapidly degenerates to the level of the craziest person to post on it.
Chemist
The linked post is representative of the attitude that eventually turned me off from Sully. I don’t care what one blogger said about another and therefore who is smarter or more creative. This type of behavior makes me think the blogosphere is rapidly becoming another, perhaps more insular version of the Media Village (if it ever was different).
Mike in NC
At least we can be thankful those two will never mate.
David in NY
@Bill E Pilgrim:
My prior attempt got eaten by a momentary server outage or something, but I don’t exactly see by what criterion this could be so. Geologically, Iceland is an independent and relatively new excretion of magma from the line at which one half of the Atlantic is unzipping from the other. I suppose that culturally it could be called part of Europe, but then, wouldn’t Canada be?
Quaker in a Basement
I used to think it would be fun to keep a Web site devoted to tracking these intramural conflicts (working title: PissingMatch.com), but then I realized I would have to care enough about such things to keep track of them.
Cerberus
Ok, serious hat on.
All right. Deep breath.
We do it for several reasons. First of all, because that is civilization. Part of human society is bat shit insane and learning how to deal with that bat shit insane subset of human existence is part of learning how to navigate society.
This also means that learning why people are bat shit insane is critical for learning how to circumnavigate them. Learning that what is driving say McArdle is a fear of thinking and a crippling narcissism are important lessons about bad-faith argumentation and libertarians that can save us energy and be more productive when we run into these people in “real life” and have to listen to their pointless whines when we are advocating for various political ideas.
Furthermore, dealing with them also allows us to educate. Not all of us, but a good number of us are probably related to educational fields or otherwise really big on expanding our personal knowledge base and educating others. We are intellectually curious people and as a good faith stance, we like to try and bring people up when we have the energy to and educate them about the world they inhabit.
We do this especially when we are or personally know someone of a minority group that is often targeted by aggressively ignorant people and know that education may help others to overcome biases or further radicalize against bigotry and casual discrimination.
In political actions, most progress is made on the street level, undoing the biases of history, removing the casual -isms that feed discriminatory law and bad social interactions and marginalizing the open bigots from any claim to “mainstream” society. Education is the backbone of any minority movement because getting out the truth is the only way to get pressure going against entrenched status quo and the aggressive privilege of those who refuse to change or acknowledge a world that’s different than their assumptions.
On that same level, by engaging, we learn new things as well. Sure, engaging the bat shit insane people ends up mostly just teaching us about bad faith arguments and how much religion and the like can fuck you up as a kid, but it can teach us more about ourselves as well, reminding us of why we fight and how people we love can seem to be really thick on a specific issue. Ways that may aid us in helping those loved ones.
It also teaches us about society as is and knowing where we are in reality is critical for knowing what needs to be fixed and also recognizing how far we come. If we believed we got rid of racism in the 60s, then the teabaggers seem out of left-field. But if we’ve been paying attention, we can be heartened that the out and out racists who used to have way more numbers have been reduced so even with the bait of a black president.
So, this is why we look into, respond, or otherwise deal with crazy people.
Now, on the flipside, engaging with crazy people can be really draining. The point of most conservatism is to stop history and progress and one of the fastest ways to do that is to drain all energy in those fighting for progress by having them chase arguments you don’t care about and fighting battles that have nothing to do with core reasons for antagonism. Trolling the hippies can piss them off and keep them from focusing their energy on organizing and actually changing things and leave them feel constantly attacked and thus constantly as a minority who should shut up in public.
Owning the public perception of public space is critical in the battle, because for the most part there’s 10% awesome people, 10% fuckers, and 80% mostly indifferent types for most everything. If the 10% awesome people assume that the 80% agree with the nutcase, then they’re going to feel alone and that’s easy to happen when that 10% fuckers is part of the culturally dominant group defending an existing privilege.
However, that’s another reason to engage the crazy.
They’re crazy because they assume ownership of everything. Everything has always gone their way because of privilege and they could safely assume that the “masses” always had their back when they shoved around anyone less privileged or lower on the hierarchal rank.
Daring to speak up, daring to speak up for (when they think they are in “safe company”) shatters that for them and begins to remind others that they don’t have to put up with this shit.
That’s a good habit to have in “real life” and it’s good to practice online, though we should all keep in mind not to burn ourselves out, because trolls are assholes and will piss you off to engage them.
But yeah, serious hat off.
Oingo Boingo Squid. Cilantro.
jacy
@arguingwithsignposts:
Friedersdorf may have some merit somewhere, but I’m not digging through to find it. If he wants to hear more from Jonah Goldberg, I think that marks him as someone who can’t really be counted on to show a) any intellectual discernment, and b) any goddam sense.
He also said on one of those posts that McMegan was “always worth reading.”
Um, no.
Cerberus
All that said, I fucking hate the concept of names.
I mean, I’m all down on giving the mad props to people who educate me or make really strong points. I’m an academic at heart, my heart’s all a-flutter for citations, but I hate the hierarchal idea some people have of “being in the ‘in-crowd’ by dropping the ‘big names'”.
I hated that shit in high-school, I hate it today. Drop a citation because the work is interesting, thought-provoking, leads to a point you want to make, don’t just drop a citation because you want to look like you totally party with the Top 20 set.
Nathanael
No, no, people do this in real life too. Sane, sensible people engage with lunatics *all the time* in real life.
It’s not just the Internet.
Still dunno why, though.
racrecir
Friedersdorf’s critique of Goldberg says more about Friedersdorf than it says about Goldberg.
James K. Polk, Esq.
Wow, Cerberus… thanks for your nifty insights.
Mark S.
Megan:
The Irish? What does this have to do with anything? Why did I read that post?
As for the matter at hand, talk to someone who gets their news from Fox and then talk to anyone else. You won’t think the two people live in the same country, or the same dimension for that matter.
Bill E Pilgrim
@David in NY: Yeah good questions, I remember being similarly surprised. Wikipedia says:
It seems to be considered geographically (as opposed to geologically) Europe, in that it’s at least partly situated on the plate that the rest of Europe is, whereas Greenland is entirely on the same one as North America.
It’s definitely considered part of Europe culturally, which is now more clear to me after many years here.
Church Lady
Doug, a lot of people here engage with you on a daily basis. Next question please.
Allan
Mr Chigger: Look, I came here to learn how to counteract epistemic closure.
Mr Anemone: A what?
Mr Chigger: I came here to learn how to counteract epistemic closure.
Mr Anemone: (sarcastically) Oh, ‘an epistemic closure’. Oh, I say, we are grand, aren’t we? (imitation posh accent) ‘Oh, oh, no more buttered scones for me, mater. I’m off to counteract an epistemic closure’.
h/t
Jamie
the Guud news is it might slow global warming for a bit.
melmoth
Are shithouse rats crazy? I never noticed.