This is the definitive piece on Instapundit’s methods over the years, but I have to wonder why Conor even bothered. If Reynolds even addresses it, it will be to get pissy that Conor stated he “coddle the movement conservative’s ideological preconceptions,” on the grounds that everyone knows he isn’t a conservative, he’s a libertarian. HAHAHAHAHA. It is still funny to write that.
And then, after he whines about that, he’ll probably link to one of the knuckledraggers he is in bed with these days, who will no doubt call Friedersdorf a fag or not a true conservative (depending on whether Insty decides to go with Riehl or the Other McCain). But of course Insty doesn’t think that! He was just linking to deserve opinions!
Yutsano
Can we take this post to mean you’ve arrived safely at your destination?
Mike Kay
Did tunch post this?
Punchy
Haven’t a fucking clue what any of this means, who these people are, and why it’s worth 5 “HA”s.
arguingwithsignposts
Instapundit is ironic, because, although he’s insta, he’s very rarely a pundit. Linker, not a thinker.
Dork
Cole’s bombed on Jaegermiester. No other explanation.
Steeplejack
@Yutsano:
Well, I have just arrived safely at my destination, i.e., home at the man-cave, after a long day at work and a bitter arctic hike each way.
Just now preparing to go +1. And maybe Mexican food later, if a certain friend calls. Ah . . .
Er, on topic: Isn’t Conor Friedersdorf one of Sullivan’s vacation fill-in minions? He sounds unusually lucid in the piece Cole links above. Really gets at what irritates me about Reynolds:
jeffreyw
Good evening sir.
General Winfield Stuck
I do hope no one expects us to read a thousand words, more or less, but a lot, toward understanding the inner workings of this human’s neural net. — when a single word would describe in full.
Weasel
arguingwithsignposts
My one critique is that Friedersdorf takes 2,500 words (! ! !) to say what could have been said in less than 1,000. It’s like he goes to the extreme to be the anti-Instapundit. Really, do we care that you wrote a humor magazine in college? Didn’t everyone?
Uriel
From the link:
For some reason, when I look up the phrase “definitive piece,” I’m not finding “counterfactual crazy-talk” as a definition.
Would this be a regionally specific idiom of some sort?
A Mom Anon
OT: I found a puppy at the county animal shelter yesterday. I am hopelessly and madly in love. I cried the whole way home,since I couldn’t take her with me and have to wait. When I had to put her back in her kennel she cried so much,it was awful.
I went there with the full intent of adopting an older dog. And then,I rounded the corner in the shelter and there she was.The sweetest little 2 month old German Shepard mix. All alone in this big cold kennel,scared and sad. I spent the maximum time they’d let me spend alone with her in the quiet room they use for introductions,they had to ask me to leave,lol. I am first on the list to adopt her,I have to be at the shelter at 9:30 am on Wednesday the 13th to get her or she goes to the next person on the list. I guess the shelter has to wait a certain number of days before they officially “own” the dog to allow it to be adopted out.
I couldn’t sleep last night,and I decided to name her Abby this morning. I do believe I have been smitten by a baby girl doggie. Oh yes,big time. I love her,unconditionally.
Dr. I. F. Stone
Ahh. Now I understand the reason for all those links that Sully gives him.
jeffreyw
@A Mom Anon: Yay!!!!!!!
Yutsano
@A Mom Anon: AWWW!! Dammit now my rescue kitteh is demanding attention.
Tom Hilton
He just about lost me at “someone who kept a relatively even keel in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks”. Even keel compared to what–the Titanic?
Funkhauser
@Uriel: I too stopped reading right there. No sense going farther.
Svensker
@Tom Hilton:
Ha ha ha.
Notorious P.A.T.
@A Mom Anon:
Sounds like a perfect match!
jacy
Ha – Conor praises Reynolds for “links to great…Megan McArdle stories…”
Everybody knows those don’t exist.
General Winfield Stuck
@A Mom Anon:
Oh Mom anom, so happy for ya! They capture your heart in no time flat. !!
geg6
Yay for A Mom Anon and Abby! She sounds adorable and after the year you’ve had, this sounds like things are looking up.
Comrade Luke
Is instapundit shagging conservative blogchicks, or is “in bed” a metaphor?
DougJ
Conor Friederwhatever has really come around. He did a nice job at Sully’s when he filled in recently.
Bill Rutherford, Princeton Admissions
I know – I was gonna ask for an example in the comments, but didn’t feel like registering or using my Facebook account.
Bill Rutherford, Princeton Admissions
Yeah, he’s by far the best of Sully’s fill-ins.
Suderman being the worst, natch.
freelancer
@Bill Rutherford, Princeton Admissions:
I disagree. Pat and Chris seem to have the tone of the site down pretty pat, but whether or not Conor F has improved, I have no idea, thanks to his August performance, I skip his writing entirely.
Sully did bring on Andrew Sprung in his most recent absence and his material wasn’t half bad.
Bill Rutherford, Princeton Admissions
I don’t remember his August work, but it couldn’t have been worse than Ross fucking Douthat whining about pro-choice bias in the liberal media.
schrodinger's cat
Who is this Instapundit and why should I care?
freelancer
@Bill Rutherford, Princeton Admissions:
I would have stopped reading Sullivan altogether if he let Douthat guest-post.
Demo Woman
@A Mom Anon: Congrats! Can you visit her between now and the 13th? If you have any questions about raising her, I’m sure the gang here can help.
schrodinger's cat
@A Mom Anon: Aawwthat so sweet, we can has pictures of the new puppeh, when you get her?
Bill Rutherford, Princeton Admissions
@freelancer –
He did. Several years ago. Possibly before Douthat had his own blog at The Atlantic.
And he’s been pimping Douthat’s tripe ever since then, which is almost as bad.
A Mom Anon
@Demo Woman: I was going to go back today but the road in front of my house was too icy (the Teenager and I spent the afternoon watching cars slide into each other out front). Things are supposed to clear up by Sunday,I’m going back then to see her. It’s just so hard to leave her there.
A Mom Anon
@schrodinger’s cat: Yep,I’ll figure something out so you guys can see her. Teh Cute is strong with this one,lol.
CJ
@jacy:
Heh, indeed.
Mike in NC
Fuck Instaputz, and may his 2010 be miserable in every respect.
(+2 and packing for a funeral on Long Island this weekend)
deadrody
Heh, indeed. You know your are a leftard when you find Glenn Reynolds too far to the right.
Ah the joke that is Balloon Juice!
Clark
He’s too kind to Reynolds, who’s been nothing more than a hack for the last five or six years.
deadrody
And, hey Mike, stay classy!
handy
@schrodinger’s cat:
exactly.
OriGuy
@deadrody: Are you confusing Glenn Reynolds with Glen Greenwald? Or are you trolling?
AhabTRuler
@General Winfield Stuck: Thank you for saying so directly in one word what I was struggling to put into a couple dozen.
AhabTRuler
@Tom Hilton: This is an even keel too.
burnspbesq
@A Mom Anon:
Congratulations. Lucky puppeh.
burnspbesq
Glenn Reynolds. Bruce Pearl.
All you need to know about the University of Tennessee.
Yutsano
@A Mom Anon: German shepherd puppehs are known for being strong in teh cuteness. Granted my parents’ border collie ranks right up there, but they’re cute little balls of fluff when young.
Darkrose
@A Mom Anon: Awesome! I’ll keep crossable things crossed for you.
Cat Lady
@DougJ:
He’s thoughtful, which means he’s going to eventually find his way over to here. All those words he uses on an unworthy subject need to be put to better use.
Darryl
I’ll have to take Conor’s word for it. My only exposure to Reynolds is Instapundit, and the passive-aggression there is so nauseating and immature that I quit reading it several years ago. Actually, come to think of it, I guess I have indirect exposure to him through his wife, Dr. Helen, and her thoroughly moronic advocacy of Going Galt last year, an activity that she never actually performed, because while she may talk that stupid, she’s not going to actually live that stupid.
M. Bouffant
Mr. Cole:
Should that be “diverse opinions” in your last sentence?
Cat Lady: Well, Conor found his way to Fire Megan McArdle, where I had linked to his piece as an illustration of how McA. is just as lame as Insty, using a quote from Conor & applying it to her rather than Reynolds.
He was passive-aggressive, oddly enough. Well, mostly aggressive, but passively.
Darryl
brevity is the soul of wit.
(where wit means ‘intelligence’, not ‘humor’)
There used to be a really dumb guy on the internets, named Steven Den Beste, who would write 17,000 word pieces about, for instance, why invading Iraq was going to be the greatest thing since the invention of chocolate ice cream, and the stupidity of the analysis was doubly-compounded by how many dozens of pages it took him to explain himself. It didn’t just waste your time, it wasted a lot of your time.
Mike in NC
He obviously deserves a permanent wing in the George W. Bush Presidential Library!
Darryl
George W. Bush, while I think he was a terrible president, is much smarter than Den Beste. I would trust Bush to look after my dog for a week (though not much more than that), while Den Beste would write a 5,000-word piece on how he fed my dog chocolate and it died and so it must have been a french liberal african female dog, with the various weaknesses all those adjectives imply.
Clark
“Glenn Reynolds. Bruce Pearl.
All you need to know about the University of Tennessee.”
I’m not sure what this is supposed to mean, but trust me–nobody, and I mean nobody at UT knows or gives a shit about Glenn Reynolds. He was interviewed on a local station a few years back about a smoking ban; not because he was a famous pundit, but because he was some schmuck coming out of a restaurant.
Cat Lady
@M. Bouffant:
Heh. Passively aggressive indeedy, or aggressively passive indeedy. Still, he’s young, and look how long it took Cole to figure this shit out.
mclaren
Why is anyone making a big deal about this? Why is anyone acting as though Glenn Reynolds is a serious thinker?
Glenn Reynolds is a crackpot — he’s just a laconic crackpot.
Reynolds is no different from the wild-eyed kooks who stand on the street corner waving 500-page manifestos linking UFO abductions with the gold standard and fluoridation in the water supply. Reynolds merely realized that the best way to conceal the crackpot nature of the crap he’s spewing is to be really really brief.
Am I being too harsh?
Am I reading things into Reynolds’ posts?
Nope, just examine the evidence.
Everything that comes out of Glenn Reynolds’ mouth is crackpot nonsense. He’s just wily enough to reduce his crackpot nonsense to single word posts, so most people get bamboozled and think “Wow, this guy is really terse, he must be saying something profound…not the insane nonsense it seems like he’s saying.
Uh..no. Glenn Reynolds really is spewing insane nonsense.
Just take a look at Reynolds’ claims:
When a reporter asked Gelnn Reynolds what America should do in Iraq, he responded, “Win.”
Great. That’s insane gibberish. That’s like a guy who’s in a plane that’s about to crah into the ground and another passenger scream, “My GOD, WHAT DO WE DO???” and you respond “Stop falling.”
Yeah, great, genius. How do you do that? Oh, wait — you don’t have a fucking clue. Because you’re a crackpot. You’re spouting ignorant nonsense.
Or take the example where Glenn Reynolds opined that the solution to high oil prices was to invade the middle east and force them to pump more oil.
Hey, moron — they’re already pumping as much oil as fast as they can. It’s called “Peak Oil,” you ignorant fool.
I just don’t understand the respect accord this Instapundit clown. Sure, he’s a tenured law professor — wake up, folks! Expertise is very narrow in modern society and does not transfer outside its native domain. Just because some guy knows a lot about the law doesn’t mean he knows anything about any other subject. Linus Pauling was a Nobel prize winning physical chemist but when he published a possible structure for DNA he made a damn fool of himself, because Pauling literally wrote the book on quantum chemistry, but he didn’t know a goddamn thing about biology.
Same deal with Glenn Reynolds. Reynolds knows lots about the law…but the evidence shows overwhelmingly that he doesn’t know shit from shinola about global warming, or Peak Oil, or military strategy, or economics, or any of the other complicated and serious subjects about which Reynolds repeatedly demonstrates his pervasive lack of basic knowledge.
The guy is an ignorant kook (outside of the law — a subject on which he never posts as Instapundit) and every word out of his mouth proves it. Whenever someone points out a serious problem in the real world (Peak Oil, global warming, government gridlock, Wall Street corruption, declining middle class, out-of-control military spending), Glenn Reynolds prematurely ejaculates a one-word or two-word answer that’s simple, pithy, humorous and completely insane.
How is that different from the Laffer Curve?
How is that different from chanting “Drill, baby, dill!” ?
How is that different from saying we can solve all America’s problems by stopping science teachers from teaching Darwin in the classroom?
How are Glenn Reynolds’ one-word crackpot nonsense answers to the world’s serious and complicated problems any different from the kook on the streetcorner who rants about the protocols of the elders of Zion, or the homeless guy sleeping on the steam grate who answers “UFOs” when you ask why he’s homeless?
The kook on the streetcorner just uses more words than Glenn Reynolds. But the end result is the same, isn’t it?
Insty
Because it is. Heh.
Meanderthal
The article rather creepily swaps between regret-tinged condemnation of Instamoron’s style, and masturbatory hero-worship.
Statistically, I guess someone would.
satch
For a guy who (allegedly) wrote a humor magazine whose punchlines had to be pithy, why did we have to wade through 2500 turgid words before getting to the punchline: “I sure miss what Instapundit used to be”. Heh, or rather, WOWinfuckingdeed!
besteaster
What’s funny about that Friersdorf piece is that he can barely get his criticism of Reynolds out for the fact that he’s so extravagently praising the magnificent aspects of the glorious Instapundit intelligence and ouvre.
You’d think from Conor’s piece that Instapundit is actually some sort of legitimately serious thinker and intellectual, and that he’s merely fallen off his usual quality in some respects. If Conor actually believes that, he’s a moron. If he’s just pretending to believe it, he’s a tool.
Reynolds is a passive-aggressive right-wing creep/dork. That’s about it. There’s nothing positive there.
besteaster
Comment #58 makes a good point. I mean, for God’s sake:
“so funny, so quotable, so wise…Seriously.”
I mean, isn’t that the way you’re supposed to talk about, like, Shakespeare or something?
And I think I’d rather have me skin ripped off than have a beer with that grinning dweeb. What a buncha crap from Conor.
Common Sense
I don’t understand why everyone calls Reynolds out for being a fake Libertarian. I don’t think there is such a thing as a real Libertarian. Christ, they nominated Bob Barr, the former Democrat then Republican who made a national name for himself prying into Clinton’s personal life and championed the war on drugs while in Congress. That’s not exactly sticking to principle.
liberal
@Common Sense:
Actually, the only candidates for true libertarian are Geolibertarians. The rest are crypto-feudalists in drag.
Todd Dugdale
This is proof that “riling up the libs” is considered legitimate discourse among wingnuts. The flip side of this is that no wingnut can ever be held accountable for what they say when ‘riling up the libs”, because (curiously) it is not “serious”.