August 25, 2005

Reductio ad egomanium

The Poor Man, er, excuse me, The Poor Man Institute for Freedom and Democracy and a Pony, has a post about the fetishism of credentials in certain sectors. Just this week, I was thinking about two other fetishes.

Fetish 1: Control of comments. Good grief the time and energy spent gerrymandering sets of rules that essentially seek to legitimize the "if I don't like what you say I will delete you and then block your access to my site." The latest was the dust-up between LaShawn Barber and Pandagon in which readers who linked to Barber from Pandagon were redirected to the Teletubbies. So there you infantile liberals! Hah! The pattern: lib web site finds wacky hijinks on conservative site, writes post ripping to shreds said wacky hijinks, conservative blogger comes over swinging, lib commenters intrigued, lib commenters start commenting on conservative blog, conservative blogger deletes comments from libs, citing various and sundry subclauses of a book length policy, lib bloggers attempt to exploit loopholes in said policy, conservo blogger gets pissy and shuts the whole comment thing down, boo hoo. (Also available here. ) These examples are of women, just because they are two blogs I read regularly that had this happen, but I know it happens between male bloggers, and across genders. I read across the aisles, and my impression (from the sites I visit) is that it's the right getting snitty and banning/blocking, but the lefties don't do the same thing. Is this true?

Fetish 2: Latin and associated philosophy terms. Now don't get me wrong. I love Latin. No, really. I can tell you about Caesar conquering the Helvetians (translated in Glenna Starr's class...whereever you are Glenna you were an awesome teacher and human being). I have appropriated (shamelessly ripped off from Mike Dowd) the "how many languages even have a word for killed every tenth person?" quote. Nothing against Latin. Really. Do liberals not take philosophy? Are they not on the debate team? Or is it that they don't feel the need to work on an image that involves spouting bits of dead language? The pattern: conservative blogger finds wacky hijinks on lib blog, writes post ripping to shreds said wacky hijinks, conservative commenters go read wacky lib blog, then come back in collegial backslapping and toss around terms like "circular reasoning" and "ad hominem." (Examples here and here. And like "drawn and quartered," yes I know what ad hominem is, along with reductio ad absurdum and puella pulchra est. The libruls are always the ones getting critiqued for being elitist. What, the common red stater studies Latin? Or is it lawyer-wannabe-ism?

Posted by binky at August 25, 2005 12:41 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Blogorama


Comments

Well, here's someone else with an answer.

Posted by: at August 25, 2005 03:21 PM | PERMALINK

With respect to the first "fetish", I've wondered about this myself. I like comments to my posts - I like write and think about these things. I have my opinions, and I obviously don't think I'm wrong, but I'm also smart enough to realize I don't know everything, and may actually be wrong about a few things along the way.

In addition, of course, comments allow other people to point out things I haven't considered. There's always room for another viewpoint. Maybe that's what conservatives don't like. After all, they mostly treat dissent like heresy akin to treason. Comments allow (promote?) dissent, so doing away with comments reduces problems. If you can't see it, it isn't there.

Posted by: baltar at August 25, 2005 07:38 PM | PERMALINK
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