The liberal blogs
Bookworm on Jul 10 2006 at 8:16 pm | Filed under: Democrats
I’m always fascinated, when visiting my favorite bloggers, to see the things they find on the liberal blogs. I’ve never had any success reading some of the most popular liberal blogs, though. Many are written in a kind of shorthand that reminds me of the bulletin board at my high school. That was the one where the cool girls would post for all to see that “The short dude with the backhand was playing hard in the Pit last night with Roller Girl.” While these cryptic comments conveyed volumes of information to those in the know, they left me confused and bewildered. Today, to see if my past experiences hold true, I made another foray to visit a handful of the top liberal blogs. Along with news snippets, which are always of moderate interest, commentary on a couple of blogs today was limited to things like this:
From Wonkette:
*In the mixed-up world of Connecticut politics there’s one thing Joe Lieberman can count on. [Corrente]
*How many naked Libertarians can you fit in the back of a squad car? [AP]
*The drunker the President gets, the safer we are. [Bring It On!]
*Durty Jerz is about heritage, not hate. [Four Four]
*The American military is like the Green Lantern, dependent on willpower and unable to fight yellow things. [Matthew Yglesias]
*Johnny Deep is really just a better looking Jerry Falwell, puffy shirt notwithstanding. [Collective Sigh]
I know it’s me being uncool, but I don’t understand any of that — and nothing is sufficiently interesting (or intelligible) on its face to make me want to bother with the links.
From Crooks and Liars:
Matt Stoller was on “To the Point” and did a great job of explaining that the Lamont/Lieberman race is much more than just about the war.
Click hear to listen to the debate.
The funny thing is that for Lieberman supporters it is all about the war. –Oddly the wanker Chait seems to think this is about obtaining power - that supporting Lamont is some sort of power grab by the netroots, and he worries we’ll take over the Democratic party. It’s a weird view of things. I really don’t have much interest in being a kingmaker, and I’m too lazy to run much of anything. I do what I do because I actually give a shit about stuff, not to glorify myself (though just in case George S. is reading, I’m happy to be enriched.) Giving a shit seems to be alien to too many beltway pundits.
I started blogging because I wanted my voice to be heard. I knew that if I introduced video into the blogosphere it would have an impact in some sort of way. I knew that seeing what people say is much more powerful than just reading the text. I do what I do because I care– which is why most of us do this blogging thing. And also Sauron told me to write this…
I’m a lazy reader — I like to have things spelled out, rather than having to guess at their meaning. To one with my boring, old-fashioned sensibilities about organizing essays and sentences, the above is simply too disconnected for me to make immediate sense of it, and not interesting enough for me to work at making sense.
Not all of the top liberal bloggers employ “in the know” shorthand. Some of them write traditionally, but I just have a problem with what they’re saying. For example, Think Progress has a good post taking on a mistake in Newsweek regarding President Bush’s position on global warming:
The most recent Newsweek has an article called “The President: Shades of Green,” examining the President’s environmental record. Newsweek reports that Bush has conceded human activity is responsible for global warming:
And on global warming, the most controversial part of his green scorecard, Bush acknowledged back in June 2001 that the National Academy of Sciences believed climate change was “due in large part to human activity.” The dispute is what to do about that warming.
Bush did say that in June 2001. (In the next sentence he says “we do not know how much effect natural fluctuations in climate may have had on warming.”) Since that time, however, he has said there is a “dispute,” not just about the solution, but about whether human activity is responsible. For example, on June 26, 2006 Bush said:
I think — I have said consistently that global warming is a serious problem. There’s a debate over whether it’s manmade or naturally caused.
So far, so good. Where I part ways with Judd, the post’s author, is in his blithe conclusion:
Bush is describing a debate that doesn’t exist. There is a scientific consensus that global warming is real and the human activity is largely responsible. This is reflected in the most recent report by International Panel on Climate Change, which was vigorously reviewed and accepted by thousands of scientists, and every peer-reviewed journal article since 1993.
In fact, global warming is still being vigorously debated. It’s an important debate, because it touches not just upon whether it’s happening, but whether we’re causing it, whether we can stop it, whether it matters, etc. As always, it’s worth pointing out that, in the early 1970s, those of us old enough to remember were being told that we were heading into a deadly cycle of global cooling. History buffs are also fond of pointing to both the mini-Ice Age and the year without a summer as examples of recent climate change that had little to do with us. Frankly, I get much more panicky when I think of the fact that the earth’s core is getting demagnetized, which is a truly undisputed fact, but one that’s not getting a lot of press. A demagnetized core means that we lose entirely our protection against cosmic rays. Now there’s global warming with a vengeance.
I also visited Atrios’ Eschaton blog and found this:
Yglesias has a good post about how conservatives (and certain senators named Joe) see foreign policy. It’s truly twisted for a variety of reasons over and above its prima facie stupdity. It’s the animating force behind the 101st Fighting Keyboarders. It’s what gets Andrew Sullivan through the day, imagining that he’s someone fighting a noble war. It’s the belief that what differentiates them from those who aren’t so thrilled about sending other peoples’ kids off to die is their personal courage, when in fact it’s nothing more than rank cowardice. It animates the “wishes are ponies” views of Friedman and the gang. It’s what has caused the prominence of the Tinkerbell Approach.
It allows weak people to imagine they are strong in the comfort of their homes. I’ll leave the pop psychology to others, but these people creep me out.
It’s rhetoric, all right, but it’s not substantive. If I understand the core argument, it’s that nobody can believe in a just or appropriate war if s/he doesn’t actually engage in combat personally. That’s a ludicrous argument. The concept of an entire nation carrying the war with it, with the political leader being the same person as the battle leader, pretty much went out with Ghengis Khan and his warriors as they swept down the plains — and even in that case, I imagine there were some women, kids, and old people minding the home front.
The logic behind this argument also eludes me. Since 9/11, something more than a million troops have been deployed, which certainly seems like a big number on its face. However, with the U.S. population just shy of 300,000,000 people, my terribly bad math tells me that only 0.003 of our population has gone to war (and, incidentally, went on its own volition). Are they therefore only ones who should have a voice in the war, with the other 99.997 of the population silenced? Just stating the proposition reveals how silly it is, but it would have one virtue regarding the current war against the Jihadists fighting us. My understanding is that our volunteer American forces are enthusiastic about fighting this war and believe that they’re doing important work in both Afghanistan and Iraq to protect American safety and freedom. If there’s was the only vote, I think we’d still be doing what we’re doing.
I also learned through perusing the liberal blogs that Markos “Kos” Moulitsas served in the United States Army. I wonder what his experiences were there that turned him so virulently from a Republican to a Democrat. It really is the opposite trajectory of so many people who go the other way politically. Indeed, Churchill, who made this journey himself, recognized this more common pattern when he said “Show me a young Conservative and I’ll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I’ll show you someone with no brains.” My father, less poetically, used to say when John Anderson was running, “Never trust a young conservative or an old liberal.”
I’m really rambling here, with no useful conclusions to draw. A lot of conservative blog writing is too eliptical and jargon-filled to have meaning. What’s well written — and there is definitely well-written stuff out there — reaches conclusions with which I might once have agreed, but that I can no longer support. A lot of the arguments strike me as bootstrapped, with the foregone conclusion providing the basis for the preceding argument. Consistently, there’s more obscenity, crudity and personal invective than one finds on the major conservative blogs (including Michelle Malkin, who enjoys her ad hominem attacks, but doesn’t engage in obscene or crude writing). Democratic politicians would do well to think hard before embracing this demographic as the litmus test for all their initiatives.
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Here is some advice I like.
Thanks, BW, for your thoughts on what is confusion (the liberal blogs). If you recall the simple juvenile senility of “The Strawberry Statement,” perhaps you see the roots.
–excerpt (link below)
“What does it mean when so many people think they are right, not because they are right, but simply because they think they are right?
It means they learned subjects in school, possibly claim a degree, but are not educated. It means the fog has descended but those in the soup believe it to be clear. It means that people have not been inoculated with the essential humility expected to develop from the nudges of good teaching.
It will be up to the rest of us to defend ourselves from them. Sensible people will be proactive. Explaining a logical fallacy when we see one. Laughing at parroted clichés. And above all, not tolerating uncivil behavior — labeling it, at the least, when we see it and defending ourselves from it when we must…”
—
http://blogs.rny.com/sbw/
Wonkette’s got her own unique style, which might be summed up as “snark” on steroids.
It’s so lacking in substance and gaining in snark, that I thought she was center-right instead of the Democrat she actually is.
I can’t analyze people’s positions accurately without substantive data and variables. Weird things happen when people use a writing style to substitute for their own personality. Some positive, some negative.
If you read the Green Lantern post, it highlights a necessary point. People like whomever, believes that diplomacy and victory derives not from will power and determination, but on who has the bigger guns, nukes, and brains.
I’ve studied too many battles and wars and generals to believe that, but the Left isn’t me, they don’t have my interests nor my brain. You do have to realize that this is different from the Left’s argument that Republicans are cowards for not going in personally to kill people. The logical extension of that is pretty simple.
If every Republican was serving in the military, what we’d become is a Spartan state. If you recall, Sparta had two classes, the warriors that did the fighting and the helots that grew the food. The warriors had right through power, and the helots had jobs without freedom. The reason why the Left even thinks this way is pretty simple. If they were in our shoes, and they were wanting to ’spread’ their power, they would join the jihad machine and kill everybody. They would drop bombs on anyone and everyone. This, as you might guess, reflects the sentiments of “young” Democrats. The firebrand revolutionaries that believe Republicans are soft and hypocrites for supporting a war by not fighting in it. If you aren’t careful, the revolutionaries will wash the world in blood five times over before they are finally taken down.
People like that guy who said Republicans thought like Green Lanterns, don’t know what willpower is. They don’t, they’d have to have some of it themselves to know. The firebrand revolutionaries have the desires, but no endurance. The people like Yg just don’t get it.
Their view of the world eliminates the human component from it. Human desire, human weakness, human aspirations, all go down the toilet when they throw away willpower. If you throw out human free will, wat you are left with is a box of numbers to crunch. Which army is bigger, who has the more powerful weapons, and so on. Sun Tzu didn’t tell his Generals to judge a force by their size, but based upon their discipline and human factors. In Yg’s world, the US has the superior tools in everything, so we “don’t need willpower” because we are already always going to win. Wrong.
If I understand the core argument, it’s that nobody can believe in a just or appropriate war if s/he doesn’t actually engage in combat personally.
That isn’t their core argument, simply because. The soldiers that have served and are serving, the Left just calls them kill bots and disregard their views. It doesn’t matter if you’ve engaged in combat personally, your views are still worthless to the Left. Only if you agree with the Left do they give you kudos and legitimacy. Ace did a good long post on this, link’s on my blog, recent entries, if you want to look.
Their core argument, I guess, is that Republicans are soft and have no willpower to do what is necessary, while the Left does have the willpower to do what is necessary. It’s what they think unconsciously, along with the belief that they are better and stuff.
You can have willpower without wisdom and intelligence, but that’s not very survivable to the human condition. Daily Kos had a video promo that used a bunch of military aircraft and weapons.
So you have thi split between the true believers on the Left and the sophisticated pundit diplomads like Yg. Someone’s going to purge the other soon enough in this 1v1.
It reminds me of Osama’s strong horse vs weak horse argument. He said Al Qaeda is the strong horse in Arabia, and therefore people will flock to him compared to the weak horse of the West.
Yg focuses on intellectual maneuvering and diplomacy, basically puppetmastering the world from the safety of the inviolable power of the US. He has nothing tofear, nothing will make him give up because nothing has the power to make him give up. His willpower is secure, he needs no more of it. At least that is what he believes.
Daily Kos’s faction focuses on religion, belief, zealousness, and stuff like that. But what Yg and DK have in common is the simple fact that neither of them have a scintilla of wisdom.
I think Connecticut will be the bust-up of the lefty blogs. They are backing Lamont and vilifying Lieberman, in the most vituperative manner. If Lieberman wins the Democratic primary and the general election, the wind is out of the netroots sails. If Lieberman loses, then they’ve pushed and dragged the Democratic party toward the antiwar left. That will alienate the mainstream of voters faster than you can say George McGovern.
I’d like to begin with a recent quote from Mark Goldblatt (over at NRO): “I’d love to be a liberal because, you know, chicks dig the progressives. But also because I’d love to resolve debates with clever rejoinders like “Halliburton!” or “Fox News!” or “Karl Rove!,” and because I’d love to engage in intellectual group hugs rather than confront awkward truths, and because I’d love to show how my heart is in the right place by supporting benevolent-sounding but historically discredited social policies which end up devastating the very communities they’re intended to benefit. So, yes, I’d love to be a liberal . . . except these pesky I.Q. points keep getting in the way.”
That being said, one of my favorite liberal blogs to visit (at least until they banned my IP address for the crime of trying to debate their ridiculousness) was democrats.com—home of the aggressive progressive. This group will believe anything, no matter how extreme, as long as it’s either anti-Republican or anti-Bush. I found the most amusing part of their blog to be the discussions regarding their “aggressive progressive strategies,” as if they were the backbone of the DNC (and they were absolutely furious when all of their phone calls and emails didn’t produce a filibuster on Sam Alito.) I’d like to offer a classic example of one of their posts: “Trolls were frantic about changing the subject matter of the posts on this site because they were desperately trying to kill our political momentum.”
So, if you’re ever in need of a bit of humor, I highly recommend this site but be forewarned, they immediately ban anyone who exhibits even the slightest bit of sanity (or intelligence for that matter) from posting.
While this does not address your overall point about incoherent liberal bloggers, I’d like to respond to your thoughts about global warming “debate”:
It’s strange that John Stossel’s only quoted scientist, out of the “many scientists [who] laugh at the panic,” is John Christy. Christy told NPR recently that “It is scientifically inconceivable that after changing forests into cities, turning millions of acres into farmland, putting massive quantities of soot and dust into the atmosphere and sending quantities of greenhouse gases into the air, that the natural course of climate change hasn’t been increased in the past century.” If you listen to the interview, you will find that he simply has a very conservative projection of the level of temperature increase, and based on his projection, considers outright “panic” to be unfounded.
As all climate scientists know, aerosols (particles suspended in gas – soot, sea salt, sulfates, etc.) cause atmospheric cooling. In the seventies, early computer models tried to factor in aerosols (including manmade), causing some scientists to fear a cooling trend. Without factoring in human CO2 production, it SHOULD be cooler right now. We are caught in a dangerous paradox, because manmade aerosols (pollutants) are actually mitigating the perceivable effects of global warming (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sun/dimming.html). Noting past predictions (which every skeptic seems to have independently “remembered” as of late), based on 30 year old technology, is illogical in terms of the current situation and what science has conclusively learned since then. iPods are better, technologically speaking, than 8-tracks. Climate science has come a long way.
As with the demagnetization of the earth’s core, which likely indicates a routine (although not for human beings) shift in the earth’s poles, at which time compassess will point South, we cannot predict with absolute certainty what the effects of global warming will be. However, at this point we can do nothing about the earth’s polar orientation. We can do something to reduce our CO2 emissions. People commit suicide by sitting in the garage with the car running. Our atmosphere is like a giant garage – humans are not so small, and the earth is not so big, that all 6.5 billion of us can’t collectively become a climactic agent. While there still is debate about the impact and scale of global warming over time, we know global temperatures are rising at an UNPRECEDENTED RATE, and a “mini ice age” and a cold summer in 1816 (the likely result of a massive volanic eruption – those durn aerosols again) does not alter this fact. We know essentially how much CO2 we produce, and we know that the increase in human-generated CO2 levels coincides nearly exactly with the global temperature increase we are currently experiencing (http://www.grida.no/climate/vital/02.htm). Both are rapidly rising, in nearly perfect unison.
The post by Fleur highlights many of the gaping holes that perforate global warming ideology. One is the emission of greenhouse gasses. The most potent greenhouse gas is not carbon dioxide but water vapor and, the fact is, scientists don’t have a clue how climate and solar effects affect water vapor dynamics in the atmosphere. Hence, water vapor (and cloud formation) cannot accurately be factored into climate models. The second is the assumption promoted by global warming ideologues, that CO2 simply collects in the atmosphere. In reality, CO2 is reabsorbed in many ways in a process called the “Carbon Cycle”. On land, it is absorbed by new, growing plant life and transformed into cellulose and other carbonaceous materials. The ocean represents the largest CO2 sink, wherein CO2 is absorbed by seaweed and plankton, and is transformed by coral polyps into limestone (all limestone formations on earth comprise former coral reefs). However, this natural carbon cycle cannot be accurately factored into climate models because nobody really understands how to adjust for it. It can be assumed that when CO2 levels rise, so do levels of new plant, plankton and coral reef formation in response. Yet, we really have no good way to measure that dynamic. Finally, there is a big assumption that increased CO2 in the atmosphere is the cause of global warming…there actually exists good evidence to suggest that it could be the result of global warming. Is the earth warming rapidly? Not really. There is some evidence of a warming trend as part of a very natural solar cycle…a trend reflected similarly in the ebb and flow of Martian ice caps. For a reality check, look to the U.S. National Park services maps of Glacier Bay, Alaska, where the glaciers have been in retreat for hundreds of years, according to records left by Russion explorers at a time when human industrial activity was virtually non-existent.
When one studies the transformation of the Republicans into a dictatorial cabal that have failed at everything they’ve attempted, how on Earth can it possibly be confusing to ANYONE as to why so many have turned away?
And as long as they continue their failed policy, which consists of nothing to offer but smears and Jesus, people will continue to turn away.
Why not give the guy who values individual liberty a place to go? Or the one who wants fiscal responsibility? Or the one who doesn’t want his country expending its Armed Forces in wars of choice that are unplanned, poorly run exercises from day 1? Or how about people who believe in ethical behavior in Government? Once upon a time, such people could have been Republicans. In these times, no chance.