What would be cool is if we could get all of the trolls (left, right, and center) together on one blog so that they could battle it out once and for all. Who will be the ultimate troll!?!?
Actually, I was going to expand more on that "blog full of trolls" idea but then things started to sound uncomfortably familiar.
Trolls tend to defend themselves by saying, "You can't hear a dissenting opinion? Clearly your argument can't withstand challenge and it is wrong!" Right? It's just a way of avoiding the [gulp] intimacy of communication.
I had a friend who was kind of like a real-life Troll of Constant Sorrow, taking a tone-deaf view of everything I said about anyone, based on assumptions counter to all of my assumptions about the conversation. He claimed it was because everyone needs their assumptions challenged to know when they're right. It made him impossible to talk to, and our conversations lacked any content.
#3 is a good reason for other people to tolerate trolls, but it's not an explanation of their existence in the first place... The answer to Alameida's question probably requires some kind of Grand Unified Theory for Why People Read Blogs in the First Place. Sorta in the same way that one becomes someone's "friend" in the first place too...
At some point, the Common House Troll (not an uber-troll like the ToS) finds himself reading a blog, thinking, "I really like this blogger, on a personal level! How can they be wrong about this thing they're writing about? I'm sure he would appreciate it, if I set him/her straight."
In high school, I thought it was cool that we always argued. He had me convinced that arguing makes you smarter.
When we found out we both lived in NYC and started hanging out, it was less cool. He asked me where my bf went to high school, and I gave the name of a Manhattan private school. Trollfriend says, "Huh. So he's a spoiled little rich boy." I tell a story about the boyfriend enjoying simple things like foosball: "Hah! Just like a rich Manhattan guy to be all competitive about nothing!" I say he enjoys it despite not being competitive or into sports: "Oh ho! Even more perfect! An upper-class dude pretending he likes competition ironically!"
He did this with my work ("Oh, so now you're an elitist snob forcing 'littracher' down the throats of kids who'd rather be learning something worthwhile!"), my neighborhood, my clothes, my friends, and so forth until finally I stopped returning his tearful voicemails. ("Oh, AWB, your friendship means SO MUCH to me!") Ack.
#3 is a good reason for other people to tolerate trolls, but it's not an explanation of their existence in the first place
Well why do arbitrageurs in general exist? They see an opportunity to profit without exposing themselves to risk by taking a position. Similarly a trolls is getting psychological profit (by being able to represent him/herself as out-arguing his/her opponents) without exposing him/herself to risk (because s/he does not fully join the community of the board s/he is posting on, and either explicitly or implicitly makes clear that criticism of him/her is being discounted.)
Is it possible that certain forms of mental illness, when combined with the internet, produces trolling? That seems to be the best explanation for the Troll of Sorrow.
It doesn't seem to me to be entirely irrational to hang out someplace where you disagree with the consensus, but think reasonably well of the quality of the conversation -- the 'challenge your assumptions' think is often bullshit, but it's not innately nuts.
Think of Idealist or baa here (or anyone else conservative we have commenting, I don't mean to leave anyone out.) I assume what they get out of it, beyond the apolitical entertainment, is a combinations of (a) checking to see if we might have a point about something -- that is, showing some willingness to be convinced; (b) figuring out what the opposition thinks among itself, for purposes of more effective opposition; (c) honing arguments for use in more serious contexts; and (d) simply enjoying political argument.
When the conversation is at a dopier level than it is around here (hard to imagine, I know, but pretend), it's a little harder to see what's going on, but just as the people aligned with such blogs who comment there clearly like the level of conversation, presumably the trolls they get do too.
I don't think I understood trolling until [the mysterious Alameida][edited by LB] used the Reason example. I could see myself trolling libertarians. Well, not really. But almost! Libertarians are fascinating and crazy and sense-of-a-sort-making all at once. If I ever got into serious political discussions with my friend Jackie (on my blogroll), I'm sure it could turn kind of trollish pretty quickly, by the method suggested in 5.
Yeah, that (or my perception that that was what was going on) is what led me to go off on Andrew the other day in that discussion of sexist commercials. Disagreement is one thing, but that feeling of talking to a wall that is entirely impervious to anything you might say gets old very, very fast.
Sometimes it's personal. I've got a troll who shows up from time to time on both my work and personal blogs, and a little check of IP addresses showed that the same person was showing up in both places under a variety of pseudonyms. He made the mistake of posting on some of our other blogs under his real name. He's a retired local cop, hates my employer and appears to have it in for me personally as well, although so far as I know I've never met the guy in RL or had to deal with him professionally (I'm a newspaper reporter).
If this weren't North Carolina, where even the journalists carry guns, I'd be more worried about it.
Huh. My understanding of the safety advice for anyone stalkery is to simply fail to engage -- don't respond to anything, no contact, no reaction. Mostly they eventually get bored and go away. (The real-life version of "Don't Feed The Troll.")
Actually that's another mode of trolling: Show up somewhere where they're talking about global warming, say, and try to start a fight about whether it's happening. Then complain about how people aren't willing to entertain arguments for another position. (This technique can also be found in philosophy papers that touch on the subject of evolution.)
And it's a good (powerful?) technique, because, contra Adam's joke in 18, I think it is important to be open to being convinced. This doesn't make it illegitimate to say "Not now, we're talking about something else, and you aren't saying anything I haven't heard before and found unconvincing," but it does make saying that something that reasonable people tend to do cautiously, leading to a lot of pointless annoyingness.
The problem with trolls, online and IRL, is that you will not generally be willing to pay the necessary price to irritate, intimidate, or generally "beat" a psycho, so your only real option (usually) is not to engage. Not usually satisfying, and not always effective.
I actually enjoy heaping shit on trolls, but most hosts do not appreciate my help. And rightly so -- a flame war stinks up the place.
I'm convinced that when it gets serious, some combination of screening and deletion is the only way to go. It's not necessarily true that if you ignore them they'll go away, and anyway, some poster new to the site will always try to engage them.
I'm convinced that there are paid trolls out there. On some sites the first poster is almost always a troll. And one category of troll consistently sticks to the Republican talking points -- Al on Kevin Drum was repeating the "flip flop" slogan 2 or 3 months before it became mainstream.
Paid trolls divert threads from productive paths and plant Republican memes, until the topic becomes defending Kerry against the flipflop charge instead of whatever else it had started to be. Once you're defending, and once you're letting them frame theargument, you've lost. Buzzword politics works by reiteration and noise -- you want to be sure that everyone has heard the message. (Another example: "Social Security is bankrupt").
Come on JE, that can't be right. You're just saying that because you want to avoid the fact that Kerry recently has flip-flopped on defending against the Swift Boat accusations (IMHO, to avoid discussing the important issues, which are that Social Security is bankrupt, we are overrun with illegal immigrants and gays are destroying the sanctity of marriage).
23- But was that actual Al, or wierd pseudo-parody Al?
I think the original, actual human Al still shows up on Yglesias' site sometimes, and he's pretty reasonable as far as friendly right-wingers go- maybe a little less persuadable than baa, but still sane. Like Tacitus, before he went crazy.
I go to that Tacitus site when I really want to freak myself out. It's kind of a neat experiment. Take a very intelligent group of people who consider they cannot be fooled, and fool them about something important. See what intricate intellectual hoops they will create for themselves in order to consider that they haven't been fooled.
I will read a post on that site and think: surely, this is going to end in a reasonable way. And then, nope. The comment section lends credence to some of David Icke's theories.
trolls get off on making people angry; it's how they get their daily dose of human contact. It's because we're all stuck in our cars and we've got to crash into each other just to remember that we're human, or something like that.
Tacitus is a wierd case- he always was kinda jerky, but I'm used to that with certain online sorts. I just lumped him in with folks who can't figure out how their tone come across in writing, or just aren't very good at talking to people.
I'm going on memory, but he actually got more rhetorically dogmatic and sure of Bush as his policies got less defensible, so there was this sudden slide from "supporter with doubts," in the same vein as Kevin Drum before the war, to Powerline-style slave to the party line. It was there from the beginning, but if you didn't follow it too closely, he looked like he was arguing in good faith.
Pre-Red State Tacitus was the thinking man's Victor Davis Hanson—which might sound like damning with faint praise but is meant as a compliment. He used to be a much clearer writer (even if never a tactful one) and still held to that awesome military historian mold of conservative thinker, the type who holds that the Peloponnesian War augored crucial instructions for the GWOT and that's ultimately why liberals just don't get it. But then the Internet became some actually useful thing, instead of merely a sounding off board for RISK nerds, and in his search for a larger role he eventually gravitated toward the Powerline/MM pole of the conservosphere.
the type who holds that the Peloponnesian War augored crucial instructions for the GWOT
Specifically, the parts about pissing everyone else in the world off, going to war, and completely freaking out at home. Remember: we must recapture Amphipolis!
Trevino was always a bad person, and always utterly mad. The reason lefties used to like him is that he harshly attacked Bush, using lefty talking points. He was useful, to some extent, but people who thought he was "reasonable" were wrong.
Oh, no: now you've lit the Tacitus bat-signal. He googles and technoraties himself frequently enough to descend on threads where he's being discussed, scatter poison in every direction, denounce anyone familiar with his work as "obsessed," and leave the place in ruins. He's always trolled his own damned comment threads; no matter how "reasonable" his posts might seem, it's impossible to have a conversation with the GOP operative man.
I've noticed that when he really is losing an argument he likes to make fun of you for dealing with him at all. Which is odd, because the rest of the time he clearly thinks he's a Very Serious Person.
Well, if he shows up I'm sure we can give him a nice "You're stupid and you're ugly and nobody likes you" and he'll get no joy.
It wasn't the beginning of RS that changed Tacitus/ I can remember the exact week and causal event:Abu Ghraib. My perception only, as someone who gung out and commented at Tacitus on a dailt basis.
Up until Abu Ghraib, I think Tacitus might have voted for Kerry(really) or helped impeach Bush. He was horrified by the incompetence and corruption in Iraq. I think Tacitus was at least as horrified by Abu Ghraib as the rest of us, but I believe at that exact moment he understood that the conservative movement and its entire agenda was dependent on the survival of George Bush.
He is still very careful about what he defends in the policy and practice of Republicans. I consider Tacitus technically honest, but one of the most skillful dissemblers and deceivers I have ever encountered;a professional speechwriter, ya know.
Tacitus is one of the very few committed conservatives/Republicans for whom I retain a degree of respect. Lord I'm verbose for this blog.
The quarter-inch of respect is why I consider Tacitus to be more dangerous than, oh, the Powerline flaks. Because JT really is deceptive, and his values really are extremist.
Actually, I can make 60 stronger. Tacitus has ties to the military, contacts in Washington, and always and still says the War is woefully undermanned. I think he took one glance at Abu Ghraib, instantly knew this was the tip of a very large iceberg, and knew investigations of cabinet-level decisions had to be prevented at any cost.
I object to Tacitus's ends, he is a pro-life fanatic. I actually don't object to his means:I am a pro-choice fanatic, and would engage in activity to achieve that end and others that are illegal and immoral to even think.
I object to Tacitus's ends, he is a pro-life fanatic. I actually don't object to his means:I am a pro-choice fanatic, and would engage in activity to achieve that end and others that are illegal and immoral to even think.
The problem is that each of you breeds the other (said the pupae).
Oh, please, dear Gawd, no. And can we just agree that people who choose nicknames like "Tacitus" or "Augustine" or "Cato the Younger" are jackasses who have let their youthful infatuation with D&D and other role-playing games extend too far into real life. (NB: I played D&D when I was younger.)
You may know me by my designation, Orion IIC DW102, titled after the fines of mechs to emerge from the Trials of Possession. What forces defend this comment thread?
And can we just agree that people who choose nicknames like "Tacitus" or "Augustine" or "Cato the Younger" are jackasses who have let their youthful infatuation with D&D
After agreeing to that, I think it would be neat if we all named ourselves after Monty Python characters. What do you think, SomeCallMeTim?
74: But that's precisely the point. When we chose names, it's flippant and self-mocking. Few have chosen any other kind of name; if they have, it's not some poncey hero of ours whose name they've appropriated.
OK, I'm containing my 'step back, and keep steppin'' response for now and instead merely noting that one of my favorite D&D characters of very recent years was a monk named Robusto de Pantalones. That's not where this name came from, though; quite the other way around.
Were this identity translated to a gaming system, though, it'd have to be Trinity.
That said, I wholly agree about a name like 'Tacitus.' If he ever ends up here, folks should take turns baiting him as 'Biggus Dickus' and see if it makes his head explode.
According to Black, the name "Atrios" is actually a (misspelled) reference to a character named Antrios in the Yasmina Reza play Art who paints the play's key "white painting on white canvas".
I'm not sure if it's a step up or down that your game character is named after your handle.
Let's call it a step sideways. Some days I'm pretty certain that the entirety of Blogworld is one big roleplaying game. (And Unfogged rolled a 1 on its save vs. comment spam.)
i troll from time to time, and its usually at site who i generally agree with, but who on a certain point i think there is some weakness, or the poster is just a bit too smug. in part it just makes for better discussion than some sort of couched 'but don't you think they ahve a bit of a point at X or Y..."
I beg to differ with 76:
When I chose the name Miss Emily it was because she was a fictional character with whom I could identify, fairly closely.
Like the literary Miss Emily, I am a small town spinster (well, poetic license) with a scandalous past, and a dead boyfriend mouldering in one of the bedrooms. Oh! wait...maybe that was the self-mocking part.
While I haven't killed anybody, part of what I identified in reading Faulkner's story was my anger at the village gossips who are writing my family's history with their words. and getting it wrong.
Tune in tomorrow, when I get "Death of a Salesman" exactly wrong! I hated Willie Loman.
Cultured? Pffft!
You just ignored the 'I grew up in a hick town' sub-text, didn't you?
As far as pseudonyms go, the waitress in me really wanted to ask what cut of fish the teofilo was.
The long time lurker is fairly sure that Teofilo's is the name of a restaurant. I could be wrong.
I certainly didn't mean to sound pompous. I'm a little nervous. If you really don't like me, let's all blame Matt Weiner.
Re Biggus Dickus: a person I know, who shall remain even more unnamed than grey-eyed Alameida herself, had a job connection to Biggus Dickus. (As in, helped get Biggus Dickus a job.) Swore up and down that he was a good guy, that he was rational and thoughtful and was merely working from different starting premises than the rest of us, um, actual heartland types. E.g., Biggus Dickus converted to the religion he now practices after carefully and rationally weighing all the options and judging their cultural implications. Yes, he used to be a Randroid [1], but he's much better now!
Just, you know, don't bring up how Reagan appeased the Communists and broke Carter's grain embargo for the sake of a few farm votes.
I was skeptical. I looked over on a neutral site. My troll-dar went off immediately. I tested the waters.
Wow. I've been around the Internet. I've encountered pedophiles, neo-Nazis, Trolls of Sorrow, crazed science fiction fans, crazed science fiction writers, and even the young Adam Yoshida. But never have I seen someone as determined to be a hemorrhoid for the sake of minor partisan advantage as Mr. Biggus Dickus. I think it took a two-post exchange to establish our mutual antipathy. (I do have a gift.)
I e-mailed my friend. "Do I have to say it?"
"Yes, yes. You're the smart one, I'm the cute one."
I also had an opportunity to meet Biggus Dickus during the RNC. I declined, because I dislike cock-punching strangers.
[1] Randroid? Yes. Dickus used to have his book list up on Amazon. Quite funny.
You know, I think that was all fair (I just read it linked from Brad DeLong.) The kid writing was really sloppy, and he's working for a professional publication. Admittedly, I'm predisposed in favor of the Neilsen Haydens, but even generally, if you're going to write disorganized fluff, you should be prepared to be corrected.
(Not that someone couldn't tear most things I write to shreds as well, but if I deserved it like that kid did, I'd take it with good humor. Which he did, mostly.)
Good humor and apologies is not good enough for the Neilsen Haydens:
"Wow, I feel like both Strunk and White just attacked me in some dark alleway with a lead pipe and wrench! I agree with all the claims of hackneyed prose and illiterate english. I strive to be someone who has a strong grasp on grammer, syntax, and diction, and within this post I have apparently failed to live up to this expectation. Perhaps in my haste I neglected to both self edit and self critique my writing, and in the future will take greater care when posting. Thanks for the insight!"
My goodness. What a facile, shallow brush-off that was. I suspect, from the speed and smoothness of its deployment, that this wasn't the first time Blickstein's used it.
Tell me again why Tapped is using this pup?
Posted by: Teresa Nielsen Hayden | June 8, 2006 01:21 AM
I thought she was a little testy (I would have been less so), but basically right. Blickstein was sloppy and illiterate sounding, and got called on by PNH being firm, but really very helpful. The response 'Strunk and White just attacked me in some dark alleway with a lead pipe and wrench' was flip, and equally sloppy and illiterate -- with a response like that, he isn't learning anything.
I'd say someone doing what the NH's did to the writer of a randomly selected LiveJournal would be being a prick, but the Prospect is supposed to be professional.
I agree with Joe O in 97. Before then it was harsh but fair critique, but Teresa's comment was thoroughly obnoxious. Was Blickstein supposed to prepare a carefully worded resignation letter for the blog comments? I thought his response was reasonably classy.
Also, if the complaint is that Blickstein is abusing his privileged platform by mixing metaphors, their time would be better spent doing grievous bodily harm to Thomas Friedman.
I read Blickstein's response as a testy fuck-you to PNH, the sort of thing someone who's caught not doing something he never cared about doing anyway trots out in front of the authorities with a roll of the eyes and plenty of resentful sarcasm. So, not really "reasonably classy" at all.
But that could just be because I'm a misanthrope who thinks the worst of everyone.
I agree with the anti-TNH position. She was being rude with that response; his comment to her was polite and good-humored. It would have been better if his response had been more carefully written, but there was no call for rudeness and insults--"pup"?
I wasn't sure how to read Blickstein's response. Almost anything including 'Thanks for the insight!' probably isn't meant seriously.
But I have a question: doesn't Tapped employ an editor? It's hard for the young pup to learn without help, especially given that most blogs and print media are barely literate.
Yeah, I'm with Wolfson. If the critique was fair, the reasonable thing to do is to be chastened and say thank you. If you think it's unfair, have the guts to fight back. That sort of "WHATever" response is bogus. I still think TNH was harsher than I would have been, but I don't think she was out of line.
Can one write sentence of reasonable length that is readable both in regular and disemvoweled form? With a few misspellings in one form or the other if it's needed. Cause that'd be great. And it would be teh roxx if it was insulting in both forms.
What do you mean by readable? Almost anything is readable in disemvoweled form if you work at it - pretty much nothing in English will be unchanged by disemvoweling. (If we consider the word "cwm" to be English, I think that's about it.)
Can one write sentence of reasonable length that is readable both in regular and disemvoweled form?
Perhaps I don't understand disemvoweling, but isn't this equivalent to asking if one can write [a] sentence of reasonable length without using vowels? I think the answer is no, one cannot.
I'm not a mindreader, so I don't know whether Blickstein was sincerely acknowledging constructive criticism or blowing it off. Teresa is not a mindreader either, so she doesn't know either. Honestly, I think most people would be hard pressed to come up with anything as polite as an ambiguously flip response under the circumstances.
He didn't say "whatever". You guys are assuming he was being sarcastic when it's totally possible he was being genuine, and the S&W thing was a joke to show he was taking it all in stride. You can't hear tone of voice on the internet, and the plain meaning of his words was "thank you"; you have to read the sarcasm in. In the absence of some kind of explicit sarcasm tag, she was being obnoxious.
I see a "pick on someone your own size" problem. Yes, Tapped is a big site, but no, I think it moves too fast to be edited. It really feels like bullying to me, as do injunctions to "have the guts to fight back."
Fuck! When I said "disemvowelling," I was somehow thinking of a process that left only vowels remaining. Applying it to either one, by readable I surely didn't mean that one has to figure out which vowels (consonants on the meaning I meant to say) have been removed. Rather, the sentence, after having gone through whichever process, now imperfectly resembles another sentence of different meaning.
I'm torn. I've contradicted myself on this point already (compare 95 to 109).
While the ambiguously flip response is on some level politer than a directly hostile 'Give me a break' would have been, direct hostility wouldn't have made me think Blickstein was a twerp. That response did.
119: I think, if it is ambiguous after disemvowelling or deconsonantution, it almost certainly won't be easily readable; or do you mean a sentence that, after it undergoes this process, will be naturally read as a completely different sentence?
Come ON. Blickstein's "Strunk and White beat me up in an alley" is classic "you're just being petty and schoolmarmish" undergrad whining. Yes, all professional editors should spend an hour a month mocking Thomas Friedman--no argument there--but Blickstein was immaturally and unsuccessfully trying to save face while denying the substance of PNH's criticism. Maybe I wouldn't have written what TNH did, especially not if I was actually trying to get him to improve his writing, but he did deserve it.
The thing is that there shouldn't be a 'your own size' problem here. The Prospect is supposed to be a professional publication. Blickstein can't write a blog post straight, and if he meant to apologize, he can't write an apology straight -- TNH's interpretation that it's flip sarcasm might be wrong, but it's not unlikely. I really think that as one of the faces of a professional publication he should either be a good enough writer not to deserve that sort of criticism, or he should, when criticised, roll over on his back and expose his soft underbelly in surrender: "Yes, I know I'm not a very good writer; I'm trying to improve."
I took Adam's response to be an unsuccessful attempt to diffuse the situation and accept his helping of crow. He made a joke and said that he'll try harder; it was nsuccessful because it was poorly written. But TNH's reply accused him of copying and pasting boilerplate—that was odd.
121: See "somewhat lengthy" in 110. But that otherwise follows the model I have in mind.
122: A different sentence, which would almost surely be misspelled.
For instance, if there was some way to make a sound like the one made by the word "are" using only vowels, you could have "fuck [form of the word that sounds like the sound made by the word "are" using only vowels while it still has consonants] ass" become "u [word that sounds like the sound made by the word "are" using only vowels ] a [something that one would not to be accused of being that can be misspelled in a way the resembles its properly spelled form with vowels only]." Of course, fuck [] ass []" would have to be a meaningful sentence as well.
Perhaps "don't comment drunk at 12:30 AM when a bunch of people have ripped apart the style of your post" would be good advice too. On the other hand, is this a firing offense? That's what TNH said, in a particularly insulting way, and that was. Just. Not. Called. For.
125:So they're words that are never uttered sincerely? If some one says "thank you", the thing to do is say, "you're welcome", unless you're getting a much clearer signal than he gave.
I'm not saying B. did everything perfectly; I'm considering the judiciousness and grace of TNH's comment, and they were lacking.
Well, see, I thought he was giving a pretty clear signal, if not of snideness at least of not caring. Maybe TNH went overboard, but I don't think she misapprehended the basic situation.
Perhaps "don't comment drunk at 12:30 AM when a bunch of people have ripped apart the style of your post" would be good advice too. On the other hand, is this a firing offense?
Commenting drunk on a blog you're paid to privileged and thrilled to supposed to be writing professionally?
I generally don't applaud the impromptu supercilious grammar style lessons, but I don't think that commenting drunk in response is particularly intelligent, either.
I'm missing a comma after the last appearance of "misspelled", another comma after "form" when it appears following the previously mentioned missing comma, and one open quote before the last appearance of "fuck".
It is a good thing that Tapped does not employ any other writers who are often razzed for frequent grammatical, syntactical, or homophone-related snafus!
"Thanks for the insight!" I don't read as being particularly sincere; half-heartedly apologizing for further infelicities of style and grammar by pleading intoxication is just sad. It's a professional blog, keeping professional hours: he didn't have to respond in comments at all, according to Tapped conventions, and doing so in this weird-ass way is really bizarre.
"Tell me again why Tapped is using this pup" is, as Matt says, very close to the line, if not over it. But I think she read B. correctly.
"Tell me again why Tapped is using this pup" is, come to think of it, a pretty serious case of the mote and the beam. That post isn't on TAPPED. A nice prose style isn't as important as getting your facts right.
I'm all for sympathy, but let's admit that if an apology gives the appearance of ambiguity, it's a poor apology. And ending an apology with an exclamation point, either in written form or through verbal intonation, is a really really bad idea.
Seems like this whole discussion just proves there's a writing problem; "Wow, I feel like both Strunk and White just attacked me in some dark alleway with a lead pipe and wrench!" and "Thanks for the insight!" seem extremely sarcastic, while the rest of it could be sincere.
I agree with 126. Further, I think this exchange is not "grammar trolling" as described in 94. The accusation of cutting-and-pasting was indeed weird, but the basic criticism was that his response sucked, which it did.
138: Oh, Sausagely can't type for shit, but he writes well -- he should have a copy-editor to clean his stuff up, but there's nothing wrong with it beyond multiple horrible typos. My father is terribly clever, incredibly literate, has been a professional for close to fifty years, and can't reliably spell words like 'maybe'. He's a fine writer, just missing the spelling center of his brain.
But perhaps we can achieve comity by agreeing that (1) ambiguously sincere apology = bad; (2) flippant dismissal of even ill-rendered apology = ungracious.
140: Probably my deep knowledge of baseball, including the proper grounds for having certain opinions about same. Also how to interpret very ambiguous sentences in contracts.
147: No. But asking, in a manner as if your desire was to cause, why someone retains their job, is.
My goodness. What a facile, shallow brush-off that was. I suspect, from the speed and smoothness of its deployment, that this wasn't the first time Blickstein's used it.
145: Oh, I know, I only tease. MY's sportswriting debut in support of Dirk Nowitzki as the greatest basketball player ev-ar shows his cunning and thoughtfulness as a writer.
It took me a couple views to figure out what Weiner meant in 141. Aha! It's not TAPPED, it's TAP/Midterm Elections.
LB is right in 145. A.B.'s original post was simply impenetrable, in the Humpty Dumpty sense of "that's enough of that; let's move on to something nicer." Sausagely's writing is clear enough that the homophones are instantly translatable--and so all the more mysterious!
Maybe I'm just conflict-averse, but it struck me as analagous to walking up to a street musician and saying, "You're not a very good saxophonist, are you?"
TNH, in a short space, called him a "pup," accused him (crazily) of deploying a prepared comment, and suggested that he be fired. Maybe that's not "frothing," but it's far beyond a facile dismissal.
I also don't think that his post was impenetrable; the last sentence, which PNH Orwellizes, just means that in the next few months we can expect to see more anti-establishment candidates succeed, and that endorsements from established political figures will not play a significant role. This may be wrong, but he's not blinding you with a spray of metaphors the way Friedman does. (And picking on "moreso" is exactly Hilde's speed.)
That's why I think it was okay. Blickstein's not a street musician. He's doing what should be a useful job, covering the midterm elections for what should be a serious and informative publication, and he's doing it badly. Grammar trolling someone with a personal blog would be bogus, but this kid should either shape up or should not be working where he is. There are good writers out there to be hired.
163: This is where the TAPPED/Midterm distinction makes a difference. "Midterm Madness" is the semipro operation. I think polite but firm editing of the post would've been fine, but some commenters did not keep to polite but firm.
Blickstein may be taking the heat for the Prospect here. I don't think they should have a 'semi-pro' blog on the mid-term elections. If they want to hire student interns, find ones who can write at a professional level and hire them, don't devalue the whole operation by putting badly written fluff up on their website.
Well, it seems the issue is whether or not he had a conflict of interest w/r/t some of the stuff he wrote on Kos, and whether or not that justifies or mitigates the outing.
Just a dumb joke playing on another's recent misfortunes w/r/t outing threats.
To be totally clear, the assclowns at NRO were way out of line, although I have not yet found the Corner post in which they did the deed so I'm still a little confused about what happened.
In re Blickstein, I think the problem is more the 'fluff' than the 'badly written'. As Calton Bolick says, his piece is speculative and anecdotal. The problem is partly that uses buzzwords like 'insurgent' and 'grassroots' without having a clear conception of what they mean. But that wouldn't be helped by a more felicitious prose style; from that perspective "The grassroots support him" is no better than "The grassroots are behind him."
But that wouldn't be helped by a more felicitious prose style
Well, that's the Orwell point. If you write clearly, then you're less likely to write stupidly, because clear writing makes your stupidity obvious. A foggy prose style covers thoughtless writing.
But Matt, you do see that your version in 162 of almost exactly the same phrases is more clear, right?
A.B. writes: "watch for the diminishing importance of entrenched endorsements."
You rephrase: "endorsements from established political figures will not play a significant role."
Your sentence is more active and less pretentious; it's actually trying to explain something to a reader (well, me) who you think should be able to get it if you put it straight.
As for 165, do you think A.B. is not paid? Or doesn't have some sort of semi-official status as "intern"?
(I realize I'm arguing this more because A.B.'s writing style and pseudo-apology ["I'm sorry my paper set off your pedantic antennae, teach!"] reminds me so much of the clever, unteachable students I've struggled with at X. Univ. So I'd better back down a bit.)
Well, it seems the issue is whether or not he had a conflict of interest w/r/t some of the stuff he wrote on Kos, and whether or not that justifies or mitigates the outing.
It doesn't mitigate it at all. If there was a conflict, NRO could have so alleged without outing him. If Armando pretended it didn't exist, then they could out him, if necessary. Just deep, deep dickishness.
Congratulations, 'Smasher! Not that I really know what "jury a show" means.
I thought Blickstein's reply was flip, particularly the "I have apparently failed to live up to this expectation" and the "Perhaps in my haste I neglected . . ." parts. He's not copping to anything, and so the "Thanks for the insight!" comes off as disengenuous.
That said, I think Teresa's response was condescending and assy, but I can see why she felt moved to make it in such a manner.
179, Yep. I strive to be someone who has a strong grasp on humor, relevance, and Unfoggedalia, and within 168 I have apparently failed to live up to this expectation. Perhaps in my haste I neglected to both self edit and self critique my joke, and in the future will take greater care when commenting.
161, I got it! Though that's not quite how I spell my name, thanks.
If you write clearly, then you're less likely to write stupidly, because clear writing makes your stupidity obvious. A foggy prose style covers thoughtless writing.
I'd say that David Brooks has a good prose style. I think it's dangerous to equate good prose with clear thought, let alone intelligent thought. That's a problem with Orwell as he is often cited.
178: Sure, I hope I'm clearer, and A.B. would do well to learn from me. But he was a long way from the complete obscurantism that Orwell quotes. (And I'm sure he's getting paid, and TAP would do well to make him write better. But I'm not sure that unleashing the whole Making Light crew on him was the best thing to do, especially when they got personal.)
OTOH I am sympathetic with Emerson's point about the extra opportunities given to Ivyish students, which I think should stop with me.
184. The whole point of the Ivy-snobbery is that they're supposed to have been knocked over the head with a grammar-cudgel by someone like Wolfson or me at some vulnerable, formative stage. Alas, such is no longer the case: curriculae have been modernized, grades have been raised, teachers instructed not to bruise--o tempora! o mores!
183: But it should be Apo giving the joke apology. You alluded, while he named. The reminder that I transposed the "K" from elsewhere (the lack of an "s" was intentional) makes this a good time to stop commenting for the day.
Also, I didn't emphasize "I" in 176 to contrast myself with anyone else.
I remember a kerfluffle over whether Leiter should out Juan Non-Volokh and the consensus was, correctly, that Leiter was being a dick.
NRO is being a dick, too. While the prevalence of pseudonymity has its drawbacks, viz., any schmuck can pretend to be an expert without being held accountable, its benefits, like allowing less powerful people to proclaim their opinions without fear of reprisal.
If you write clearly, then you're less likely to write stupidly, because clear writing makes your stupidity obvious. A foggy prose style covers thoughtless writing.
That's what my advisor says ("If you wrote less clearly, I wouldn't have caught this, but you do, so...")
186: Long story short, it's broken and I can't fix it. I'm going to have to pay up for an MT license and upgrade so that they'll fix it for me. (My friendly neighborhood computer whizzes are unf. a bit too busy to hold my hand right now.)
My last grammar course was in sixth grade, but I found that when I learned Latin at a university, my English improved, solely because subordinate clauses and subjunctives jumped out everywhere, even in instant message away messages.
(Apparently writing clearly occasionally leaves fragments. Oops @ 192 should have 'outweigh them' or something to finish the damn sentence. Multitasking.)
I looked at the NRO blog so you don't have to, and the one accusation of conflict of interest they make is AFAICT sheer bullshit. They cite this post while pointing out that he was representing a large corporation in negotiations in an antitrust suit. It's not even obvious to me that the position he takes in that article is advantageous to his client.
It is true that he once identified himself in public as a guestblogger at dKos, but that hardly seems like an excuse.
He wasn't very careful, was he? My understanding is that his real name was up on Wikipedia -- at that point, aren't you out? (Not that I've been all that careful myself, but in a contentious political world, I have a hard time seeing republishing already public information as a major offense. Hurtful to the target, but not wrong in itself.) On the other hand, I'm not sure of how out he was already, and I don't know what NR did. Does anyone have a link?
202.--LB, Armando deleted the Wikipedia entry, but by then it was already archived. Or at least that's what I thought I understood from the NRO MediaBlog's version of affairs.
202: But was his name up at Wikipedia before, or after the outing? B/c yeah, if it were already known, then identifying him would be kind of a non-issue. OTOH, the argument here (and I don't know for sure about this one) is that it wasn't outing his name, but outing his client that was the real problem.
Again, I'm torn. NRO are assholes, and were trying to hurt him. On the other hand, clicking through, he spoke on NPR under his real name as a DailyKos blogger, and gave a speech somewhere doing the same thing? At that point, it seems as if you've flung caution to the winds.
My understanding is that his real name was up on Wikipedia
Assuming that's true, anyone could have put his name up. I'm not very comfortable with that as a get out of judgment card. He was trying to be anonymous, it should have been respected.
Speaking of lawyers getting fired, the partners at a firm wouldn't try to hide the fact that the firm's youngest associate is leaving only 8 months into his work here unless there was something bad going on, right?
Well, but, who cares if you've flung caution to the winds? AS JM says, the point isn't whether he was asking for it.
I'm touchy on the issue, obviously. There are plenty of people who know who I am, but if someone made a point of publishing my name as Bitch Ph.D., particularly in the context of an ad hominem implication that the reason for my anonymity had something to do with a desire to mislead people rather than for self-protection, and then followed it up with some kind of bullshit self-justification, I'd be pissed. I think the question of whether Armando was incautious is a totally separate issue from whether or not the NRO was justified in publishing that; I don't think it was.
No. He admitted to my co-summer that the partners told him not to tell any of us that he was leaving. He claims he loves the firm and is leaving for "personal reasons."
His last day is tomorrow, and there's a farewell lunch for him, but none of the summers can go, because we're all going to lunch with a couple of the partners, which we were invited to this morning. We only found out he was leaving when we got a (possibly mistakenly sent to us) email this afternoon announcing the farewell lunch.
One of the commenters at ObWi made what I thought was a good point: it's the aggregation of the various bits of information that may have circulated in semi-private into a single, easily accessible post on a high-traffic blog that definitively breaks the pseudonymity. At that point, I think, you either have to come out, gather up the uncertain shreds of your privacy, or retreat from the field.
I don't know what the future for high-profile, pseudonymous writers looks like; I rather suspect the internet has moved beyond its former subculture clubbiness and that no "Online Integrity" pledges will preserve it. (Not that there weren't assholes who outed people back in the days of mimeographed zines, I'm sure.)
211, what's to be torn about? There's not a gram of nutrition in Spruiell's post. He reveals that Armando hoped to close the Wikipedia loophole and then gives us the kicker ("A Daily Kos guy working for Wal-Mart? No wonder he doesn't want anyone to know"), which delivers the fait accompli of the post, since it isn't noteworthy in the slightest that some guy wanted to tweak his public profile.
It seems to me this is similar to a whistleblower issue, and ties into increasing problems with the question of free speech off the job. If we're to maintain the right to free speech as citizens, it seems to me we have to be able to protect ourselves from losing our jobs if we exercise it, no? And really, that's what all this boils down to.
The problem, 'course, is that in some jobs, it's not so much that you'll be "fired" as that you might lose a client, or create a perception of conflict of interest for your students, or whatever. And I think people should be able to protect themselves from such things by being anoymous, or pseudonymous. Surely it can be misused, but it seems to me that the argument against it boils down to the argument that there's no free speech problem if people's speech is inhibited by their need to make a living, which I think is a dangerous idea.
Oh, I'm back in. What I'm torn about (and NRO is worthless, I just don't know if they've done something wrong rather than just mean) is that if I have the facts straight, which I may not, Amando did at least two things which seem to me to be publishing his real identity: I think, if I got it straight, he spoke on NPR under his real name and IDed himself as the DK blogger, and he gave a public speech somewhere else. If that's right, that seems absolutely different to me from being careless with IP addresses (hell, I wouldn't know how to be careful with IP addresses) or telling individuals your real name. When lots of people not personally known to you know the facts, I just can't see that they have an affirmative duty to you not to repeat them.
Well, if he spoke on NPR under his real name (which presumably he did; my own experience is that NPR doesn't like to let people be interviewed under pseudonyms), then yeah: he was already outed. Re. public speech, I'm not sure: did he do so under his name, or as "Armando from Daily Kos, and no pictures, please"? Because that's risky, yes, but it isn't self-outing.
Real name: "Armando Llo/re/ns is a Guest Blogger for dailykos.com." I'm sorry for the guy, but I don't know what he expected -- you can't exploit anonymously acquired credibility under your real name and expect to stay anonymous.
I didn't wear a mask; I just didn't say my name, except privately to individuals in casual conversation before and after.
I don't think the issue is whether he can *expect* to remain anonymous. I think the issue is whether the NRO was right to publish his (private) name in connection with his very public blog. It seems to me that his putting the role of "guest blogger" on an obscure site in connection with an otherwise unknown name isn't the same thing by a long shot.
Of course, all that said, I'll be publishing things in the next few months under my own name that will pretty easily identify me. And I don't expect to be really anonymous after that point. But I don't think that a major news organ will be justified if it tries a bit of character assassination by linking my well-known pseud with my little-known (but soon, easily findoutable) real name.
Which doesn't make the NRO guy any less of an asshole, since his obvious goal was to link Armando to Wal-Mart, thus damaging both his credibility with his readers and his relationship with his client. That's purely shitty behavior.
More Blickstein abuse; check this comment out, just posted on Making Light:
Well, I may as well join in the conversation, perhaps to defend myself, perhaps also to admit culpability. First, in regards to my education, I worked hard to both get into Tufts and excel academically while at Tufts. I also strived to make a difference in my co-curricular activities, including as President of the Tufts Democrats. I was not one of the priveledged ones as alleged, and it would suit all of you arrogant folks out there to not make assumptions based on superficial perceptions. I come from a single parent household, and thank god I had a great mother who pushed me to excel. Thank god also for a great university like Tufts in assisting students financially like me who would not otherwise be able to afford such an expensive university. I come not from some ivory tower where everything is handed to me but rather extremely humble roots. Now I admit I was sloppy in this post, everyone makes mistakes, but that doesn't call for some sort of angry swarm to form. Call me out on my mistakes, fine, but do so on the merits, or rather demerits, of my mistakes, not on my background, youth, or other extraneous factors. Listen, I'm here to defend myself, and at least I have the balls to do so in a calm manner without making assumptions about anyone else. Take my words for what they are, but by debasing me, my past, and my present, you are in the process also debasing yourselves.
I don't care how rude anyone was to him, that's not someone who should have a prestigious writing job. The Prospect should be ashamed of hiring him.
B, do you mean articles in the mode of "here's what being a well-known online feminist is like, plus things I've observed?" A professional article that would allow you to claim some authority from your online experience, I mean?
I suppose it's this I don't expect to be really anonymous after that point that makes me wonder how you expect that de-pseudonymizing to happen. I agree that if a major news source suddenly swooped down and plucked a post, an article, and your name up out of the mix and aggregated them together to tear you down, that would be mean and awful. But have you given any thought to how you'd prefer to be rendered non-pseudonymous?
I'm kind of coming around to LB's 224: Armando in bits and pieces was making himself public but hadn't quite prepared his post-pseudonymous ground. That doesn't excuse NRO--that was a hit-piece, no more--but I'm also sort of uncomfortable with high-profile bloggers' being pseudonymous for the average reader but not for those within the charmed circle. (It would have changed my experience of reading Tacitus back in the day if I'd been fully aware that he was at that time a Republican operative. Maybe everyone else knew, but I didn't...)
The funny thing about reading writing like that is that it makes me doubt myself. Everything seems wrong, but then I'm not sure that anything is. "Strived"?
Well, you all are in the charmed circle, so what are you complaining about, hmmmm?
There is a difference, I think, between working for a political party and having a public persona that presents oneself as a private individual speaking on public topics, and other kinds of pseudonymity. I mean, say I worked for NARAL--it would be kind of sucky for me to post as a private person about reproductive rights without revealing that affiliation. I post about academic stuff, *and* I say that I work for a university, for example. That seems to me to be a basic kind of revealing of potential biases that any writer owes to a reader.
The article is about my "real" work in connection to blogging. It'll use the results of a survey I did using bitch a while back. Anyone who reads both the article and bitch will be able to put two and two together; likewise, I'm going to be on an MLA panel later this year. At the MLA I'll be appearing under my real name, but my presence on the panel's already been advertised as the presence of bitchphd, so again, anyone paying attention will put two and two together (although the MLA abstract didn't hinge on my blog identity, nor will the paper). When I speak as me, I rely on my real-life credentials; when I speak as bitch, I rely on her blogging activity. So far, I haven't mixed the two, but once the article and the MLA paper happen, I don't see that there will be much point in not doing so.
But that said, I really do kind of feel like my real name will inevitably affect how people read bitch, and not necessarily in great ways. It's kind of nice to write the thing without any specific claims of particular expertise, simply as a generic academic woman. It'll make me somewhat sad when, inevitably, the thing starts to be read not in light of what it says, but in light of what people know or assume about me based on my other published work, if that makes sense.
I think even 'strove to make a difference' sounds like management-speak pablum. Endeavoring to try his best in all of his extracurricular pursuits, that sort of thing.
Nope. "Strove." According to Garner, it hasn't yet been regularized by usage, although if A.B. is any indication, the younger generation is working on it.
God, this is rapidly not becoming funny. I thought the damage was going to be contained to that one thread--bad news that ML had posted on it on the mainpage, of course, but not a big deal. If A.B. is determined to make an ass of himself all over the net, maybe TAP really did screw up--not necessarily by hiring him but certainly for not preparing him better for the to-and-fro.
229: See, now I feel bad for him (even though people who spell "privilege" with a D make my skin crawl). That comment genuinely does sound like the outburst of someone who just was not ready for that level of scrutiny. Poor kid. Presumably he got hired because he was supposed to represent the voice of youth, or something.
There may, though, be a genuine argument to be made that expecting someone so young to be prepared for professional interactions has some shitty class-based presumptions operating under it.
At the MLA I'll be appearing under my real name, but my presence on the panel's already been advertised as the presence of bitchphd, so again, anyone paying attention will put two and two together (although the MLA abstract didn't hinge on my blog identity, nor will the paper).
I'm curious -- both of these could have been done more anonymously. Are you deliberately coming out, or did you slip up (someone who knew you in both capacities did the MLA publicity, and you didn't stop them in time) and are just planning to manage it?
I'm sorry for the guy, but I don't know what he expected -- you can't exploit anonymously acquired credibility under your real name and expect to stay anonymous.
"Strived" currently gets half as many Google hits as "strove" does. It may be one of those irregular verbs that's in the process of regularizing itself. That's some awful writing, though.
236, well, they'd already hired Klein and Ygelsias, and that worked out okay. The missing ingredient for AB, though, is having maintained public blogs for a good while beforehand.
233, if you've been advertised under your and B's name, then that's your coming-out party. I don't think it necessarily has to change much about the dynamic on your blog--a lot of your readers aren't going to check up on the bone fides, or will forget them a day later--but it might mean you should prepared yourself for the better-armed trolls.
Also: if I'm in the charmed circle, I didn't know it. I've never even saw a picture of your tits!
I feel sorry for Blickstein, and I think Weiner's comments about the issue have generally been dead on; he's not a good writer, but all this piling on is a bit much. In addition, it's not at all clear to me that he has a "prestigious writing position"; he's not on the masthead, he doesn't write for TAPPED, and I haven't seen any evidence for what, exactly, his relationship with the magazine is. He just seems like a kid who's out of his depth and doesn't really seem to know how to respond to criticism like PNH's.
Fine, he writes poorly. I assume his employers are allowed to read his work; they can make the necessary decisions. (I find a great many of TAPPED's writers incomprehensible, so he's not that far of my sense of the median.) If it's a problem for TAPPED, they'll fix it. Brutalizing someone in public, again and again, about his job, is just wrong. Most of us have turned in work we're not proud of from time to time; most of us would be horrified and angry if someone from outside our company, who was not depending on the quality of our work, called our office and broadcast the criticism.
I'm actually not sure if I'm intentionally in on your ID. You signed an email with enough of your name to be googlable once, and, being nosy, I googled. But I wasn't certain if you'd meant to.
Oh my God. That's exactly the kind of student newspaper article I use as a teaching lesson. One sentence in, I'm too embarrassed on his behalf to continue reading.
I feel bad for criticizing him too harshly, because I am convinced that while I was once a good writer, I am no longer, and therefore do not wish to cast stones from the glass veranda.
On the other hand, I have graduate school to blame for my inability to forge a sentence.
What would be cool is if we could get all of the trolls (left, right, and center) together on one blog so that they could battle it out once and for all. Who will be the ultimate troll!?!?
Actually, I was going to expand more on that "blog full of trolls" idea but then things started to sound uncomfortably familiar.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 6:33 AM
Trolls tend to defend themselves by saying, "You can't hear a dissenting opinion? Clearly your argument can't withstand challenge and it is wrong!" Right? It's just a way of avoiding the [gulp] intimacy of communication.
I had a friend who was kind of like a real-life Troll of Constant Sorrow, taking a tone-deaf view of everything I said about anyone, based on assumptions counter to all of my assumptions about the conversation. He claimed it was because everyone needs their assumptions challenged to know when they're right. It made him impossible to talk to, and our conversations lacked any content.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 6:49 AM
Trolls are the arbitrageurs of the internet. We need a couple of them around to maintain liquidity, keep the pot stirred.
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 6:50 AM
AWB -- how did he manage to maintain his "friend" status?
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 6:52 AM
#3 is a good reason for other people to tolerate trolls, but it's not an explanation of their existence in the first place... The answer to Alameida's question probably requires some kind of Grand Unified Theory for Why People Read Blogs in the First Place. Sorta in the same way that one becomes someone's "friend" in the first place too...
At some point, the Common House Troll (not an uber-troll like the ToS) finds himself reading a blog, thinking, "I really like this blogger, on a personal level! How can they be wrong about this thing they're writing about? I'm sure he would appreciate it, if I set him/her straight."
And then they're a troll...
Posted by arthegall | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 7:13 AM
In high school, I thought it was cool that we always argued. He had me convinced that arguing makes you smarter.
When we found out we both lived in NYC and started hanging out, it was less cool. He asked me where my bf went to high school, and I gave the name of a Manhattan private school. Trollfriend says, "Huh. So he's a spoiled little rich boy." I tell a story about the boyfriend enjoying simple things like foosball: "Hah! Just like a rich Manhattan guy to be all competitive about nothing!" I say he enjoys it despite not being competitive or into sports: "Oh ho! Even more perfect! An upper-class dude pretending he likes competition ironically!"
He did this with my work ("Oh, so now you're an elitist snob forcing 'littracher' down the throats of kids who'd rather be learning something worthwhile!"), my neighborhood, my clothes, my friends, and so forth until finally I stopped returning his tearful voicemails. ("Oh, AWB, your friendship means SO MUCH to me!") Ack.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 7:13 AM
#3 is a good reason for other people to tolerate trolls, but it's not an explanation of their existence in the first place
Well why do arbitrageurs in general exist? They see an opportunity to profit without exposing themselves to risk by taking a position. Similarly a trolls is getting psychological profit (by being able to represent him/herself as out-arguing his/her opponents) without exposing him/herself to risk (because s/he does not fully join the community of the board s/he is posting on, and either explicitly or implicitly makes clear that criticism of him/her is being discounted.)
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 7:30 AM
BTW AWB, check your mail.
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 7:31 AM
Also, young people and their crazy music these days --- what's up with that? And those pants. What were they thinking?
Posted by Gonerill | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 7:36 AM
Is it possible that certain forms of mental illness, when combined with the internet, produces trolling? That seems to be the best explanation for the Troll of Sorrow.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 7:36 AM
TMK: AWB's received your tearful emails, she's just choosing not to respond to them...
Posted by mike d | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 7:42 AM
It doesn't seem to me to be entirely irrational to hang out someplace where you disagree with the consensus, but think reasonably well of the quality of the conversation -- the 'challenge your assumptions' think is often bullshit, but it's not innately nuts.
Think of Idealist or baa here (or anyone else conservative we have commenting, I don't mean to leave anyone out.) I assume what they get out of it, beyond the apolitical entertainment, is a combinations of (a) checking to see if we might have a point about something -- that is, showing some willingness to be convinced; (b) figuring out what the opposition thinks among itself, for purposes of more effective opposition; (c) honing arguments for use in more serious contexts; and (d) simply enjoying political argument.
When the conversation is at a dopier level than it is around here (hard to imagine, I know, but pretend), it's a little harder to see what's going on, but just as the people aligned with such blogs who comment there clearly like the level of conversation, presumably the trolls they get do too.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 7:46 AM
I don't think I understood trolling until [the mysterious Alameida][edited by LB] used the Reason example. I could see myself trolling libertarians. Well, not really. But almost! Libertarians are fascinating and crazy and sense-of-a-sort-making all at once. If I ever got into serious political discussions with my friend Jackie (on my blogroll), I'm sure it could turn kind of trollish pretty quickly, by the method suggested in 5.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 7:53 AM
so that they could battle it out once and for all. Who will be the ultimate troll!?!?
Standard formulation is, "There can be only one!"
I don't know how you would define "unwillingness to engage," but that seems to be the root characteristic of a troll.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 8:01 AM
Yeah, that (or my perception that that was what was going on) is what led me to go off on Andrew the other day in that discussion of sexist commercials. Disagreement is one thing, but that feeling of talking to a wall that is entirely impervious to anything you might say gets old very, very fast.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 8:03 AM
Sometimes it's personal. I've got a troll who shows up from time to time on both my work and personal blogs, and a little check of IP addresses showed that the same person was showing up in both places under a variety of pseudonyms. He made the mistake of posting on some of our other blogs under his real name. He's a retired local cop, hates my employer and appears to have it in for me personally as well, although so far as I know I've never met the guy in RL or had to deal with him professionally (I'm a newspaper reporter).
If this weren't North Carolina, where even the journalists carry guns, I'd be more worried about it.
Posted by Lex | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 8:06 AM
Huh. My understanding of the safety advice for anyone stalkery is to simply fail to engage -- don't respond to anything, no contact, no reaction. Mostly they eventually get bored and go away. (The real-life version of "Don't Feed The Troll.")
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 8:10 AM
I'm not convinced that everyone always needs to be willing to be convinced of another position, but I'm willing to be convinced.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 8:11 AM
Actually that's another mode of trolling: Show up somewhere where they're talking about global warming, say, and try to start a fight about whether it's happening. Then complain about how people aren't willing to entertain arguments for another position. (This technique can also be found in philosophy papers that touch on the subject of evolution.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 8:15 AM
Is it possible that certain forms of mental illness, when combined with the internet, produces trolling?
Judging from some of my past internet activity, I would say yes.
Posted by King-Walters | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 8:16 AM
And it's a good (powerful?) technique, because, contra Adam's joke in 18, I think it is important to be open to being convinced. This doesn't make it illegitimate to say "Not now, we're talking about something else, and you aren't saying anything I haven't heard before and found unconvincing," but it does make saying that something that reasonable people tend to do cautiously, leading to a lot of pointless annoyingness.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 8:18 AM
The problem with trolls, online and IRL, is that you will not generally be willing to pay the necessary price to irritate, intimidate, or generally "beat" a psycho, so your only real option (usually) is not to engage. Not usually satisfying, and not always effective.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 8:18 AM
I actually enjoy heaping shit on trolls, but most hosts do not appreciate my help. And rightly so -- a flame war stinks up the place.
I'm convinced that when it gets serious, some combination of screening and deletion is the only way to go. It's not necessarily true that if you ignore them they'll go away, and anyway, some poster new to the site will always try to engage them.
I'm convinced that there are paid trolls out there. On some sites the first poster is almost always a troll. And one category of troll consistently sticks to the Republican talking points -- Al on Kevin Drum was repeating the "flip flop" slogan 2 or 3 months before it became mainstream.
Paid trolls divert threads from productive paths and plant Republican memes, until the topic becomes defending Kerry against the flipflop charge instead of whatever else it had started to be. Once you're defending, and once you're letting them frame theargument, you've lost. Buzzword politics works by reiteration and noise -- you want to be sure that everyone has heard the message. (Another example: "Social Security is bankrupt").
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 8:37 AM
re: 23
Come on JE, that can't be right. You're just saying that because you want to avoid the fact that Kerry recently has flip-flopped on defending against the Swift Boat accusations (IMHO, to avoid discussing the important issues, which are that Social Security is bankrupt, we are overrun with illegal immigrants and gays are destroying the sanctity of marriage).
Posted by Idealist | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 8:48 AM
There is an indiscretion error in this thread. Look for the unlucky number. (I don't want to quote it.)
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 8:49 AM
Idealist is banned!
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 8:49 AM
Yeah, where's the outrage on these illegal flip-flopping social security cheats anyway? Surely feminism is to blame.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 8:50 AM
Good catch, eb. I edited.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 8:52 AM
23- But was that actual Al, or wierd pseudo-parody Al?
I think the original, actual human Al still shows up on Yglesias' site sometimes, and he's pretty reasonable as far as friendly right-wingers go- maybe a little less persuadable than baa, but still sane. Like Tacitus, before he went crazy.
Posted by Moleman | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 8:53 AM
The real Al (I assume it's the real one) comments all the time on Yglesias's basketball blog, and seems to make sense. I mean, I could care less.
Tacitus always seemed like a total dick to me. Maybe I didn't catch him in time.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 8:55 AM
I go to that Tacitus site when I really want to freak myself out. It's kind of a neat experiment. Take a very intelligent group of people who consider they cannot be fooled, and fool them about something important. See what intricate intellectual hoops they will create for themselves in order to consider that they haven't been fooled.
I will read a post on that site and think: surely, this is going to end in a reasonable way. And then, nope. The comment section lends credence to some of David Icke's theories.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 9:00 AM
or, like Weiner said, Tacitus is a dick.
trolls get off on making people angry; it's how they get their daily dose of human contact. It's because we're all stuck in our cars and we've got to crash into each other just to remember that we're human, or something like that.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 9:02 AM
Tacitus always seemed like a total dick to me. Maybe I didn't catch him in time.
Agree entirely. I've never understood the weird acceptance of Tacitus that pervades the Dem side of the blogosphere.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 9:03 AM
that Tacitus site
Which one? I've never got the hang of Tacitus myself, although I know he has something to do with the founding of Obsidian Wings.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 9:04 AM
Tacitus is a wierd case- he always was kinda jerky, but I'm used to that with certain online sorts. I just lumped him in with folks who can't figure out how their tone come across in writing, or just aren't very good at talking to people.
I'm going on memory, but he actually got more rhetorically dogmatic and sure of Bush as his policies got less defensible, so there was this sudden slide from "supporter with doubts," in the same vein as Kevin Drum before the war, to Powerline-style slave to the party line. It was there from the beginning, but if you didn't follow it too closely, he looked like he was arguing in good faith.
Posted by Moleman | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 9:07 AM
How much of it is that Romans are totally sweet?
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 9:07 AM
Oops. Sorry about the slip in 13.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 9:20 AM
Wait, was that another slip?
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 9:23 AM
38: that was not another slip. (I am getting tired of "the mysterious..." though. Let's pick another adjective -- I nominate "inscrutable".)
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 9:38 AM
(or "nicht erkennbare".)
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 9:39 AM
(or "imperspicabila")
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 9:45 AM
See what intricate intellectual hoops they will create for themselves
Epicycles.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 9:50 AM
Impenetrable? No, I'm pretty sure that would be false.
Abstruse? That has alliteration going for it.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 9:52 AM
Epicycles have a bit of a bad rap, but I think this explains the phenomenon well.
Let us save our old epithets! Or, "the rosy-fingered Alameida" if you insist.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 9:59 AM
rosy-fingered
Living, as she does, relatively close to the land of the rising sun...
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 10:04 AM
And wasn't Epicycles a pre-Socratic?
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 10:05 AM
The Unnameable.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 10:10 AM
Pre-Red State Tacitus was the thinking man's Victor Davis Hanson—which might sound like damning with faint praise but is meant as a compliment. He used to be a much clearer writer (even if never a tactful one) and still held to that awesome military historian mold of conservative thinker, the type who holds that the Peloponnesian War augored crucial instructions for the GWOT and that's ultimately why liberals just don't get it. But then the Internet became some actually useful thing, instead of merely a sounding off board for RISK nerds, and in his search for a larger role he eventually gravitated toward the Powerline/MM pole of the conservosphere.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 10:26 AM
the type who holds that the Peloponnesian War augored crucial instructions for the GWOT
Specifically, the parts about pissing everyone else in the world off, going to war, and completely freaking out at home. Remember: we must recapture Amphipolis!
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 10:37 AM
The Unnameable
Y'mean -l-m--d-?
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 10:41 AM
I'm liking rosy-fingered.
Posted by alameida | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 10:47 AM
Trevino was always a bad person, and always utterly mad. The reason lefties used to like him is that he harshly attacked Bush, using lefty talking points. He was useful, to some extent, but people who thought he was "reasonable" were wrong.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 11:58 AM
How about "ox-eyed"?
Posted by dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 1:00 PM
How about 'She Who Must Not Be Named' or 'You-Know-Who'? Alameida would make a pwning Hermione.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 1:05 PM
Since the Sicilian campaign worked out so well, I'm sure things will go swimmingly in Iran.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 1:05 PM
53 is very nice. Is that description only applied to Hera or is it a general way of describing women/goddesses?
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 1:07 PM
"rosy-fingered" is okay, but I think "wine-dark" is even better.
Posted by M/tch M/lls | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 1:58 PM
Oh, no: now you've lit the Tacitus bat-signal. He googles and technoraties himself frequently enough to descend on threads where he's being discussed, scatter poison in every direction, denounce anyone familiar with his work as "obsessed," and leave the place in ruins. He's always trolled his own damned comment threads; no matter how "reasonable" his posts might seem, it's impossible to have a conversation with the
GOP operativeman.Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 2:19 PM
I've noticed that when he really is losing an argument he likes to make fun of you for dealing with him at all. Which is odd, because the rest of the time he clearly thinks he's a Very Serious Person.
Well, if he shows up I'm sure we can give him a nice "You're stupid and you're ugly and nobody likes you" and he'll get no joy.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 2:29 PM
It wasn't the beginning of RS that changed Tacitus/ I can remember the exact week and causal event:Abu Ghraib. My perception only, as someone who gung out and commented at Tacitus on a dailt basis.
Up until Abu Ghraib, I think Tacitus might have voted for Kerry(really) or helped impeach Bush. He was horrified by the incompetence and corruption in Iraq. I think Tacitus was at least as horrified by Abu Ghraib as the rest of us, but I believe at that exact moment he understood that the conservative movement and its entire agenda was dependent on the survival of George Bush.
He is still very careful about what he defends in the policy and practice of Republicans. I consider Tacitus technically honest, but one of the most skillful dissemblers and deceivers I have ever encountered;a professional speechwriter, ya know.
Tacitus is one of the very few committed conservatives/Republicans for whom I retain a degree of respect. Lord I'm verbose for this blog.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 2:43 PM
The quarter-inch of respect is why I consider Tacitus to be more dangerous than, oh, the Powerline flaks. Because JT really is deceptive, and his values really are extremist.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 2:48 PM
Actually, I can make 60 stronger. Tacitus has ties to the military, contacts in Washington, and always and still says the War is woefully undermanned. I think he took one glance at Abu Ghraib, instantly knew this was the tip of a very large iceberg, and knew investigations of cabinet-level decisions had to be prevented at any cost.
I object to Tacitus's ends, he is a pro-life fanatic. I actually don't object to his means:I am a pro-choice fanatic, and would engage in activity to achieve that end and others that are illegal and immoral to even think.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 2:56 PM
I object to Tacitus's ends, he is a pro-life fanatic. I actually don't object to his means:I am a pro-choice fanatic, and would engage in activity to achieve that end and others that are illegal and immoral to even think.
The problem is that each of you breeds the other (said the pupae).
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 2:59 PM
now you've lit the Tacitus bat-signal.
Why, I think that might be great fun.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 3:04 PM
would engage in activity to achieve that end and others that are illegal and immoral to even think
You mean, like, mandatory abortions? Even for men?
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 3:04 PM
Why, I think that might be great fun.
Oh, please, dear Gawd, no. And can we just agree that people who choose nicknames like "Tacitus" or "Augustine" or "Cato the Younger" are jackasses who have let their youthful infatuation with D&D and other role-playing games extend too far into real life. (NB: I played D&D when I was younger.)
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 3:08 PM
Please everyone call me Draco from now on.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 3:10 PM
I wish to be Sapphyra, dark half-drow adherent of the ethereal eighth rune.
And I always misread Tacitus as Tacticus, the parodied Sun-tzu in the Discworld series.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 3:13 PM
66: Yes, we can.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 3:14 PM
No, no, Tim, there's a perfectly enjoyable way to engage Trevino, with all the seriousness his disingenuousness deserves.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 3:17 PM
can I be Cato the Kaelin?
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 3:22 PM
You may know me by my designation, Orion IIC DW102, titled after the fines of mechs to emerge from the Trials of Possession. What forces defend this comment thread?
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 3:28 PM
I remain Flitch of Bacon.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 3:29 PM
And can we just agree that people who choose nicknames like "Tacitus" or "Augustine" or "Cato the Younger" are jackasses who have let their youthful infatuation with D&D
After agreeing to that, I think it would be neat if we all named ourselves after Monty Python characters. What do you think, SomeCallMeTim?
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 3:34 PM
Okay, 74 is fucking brilliant.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 3:35 PM
74: But that's precisely the point. When we chose names, it's flippant and self-mocking. Few have chosen any other kind of name; if they have, it's not some poncey hero of ours whose name they've appropriated.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 3:39 PM
What the hell does Atrios mean, anyway? I figured it was a minor character in some Socratic dialog or something, but I can't find anything on google.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 3:41 PM
Think he said somewhere that it was a misspelling of "Antrios."
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 3:43 PM
now I'll have to think up a new one.
Posted by a poncey hero | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 3:46 PM
can we agree that poncey is a wonderful word? Has anyone else been reading Black Swan Green?
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 3:47 PM
their youthful infatuation with D&D
OK, I'm containing my 'step back, and keep steppin'' response for now and instead merely noting that one of my favorite D&D characters of very recent years was a monk named Robusto de Pantalones. That's not where this name came from, though; quite the other way around.
Were this identity translated to a gaming system, though, it'd have to be Trinity.
That said, I wholly agree about a name like 'Tacitus.' If he ever ends up here, folks should take turns baiting him as 'Biggus Dickus' and see if it makes his head explode.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 5:55 PM
I always had the impression that the classical names were chosen to evoke the days of Cato's Letters and the Federal Farmer from the 18th century.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 6:01 PM
I'm not sure if it's a step up or down that your game character is named after your handle.
Not that I've ever, ever done the same. Yes. Yes.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 6:02 PM
Wikipedia:
According to Black, the name "Atrios" is actually a (misspelled) reference to a character named Antrios in the Yasmina Reza play Art who paints the play's key "white painting on white canvas".
So that explains that, right?
Posted by DonBoy | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 6:07 PM
I'm not sure if it's a step up or down that your game character is named after your handle.
Let's call it a step sideways. Some days I'm pretty certain that the entirety of Blogworld is one big roleplaying game. (And Unfogged rolled a 1 on its save vs. comment spam.)
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 6:14 PM
Jesus saves! (And takes half damage.)
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 6:24 PM
We were eaten by a grue.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 6:24 PM
I still contend that Froz Gobo is a D&D name.
Posted by M/tch M/lls | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 7:10 PM
i troll from time to time, and its usually at site who i generally agree with, but who on a certain point i think there is some weakness, or the poster is just a bit too smug. in part it just makes for better discussion than some sort of couched 'but don't you think they ahve a bit of a point at X or Y..."
Posted by Dan | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 7:56 PM
I beg to differ with 76:
When I chose the name Miss Emily it was because she was a fictional character with whom I could identify, fairly closely.
Like the literary Miss Emily, I am a small town spinster (well, poetic license) with a scandalous past, and a dead boyfriend mouldering in one of the bedrooms. Oh! wait...maybe that was the self-mocking part.
While I haven't killed anybody, part of what I identified in reading Faulkner's story was my anger at the village gossips who are writing my family's history with their words. and getting it wrong.
Tune in tomorrow, when I get "Death of a Salesman" exactly wrong! I hated Willie Loman.
Posted by Miss Emily | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 11:28 PM
Miss Emily is clearly more cultured than me; I got my moniker from a restaurant.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 06- 7-06 11:39 PM
Cultured? Pffft!
You just ignored the 'I grew up in a hick town' sub-text, didn't you?
As far as pseudonyms go, the waitress in me really wanted to ask what cut of fish the teofilo was.
The long time lurker is fairly sure that Teofilo's is the name of a restaurant. I could be wrong.
I certainly didn't mean to sound pompous. I'm a little nervous. If you really don't like me, let's all blame Matt Weiner.
Posted by Miss Emily | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 2:31 AM
Re Biggus Dickus: a person I know, who shall remain even more unnamed than grey-eyed Alameida herself, had a job connection to Biggus Dickus. (As in, helped get Biggus Dickus a job.) Swore up and down that he was a good guy, that he was rational and thoughtful and was merely working from different starting premises than the rest of us, um, actual heartland types. E.g., Biggus Dickus converted to the religion he now practices after carefully and rationally weighing all the options and judging their cultural implications. Yes, he used to be a Randroid [1], but he's much better now!
Just, you know, don't bring up how Reagan appeased the Communists and broke Carter's grain embargo for the sake of a few farm votes.
I was skeptical. I looked over on a neutral site. My troll-dar went off immediately. I tested the waters.
Wow. I've been around the Internet. I've encountered pedophiles, neo-Nazis, Trolls of Sorrow, crazed science fiction fans, crazed science fiction writers, and even the young Adam Yoshida. But never have I seen someone as determined to be a hemorrhoid for the sake of minor partisan advantage as Mr. Biggus Dickus. I think it took a two-post exchange to establish our mutual antipathy. (I do have a gift.)
I e-mailed my friend. "Do I have to say it?"
"Yes, yes. You're the smart one, I'm the cute one."
I also had an opportunity to meet Biggus Dickus during the RNC. I declined, because I dislike cock-punching strangers.
[1] Randroid? Yes. Dickus used to have his book list up on Amazon. Quite funny.
Posted by Halfway Done | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 5:17 AM
Here is some annoying grammer trolling.
Posted by Joe O | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 2:30 PM
You know, I think that was all fair (I just read it linked from Brad DeLong.) The kid writing was really sloppy, and he's working for a professional publication. Admittedly, I'm predisposed in favor of the Neilsen Haydens, but even generally, if you're going to write disorganized fluff, you should be prepared to be corrected.
(Not that someone couldn't tear most things I write to shreds as well, but if I deserved it like that kid did, I'd take it with good humor. Which he did, mostly.)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 2:34 PM
94: What is this "grammer" of which you speak?
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 2:36 PM
Good humor and apologies is not good enough for the Neilsen Haydens:
"Wow, I feel like both Strunk and White just attacked me in some dark alleway with a lead pipe and wrench! I agree with all the claims of hackneyed prose and illiterate english. I strive to be someone who has a strong grasp on grammer, syntax, and diction, and within this post I have apparently failed to live up to this expectation. Perhaps in my haste I neglected to both self edit and self critique my writing, and in the future will take greater care when posting. Thanks for the insight!"
My goodness. What a facile, shallow brush-off that was. I suspect, from the speed and smoothness of its deployment, that this wasn't the first time Blickstein's used it.
Tell me again why Tapped is using this pup?
Posted by: Teresa Nielsen Hayden | June 8, 2006 01:21 AM
Posted by Joe O | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 2:39 PM
Go PNH!
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 2:39 PM
So, Joe O, you don't think that Teresa was basically right in her assessment?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 2:41 PM
Why did all these venerables jump on this kid all of a sudden? And where is their old friend Farber?
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 2:44 PM
96 -- Did you read the linked thread? Huh, didja?
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 2:44 PM
I thought she was a little testy (I would have been less so), but basically right. Blickstein was sloppy and illiterate sounding, and got called on by PNH being firm, but really very helpful. The response 'Strunk and White just attacked me in some dark alleway with a lead pipe and wrench' was flip, and equally sloppy and illiterate -- with a response like that, he isn't learning anything.
I'd say someone doing what the NH's did to the writer of a randomly selected LiveJournal would be being a prick, but the Prospect is supposed to be professional.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 2:45 PM
I agree with Joe O in 97. Before then it was harsh but fair critique, but Teresa's comment was thoroughly obnoxious. Was Blickstein supposed to prepare a carefully worded resignation letter for the blog comments? I thought his response was reasonably classy.
Also, if the complaint is that Blickstein is abusing his privileged platform by mixing metaphors, their time would be better spent doing grievous bodily harm to Thomas Friedman.
(99: No she was fucking not.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 2:46 PM
IDP -- I'm pretty sure Farber and that crowd are on the outs.
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 2:46 PM
103 is good.
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 2:48 PM
I read Blickstein's response as a testy fuck-you to PNH, the sort of thing someone who's caught not doing something he never cared about doing anyway trots out in front of the authorities with a roll of the eyes and plenty of resentful sarcasm. So, not really "reasonably classy" at all.
But that could just be because I'm a misanthrope who thinks the worst of everyone.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 2:49 PM
I agree with the anti-TNH position. She was being rude with that response; his comment to her was polite and good-humored. It would have been better if his response had been more carefully written, but there was no call for rudeness and insults--"pup"?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 2:51 PM
I wasn't sure how to read Blickstein's response. Almost anything including 'Thanks for the insight!' probably isn't meant seriously.
But I have a question: doesn't Tapped employ an editor? It's hard for the young pup to learn without help, especially given that most blogs and print media are barely literate.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 2:54 PM
Yeah, I'm with Wolfson. If the critique was fair, the reasonable thing to do is to be chastened and say thank you. If you think it's unfair, have the guts to fight back. That sort of "WHATever" response is bogus. I still think TNH was harsher than I would have been, but I don't think she was out of line.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 2:54 PM
Can one write sentence of reasonable length that is readable both in regular and disemvoweled form? With a few misspellings in one form or the other if it's needed. Cause that'd be great. And it would be teh roxx if it was insulting in both forms.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 2:56 PM
Also, crazed science fiction editors. (I once saw the NHs at Freddie's. It would be too mean to describe.)
Posted by Halfway Done | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 2:56 PM
I think LB is a misanthrope who thinks the worst of everyone, too.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 2:57 PM
What do you mean by readable? Almost anything is readable in disemvoweled form if you work at it - pretty much nothing in English will be unchanged by disemvoweling. (If we consider the word "cwm" to be English, I think that's about it.)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 2:58 PM
Can one write sentence of reasonable length that is readable both in regular and disemvoweled form?
Perhaps I don't understand disemvoweling, but isn't this equivalent to asking if one can write [a] sentence of reasonable length without using vowels? I think the answer is no, one cannot.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 2:59 PM
I'm not a mindreader, so I don't know whether Blickstein was sincerely acknowledging constructive criticism or blowing it off. Teresa is not a mindreader either, so she doesn't know either. Honestly, I think most people would be hard pressed to come up with anything as polite as an ambiguously flip response under the circumstances.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 2:59 PM
I dunno, folks. I think TNH came off distinctly Hildean.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 2:59 PM
He didn't say "whatever". You guys are assuming he was being sarcastic when it's totally possible he was being genuine, and the S&W thing was a joke to show he was taking it all in stride. You can't hear tone of voice on the internet, and the plain meaning of his words was "thank you"; you have to read the sarcasm in. In the absence of some kind of explicit sarcasm tag, she was being obnoxious.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:00 PM
I see a "pick on someone your own size" problem. Yes, Tapped is a big site, but no, I think it moves too fast to be edited. It really feels like bullying to me, as do injunctions to "have the guts to fight back."
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:00 PM
Fuck! When I said "disemvowelling," I was somehow thinking of a process that left only vowels remaining. Applying it to either one, by readable I surely didn't mean that one has to figure out which vowels (consonants on the meaning I meant to say) have been removed. Rather, the sentence, after having gone through whichever process, now imperfectly resembles another sentence of different meaning.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:02 PM
I'm torn. I've contradicted myself on this point already (compare 95 to 109).
While the ambiguously flip response is on some level politer than a directly hostile 'Give me a break' would have been, direct hostility wouldn't have made me think Blickstein was a twerp. That response did.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:03 PM
No! → O!
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:04 PM
119: I think, if it is ambiguous after disemvowelling or deconsonantution, it almost certainly won't be easily readable; or do you mean a sentence that, after it undergoes this process, will be naturally read as a completely different sentence?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:04 PM
Come ON. Blickstein's "Strunk and White beat me up in an alley" is classic "you're just being petty and schoolmarmish" undergrad whining. Yes, all professional editors should spend an hour a month mocking Thomas Friedman--no argument there--but Blickstein was immaturally and unsuccessfully trying to save face while denying the substance of PNH's criticism. Maybe I wouldn't have written what TNH did, especially not if I was actually trying to get him to improve his writing, but he did deserve it.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:05 PM
He also said thank you, I want to do better in the future.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:08 PM
Words which can never be uttered without utmost sincerity.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:09 PM
The thing is that there shouldn't be a 'your own size' problem here. The Prospect is supposed to be a professional publication. Blickstein can't write a blog post straight, and if he meant to apologize, he can't write an apology straight -- TNH's interpretation that it's flip sarcasm might be wrong, but it's not unlikely. I really think that as one of the faces of a professional publication he should either be a good enough writer not to deserve that sort of criticism, or he should, when criticised, roll over on his back and expose his soft underbelly in surrender: "Yes, I know I'm not a very good writer; I'm trying to improve."
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:09 PM
I took Adam's response to be an unsuccessful attempt to diffuse the situation and accept his helping of crow. He made a joke and said that he'll try harder; it was nsuccessful because it was poorly written. But TNH's reply accused him of copying and pasting boilerplate—that was odd.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:11 PM
121: See "somewhat lengthy" in 110. But that otherwise follows the model I have in mind.
122: A different sentence, which would almost surely be misspelled.
For instance, if there was some way to make a sound like the one made by the word "are" using only vowels, you could have "fuck [form of the word that sounds like the sound made by the word "are" using only vowels while it still has consonants] ass" become "u [word that sounds like the sound made by the word "are" using only vowels ] a [something that one would not to be accused of being that can be misspelled in a way the resembles its properly spelled form with vowels only]." Of course, fuck [] ass []" would have to be a meaningful sentence as well.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:11 PM
Perhaps "don't comment drunk at 12:30 AM when a bunch of people have ripped apart the style of your post" would be good advice too. On the other hand, is this a firing offense? That's what TNH said, in a particularly insulting way, and that was. Just. Not. Called. For.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:12 PM
125:So they're words that are never uttered sincerely? If some one says "thank you", the thing to do is say, "you're welcome", unless you're getting a much clearer signal than he gave.
I'm not saying B. did everything perfectly; I'm considering the judiciousness and grace of TNH's comment, and they were lacking.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:12 PM
Words which can never be uttered without utmost sincerity.
Every now and again, I fall a little bit in love with you, Wolfson.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:13 PM
Well, see, I thought he was giving a pretty clear signal, if not of snideness at least of not caring. Maybe TNH went overboard, but I don't think she misapprehended the basic situation.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:15 PM
(OT, but w00t! I was just asked to jury a show! Kind of a big one, too!)
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:15 PM
Smasher is the one with the interesting job!
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:16 PM
Perhaps "don't comment drunk at 12:30 AM when a bunch of people have ripped apart the style of your post" would be good advice too. On the other hand, is this a firing offense?
Commenting drunk on a blog you're
paid toprivileged and thrilled tosupposed to be writing professionally?I generally don't applaud the impromptu supercilious grammar style lessons, but I don't think that commenting drunk in response is particularly intelligent, either.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:17 PM
I'm missing a comma after the last appearance of "misspelled", another comma after "form" when it appears following the previously mentioned missing comma, and one open quote before the last appearance of "fuck".
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:17 PM
Congratulations, Smasher!
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:19 PM
It is a good thing that Tapped does not employ any other writers who are often razzed for frequent grammatical, syntactical, or homophone-related snafus!
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:20 PM
"Thanks for the insight!" I don't read as being particularly sincere; half-heartedly apologizing for further infelicities of style and grammar by pleading intoxication is just sad. It's a professional blog, keeping professional hours: he didn't have to respond in comments at all, according to Tapped conventions, and doing so in this weird-ass way is really bizarre.
"Tell me again why Tapped is using this pup" is, as Matt says, very close to the line, if not over it. But I think she read B. correctly.
Congratulations, 'Smasher!
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:22 PM
Tell me again why we're using you, w/d?
And congrats, Arm'.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:24 PM
"Tell me again why Tapped is using this pup" is, come to think of it, a pretty serious case of the mote and the beam. That post isn't on TAPPED. A nice prose style isn't as important as getting your facts right.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:26 PM
I'm all for sympathy, but let's admit that if an apology gives the appearance of ambiguity, it's a poor apology. And ending an apology with an exclamation point, either in written form or through verbal intonation, is a really really bad idea.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:27 PM
A nice prose style isn't as important as getting your facts right.
Lies!
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:27 PM
Seems like this whole discussion just proves there's a writing problem; "Wow, I feel like both Strunk and White just attacked me in some dark alleway with a lead pipe and wrench!" and "Thanks for the insight!" seem extremely sarcastic, while the rest of it could be sincere.
I agree with 126. Further, I think this exchange is not "grammar trolling" as described in 94. The accusation of cutting-and-pasting was indeed weird, but the basic criticism was that his response sucked, which it did.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:28 PM
138: Oh, Sausagely can't type for shit, but he writes well -- he should have a copy-editor to clean his stuff up, but there's nothing wrong with it beyond multiple horrible typos. My father is terribly clever, incredibly literate, has been a professional for close to fifty years, and can't reliably spell words like 'maybe'. He's a fine writer, just missing the spelling center of his brain.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:28 PM
Anyway, I approve of any Nielsen Hayden tag-team obloquy colloquy.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:29 PM
Congrats, Smasher.
And honestly, is "pup" really an indefensible insult? It's pretty mild.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:29 PM
But perhaps we can achieve comity by agreeing that (1) ambiguously sincere apology = bad; (2) flippant dismissal of even ill-rendered apology = ungracious.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:30 PM
140: Probably my deep knowledge of baseball, including the proper grounds for having certain opinions about same. Also how to interpret very ambiguous sentences in contracts.
147: No. But asking, in a manner as if your desire was to cause, why someone retains their job, is.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:31 PM
A flippant dismissal would've been OK. This was frothing.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:31 PM
And honestly, is "pup" really an indefensible insult? It's pretty mild.
Of course you think that--you chose a dog-related psued.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:32 PM
I thought it was more a matter of being a little more seasoned than the some of the, umm, young people around here.
Posted by DaveL | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:33 PM
Congrats, Smasher.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:34 PM
Frothing?
My goodness. What a facile, shallow brush-off that was. I suspect, from the speed and smoothness of its deployment, that this wasn't the first time Blickstein's used it.
Tell me again why Tapped is using this pup?
Harsh, but I would say far from frothing.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:35 PM
145: Oh, I know, I only tease. MY's sportswriting debut in support of Dirk Nowitzki as the greatest basketball player ev-ar shows his cunning and thoughtfulness as a writer.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:36 PM
It took me a couple views to figure out what Weiner meant in 141. Aha! It's not TAPPED, it's TAP/Midterm Elections.
LB is right in 145. A.B.'s original post was simply impenetrable, in the Humpty Dumpty sense of "that's enough of that; let's move on to something nicer." Sausagely's writing is clear enough that the homophones are instantly translatable--and so all the more mysterious!
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:36 PM
155 also to 153. Hook 'em Mavs woo!
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:37 PM
Maybe I'm just conflict-averse, but it struck me as analagous to walking up to a street musician and saying, "You're not a very good saxophonist, are you?"
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:41 PM
Go, Smasher!
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:41 PM
Conflict-averse? What does that mean?
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:42 PM
A tip of my Kapp to you.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:43 PM
TNH, in a short space, called him a "pup," accused him (crazily) of deploying a prepared comment, and suggested that he be fired. Maybe that's not "frothing," but it's far beyond a facile dismissal.
I also don't think that his post was impenetrable; the last sentence, which PNH Orwellizes, just means that in the next few months we can expect to see more anti-establishment candidates succeed, and that endorsements from established political figures will not play a significant role. This may be wrong, but he's not blinding you with a spray of metaphors the way Friedman does. (And picking on "moreso" is exactly Hilde's speed.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:44 PM
"street musician" s/b "musician playing for reputable and respected music group"
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:44 PM
to a street musician
That's why I think it was okay. Blickstein's not a street musician. He's doing what should be a useful job, covering the midterm elections for what should be a serious and informative publication, and he's doing it badly. Grammar trolling someone with a personal blog would be bogus, but this kid should either shape up or should not be working where he is. There are good writers out there to be hired.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:46 PM
163: This is where the TAPPED/Midterm distinction makes a difference. "Midterm Madness" is the semipro operation. I think polite but firm editing of the post would've been fine, but some commenters did not keep to polite but firm.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:47 PM
Blickstein may be taking the heat for the Prospect here. I don't think they should have a 'semi-pro' blog on the mid-term elections. If they want to hire student interns, find ones who can write at a professional level and hire them, don't devalue the whole operation by putting badly written fluff up on their website.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:51 PM
Hey, let's fight about whether or not the National Review should have outed Armando instead.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:51 PM
Serves Armando right for spoofing National Review's IP address.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:54 PM
167: Is this even a question? They shouldn't have. It's a bad, bad thing that they did.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:54 PM
168: What are you talking about? Maybe I'm missing some important facts.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:56 PM
It was indeed a very bad thing they did, but I was a little surprised that his handle was his actual name. That's not very deep cover.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:57 PM
Well, it seems the issue is whether or not he had a conflict of interest w/r/t some of the stuff he wrote on Kos, and whether or not that justifies or mitigates the outing.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:57 PM
170: It's a D/eignan joke, if I'm not mistaken.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:58 PM
Just a dumb joke playing on another's recent misfortunes w/r/t outing threats.
To be totally clear, the assclowns at NRO were way out of line, although I have not yet found the Corner post in which they did the deed so I'm still a little confused about what happened.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 3:59 PM
168: ?
In re Blickstein, I think the problem is more the 'fluff' than the 'badly written'. As Calton Bolick says, his piece is speculative and anecdotal. The problem is partly that uses buzzwords like 'insurgent' and 'grassroots' without having a clear conception of what they mean. But that wouldn't be helped by a more felicitious prose style; from that perspective "The grassroots support him" is no better than "The grassroots are behind him."
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:00 PM
Re 161: Obviously, I think jokes based on someone's last name are funny.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:01 PM
But that wouldn't be helped by a more felicitious prose style
Well, that's the Orwell point. If you write clearly, then you're less likely to write stupidly, because clear writing makes your stupidity obvious. A foggy prose style covers thoughtless writing.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:02 PM
But Matt, you do see that your version in 162 of almost exactly the same phrases is more clear, right?
A.B. writes: "watch for the diminishing importance of entrenched endorsements."
You rephrase: "endorsements from established political figures will not play a significant role."
Your sentence is more active and less pretentious; it's actually trying to explain something to a reader (well, me) who you think should be able to get it if you put it straight.
As for 165, do you think A.B. is not paid? Or doesn't have some sort of semi-official status as "intern"?
(I realize I'm arguing this more because A.B.'s writing style and pseudo-apology ["I'm sorry my paper set off your pedantic antennae, teach!"] reminds me so much of the clever, unteachable students I've struggled with at X. Univ. So I'd better back down a bit.)
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:03 PM
173: I don't know who that is. Do you mean Luap Nangied?
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:04 PM
174: It isn't in The Corner, it's in NRO's mediablog.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:04 PM
Well, it seems the issue is whether or not he had a conflict of interest w/r/t some of the stuff he wrote on Kos, and whether or not that justifies or mitigates the outing.
It doesn't mitigate it at all. If there was a conflict, NRO could have so alleged without outing him. If Armando pretended it didn't exist, then they could out him, if necessary. Just deep, deep dickishness.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:08 PM
Congratulations, 'Smasher! Not that I really know what "jury a show" means.
I thought Blickstein's reply was flip, particularly the "I have apparently failed to live up to this expectation" and the "Perhaps in my haste I neglected . . ." parts. He's not copping to anything, and so the "Thanks for the insight!" comes off as disengenuous.
That said, I think Teresa's response was condescending and assy, but I can see why she felt moved to make it in such a manner.
Posted by M/tch M/lls | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:09 PM
179, Yep. I strive to be someone who has a strong grasp on humor, relevance, and Unfoggedalia, and within 168 I have apparently failed to live up to this expectation. Perhaps in my haste I neglected to both self edit and self critique my joke, and in the future will take greater care when commenting.
161, I got it! Though that's not quite how I spell my name, thanks.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:10 PM
If you write clearly, then you're less likely to write stupidly, because clear writing makes your stupidity obvious. A foggy prose style covers thoughtless writing.
I'd say that David Brooks has a good prose style. I think it's dangerous to equate good prose with clear thought, let alone intelligent thought. That's a problem with Orwell as he is often cited.
178: Sure, I hope I'm clearer, and A.B. would do well to learn from me. But he was a long way from the complete obscurantism that Orwell quotes. (And I'm sure he's getting paid, and TAP would do well to make him write better. But I'm not sure that unleashing the whole Making Light crew on him was the best thing to do, especially when they got personal.)
OTOH I am sympathetic with Emerson's point about the extra opportunities given to Ivyish students, which I think should stop with me.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:11 PM
92 (although the thread seems to have wandered since then):
Cultured? Pffft!
You just ignored the 'I grew up in a hick town' sub-text, didn't you?
I suppose I did. Apologies.
As far as pseudonyms go, the waitress in me really wanted to ask what cut of fish the teofilo was.
The wet bits, naturally.
The long time lurker is fairly sure that Teofilo's is the name of a restaurant. I could be wrong.
You are correct.
I certainly didn't mean to sound pompous. I'm a little nervous. If you really don't like me, let's all blame Matt Weiner.
Don't worry, I like you. We can still blame Weiner, though.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:12 PM
Hey, speaking of 'Smasher and Grammar Squads, what's going on with Grammar Police?
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:12 PM
181: Thank you, I agree.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:15 PM
184. The whole point of the Ivy-snobbery is that they're supposed to have been knocked over the head with a grammar-cudgel by someone like Wolfson or me at some vulnerable, formative stage. Alas, such is no longer the case: curriculae have been modernized, grades have been raised, teachers instructed not to bruise--o tempora! o mores!
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:16 PM
I'd say that David Brooks has a good prose style. I think it's dangerous to equate good prose with clear thought, let alone intelligent thought
But his clear, entertaining prose allows us to know certainly and confidently that he's a dolt, without having to sift through fog to be sure.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:19 PM
curriculae
I think you mean "curricula", darling.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:19 PM
183: But it should be Apo giving the joke apology. You alluded, while he named. The reminder that I transposed the "K" from elsewhere (the lack of an "s" was intentional) makes this a good time to stop commenting for the day.
Also, I didn't emphasize "I" in 176 to contrast myself with anyone else.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:19 PM
I remember a kerfluffle over whether Leiter should out Juan Non-Volokh and the consensus was, correctly, that Leiter was being a dick.
NRO is being a dick, too. While the prevalence of pseudonymity has its drawbacks, viz., any schmuck can pretend to be an expert without being held accountable, its benefits, like allowing less powerful people to proclaim their opinions without fear of reprisal.
If you write clearly, then you're less likely to write stupidly, because clear writing makes your stupidity obvious. A foggy prose style covers thoughtless writing.
That's what my advisor says ("If you wrote less clearly, I wouldn't have caught this, but you do, so...")
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:20 PM
186: Long story short, it's broken and I can't fix it. I'm going to have to pay up for an MT license and upgrade so that they'll fix it for me. (My friendly neighborhood computer whizzes are unf. a bit too busy to hold my hand right now.)
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:20 PM
I lied. I should have either said, "The reason I emphasized..." or "in 176 in order...".
Posted by wahserdreyer | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:22 PM
190.--More cudgel!
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:23 PM
My last grammar course was in sixth grade, but I found that when I learned Latin at a university, my English improved, solely because subordinate clauses and subjunctives jumped out everywhere, even in instant message away messages.
(Apparently writing clearly occasionally leaves fragments. Oops @ 192 should have 'outweigh them' or something to finish the damn sentence. Multitasking.)
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:23 PM
Also, by the time anyone's at the Ivy League, it's probably too late to set right what's gone wrong. Virtue is only available to the well-brought-up.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:24 PM
See, this kind of response to the outing thing really worries me. Suddenly we're all persumed to be incapable of thinking for ourselves?
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:24 PM
I'm sorry to hear that it's down for the forseeable, 'Smasher. I hope you find a fix soon.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:26 PM
I looked at the NRO blog so you don't have to, and the one accusation of conflict of interest they make is AFAICT sheer bullshit. They cite this post while pointing out that he was representing a large corporation in negotiations in an antitrust suit. It's not even obvious to me that the position he takes in that article is advantageous to his client.
It is true that he once identified himself in public as a guestblogger at dKos, but that hardly seems like an excuse.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:27 PM
189: I think that's a bit facile. Many are seduced by his smooth prose.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:28 PM
He wasn't very careful, was he? My understanding is that his real name was up on Wikipedia -- at that point, aren't you out? (Not that I've been all that careful myself, but in a contentious political world, I have a hard time seeing republishing already public information as a major offense. Hurtful to the target, but not wrong in itself.) On the other hand, I'm not sure of how out he was already, and I don't know what NR did. Does anyone have a link?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:29 PM
No, no: clearly, if you were
wearing a short skirtnot using Tor for all your blogging, you were really asking for it.Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:29 PM
Virtue is only available to the well-brought-up.
Untrue. It can be acquired by anyone who has the wherewithal to purchase a well-made set of evening clothes.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:30 PM
202.--LB, Armando deleted the Wikipedia entry, but by then it was already archived. Or at least that's what I thought I understood from the NRO MediaBlog's version of affairs.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:31 PM
My friendly neighborhood computer whizzes are unf
Is that why unf never posts? He's too busy fixing other people's computers?
Posted by M/tch M/lls | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:31 PM
202: But was his name up at Wikipedia before, or after the outing? B/c yeah, if it were already known, then identifying him would be kind of a non-issue. OTOH, the argument here (and I don't know for sure about this one) is that it wasn't outing his name, but outing his client that was the real problem.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:32 PM
I suppose it's too late to make a difference, so: Original NRO post. Here's the shocked! follow-up.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:34 PM
207: Before the NRO post (and your link is broken).
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:36 PM
Oops. Okay, try this.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:39 PM
Again, I'm torn. NRO are assholes, and were trying to hurt him. On the other hand, clicking through, he spoke on NPR under his real name as a DailyKos blogger, and gave a speech somewhere doing the same thing? At that point, it seems as if you've flung caution to the winds.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:41 PM
God, what an asshole Spruiell is. Now there's someone who should be fired.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:41 PM
My understanding is that his real name was up on Wikipedia
Assuming that's true, anyone could have put his name up. I'm not very comfortable with that as a get out of judgment card. He was trying to be anonymous, it should have been respected.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:43 PM
Speaking of lawyers getting fired, the partners at a firm wouldn't try to hide the fact that the firm's youngest associate is leaving only 8 months into his work here unless there was something bad going on, right?
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:43 PM
I dunno. What does 'hide' mean -- he's been on vacation for six weeks and you've figured out he's never coming back?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:45 PM
On the Armando thing, I think my intuition on whether this is wrong is off, so I'm going to be quiet now.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:47 PM
Well, but, who cares if you've flung caution to the winds? AS JM says, the point isn't whether he was asking for it.
I'm touchy on the issue, obviously. There are plenty of people who know who I am, but if someone made a point of publishing my name as Bitch Ph.D., particularly in the context of an ad hominem implication that the reason for my anonymity had something to do with a desire to mislead people rather than for self-protection, and then followed it up with some kind of bullshit self-justification, I'd be pissed. I think the question of whether Armando was incautious is a totally separate issue from whether or not the NRO was justified in publishing that; I don't think it was.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:48 PM
No. He admitted to my co-summer that the partners told him not to tell any of us that he was leaving. He claims he loves the firm and is leaving for "personal reasons."
His last day is tomorrow, and there's a farewell lunch for him, but none of the summers can go, because we're all going to lunch with a couple of the partners, which we were invited to this morning. We only found out he was leaving when we got a (possibly mistakenly sent to us) email this afternoon announcing the farewell lunch.
Very fishy.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:48 PM
One of the commenters at ObWi made what I thought was a good point: it's the aggregation of the various bits of information that may have circulated in semi-private into a single, easily accessible post on a high-traffic blog that definitively breaks the pseudonymity. At that point, I think, you either have to come out, gather up the uncertain shreds of your privacy, or retreat from the field.
I don't know what the future for high-profile, pseudonymous writers looks like; I rather suspect the internet has moved beyond its former subculture clubbiness and that no "Online Integrity" pledges will preserve it. (Not that there weren't assholes who outed people back in the days of mimeographed zines, I'm sure.)
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:48 PM
211, what's to be torn about? There's not a gram of nutrition in Spruiell's post. He reveals that Armando hoped to close the Wikipedia loophole and then gives us the kicker ("A Daily Kos guy working for Wal-Mart? No wonder he doesn't want anyone to know"), which delivers the fait accompli of the post, since it isn't noteworthy in the slightest that some guy wanted to tweak his public profile.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:49 PM
I think JM is right.
It seems to me this is similar to a whistleblower issue, and ties into increasing problems with the question of free speech off the job. If we're to maintain the right to free speech as citizens, it seems to me we have to be able to protect ourselves from losing our jobs if we exercise it, no? And really, that's what all this boils down to.
The problem, 'course, is that in some jobs, it's not so much that you'll be "fired" as that you might lose a client, or create a perception of conflict of interest for your students, or whatever. And I think people should be able to protect themselves from such things by being anoymous, or pseudonymous. Surely it can be misused, but it seems to me that the argument against it boils down to the argument that there's no free speech problem if people's speech is inhibited by their need to make a living, which I think is a dangerous idea.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:56 PM
Oh, I'm back in. What I'm torn about (and NRO is worthless, I just don't know if they've done something wrong rather than just mean) is that if I have the facts straight, which I may not, Amando did at least two things which seem to me to be publishing his real identity: I think, if I got it straight, he spoke on NPR under his real name and IDed himself as the DK blogger, and he gave a public speech somewhere else. If that's right, that seems absolutely different to me from being careless with IP addresses (hell, I wouldn't know how to be careful with IP addresses) or telling individuals your real name. When lots of people not personally known to you know the facts, I just can't see that they have an affirmative duty to you not to repeat them.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 4:58 PM
Well, if he spoke on NPR under his real name (which presumably he did; my own experience is that NPR doesn't like to let people be interviewed under pseudonyms), then yeah: he was already outed. Re. public speech, I'm not sure: did he do so under his name, or as "Armando from Daily Kos, and no pictures, please"? Because that's risky, yes, but it isn't self-outing.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 5:05 PM
Real name: "Armando Llo/re/ns is a Guest Blogger for dailykos.com." I'm sorry for the guy, but I don't know what he expected -- you can't exploit anonymously acquired credibility under your real name and expect to stay anonymous.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 5:10 PM
I just found the same real name googling NPR. It was the Miers story from October, 2005, and his last name is right there.
B has been on the radio (no problem) and given speechs in that character (wearing a mask?). Drawing a line, I think; NPR be damned.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 5:14 PM
I didn't wear a mask; I just didn't say my name, except privately to individuals in casual conversation before and after.
I don't think the issue is whether he can *expect* to remain anonymous. I think the issue is whether the NRO was right to publish his (private) name in connection with his very public blog. It seems to me that his putting the role of "guest blogger" on an obscure site in connection with an otherwise unknown name isn't the same thing by a long shot.
Of course, all that said, I'll be publishing things in the next few months under my own name that will pretty easily identify me. And I don't expect to be really anonymous after that point. But I don't think that a major news organ will be justified if it tries a bit of character assassination by linking my well-known pseud with my little-known (but soon, easily findoutable) real name.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 5:21 PM
And I don't expect to be really anonymous after that point.
Well, that's the key. You might be pissed, and reasonably so, but at that point you wouldn't have been 'outed', more like harassed.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 5:26 PM
Which doesn't make the NRO guy any less of an asshole, since his obvious goal was to link Armando to Wal-Mart, thus damaging both his credibility with his readers and his relationship with his client. That's purely shitty behavior.
Posted by DaveL | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 5:32 PM
More Blickstein abuse; check this comment out, just posted on Making Light:
I don't care how rude anyone was to him, that's not someone who should have a prestigious writing job. The Prospect should be ashamed of hiring him.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 5:38 PM
B, do you mean articles in the mode of "here's what being a well-known online feminist is like, plus things I've observed?" A professional article that would allow you to claim some authority from your online experience, I mean?
I suppose it's this I don't expect to be really anonymous after that point that makes me wonder how you expect that de-pseudonymizing to happen. I agree that if a major news source suddenly swooped down and plucked a post, an article, and your name up out of the mix and aggregated them together to tear you down, that would be mean and awful. But have you given any thought to how you'd prefer to be rendered non-pseudonymous?
I'm kind of coming around to LB's 224: Armando in bits and pieces was making himself public but hadn't quite prepared his post-pseudonymous ground. That doesn't excuse NRO--that was a hit-piece, no more--but I'm also sort of uncomfortable with high-profile bloggers' being pseudonymous for the average reader but not for those within the charmed circle. (It would have changed my experience of reading Tacitus back in the day if I'd been fully aware that he was at that time a Republican operative. Maybe everyone else knew, but I didn't...)
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 5:39 PM
He sounds as though he cuts and pastes phrases from a young writer's catalog ('Just Add Water Instant Weblog Mix Inside.')
Plus, doesn't 'ivory tower' generally refer to the academy, not a privileged upbringing. One of us is misusing the phrase.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 5:41 PM
The funny thing about reading writing like that is that it makes me doubt myself. Everything seems wrong, but then I'm not sure that anything is. "Strived"?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 5:44 PM
Well, you all are in the charmed circle, so what are you complaining about, hmmmm?
There is a difference, I think, between working for a political party and having a public persona that presents oneself as a private individual speaking on public topics, and other kinds of pseudonymity. I mean, say I worked for NARAL--it would be kind of sucky for me to post as a private person about reproductive rights without revealing that affiliation. I post about academic stuff, *and* I say that I work for a university, for example. That seems to me to be a basic kind of revealing of potential biases that any writer owes to a reader.
The article is about my "real" work in connection to blogging. It'll use the results of a survey I did using bitch a while back. Anyone who reads both the article and bitch will be able to put two and two together; likewise, I'm going to be on an MLA panel later this year. At the MLA I'll be appearing under my real name, but my presence on the panel's already been advertised as the presence of bitchphd, so again, anyone paying attention will put two and two together (although the MLA abstract didn't hinge on my blog identity, nor will the paper). When I speak as me, I rely on my real-life credentials; when I speak as bitch, I rely on her blogging activity. So far, I haven't mixed the two, but once the article and the MLA paper happen, I don't see that there will be much point in not doing so.
But that said, I really do kind of feel like my real name will inevitably affect how people read bitch, and not necessarily in great ways. It's kind of nice to write the thing without any specific claims of particular expertise, simply as a generic academic woman. It'll make me somewhat sad when, inevitably, the thing starts to be read not in light of what it says, but in light of what people know or assume about me based on my other published work, if that makes sense.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 5:51 PM
I think even 'strove to make a difference' sounds like management-speak pablum. Endeavoring to try his best in all of his extracurricular pursuits, that sort of thing.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 5:52 PM
Nope. "Strove." According to Garner, it hasn't yet been regularized by usage, although if A.B. is any indication, the younger generation is working on it.
God, this is rapidly not becoming funny. I thought the damage was going to be contained to that one thread--bad news that ML had posted on it on the mainpage, of course, but not a big deal. If A.B. is determined to make an ass of himself all over the net, maybe TAP really did screw up--not necessarily by hiring him but certainly for not preparing him better for the to-and-fro.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 5:55 PM
229: See, now I feel bad for him (even though people who spell "privilege" with a D make my skin crawl). That comment genuinely does sound like the outburst of someone who just was not ready for that level of scrutiny. Poor kid. Presumably he got hired because he was supposed to represent the voice of youth, or something.
There may, though, be a genuine argument to be made that expecting someone so young to be prepared for professional interactions has some shitty class-based presumptions operating under it.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 5:55 PM
At the MLA I'll be appearing under my real name, but my presence on the panel's already been advertised as the presence of bitchphd, so again, anyone paying attention will put two and two together (although the MLA abstract didn't hinge on my blog identity, nor will the paper).
I'm curious -- both of these could have been done more anonymously. Are you deliberately coming out, or did you slip up (someone who knew you in both capacities did the MLA publicity, and you didn't stop them in time) and are just planning to manage it?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 5:57 PM
I'm sorry for the guy, but I don't know what he expected -- you can't exploit anonymously acquired credibility under your real name and expect to stay anonymous.
Fair point. You remain a she-devil, though.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 5:59 PM
Every day of my life, Timbo.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 5:59 PM
'Privileged' doesn't have a 'D'?
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 5:59 PM
"Strived" currently gets half as many Google hits as "strove" does. It may be one of those irregular verbs that's in the process of regularizing itself. That's some awful writing, though.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 6:01 PM
236, well, they'd already hired Klein and Ygelsias, and that worked out okay. The missing ingredient for AB, though, is having maintained public blogs for a good while beforehand.
233, if you've been advertised under your and B's name, then that's your coming-out party. I don't think it necessarily has to change much about the dynamic on your blog--a lot of your readers aren't going to check up on the bone fides, or will forget them a day later--but it might mean you should prepared yourself for the better-armed trolls.
Also: if I'm in the charmed circle, I didn't know it. I've never even saw a picture of your tits!
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 6:02 PM
OK, this is horrible. It shouldn't have got him a job.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 6:02 PM
What were they thinking? That's B level high-school writing. And what sort of low standards hell-hole is Tufts?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 6:05 PM
234 gets it right, too.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 6:05 PM
The general election will not be dictated by rhetoric, policy proposal, or candidate attitudes.
Maybe they gave him the job in order to keep him from crafting campaign strategies?
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 6:07 PM
I feel sorry for Blickstein, and I think Weiner's comments about the issue have generally been dead on; he's not a good writer, but all this piling on is a bit much. In addition, it's not at all clear to me that he has a "prestigious writing position"; he's not on the masthead, he doesn't write for TAPPED, and I haven't seen any evidence for what, exactly, his relationship with the magazine is. He just seems like a kid who's out of his depth and doesn't really seem to know how to respond to criticism like PNH's.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 6:07 PM
Fine, he writes poorly. I assume his employers are allowed to read his work; they can make the necessary decisions. (I find a great many of TAPPED's writers incomprehensible, so he's not that far of my sense of the median.) If it's a problem for TAPPED, they'll fix it. Brutalizing someone in public, again and again, about his job, is just wrong. Most of us have turned in work we're not proud of from time to time; most of us would be horrified and angry if someone from outside our company, who was not depending on the quality of our work, called our office and broadcast the criticism.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 6:08 PM
if I'm in the charmed circle, I didn't know it.
I'm actually not sure if I'm intentionally in on your ID. You signed an email with enough of your name to be googlable once, and, being nosy, I googled. But I wasn't certain if you'd meant to.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 6:08 PM
Oh my God. That's exactly the kind of student newspaper article I use as a teaching lesson. One sentence in, I'm too embarrassed on his behalf to continue reading.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 6:09 PM
You signed an email with enough of your name to be googlable...
Once again going back on my claim that I wouldn't comment for the rest of the day, I assumed that was what B meant.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 6:11 PM
I feel bad for criticizing him too harshly, because I am convinced that while I was once a good writer, I am no longer, and therefore do not wish to cast stones from the glass veranda.
On the other hand, I have graduate school to blame for my inability to forge a sentence.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06- 8-06 6:11 PM
239: Admit that "she-" as a prefix is awesome. Women should stop referring to themselves as "mothers," and use "she-parent" instead. And so on.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim |