it's much odder and more shameful to go around pretending to be other people on the internet.
Is there any proof that Greenwald, rather than his partner, did that? There may be, but it would seem to be on one of those blogs that you're supposed to read so I don't have to.
No, it's lame to pretend to be other people on the internet. And being obsessed with internet silliness happens to the best of us. But c'mon, dude, it's way lamer to make some federal case out of someone posting a few comments to a few blogs under different pseudonyms and Vow To Bring This Guy Down. It's the right-wing tool crusade o' the week. Credit where due, my friend.
Honestly, really and truly, I could not possibly give a flying fuck. The question of Glenn Greenwald's possible sockpuppeting proclivities may be utterly hilarious to some people, but by and large they're the same people who think beating prisoners in a cold cell doesn't count as torture as long as you serve them rice pilaf for lunch. In a very real way they're trying to make the world a worse place, and Glenn Greenwald is trying to do something to make it better, so fuck them in the ass, and hard.
That was a bad choice of words, I agree. I just read these posts one after the other, after spending a lengthy period of time going over Katherine's series at Obsidian Wings, so I'm coming back more rancorous than usual.
I just so do not get why you're embarrassed by the Greenwald thing, Labs.
If Greenwald did it, I'd be a little embarassed for him as well. It's weird, childish behavior. It's like finding out that someone you respect has, for months, called up her ex-boyfriend every 30 minutes and left rambling messages about what they once had.
Yeah, I think "rape them!" is obnoxious. Also unfair to bottoms everywhere. And "those people are bad, so anyone sticking it to them is all right by me" is lame as well, by my lights.
B, you're a person of dignity and integrity. Imagine yourself doing this-- pretending to be other people and saying "wow, Bitch, PhD sure is smart!" It's just ludicrous. And this is from someone* who aspires to be a serious observer of politics and the law. I find Greenwald to be longwinded, tedious, and over the top from time to time, but he also says some interesting things, and I'd kind of like it if people who share my general political orientation didn't do things that made them look like jokes. (Cf. Bill Clinton.)
Not that there's any practical significance to this.
*I can't bring myself to believe the "many people use my computer to defend me in similar language" line, but I admit it's a possibility.
Yeah, I think "rape them!" is obnoxious. Also unfair to bottoms everywhere. And "those people are bad, so anyone sticking it to them is all right by me" is lame as well, by my lights.
B, you're a person of dignity and integrity. Imagine yourself doing this-- pretending to be other people and saying "wow, Bitch, PhD sure is smart!" It's just ludicrous. And this is from someone* who aspires to be a serious observer of politics and the law. I find Greenwald to be longwinded, tedious, and over the top from time to time, but he also says some interesting things, and I'd kind of like it if people who share my general political orientation didn't do things that made them look like jokes. (Cf. Bill Clinton.)
Not that there's any practical significance to this.
*I can't bring myself to believe the "many people use my computer to defend me in similar language" line, but I admit it's a possibility.
It's like finding out that someone you respect has, for months, called up her ex-boyfriend every 30 minutes and left rambling messages about what they once had.
Sure. But we've all been self-mortifying assholes at some point or another, right? I mean, yeah, I'd be embarrassed for someone who did that too, but I think more because it would remind me of times I've made an ass of myself in similar ways.
Not for months at a time, though, I hasten to add.
Well, maybe once.
Great. Thanks, Tim, now I'm going to spend the rest of the day squriming inside.
B, you're a person of dignity and integrity.
Most of the time. Except for that naked pictures thing.
Seemingly Greenwald's partner, not taking netiquette seriously, did the sock puppetry. But it might have been Greenwald himself.
Greenwald has done a lot of pretty substantive writing about Bush's legal theories and also some strong stuff about the zombie right. Without answering any of his substantive points, they came back with attacks on his character. Specifically: his career, his legal license, his sexuality (gay), his residency (in Brazil). He was able to knock them all down, mostly by stating the truth and showing that he had never tried to conceal it, but on the sock-puppet question his story had some weak spots. They spent a fair amount of time sleuthing the IPA of the sockpuppets, etc.
From that point on there were a swarm of posts about the sock puppetry. They really thought that they were going to bring him down like Dan Rather. There have probably dozens and perhaps hundreds of posts from people who have not, to my knowledge, addressed the substantive issue at all: cult-of-personality near-fascism on the American right, the kind of stuff Niewert writes about.
To a considerable extent, the character-assassination swarm, while providing lots of evidence for Greenwald's thesis, has succeeded in hijacking the discussion and rerouting it to sock-puppetry.
Greenwald often tries to respond to his adversaries personally, on the comments to his own blog and sometimes on theirs. He's been very patient about detailing their errors of fact and interpretation. He's the only important blogger I know of who does that, and that seems admirable but futile to me.
I guess I'd give him a wristslap on the sock-puppetry, but that's just netiquette. What he's accusing people of is scarcely-veiled death threats and eliminationism, and he backs up his accusations well.
Yeah, while the puppetry is genuinely embarrassing (less so if it's his partner, but still embarrassing), it's very much inside-baseball. I'm glad to see that he's still posting, and the whole puppetry thing doesn't have a thing to do with the quality of his work.
I really don't get it now. Greenwald is also being accused here, by FL, of not being punchy and fun.
This is the same thing that happens to Bob Somerby. Instead of using the internet as a means of procrastination, light distraction, and snark distribution, which is what unfogged is, they're using it as a seriously forum for developing and documenting serious themes. This is to their credit, in my opinion.
Greenwald methodically lays out his case, dotting his i's and crossing his t's, and documenting every detail many times. It's like a lawyer's case. It's the same kind of thing I say, but I don't go much farther than to allege that there are a lot of rabid, murderous zombie fascists on the right, and that's easy to dismiss. I just don't have the heart to research this stuff, keep records, and then lay it out in an organized, detailed way. So anyway, thank you Gless Greenwald.
Just a general point: the names of the sockpuppets look very much like the ones a South American would choose as a generic US-of-American name -- Wilson, Ellison, etc. -- because those names are common in South America but are still recognized as of English origin. They do not look very much like the names a New Yorker would choose.
Unless it's all a brilliant double-blind stupid move in a stupid game.
Also, MW, I had to return the fruit basket. Sorry.
That's my interpretation of "I find Greenwald to be longwinded, tedious, and over the top from time to time". Your praise of Greenwald was pretty faint.
And "those people are bad, so anyone sticking it to them is all right by me" is lame as well, by my lights.
Look, that's really, really not the point I was trying to make. The point is that Greenwald does good work on subjects that are significantly more worthy and notable than the War Against Sockpuppets, and this is a transparent effort to discredit his efforts in those areas on the basis of something trivial and unrelated. It's the equivalent of attacking an opposing counsel because you saw him pick his nose.
And yes, it really, really, really does matter that the people who are pushing the sockpuppet line tend to be apologists for torture and unlimited executive power. Do you think there's no substantive consequence to this kind of smear campaign?
I'm with Strasmangelo 100%. The sock-puppet question has drowned out the substantive question (which, since we've all forgotten, is a lot of "joking" in the rightwing blogosphere about attacking Times reporters in their homes and lynching the Supreme Court).
Greenwald's opponents threw up five character-assassination diversion: sexuality, law licence, job history, residency, and sock puppetry. None wer ein any way relevant to the case Greenwald was making, and four of them turned out to be ineffective even as character assassination. But the sock-puppetry issue is sticking.
And "those people are bad, so anyone sticking it to them is all right by me" is lame as well, by my lights.
This is wrong, though. I think this all of the time; I think most people do. Who doesn't feel happy in the humiliation of his enemies, and appreciation towards the person responsible for it?
John: I like Kevin Drum a lot, but he isn't punchy or particularly fun. I think that where I disagree with Greenwald is where I disagree with you, though, so it's probably not worth hashing out.
SJ:
And yes, it really, really, really does matter that the people who are pushing the sockpuppet line tend to be apologists for torture and unlimited executive power. Do you think there's no substantive consequence to this kind of smear campaign?
I don't think it does matter, and I don't think there is a substantive consequence. These blog disputes matter far, far less than their participants sometimes seem to think. (See 20-- do you seriously think that anyone who would otherwise listen to Greenwald will stop doing so because of this?)
Remember that I wasn't saying that I endorse the general political viewpoint of any of these people. I was saying it's embarrassing and stupid when a smart, grown-up sort of pundit like Greenwald engages in this sort of thing. It's not important, but then again, this is a blog.
So I guess saying "but those people are really bad" strikes me as a non sequitur, just as "but Clinton did bad things!" does. Maybe I should write more posts about torture apologists, but once we've reached criticism of what people do and don't post about we're more or less at rock bottom.
FL, my main point is that a swarm of near-fascist zombies has succeeded in neutralizing a very substantive post on the basis of a medium-sized point of netiquette, and you seem to be going along with it.
There is a real analogy to the Dan Rather case. The orchestrated hoopla over one piece of doubtful evidence had the effect of completely obscuring the substantive case Rather was making, which was pretty strong without the doubtful evidence. (Granted that uncritical acceptance of forged evidence is a more serious offense than sock-puppetry.)
It does seem to be a center-left thing to raise every question possible to some kind of punctilious meta-level -- in this case netiquette as opposed to death threats. (A completely disastrous center-left thing, I might add, and one which leaves the center-left open to being played.)
It does seem to be a center-left thing to raise every question possible to some kind of punctilious meta-level -- in this case netiquette as opposed to death threats. (A completely disastrous center-left thing, I might add, and one which leaves the center-left open to being played.)
And it was ever thus. See Hazlitt's essay On the Spirit of Partisanship not, alas, online last time I looked.
So I guess saying "but those people are really bad" strikes me as a non sequitur
It's not that "those people are really bad," it's "those people are enabling bad things right now." Torture and warrantless wiretaps aren't things that happened back in 2003; they're current policy, and much of the right wants to keep them as current policy, and there is a debate going on right now as to whether we should change that. Right now that debate does not look good for the side of democracy, and we need every voice on our side that we can get.
And while I don't think anyone's going to say, "Well, Glenn Greenwald's wrong about executive authority because he used sock puppets in somebody's comment section," I do think it's obvious that the intent is to trivialize him by making him into a punchline. "Oh, Glenn Greenwald? The sock puppet guy? Oh ho, I remember him! Let me send you this oh so hi-LAR-ious link to a blog post which imagines him as a kind of muppet!" The intent here is to dismiss him, not to rebut his arguments.
Already we're talking about the sockpuppetry as if it's a proven thing ("it's embarrassing and stupid when a smart, grown-up sort of pundit like Greenwald engages in this sort of thing") when it's not clear that he was responsible for those comments at all. I really don't see how any of this is a non sequitur.
John, I don't follow you at all. What's being neutralized? I haven't drawn any conclusions about GG's legal or political acumen from his apparent weird habit. Pretty much anyone who would take Greenwald seriously in the first place knows that there's a difference between the validity of his arguments and his netiquette.
Contempt isn't a zero-sum game. I can loathe multitudes. You make it sound as though my saying that GG looks like he's being a tool about this means that I move that much closer to voting like Ace.
And if fascist zombies say things like "Dick Gephardt wields a +5 ring of protectionism," sign me up.
I'm not overly familiar with the case. Is it just one sock-puppet? Because then the partner defense is quite likely. (Armsmasher has posted in defense of MY from the same location. Not that you two are life partners.) I can see a roommate or friend making an account to support a friend's loony internet debate.
This sort of like the scandal on Amazon when anonymous reviewers were praising books and were discovered to be either the authors themselves or friends of the authors. Mildly scandalous, but lame to get worked up over.
And 31 gets it right. 'But they're meanies' isn't a defense against sockpuppetry, but getting that worked up about it is pretty lame, too, and getting worked up about it so you don't have to talk about torture is worse. Ban the puppet, realize your hobby doesn't matter that much, and move on.
On more substantive issues: The linked post? Not funny. Not even a "Histopher Chritchens" for us. And the +5 ring of protectionism got a lot worse when I realized the dude was trying to use that format for substantive criticisms.
35:
You make it sound as though we're part of a very serious, very influential conversation about the future of democracy, when really we're a bunch of people BSing in the comments section of a much-loved but not very popular blog.
Does this boil down to "You shouldn't say bad things about GG, even if they're true, because saying them empowers the enemies of freedom"? I think you vastly overestimate my influence.
I know that the intent of Ace, Patterico, etc. is to dismiss Greenwald on spurious grounds. I still say: sock puppetry is toolish. I also say: but Greenwald's arguments must be examined on their merits. You might think that by saying this I'm playing right into their hands in some way, but I think that's silly.
"But they're meanies" isn't the argment, Cala. "But they're trying to destroy democracy in the United States and you're being a little bitch about sock puppets" is. See 35.
I don't see anyone talking about Greenwald's original post any more, here or anywhere else. It was actually a very powerful one. The Greenwald story, here and everywhere else, is now sock puppetry.
This kind of orchestrated diversionary swarming is a major fact of American political life, both in the blogosphere and in the commercial media. (The Swift Boat story was a prize example). If a story harmful to you seems to be getting some traction, figure out a way to change the topic slightly, change the spin, and suck up all the oxygen. As far as I can tell, that's happened with this particular story.
In this case, it's also substance (talk about lynching) over process trivia (sock-puppetry).
I read the Greenwald thread comments, and there were perhaps a hundred right-wing sock-puppet posts. Not a single one of the posts or blog entries I saw discussed or responded to Greenwald's substantive story, and soon the thread was about sock puppetry. Character assassination trumped debate.
39: I'm not overestimating Unfogged's influence or even Greenwald's. I'm saying that it took lots of little suckers making harmless little jokes to convince the country that Al Gore was a wacko who thought he invented the internet.
I'm actually really confused about the FL-SJ-JE conversation because I don't know what's at issue. It seems to be that my posted view is inappropriate to assert though it is not false.
How influential can it be if most of the country doesn't read weblogs?
Al Gore, the Swift Boat, the flip-flopping, weren't solely or even primarily Internet phenomena. Character assassination always trumps debate; this is nothing new.
How influential can it be if most of the country doesn't read weblogs?
That's a weird point. Most of the country doesn't read The New Republic, or even the New York Times. One was once considered influential, and one still is.
The NYT articles are reproduced in dailies everywhere. One doesn't need to subscribe to the NYT (or the other big papers) to be reading its articles. This just isn't true of weblogs.
Emerson is completely right. "Suck up the oxygen" indeed. It happens time and time again in American politics.
And yes, people here are just BSing in the comments section of a silly blog. But did anyone pay attention at all during the 2000 and 2004 elections? Al Gore anyone?
If we were going to talk about Greenwald, I think that we should have taken into account that he has been trying to engage in a very serious.... conversation about the future of democracy..... (leaving "influential" out of it). His sock puppetry, if any, was unfortunate but no big deal, and I don't think that we should have let that become the topic.
Greenwald, Niewert, and I think that the Republican Party has been taken over by a near-fascist cult of personality, and that they're still working to gain control of the country as a whole (far beyond what they have so far). I think that the Israel-Lebanon Syria war (and possibly Iran too) is going to work to neutralize the Democrats in the Fall elections and advance the Movement Republican program.
This is the political picture I see. If you want to know why I'm so surly, that's why. When Unfogged touches on politics, my choice is usually between remaining silent, and violating comity.
51: It remains true that The New Republic was considered influential, as are any number of other small publications, because of the audience they reach. I think you could make a pretty good claim that, for example, dKos or Eschaton or Instapundit, is influential. (The same seems true for any number of small movies that gain "important" status despite lousy box-office numbers. Again, it's a matter of the audience reached.)
Yes, I am saying that we should post on Y and not X. Is that another violation of netiquette? When we saw character assassination beginning, we should not have said "You know, their fifth attempt at assassination actually had some validity."
Somebody reads them. You don't forfeit all responsibility for what you say on a blog just because you're not saying it on primetime TV.
No, but the claim that this thread on sockpuppetry ruins any attempt to take Greenwald seriously and that this internet based phenomenon -- "[is] trying to destroy democracy in the United States and you're being a little bitch about sock puppets.." -- is overwrought.
Do we have to participate in character assassination just because it's happening? I don't understand how this is even a response to the issue at hand.
Very simple. Your claim seems to be that because of the sock-puppet charges, Greenwald's good post will never be discussed (potentially true) and that this will have crazy results just like all of the other trivial character assassinations that the Internet produced, like the Swift Boat campaign. My point was that the Internet wasn't as big in the Swift Boaters' campaign as the blogosphere would have you believe, and even less so in the 2000 election. And so the claim that being a little bitch about a minor writer on a corner of the internet will ruin democracy is overwrought.
Plus, FL doesn't seem to be endorsing it; he seems to be calling the people running it lame.
If you want to read that as an endorsement of character assassination, okay, but I think we both know that's straining credulity.
FL: The clearest statement of why you shouldn't post like this even if your posts are true is SJ's 45. To repeat it more loudly, George Bush is President and more than a hundred thousand people are dead in Iraq because people picked up and ran with the "Al Gore lies so much that it's really funny," line that the right was spreading. Not every facet of that line was false -- he did mistakenly claim to have flown to a particular natural disaster with the head of FEMA, when the head of FEMA hadn't flown with him on that occasion. That doesn't mean that it wouldn't have been wrong and harmful for someone to agree that the right had a point on that one -- the line is bullshit, and the line is harmful, and the fact that many voters believed it killed people.
You're right that this event is a much less big deal -- GG isn't anyone in particular, not many people are reading this. But if it matters at all, you're doing something bad by pushing the sock-puppet flap as equivalently important, or more important, than the substantive stuff Greenwald is writing about.
The function of the sock puppet accusations was to suck up the oxygen and change the subject. This move have been successful. How many people even remember what Greenwald's original post was about? (I just told you, but how many knew before I did that?)
The problem with diversions is that you don't have to agree with the people changing the subject. If you let them change the subject and argue with them about what they want to argue with, they win and you lose.
53: But did anyone pay attention at all during the 2000 and 2004 elections? Al Gore anyone?
Have you read our posts from election season?
54: it's not like I've never linked to Greenwald's blog in the past, John.
I don't think that we should have let that become the topic.
It's not the topic. Note the links to very serious ObWi treatment of prisoner abuse issues and a discussion of civilian culpability. I posted about the goddamned Misha thing after seeing GG's post on it. There have been serious discussions of Greenwald's issues; there will be more in the future.
I fully support the Gayatollah, and any mission into which he may lead me. This really isn't important as regards GG's reputation--I still find it unlikely that he was the one actually sock-puppeting--or the issues he discusses. One of the nice things about the blogosphere is that anyone can take GGs work and build off of it; even someone who has never been accused of puppeting. At worst, Labs's post is an example of being drawn into the punji stick trap of the right. It happens.
I asked about which of GG's posts you meant, John, because I wasn't sure which of his posts, besides the "personal response" one, was directly tied to the sock thing. I didn't know what "Greenwald's original post" was about because of the ambiguity of that phrase, not because the sock issue has driven all knowledge of the Evil Right Wing from my head. If you mean the GG bit on Misha's post, recall that I linked to it and quoted the "five ropes" bit.
No, but the claim that this thread on sockpuppetry ruins any attempt to take Greenwald seriously and that this internet based phenomenon -- "[is] trying to destroy democracy in the United States and you're being a little bitch about sock puppets.." -- is overwrought.
I never claimed that this thread "ruins any attempt to take Greenwald seriously." It certainly contributes to a campaign to do so, however unintentionally, though. And considering the fact that Greenwald is part of a different campaign opposing the increasing de-democratization of America, no, I don't think it's overwrought.
And so the claim that being a little bitch about a minor writer on a corner of the internet will ruin democracy is overwrought.
Again, I'm not claiming that the smearing of Glenn Greenwald, in and of itself, will ruin democracy. But the smear campaign against Glenn Greenwald is part of a larger campaign by a bunch of people who really do want to destroy American democracy - people who are consistent apologists for torture and unlimited executive authority. It should really be pretty obvious by now that there are sides here, and when a writer known best for his work on the NSA's illegal domestic spying program is targeted by a smear campaign on the basis of obscure netiquette violations, and center-left bloggers start linking to said smear campaign and calling the guy "lame," that's really not helping.
Greenwald, Niewert, and I think that the Republican Party has been taken over by a near-fascist cult of personality, and that they're still working to gain control of the country as a whole (far beyond what they have so far).
Royalist, not fascist. And I doubt they're that intelligent.
Anyways, didn't some ancient right-wing professor type get caught out doing something similar a coupla years ago, and didn't his credibility take a nose dive? Likewise with whatever that blogger kid's name at the WaPo was.
That would be trading one of yours for two of theirs. Well, unless you want to include Deb Frisch.
Anyways, if Ista-Fuckit had done the same, D's would be all over him like white on rice, and deservedly so. Apparently the dude thinks he's Terribly Important. Which sorta implies that his writing is Terribly Important and maybe should be taken with a grain of salt. And the best weapon is the truth, not someone's well-written possibly ponderous possible exaggerations.
The thing here is, is when shit like this happens, you ditch the loser and go with somebody else. If your entire case depends on Glen Greenwald, you have much more serious problems than losing a blogger. Worse, backing the guy after he just fucked you is bad tactics. (See Dan Rather.) Hey, the evil fascists want you to stretch out your defense of this guy as long as possible, so they can continue to beat you with it.
Ditch your losers, let your winners run. Or go broke and the other guy walks home with the piece of that one-in-a-lifetime IPO.
Note: Glen Greenwald is not, unless I'm mistaken a starving orphan or a dude living in a ghetto, [if he is, that WOULD be interesting] so the Sally Struthers routine would really better serve somebody else.
didn't some ancient right-wing professor type get caught out doing something similar
Yeah, that was John Lott, whose sock-puppetry was just a facet of a wide range of bizarre lamenesses -- it seems pretty clear to me that the folks who discovered GG's alleged sock-puppetry are trying to turn him into a left John Lott.
Yup, I realize now that Glenn Greenwald is a plagiarizer who makes up evidence to support his bogus claims. Thanks "max" for proving Emerson's point once again.
One might think that a willingness to acknowledge the toolishness of sock-puppetry grants one greater authority in emphasizing what's right about Greenwald's position; furthermore, one might think that refusal to say that, yes, this series of alleged actions is toolish appears from the outside to be just the sort of close-ranks-around-leader that Greenwald sees in the conservative movement.
LB, you inform me that
George Bush is President and more than a hundred thousand people are dead in Iraq because people picked up and ran with the "Al Gore lies so much that it's really funny," line that the right was spreading.
I would think my post is not like "Al Gore is a liar!1! About everything!" and more like "Al Gore can be a tool sometimes," said right after utterances that make it perfectly clear that I think Gore is right on the big issues. If you find saying things like that to be problematic, I think we'll just have to agree to disagree.
Likewise with whatever that blogger kid's name at the WaPo was
Ben Domenech admitted to plagiarizing other people's work, which is a far cry from being accused of sockpuppetry. I don't know what "ancient right-wing professor" you're referring to.
Closing ranks is sometimes the right thing to do. Not as much as the Republicans do it, but way more than liberals and Democrats do it.
Orwell and Gandhi said wonderful things, but they aren't very good as a handbook to practical American politics. And neither was as passive and self-defeating as Democrats are.
Y'all are letting partisanship addle your brains. Sockpuppetry isn't just a violation of "netiquette," it's dishonest, and anyone who does it deserves the loss of credibility that results from its discovery. We're supposed to keep quiet about it because Greenwald is on our side? No thanks. He screwed himself (uh, assuming he did it), and if they got him, they got him.
Both Lott and his liberal adversary (Bellesiles) were accused of tampering with data and doctoring statistics. Lott's sock-puppetry was quite secondary and increased the ridicule he got, but he wasn't discredited simply for sock-puppetry. The other cases mentioned here were plagiarism, which Greenwald is not accused of.
70/71: John Lott made up data, which is not just bizarrely lame but which legitimately means that nothing he says should be taken seriously--because you can't trust that it's not also made up. And he still gets to write op-eds in places that should know better. (cf. Michael Bellesiles, who was rightly drummed out of the academy and of public discourse for making things up.) Even if Greenwald sock-puppeted, and no one seems to have any evidence that it wasn't his partner, that doesn't reflect on his credibility in the same way.
Closing ranks is sometimes the right thing to do. Not as much as the Republicans do it, but way more than liberals and Democrats do it.
I buy that. I just don't buy that here. GG isn't up for election now. As long as the left blogosphere doesn't abandon him, this won't hurt him much. (Which is to say, max is completely wrong.) Limbaugh got popped on a drug charge, and that hasn't seemed to hurt him very much.
I would think my post is not like "Al Gore is a liar!1! About everything!" and more like "Al Gore can be a tool sometimes," said right after utterances that make it perfectly clear that I think Gore is right on the big issues.
FL, I really don't think the average right-winger looking for ammunition of the "Even The Liberal Unfogged" variety is going to hunt for that level of nuance in the following: "This Greenwald thing is really embarassing. I noted below that it's odd to be so interested in it, but it's much odder and more shameful to go around pretending to be other people on the internet. So, so dumb."
Talk about internet myopia. Greenwald wrote quite an important book on an important topic, and we're supposed to not read it because of sock-puppetry? Or are we supposed to read it, but reject his data and arguments? Or maybe we should not simply reject them, but should just mark them down by 10 or 20%?
Unfogged's silly non-partisanship has always been its weak spot. What world do you people live in?
SJ, let me clarify something. Suppose for argument's sake that Greenwald did sock-puppet his way through various comment sections. Do you find that odd or shameful or dumb? (Ignore for now the judgments about relative oddness, etc.)
Not to mention, the question of how partisan to be is something Labs and I have gone back and forth on a lot here, and I think we both basically decided that we don't have the kind of partisanship in us that folks like Emerson would like. We're liberal, but not so liberal that the sockpuppet cartoon doesn't make us laugh. (I shouldn't really be speaking for Labs....)
That's the point, isn't it? But anyway, his honesty isn't an issue in relation to his substantive writing -- he's not showing up with new data, he's making arguments. Changing the subject from what Greenwald is talking about to whether he or his partner is minorly dishonest in a self-aggrandizing way is changing the subject from something important to something unimportant, and from something that serves our political goals to something that serves the goals of the right.
"The function of the sock puppet accusations was to suck up the oxygen and change the subject. This move have been successful. How many people even remember what Greenwald's original post was about?"
That's a strange and inaacurate claim. "hanging the subject" can be very effective for winning crucial news cycles, and sometimes making a story go away forever. This is a function of the strange way the media functions. None of that is applicable to the way the blogosphere functions. There are no news cycles per se, and individual posts aren't important, hammering away at issues and memes over months and years is. There is no original post.
Can the sock puppet flap harm Greenwald's long term ability to push memes? Possible, but I don't think so, as long as he's still seen as credible by leftist bloggers. The lefty blogosphere is, if not a noise machine, a meme machine, and the mainstream credibility of an individual blogger doesn't impact their ability to push memes, forunately since the establishment dislikes them all.
The first part of 84 only refers to things said or implied by maxash, right? Because no one else has come close to suggesting that. And maxash seems to be saying, seriously, that he doesn't know anything about Greenwald. So perhaps he's less of an authority here than on other issues.
Unfogged's silly non-partisanship has always been its weak spot. What world do you people live in?
John, presumably what's written here isn't the sum total of anyone's political engagement. It's nice to have a place to go where one doesn't have to read and seethe constantly, no? (And if you'd rather seethe, it's not like there's a shortage of sites to read, right?)
FL's 85 assumes something that his main post doesn't. Greenwald said that he didn't post under other names. Is he a liar about that? That sock puppet link isn't even funny unless you assume it was Greenwald rather than Greenwald's partner who was posting under other names.
Sockpuppetry isn't just a violation of "netiquette," it's dishonest, and anyone who does it deserves the loss of credibility that results from its discovery.
No, I'm sorry, that's bullshit. What you say in a comment section is what you say in a comment section, and it only has an inflated sense of importance to some people who attach way too much significance to what they say to anonymous strangers in comment sections (see: us). Glenn Greenwald could be Coco the chimp for all I care; it's what he says and advocates for on his blog that matters, and in general he defends democracy and human rights in a way that The Link In Memory Of Ogged does not.
I think that the specific "lynch the Supreme Court" issue is pretty much dead now in the blogosphere. All the people who were implicated in that stuff (by their linking) have been allowed to talk about sock-puppetry instead. This same kind of issue will rise again, and the lynching issue will be referred back to, but right now it's dead.
Greenwald is also now in the national media with his book, and we can expect to see the sock-puppetry inserted into the national media. It's not just a few little bloggers.
The problem with this is that there's something odd or silly about everyone, and if there isn't, something can be made up. (Again, Greenwald isn't a huge issue -- I'm getting het up because of what happened to Gore, and what happened to Dean, and what happened to Kerry.)
We've got a whole lot of people working on making anyone who's doing good work for the Left into the butt of a joke, not for the sheer joy of making fun of funny people, but because it works. Laughing along with them is playing into their hands.
And Labs -- if you posted something like this:
"Al Gore can be a tool sometimes," said right after utterances that make it perfectly clear that I think Gore is right on the big issues.
in the context of right-wing attacks on him during a contested election, knowing what you now know (say, if he ran in 2008) I'd think you were being an idiot, and an irresponsible idiot.
it's what he says and advocates for on his blog that matters
In an ideal world. sure, but if someone is going to play the partisan game, and hands his opponents a big stick to beat him with, it is, as Labs says, so, so dumb. Or maybe no one should date Brazilians. Not all the facts are in.
I don't think this post reflects well on Labs, but that kind of attitude is no longer a widespread problem in the lefty blogosphere. It makesyou sad when one of your imaginary Internet friends is being slightly stupid and obnoxious, though.
That is so, so wrong. I still remember a picture of some former SI covergirl, taken when she was something like 45. And I think I saw that picture a decade or two ago. We should all date Brazillians.
When someone in your party stupidly gives the other guys a stick to beat him with, isn't the normal response to start hitting the guy with the stick in order to defend your stupid friend? Or do you just stand back and say "That was a dumb move, buddy!"?
There can be too much partisanship and too much loyalty, but I don't think that Democrats or liberals nationally come anywhere near that point. (In Massachusetts, for example, they do, and people say they do in Hawaii too. But nationally Democrats are feeble and disloyal.)
Suppose for argument's sake that Greenwald did sock-puppet his way through various comment sections. Do you find that odd or shameful or dumb?
I find it lame and silly, but also beneath notice.* People do a lot of stupid things on the internet, and like I said, I don't really attach opinion writing to personalities all that much (at least not on dry political blogs). I do realize I'm atypical in this, however, and that a charge of "Pundit X did Stupid Thing Y" is often has the effect of "ingore Pundit X's argument because of Stupid Thing Y."
*As a point of comparison, there was a story about Andrew Sullivan that Atrios used to bring up a lot - and which I'm not repeating because I have no idea how accurate it was - that always used to make me pissed off at Atrios, because even if it were true, and even if it made Andrew Sullivan a bad person and someone I wouldn't like to know, it had nothing to do whatsoever with anything Andrew Sullivan was writing about, and it really got me mad that this was becoming, for a while at least, the Official Atrios Line on Andrew Sullivan.
I'd agree that sock puppetry is odd and dumb. My assumption is that it's the partner rather than Greenwald, because I have a fair amount of faith in lawyers as tending toward the literally truthful when pinned down. I'd still call it regrettable and dishonest, but I don't particularly care at all about the honesty of significant others of prominent liberal bloggers.
Even if it were Greenwald, I'd give him a hard time about it if I knew him, but it's not a big deal, because what he writes doesn't depend on his credibility.
Anyway, we've had this "how partisan to be" "what kind of space is this" discussion a lot, haven't we? It's not like we're going to come to a consensus. Someone post pictures of Brazilian hotties or something, I've used up my sitting time for the day. Later!
Emerson in 108: I don't think that Democrats or liberals nationally come anywhere near that point. (In Massachusetts, for example, they do, and people say they do in Hawaii too. But nationally Democrats are feeble and disloyal.)
This is very tre. Democratic legislators in Mass. are very loyal to eachother. I think that they may take it too far. We are ruled by a hackocracy. Some of the problems with the Big Dig (did you all catch taht a major tunnel was closed because of a death?) were related to the spreading of graft.
Also, Scott Harsbarger went after corruption as AG. Bill Bulger, an old-school conservative Dem, Senate President and borther of a mobster, didn't care for that so much. The machine did not come out for Harshbarger when he was a gubernatorial candidate. Thus we got Celucci for an extra term.
There are some people who say that the Dems in the legislature don't really want a Democratic governor. Right now, they have veto-proof margins, and they can set the Democratic agenda. If we get a Democratic governor, they may be knocked down a peg or two.
Yeah, there's good loyalty and bad loyalty. NYC Democrats have a tendency toward the bad sort -- personal loyalties within an organizational context -- that keeps them from getting much done (and makes local politics completely incomprehensible if you aren't absolutely up on all the players.)
But ideological loyalty - recognition that there are some people out there working toward the same goals you are, and so you should be working to build them up rather than tear them down - is something that, as Emerson says, Democrats are weak on these days.
re: 117 But ideological loyalty - recognition that there are some people out there working toward the same goals you are, and so you should be working to build them up rather than tear them down - is something that, as Emerson says, Democrats are weak on these days.
My impression, as an outsider, is that a big part of that problem is that many Democrats seem, to me, to just be Republicans with a veneer of bourgeios respectability and a (genuine) distate for the worst 'Fuck the poor' and 'Yay for killing brown people!' rhetoric/policies of the Republicans.
In that sense, they aren't really ideologically loyal -- there isn't an ideology for them to be loyal to.
Too true. Growing up in Massachusetts left me thinking I was a Libertarian for quite a while, because governor Bill Weld seemed to be a lot more sensible than the aptly titled Democratic 'hackocracy' that otherwise ruled the state.
But then I started spending more time on the internet and realized that libertarians were insane.
More troubling was the realization that, outside of the Northeast, Rebublicans were also insane.
It's a vicious circle. Labor issues get very little support among middle-class Democrats because labor has been personally demonized -- anyone working for a union is assumed to be corrupt, useless, attempting to destroy the company they work for out of sheer malice, etc. Likewise anyone who advocates social programs (we would be known as 'poverty pimps'). Every ideological element of a left-wing position has been defined as personally unseemly or distasteful or an indication of a deep spiritual flaw in the person who believes it.
It's not that most Democrats couldn't be talked into support for labor if they came to it cold, but they 'know' that labor is corrupt and counterproductive and risible just like they 'knew' Al Gore was a liar.
119: Yup, and most Massachsetts Dems aren't terribly liberal. Liberals don't have that much institutional power at the state level.
Kerry Healey (Lt. Gov., presumptive Republican gubernatorial nominee) alsoseems to be nuts in a peculiarly Northeastern way. All of her TV ads talk about rescinding teh gas tax and rolling back the income tax. She also want to get tough on crime in a very anti-civil liberties way.)
Basically I spent some time on Greenwald's site, reading the trolls swarming his thread, and then dropping by some of the anti-Greenwald sites and seeing how they had succeeded in ignoring all of Greenwald's points while zeroing in on the sock-puppet issue (the only one of their five smears to stand up.)
And I realized that I could expect the sock-puppet issue to appear most of the time when Greenwald's book is discussed, with a reasonable chance that Time will have Wonkette review the book from sock-puppet angle.
Nope, I just had an uncle named "skippy" and always liked the name.
re: 121
All those points are true, but I think you can't discount the fact that many people's experiences with unions (apart from being in one) are simply pretty negative.
For instance, you take an academic who might be very 'pro-union' in general, and you'll still hear them bitch about the unionized support staff at the university in terms of rewarding incompetence, inflexibility, nepotism, and inability to be fired (ironic, coming from someone with tenure, no doubt).
This isn't evidence that "unions are bad" of course, but I think there are often less abstract reasons for people to have anti-union feelings than those you mention.
I think a better approach to increasing support for unions is to simply hammer home the idea that they are a necessary counterbalance to corporate power. Yes, they come with all the requisite warts that power brings, but we're much better with them than without them.
Well, but I work with an office with non-unionized support staff, and I have stories about "rewarding incompetence, inflexibility, nepotism, and inability to be fired"; you get stories like that in workplaces, not in unionized workplaces. While there are certainly union officials that do bad things and there are bad unions (just like there are corporate executives that do bad things and bad corporations), this is a bad argument for opposing the labor movement generally. But it's been built up into a perfectly respectable argument for despising labor. Once the personal loyalty was broken, the ideological loyalty broke down in its wake.
I think a better approach to increasing support for unions is to simply hammer home the idea that they are a necessary counterbalance to corporate power. Yes, they come with all the requisite warts that power brings, but we're much better with them than without them.
Absolutely. But the 'Unions are protecting the job of that annoying guy where I work, and so the labor movement is an obsolete drag on the economy' argument is a bad argument, and anyone who's generally on the left but buys into it has been played.
You know, I was thinking of tying it back in -- the justification for berating Labs about is the desire to grab him by the shoulders (acquiring a small but sturdy footstool for the purpose of bringing them within reach first) and shake him, saying "Labs, you got played on this. You get in the habit of laughing at their jokes and spreading their shit, and we lose." It doesn't matter if the joke is funny in isolation (which it might be) or if the point is fair in isolation (all sorts of bad stuff that could be truly said about individual unions). When it's part of the right's narrative, and we're spreading it, we lose.
But then I decided that that would be making too much of it, so I didn't write the comment.
130: There either is or isn't some truth to the claim that unions, in the past, were pernicious. If there isn't, the unions got absolutely crushed in the PR battle of the 80's, because I remember them as being quite powerful in the 70's. What unions are like now is a different matter, but as skippy says, I don't think attitudes about unions are simply a function of today's anti-union PR efforts.
Sure. Making the leap you suggest is indeed illogical and I wouldn't defend it.
I just think it's worth keeping in mind that people are often speaking from experience, not just parroting talking points from some interest group.
A trivial point, I know, but it seems to often get overlooked in political discussions.
To get people to look past their anecdotal experiences, you need to grant them the validity of the experience first. Otherwise most people will tune out.
I think there's a valid argument to be made against unions from their tendency to oppose the deployment of technological developments that make jobs obsolete. Automation is a really good thing from a worldwide point of view, even if it's painful to people whose jobs it replaces.
On the other hand, this downside probably doesn't outweigh the plus of protecting the rights of labor against corporate exploitation, and in any case the propriety of government regulation of unions is a whole other question.
There either is or isn't some truth to the claim that unions, in the past, were pernicious.
'Some truth' is a pretty low standard. Sure, there's some truth to it. There's also some truth to the fact that a member of my nuclear family pulls whiskers out of cats with pliers. (She was four, she did it once, the cat never seemed to hold it against her. She just wanted one to play with.) It wouldn't tell you much that's useful about her.
The question is whether society is better off with strong or weak unions, and the answer is pretty clear, from my point of view, that we're better off when unions are strong.
Yeah, see, that was why I restrained myself. Because all of the counterarguments about "Isn't the truth of an individual claim the most important thing about it," and "Isn't it ridiculously self-important to think that what jokes we're laughing at on a C-list blog have any effect on society," are also very persuasive, and arguments where both sides have reasonably defensible positions get ugly.
139: You're addressing two different issues, though. The first is, "Why do people who lead Democrat have anti-union preferences?" The second is, "Should there be strong unions?" In conflating the two, you're assuming a method of judgment that I don't think actually operates for most people.
It's really not that different than (rank speculation) what has happened to the US car makers. As I understand it, they now make quite good cars. But if given a choice between a new US car and a low mileage used foreign car, I'd opt for the foreign car. Because somewhere in the past I learned that US cars are poorly made. There was probably some truth to it, and perhaps more was made of it than should have been. But those remain my preferences, and JD Powers studies aren't going to change my mind; it's going to cost them more than that.
My answer to the first is "Because they bought a right-wing narrative, and started blaming everything bad they ever heard about a union or experienced in a union context on the fact that unions are just bad lousy things."
My answer to the second is that strong unions do their membership and other workers, even non-union ones, in the same industries, a great deal of measurable good. They do any other participant in the marketplace very little measurable harm. Netted out, they are a great social good if you value economic equality and security for working people.
I don't think I'm conflating the two.
Your foreign car analogy works if your opinion that US cars sucked were the result of a long-term marketing campaign by foreign car manufacturers, and wasn't based on anything systematic about US cars at any point.
Lb, I meant, in particular, that Labs, you got played on this. You get in the habit of laughing at their jokes and spreading their shit, and we lose
misses the point in a sort of obnoxious way. You see it as a matter of getting played precisely because you see our joint membership in Team Left as having a status that, for me, it doesn't have. Only if I bought into that (and the thread makes it clear that I don't) does this sort of thing fall under "getting played" rather than "recognizing a funny way of saying something true."
No, duuude. You're wrong on both counts. (I take count one to be "funny!" and count two to be "sock-puppeting is so, so lame." Mwha-ha-ha--two! two counts!)
Speaking abstractly, I'm not sure if sock-puppeting is different in kind rather than in scale from astroturf operations, and I'm no fan of astroturf. Even inside baseball should be played on grass.
Count two first: It seems like when most people get caught out doing stupid shit, they wind up with a series of collapsing defenses: "my notes got burned in a mysterious fire," "the plagiarized copy was inserted by my nefarious editors," "I have three sources that say that Rove is going to be indicted! I stand by my story!", that sort of thing. Greenwald pretty much right away said something that could be read between the lines as "Someone else in my house posted this," and no one's come up with anything to shake this. (As you pointed out, Ace's request to phone interview his partner is creepy and weird.) He just doesn't sound like a guy trying to weasel his way out of something he's nailed on.
As for 'funny', once you hear "It's about sock puppets and it features pictures of sock puppets!" you have all the funny in it (admittedly pictures of sock puppets are funny). "Homesock"? I'm dying, but I wish you were. The punchline, "That guy's got issues." "Serious issues": so, so, so not funny. Repeating myself, go talk to The Poor Man to see how this is done.
(Yeah, yeah, I know, funny is in the eye of the beholder.)
No, I'm sorry, that's bullshit. What you say in a comment section is what you say in a comment section, and it only has an inflated sense of importance to some people who attach way too much significance to what they say to anonymous strangers in comment sections (see: us). Glenn Greenwald could be Coco the chimp for all I care; it's what he says and advocates for on his blog that matters, and in general he defends democracy and human rights in a way that The Link In Memory Of Ogged does not.
There's a parallel here that I think is important, and it's forming the basis of why I agree with FL & ogged on this.
Sock-puppetry isn't a big intellectual sin in general. It doesn't affect whether his book is any good or his analysis is original and worthwhile. But, like the faked Amazon reviews influence people's perceptions of the books, sock-puppetry does influence the shape of Internet debates. It can direct how a comment thread goes; it can direct what informations is brought up. It can direct how persuasive a group finds an argument (cf. groupthink, echo chambers). Especially since most internet debates seem to rely on force of numbers rather than logical persuasion. ('Lots of people agree with that Greenwald guy... must be something to it...')
It's nowhere near plagiarism, of course. But the importance and influence of a blog or a writer can be tied to the influence of people who comment on it. ('Most people at Unfogged are X' only makes sense if you believe we're different people.) So to the extent that the desired influence of the writer is important, sock-puppetry is important.
If you think blogs are sort of useless and nowhere near as hyped as they are, then fine, sockpuppetry isn't an issue anymore than lying in my diary is. If you want them to be meaningful tools to influence debate, the sock-puppetry is going to increase in importance. If you hold the former, it's fine to mock someone's sock-puppetry. If you hold the latter, you should probably call the sock-puppetry lame, point out that he's still worth reading, and move along.
Is it so big a sin that Greenwald isn't worth reading or engaging? Of course not. Does that mean we have to say it's not a problem at all in order to justify continuing to engage his argument? I don't think so.
Team Left as having a status that, for me, it doesn't have.
Yeah. I would like to persuade you toward my view of Team Left, because I'm strongly ideologically committed to its goals (which I think you, roughly, agree with me about) and I think the fact that those on the left seem more likely to share your distaste for team play than those on the right makes it more difficult to achieve those goals.
I can sympathize with wanting to admire the play as play rather than as competition, but I care how the game comes out, and it kills me seeing people on my side applauding an impressive three-pointer rather than blocking the damn thing.
So now Fontana is undermining democrats and supporting torture? Cheering as that prospect is to me personally, I fear it’s a weird and wrongheaded way to view his post. And it seems like despite his attempts to clarify, people still look at it this way (a la 134).
One disease endemic to the bloggosphere appears to be the confusion of actual moral/practical engagement with the shadow play of bullshitting about politics. The latter may be fun, informative, and can maybe lead you to learning more and changing your mind, but it is emphatically not a canonical case of moral action. Almost nothing that happens on blogs with respect to political content is part of moral life (how you treat people is, of course).
The moral distinction between laughing at (funny!)* sock-puppets and putting sugar in the Hillary! ‘08 campaign bus is an absolute abyss. They aren't even in the same universe. If, however, one's moral self-conception revolves around (or to be more fair, substantially includes) a vicarious struggle for The Cause, maybe you can mistake these things. Of course, this mistake suggests that you have become a loony tune. And is this not also the gravamen of the 101st fighting keyboardists jibe? The error is not supporting the war without fighting in it, but rather that confusing posting on myspace with smashing Osama defines "delusional."
*And obviously it's funny. You could laugh at those puppets absent any knowledge of the left/right polarity of Greenwald. I have basically no idea who this guy is and found it funny. It would have been funny with John Lott. Sheesh!
What's funny, Weiner, is that we agree that the things you point to are not funny. What is funny:
(a) the Greenwald puppet is funny
(b) the moustaches are funny
(c) Dear person I've never met personally: Thanks for your note. As a matter of fact I did write a New York Times bestselling book on executive authority, and I am indeed the person who broke a story on his blog about wiretapping that led...is a little bit funny.
Maybe the post has SNL circa 1993 syndrome; a little bit of funny drawn out to painful lengths. Visible at small scale in point c; there would be more funny there if there was less not-funny.
Almost nothing that happens on blogs with respect to political content is part of moral life (how you treat people is, of course).
To the extent that this is true, you're right. I'd argue with you about the extent to which it's true. Bullshitting about politics has some moral value in person (the moral or immoral view you advocate may get to and influence someone with the capacity to act on it), and a greater value online, given that more people read blogs than are involved in most RL conversations.
It's not a huge deal -- really pretty small -- but it's not nothing. I think it would be a mistake to take the length of this thread as a measure of its heat.
AAAAH! yes, when you look at my life, you will see a profound indifference to political outcomes. There has been no donating, no volunteering, no self-abasement in the service of a cause.
There's something I'm still not clear on. Let's say we accept that the alleged sock-puppeting was done by GG's Brazilian Partner (GGBP).
Did GGBP post as Pseudonym A on one blog, and as Pseudonym B on another blog, or did he post as both Pseudonyms A and B on a single blog?
The first is most decidely not sockpuppetry. The second is, especially if it was done on the same thread in a single blog (of course, if it was GG himself doing the posting, then of course that's sockpuppetry).
I'm counting on someone doing or having done the research I'm unwilling to do. Don't disappoint me.
But the 'Unions are protecting the job of that annoying guy where I work, and so the labor movement is an obsolete drag on the economy' argument is a bad argument, and anyone who's generally on the left but buys into it has been played.
See, this is what I struggle with when I hear people talking about certain segments of the US political scene as 'left' or liberals as 'left'. I just don't see much left there.
The left, to the extent that it does have a consistent ideological vision or visions, suffers from the fact that a huge group of people who identify themselves as of the left don't share much of that ideological vision at all. What they share is a certain squeamishness about the worst excesses of the right.
That makes it pretty damn hard to maintain much of a consistent front against the right or to articulate strongly what's so bad about the right's political vision.
re: 137
Automation is a really good thing from a worldwide point of view, even if it's painful to people whose jobs it replaces.
On what criteria of good? Good in what sense? That's a serious question rather than a piece of snark.
Good for the workers? Good for the consumer? Good for the 'global economy'? I'm not even sure how to make sense of the last of these three, btw. In the sense that it's not easy to see how it's the sort of thing that has a good except to the extent that that good supervenes on the good of people.
Yes, but as a sports event, this blogspat is (improbably) even less important and less interesting than the Tour de France. However, It would still be funny to watch one of the riders cycle headfirst into a wall. Especially if he was wearing a big, Mexican moustache.
I actually thought the sock puppet thing was kind of funny, even though I don't really believe the charge against Greenwald (as 151 notes, he's provided, if in a rather circumspect manner, an explanation that I find at least plausible and have no reason to doubt. I'd also note that it's believable to think that someone not deeply involved in online activity might not realize the potential shitstorm an accusation of sock puppetry against his partner might cause.) It was kind of cute, a rare quality in right wing humor. The contrast between the huffy, pompous Greenwald puppet and the other two who simply wanted to talk about the pirate movie was sort of amusing, though deeply disingenuous.
What really ruined it, as someone above noted, was clicking on to the main page and scrolling down; to see the same or similar devices employed as the primary mode of a blog gave a rather different impression of who it was with serious issues.
On another note, a cousin of the SO moved to Brazil some time back in order to live with his gay Brazilian partner. Could Glenn Greenwald be her cousin's sock puppet? I say that until we know the truth, we must consider the 4th Amendment suspended.
Really, Cala, I don't have the energy to go through this again, except to say that the crime of sockpuppetry seems utterly dwarfed by the various crimes Greenwald would like to draw people's attention to. You can try to frame it as an "honesty" issue if you'd like, but even so a dishonest person who opposes torture and unlimited executive power is far, far more valuable to me than an honest person who wants to empower my government to spy on me, torture prisoners and kill with impunity.
162: Absolutely didn't mean to imply that you don't, or that you don't do many things in service of your political views which are far more effective than maundering on about politics on a blog.
The sock puppet pictures were funny because, as baa says, sock puppet pictures are funny.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that, as members of Team Left, we shouldn't repeat nasty Team Right rumors about our teammates. But I think this particular instances is mitigated by
1) the fact the lefty teammate in question is an (albeit influential) blogger, not a candidate,
2) Labs's post didn't say "so let's all forget about everything that Greenwald fellow has ever written. I'm sure that any Unfogged readers who were fans of Greenwald's writing before will remain so even after seeing the nasty puppets, and
3) It's Fontana Labs, posting on Unfogged, whose influence is somewhat limited compared to those nasties in the so-called liberal media. If the big blogs ever start saying "even the liberal Unfogged," well, then we'll know the site has Arrived.
I'm all for teamwork and team spirit, but we also have to be able to debate tactics and strategy and to disagree from time to time. Complete uniformity of message is a little creepy, no?
Worse yet, he stopped talking to some attractive girl the day before the election in order to continue to canvass for Kerry in some crappy battleground state. All I did for Dick Cheney was donate blood.
The left, to the extent that it does have a consistent ideological vision or visions, suffers from the fact that a huge group of people who identify themselves as of the left don't share much of that ideological vision at all. What they share is a certain squeamishness about the worst excesses of the right.
This is partially why I'm getting bent out of shape (and being quite reasonably mocked by FL and baa for it.)
I don't think American liberals actually disagree with much of what I'd think of as reasonable leftist ideology. But lots and lots of them don't identify with it either: they find it, and the people they associate with it, kind of embarrassing. And they find it embarrassing because they've been bombarded with right-wing nonsense like this all their lives, and other liberals are laughing at the right-wing jokes and taking the fragments of right-wing arguments that can be made sense of seriously.
Americans are ashamed to admit they have leftist beliefs, outside of some very limited areas like anti-racism and (less so) anti-sexism. But it's not ideological disagreement, it's social pressure, which is why the social stuff like this post gets me all cranky.
169: a dishonest person who opposes torture and unlimited executive power is far, far more valuable to me than an honest person who wants to empower my government to spy on me, torture prisoners and kill with impunity.
It's not like we're deciding who gets the last seat on the lifeboat.
170: actually, I don't, I just wanted to seize the moral higher ground in an obnoxious way.
Automation is a really good thing from a worldwide point of view, even if it's painful to people whose jobs it replaces.
Automation certainly made genocide more efficient. Pity about all the German executioners it displaced though. Those guys shoulda had a union! (Hi, Godwin!)
I am reminded of this:
A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
171: The sock puppet pictures were funny because, as baa says, sock puppet pictures are funny.
Meet 151... then MEET MY FIST!
Aesthetically, this is reminding me of a painting in a museum I've been to a fair number of times, but I don't think it's the Carnegie in Pittsburgh, so I'm guessing MoMA. It's post-WWII history rendered in a continuous cartoon, with pictures of bears (for Russia) and missiles, I think, also depicting the assassination of the Kennedys and MLK... and from a distance it looks like a really great piece, but if you get close and read the text interweaved among the pictures it's kind of eh. So, my mistake here was reading the text instead of appreciating the funny sock puppet pictures simply as such.
JL, Smasher, have you any idea what piece I'm talking about?
a dishonest person who opposes torture and unlimited executive power is far, far more valuable to me than an honest person who wants to empower my government to spy on me, torture prisoners and kill with impunity.
What FL said about the lifeboat. Plus, there's presumably plenty of other people (I hear that Gary Farber guy has a blog) who draw people's attention to issues without sockpuppeting; Greenwald's probably pretty replaceable. Otherwise, I suspect you and I just disagree on how important a front of solidarity is.
Or,
I don't think American liberals actually disagree with much of what I'd think of as reasonable leftist ideology. But lots and lots of them don't identify with it either: they find it, and the people they associate with it, kind of embarrassing.
A plausible third option isn't that they find it embarassing, but that they simply (I include myself in this number) don't strongly identify with it. It's not because I find it embarassing, but I think from issues-to-party affiliation, not the other way around. Being called a liberal isn't nearly as important to be as being in the right camp on individual issues; I don't look at fellow liberals as members of my family to be defended. I didn't grow up going yay Democrats.
If this makes me a bad liberal, fine, because I'm not all that attached to the label.
Obviously, I think that most people would agree with key parts of a broadly 'left' political platform absent the various socio-cultural factors you allude to. I say 'obviously because I'm not an authoritarian asshole who'd want to impose my beliefs on everyone absent their agreement.*
* He says with a wry smirk. Do emoticons still count as objectively evil if they're written out in prose rather than conveyed by annoying ASCII?
FL, I understand that your blogging is not serious, but Greenwald's is. I understand that you refuse to be part of Team Left, for whatever reason, but you don't have to heckle from the sidelines.
I've been encountering this refusal of partisanship for a decade or more, and I have no idea where it comes from or why people are so proud of it. It really seems like a fossil of the early Clinton era.
Or a blog where liberals can call other 'liberals' to stop calling themselves 'liberals' because they aren't actually very liberal at all?
Sort of like the libertarian versus 'schmibertarian' distinction. Or, the Henley and Silber versus all-those-other-assholes distinction? Only with fruitbaskets and cockjokes.
181: Doesn't ring a bell. I'd be happy to try and answer any questions anyone has about Roman art, though.
It sounds '70s-'80s to me; Smasher probably knows it. I hate to say it, but I hardly ever get to New York, and when I do, I find it hard not to go to the Met and/or the Frick (I haven't yet been to the new MoMA once.)
Your description at first had me thinking Rosenquist, but then the text didn't sound right for him.
188: Nobody's replaceable. In case you haven't noticed, the anti-torture, anti-permanent emergency powers side is losing right now. It's not like Greenwald is going to turn things around all by his lonesome, but it's not like we can afford to start chucking people over the side for the sake of precious fucking netiquette. If it hasn't sunk in yet that the circular firing squad needs to stop, I have no idea when it will.
And the "lifeboat thing"? The notion that it isn't enough that it's not enough that we're arguing to uphold democracy and basic fucking humanity, but that we also keep our net handles sorted when we comment? That's pretty fucking asinine.
It's not because I find it embarassing, but I think from issues-to-party affiliation, not the other way around. Being called a liberal isn't nearly as important to be as being in the right camp on individual issues; I don't look at fellow liberals as members of my family to be defended.
I used to think like that, but the last five years have definitely changed my mind. I have a core set of issues that turn out to matter a lot to me, and a judgment that any Republican-controlled government will be more hostile to it than any Democrat-controlled government. I am a lot more comfortable being in the wrong camp on issues I don't really care about. (I'm not quite where mcmanus is, though.) I'm a lot more comfortable supporting-through-silence things that I think are wrong and even bad.
But none of that says much about what's appropriate for a small blog that is distinctly personal and somewhat intimate in temperment. The proper response to a right-wing comment in real life is to ask the winger, loudly, if he still belongs to NAMBLA. Here, not so much.
I see the US in the middle of what may end up being a fascist takeover. Greenwald has described aspects of that takeover very well, and he's made the fascists mad, and they've caught him in a no-no and put up a mildly funny cartoon about it, which will form part of a broad-based attempt to discredit his character. To me, joining in on the hilarity is just wrong.
We have a two-party system, which means that functionally our efforts to participate get channeled through one party or the other. So a degree of partisanship is necessary.
I can see avoiding partisanship if both sides were similiar or both parties equally bad, but I don't think that that's been true for a decade or more. To me the lines are pretty clear.
"Team Left" isn't even in play any more. The Democrats are "Team Center" or "Team Not Quite Crazy".
I understand the facticity of Unfogged's refusal of partisanship, but I don't really understand its motivation or justification. It seems to amount to pretending that the US is a much different, much nicer place than it really is, as if lovable old Everett Dirksen were debating Hubert Humphrey or something.
I don't really understand its motivation or justification
Just that not every moment needs to be devoted to fighting the fight, along with the belief that what we say here really doesn't matter; no matter how many people read this thing, I'm still going to think of it more as "my living room" than "a public forum."
I agree with your diagnosis of the current state of America, John, but Unfogged doesn't refuse partisanship. Everybody here is pretty damned partisan. We can also look at a silly joke and say, "Okay, that's pretty funny." For every post here linking to something right-wing for the intentional humor, there are 200 posts linking to something right-wing to mock it.
That is to say, I don't feel the need to give the finger to everybody with whom I disagree simply on principle. Your mileage may vary.
Although I'm in sympathy with you, tbh, I don't see why 'Unfogged' as a collective has to be partisan about anything.
It's my understanding, as a relative newcomer, that there is no 'Unfogged' stance. Especially given that some of the regulars bat for Team Objectively Evil and are much liked for reasons other than their Political Eviliaty.
On the other hand, I don't see why individual participants shouldn't be damn partisan -- subject to ordinary rules of politeness and cockjokery -- and I'm with you on that one.
"We've been over how the funny sockpuppet comic does not exist in a vacuum, yes?"
Indeed we have. That still doesn't make linking to it equivalent to chucking someone over the side, moreso because Unfogged isn't exactly the heaviest of hitters.
You know what's funny about this entire discussion? Looky here:
Side A: "Being a sock puppet in an internet comment thread is bad and embarrassing."
Side B: "What? Who cares about what gets said in internet comment threads?"
Side A: "It's the principle of the thing!"
Side B: "By adhering to this principle, you're undermining the important things GG said in his blog!"
Side A: "Who cares what people say on blogs?"
It's like, either blogs matter (in which case sock puppeting matters) or they don't (in which case it doesn't). But we seem to have mixed and matched the game pieces somehow.
For the record, sock puppeting in some instances would, I think, be extremely fucked up. In this case, I think it's at worst (if indeed it happened) a minor embarassment, but it doesn't seem that GG actually *used* the sock puppet (if he did use it) to, like, fool anyone or get someone in trouble, or even embarass someone by showing them to be agreeing with person A who is really person B with whom they always disagree, or something. Or whatever. I don't really give a rat's ass. *And* I don't read GG's blog, because I am bored with political blogs for the most part. *And* I think blogging matters anyway. SO THERE.
Also, I have a headache. Home Depot is the seventh level of hell, people.
OK, let me start over. One of the powers of the right wing is to spread memes (in the slang sense). Gore was killed by memes. On TV and in the newspapers, silly young people (often people who voted Democratic and called themselves liberals) invented memes about Gore and threw them out. There were a dozen of them or more, and a few of them were true.
Someone gets tagged with a meme, and it sticks to him. Kerry did indeed change his position about this and that, but the meme "flip flop" got stuck to him by deliberate malice.
To me the sock puppet things is a rightwing meme. If they're able to, they'll tar Greenwald with it, so that his name becomes "Sockpuppet Greenwald, the way Kennedy's is Chappaquiddick Kennedy.
To me, you just don't play that game. It's something to deal with, but not something to join in on.
That still doesn't make linking to it equivalent to chucking someone over the side, moreso because Unfogged isn't exactly the heaviest of hitters.
It's participating in a smear campaign, and given FL's commentary, it's not simply saying "hey, this cartoon is funny," but it's saying "hey, Glenn Greenwald is a sockpuppet and is stupid and I'm embarrased to be associated with him." I don't particularly care that Unfogged isn't Atrios or Instapundit; I care that it's going along with something shitty.
Emerson: To defend Unfogged's non-partisanship (because I'll argue both sides of most things), there are a couple of things about it that make sense.
First, not all that many people read this, nothing we say here matters, we're just kidding around and it's no big deal. Myself, I know this is literally true -- readership isn't all that high -- but I find it unsatisfying. Self-aggrandizing it may be, but I really want to believe that what I say about politics matters on some micro level -- we may be talking about one or two votes, but you do what you can. I can't really defend this as rational, but I'm with you -- when there's an important fight going on, it's unseemly not to be doing what you can on the right side, even if what you can is pretty imperceptible.
Second, and IMO more persuasive, to the extent that we're trying to win politically, there's a virtue to engaging people on the right if we can do it without giving anything up. The country's split 50-50 (well, maybe not still, but it was). Being willing to engage and persuade rather than dismiss seems like the only way to change that division.
That said, I've exhausted both myself and the only point I had to make way too often, so I'm off and I'm sorry for making this thread any nastier than it had to be.
One of the powers of the right wing is to spread memes (in the slang sense). Gore was killed by memes.
Disagree with that. Gore lost the election because people didn't like him, or were uneasy with him. The right-wing memes just gave them a justification for acting on that dislike, or an explanation for that unease. If our leaders were any good, we would commit to making the right seem as hateful as possible, and offer justification for voting against them rather than for us. But they're not, so the best we can hope for is a tie of some sort.
Unfogged seems to have a definite policy of being non-partisan. It's not just an absence of partisanship, but some sort of prohibition. Knowing this, I bit my tongue for a long time, but I've lost my ability to do that.
I've run into a lot of people, and I see people in the media especially, for whom being a partisan liberal Democrat is taboo because it's uncool, so they throw out little jabs at Democrats and liberals from time to time while still being mostly liberal and mostly Democratic.
I just don't understand that fear. At this point there's no reason not to be a partisan Democrat (forget liberal) because there are only two games in town, and one of them is near-fascist.
I've run into a lot of people, and I see people in the media especially, for whom being a partisan liberal Democrat is taboo because it's uncool, so they throw out little jabs at Democrats and liberals from time to time while still being mostly liberal and mostly Democratic.
Tim, people knew Gore through a meme filter. The Gore they diliked was the meme Gore. It's not like people knew him.
The Dean Scream is another example. Careful editing and sound-processing made Dean seem like a madman. It was fake. You could have done that with Martin Luther kind.
Disagree with that. Gore lost the election because people didn't like him, or were uneasy with him. The right-wing memes just gave them a justification for acting on that dislike, or an explanation for that unease.
I think you are absolutely, absolutely wrong about this. Every candidate we've put up for the last twenty years has been somehow, 'oh, I can't describe it, personally lacking. Voting for them -- you just wouldn't do it because they weren't the kind of people you feel comfortable with. It's not the issues, it's the character -- you know it when you see it. None of them were comfortable in their own skin.' Clinton overcame this by being the most charming human being on the face of the planet, the rest lost.
This is not a huge coincidence, it's a publicity campaign, and it works. If you think that the 'Gore is a liar' meme worked because it crystalized the American public's hidden unease with Gore, you're dreaming -- it worked because people believed it and it made him a joke.
"Second, and IMO more persuasive, to the extent that we're trying to win politically, there's a virtue to engaging people on the right if we can do it without giving anything up. The country's split 50-50 (well, maybe not still, but it was). Being willing to engage and persuade rather than dismiss seems like the only way to change that division."
That's so wrongheaded I don't know where to begin. One persuades unattached people, not wingnuts. Trying to engage rightwingers is extremely counterproductive.
On balance, I think that this is a pretty reliable political blog precisely because it isn't always blindly partisan.
I also like it as a place to hang out because we can joke about shit without dismissing the importance of partisanship, or hating on people for having strong feelings about politics.
223 is wrong taken literally, but there is a policy of actively being pleasant and friendly to conservatives who wander through, and making an effort to engage them non-abusively. I'm all for it, and it's not non-partisanship, but there's something that resembles what Emerson is talking about.
re: 223 There's a difference between partisan and totalitarian. Obviously, unfogged skews democrat. That's understood. But it's more than partisan to believe that one can never make fun of democrats because of the cause. That's what is at issue here (and what is a leading indicator of being crazy).
re 216: what's wrong with Home Depot? You can buy a huge tub of grout there for like $8 bucks! Clearly it is *you* who hate America!
That's so wrongheaded I don't know where to begin. One persuades unattached people, not wingnuts.
I don't know about this. Anyone who's unattached is so politically disengaged that persuading them, rather than waving pictures of kittens in their face and saying 'look at the pretty kitty, vote for us!" seems unlikely. Someone who's rationally persuadable is going to either agree with me or fervently disagree with me -- I'm not expecting a lot of success in working on the latter, but it's not impossible.
We may be having trouble with defining terms here. As Ogged says, there's no way anybody would see this as anything but a liberal blog. The sympathies here are not remotely obscure. I get the feeling that what John is saying is that we aren't personally nasty enough in every interpersonal encounter we have. To which I can only say, 224 gets it exactly right.
I think that prior to the primaries people would have said: (a) Dukakais is boring and charmless, (b) Gore is boring and charmless, and (c) Kerry is boring and charmless. Impossible to believe anyone thought that about Reagan or Clinton. The Bushes--GWB has a reputation for charm that I don't understand and that we didn't attack, and HW ran against Dukakais on the tail of a very popular president.
Basically, I don't think that many moveable people vote on well-defined issues, but on how much they like the Presidential candidate. And I think it's much harder to make something stick if people like the candidate--Clinton was dead several times over, and he still managed a win.
John Emerson evidently feels otherwise, but one of the things I particularly enjoy about being a liberal Dem with a 3-digit IQ, and not a Bush-worshipping Republican, is the sensation of NOT having to refrain from criticizing my own team when one of them fucks up.
"Things have come to a sorry pass
When a man can't cudgel his own jackass."
But it's more than partisan to believe that one can never make fun of democrats because of the cause. That's what is at issue here (and what is a leading indicator of being crazy).
This seems right: the idea that we oughtn't make fun of instances of toolishness because it undermines our unified front is just bizarre on both highminded and pragmatic grounds.
I don't mean to say you shouldn't try to persuade rightwingers, but that liberal bloggers shouldn't think about persuading rightwingers when writing blog posts. Trying to persuade rightwingers you personally interact with is a good thing.
My posts got kinda heated for some reason, I hope I didn't seem like an ass.
I don't mean to say you shouldn't try to persuade rightwingers, but that liberal bloggers shouldn't think about persuading rightwingers when writing blog posts. Trying to persuade rightwingers you personally interact with is a good thing.
My posts got kinda heated for some reason, I hope I didn't seem like an ass.
Home Depot is the shit. So is Garrison Keillor. Every day I thank god that I don't have to deal with the bitterness of knowing that my breasts looked much better twenty years ago.
it's more than partisan to believe that one can never make fun of democrats because of the cause. That's what is at issue here (and what is a leading indicator of being crazy).
Yeah, but I don't think that *is* what's at issue here. I think what's at issue is whether, at this moment in political history, one should value the cause over particular Democratic failings, like sock puppetry. I don't think anyone's arguing that it's always bad to mock your own, or that major scandals or assholery should be tolerated.
Home Depot sucks because I just want this fucking project to be done, and I don't want to spend a ton of money, and frankly most of their stuff like vinyl flooring and so forth is so motherfucking ugly (not that I care, b/c we're moving soon) but it bothers me to settle for ugly flooring because it's good enough and it costs 1/3rd of what the decent-looking stuff costs. I hate doing things in a half-assed way. I'd much rather spend a month tootling around wholesalers or suppliers or importers and finding something that's really neat than an hour in Home Depot debating on whether the grayish fake-tile vinyl pattern matches the bathroom paint color better than the beigeish fake-tile vinyl pattern with the little godawful flowers on it.
FL, the problem with this post, and I don't mean to make a big deal about it, isn't that you're not in general not hackish enough, it's that it's kinda oafish. You shouldn't give Greenbaum shit, beacause he doesn't deserve it.
226, 237: Being liberal is one thing. Being partisan is a different thing. And you can be ever-so-liberal and still put too much energy into disavowing the uncool parts of liberalism and uncool parts of the Democratic party.
On the specific issue here, I wasn't asking people to be nastier, but just to refrain from relaying a right-wing meme. In the same way I'd hope people would refrain from passing on Barney Frank fag jokes, even if they were grounded in truth.
248: Hey, whatever. I skimmed off the top of the donations, it's not me whose gift you gave away. Plus I'm sure the homeless guy needed a teddy bear more than you do, you spoiled Whole Foods shopping yuppie.
Also, omg: 250 comments and finally someone gets it exactly right. I endorse 250.
it's much odder and more shameful to go around pretending to be other people on the internet.
Is there any proof that Greenwald, rather than his partner, did that? There may be, but it would seem to be on one of those blogs that you're supposed to read so I don't have to.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 7:26 AM
No, it's lame to pretend to be other people on the internet. And being obsessed with internet silliness happens to the best of us. But c'mon, dude, it's way lamer to make some federal case out of someone posting a few comments to a few blogs under different pseudonyms and Vow To Bring This Guy Down. It's the right-wing tool crusade o' the week. Credit where due, my friend.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 7:56 AM
1 gets it exactly right.
Posted by Mitt Winner | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:00 AM
You tell 'em, Mitt.
Posted by Watt Meiner | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:05 AM
Honestly, really and truly, I could not possibly give a flying fuck. The question of Glenn Greenwald's possible sockpuppeting proclivities may be utterly hilarious to some people, but by and large they're the same people who think beating prisoners in a cold cell doesn't count as torture as long as you serve them rice pilaf for lunch. In a very real way they're trying to make the world a worse place, and Glenn Greenwald is trying to do something to make it better, so fuck them in the ass, and hard.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:08 AM
Wait, I thought that part of the anti-torture argument was supposed to extend to being anti-prison rape jokes.
I just so do not get why you're embarrassed by the Greenwald thing, Labs.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:17 AM
That was a bad choice of words, I agree. I just read these posts one after the other, after spending a lengthy period of time going over Katherine's series at Obsidian Wings, so I'm coming back more rancorous than usual.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:21 AM
I just so do not get why you're embarrassed by the Greenwald thing, Labs.
If Greenwald did it, I'd be a little embarassed for him as well. It's weird, childish behavior. It's like finding out that someone you respect has, for months, called up her ex-boyfriend every 30 minutes and left rambling messages about what they once had.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:25 AM
But 2 and 5 would still be right.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:27 AM
Yeah, I think "rape them!" is obnoxious. Also unfair to bottoms everywhere. And "those people are bad, so anyone sticking it to them is all right by me" is lame as well, by my lights.
B, you're a person of dignity and integrity. Imagine yourself doing this-- pretending to be other people and saying "wow, Bitch, PhD sure is smart!" It's just ludicrous. And this is from someone* who aspires to be a serious observer of politics and the law. I find Greenwald to be longwinded, tedious, and over the top from time to time, but he also says some interesting things, and I'd kind of like it if people who share my general political orientation didn't do things that made them look like jokes. (Cf. Bill Clinton.)
Not that there's any practical significance to this.
*I can't bring myself to believe the "many people use my computer to defend me in similar language" line, but I admit it's a possibility.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:30 AM
Yeah, I think "rape them!" is obnoxious. Also unfair to bottoms everywhere. And "those people are bad, so anyone sticking it to them is all right by me" is lame as well, by my lights.
B, you're a person of dignity and integrity. Imagine yourself doing this-- pretending to be other people and saying "wow, Bitch, PhD sure is smart!" It's just ludicrous. And this is from someone* who aspires to be a serious observer of politics and the law. I find Greenwald to be longwinded, tedious, and over the top from time to time, but he also says some interesting things, and I'd kind of like it if people who share my general political orientation didn't do things that made them look like jokes. (Cf. Bill Clinton.)
Not that there's any practical significance to this.
*I can't bring myself to believe the "many people use my computer to defend me in similar language" line, but I admit it's a possibility.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:31 AM
Yeah, I think "rape them!" is obnoxious.
Unless it's in the face.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:33 AM
Wow! BitchPhD is really smart!
Satan
['So who's Glen Greenwald and why would I care?']
Posted by Satan | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:38 AM
It's like finding out that someone you respect has, for months, called up her ex-boyfriend every 30 minutes and left rambling messages about what they once had.
Sure. But we've all been self-mortifying assholes at some point or another, right? I mean, yeah, I'd be embarrassed for someone who did that too, but I think more because it would remind me of times I've made an ass of myself in similar ways.
Not for months at a time, though, I hasten to add.
Well, maybe once.
Great. Thanks, Tim, now I'm going to spend the rest of the day squriming inside.
B, you're a person of dignity and integrity.
Most of the time. Except for that naked pictures thing.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:38 AM
Seemingly Greenwald's partner, not taking netiquette seriously, did the sock puppetry. But it might have been Greenwald himself.
Greenwald has done a lot of pretty substantive writing about Bush's legal theories and also some strong stuff about the zombie right. Without answering any of his substantive points, they came back with attacks on his character. Specifically: his career, his legal license, his sexuality (gay), his residency (in Brazil). He was able to knock them all down, mostly by stating the truth and showing that he had never tried to conceal it, but on the sock-puppet question his story had some weak spots. They spent a fair amount of time sleuthing the IPA of the sockpuppets, etc.
From that point on there were a swarm of posts about the sock puppetry. They really thought that they were going to bring him down like Dan Rather. There have probably dozens and perhaps hundreds of posts from people who have not, to my knowledge, addressed the substantive issue at all: cult-of-personality near-fascism on the American right, the kind of stuff Niewert writes about.
To a considerable extent, the character-assassination swarm, while providing lots of evidence for Greenwald's thesis, has succeeded in hijacking the discussion and rerouting it to sock-puppetry.
Greenwald often tries to respond to his adversaries personally, on the comments to his own blog and sometimes on theirs. He's been very patient about detailing their errors of fact and interpretation. He's the only important blogger I know of who does that, and that seems admirable but futile to me.
I guess I'd give him a wristslap on the sock-puppetry, but that's just netiquette. What he's accusing people of is scarcely-veiled death threats and eliminationism, and he backs up his accusations well.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:40 AM
Wow, BitchPhD is really hot!
Posted by sock p(h.d) | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:43 AM
Yeah, while the puppetry is genuinely embarrassing (less so if it's his partner, but still embarrassing), it's very much inside-baseball. I'm glad to see that he's still posting, and the whole puppetry thing doesn't have a thing to do with the quality of his work.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:44 AM
They really thought that they were going to bring him down like Dan Rather.
I agree, but it does raise the question of "bring him down from what?" Do they think they'll get him kicked off blogspot or something?
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:46 AM
I really don't get it now. Greenwald is also being accused here, by FL, of not being punchy and fun.
This is the same thing that happens to Bob Somerby. Instead of using the internet as a means of procrastination, light distraction, and snark distribution, which is what unfogged is, they're using it as a seriously forum for developing and documenting serious themes. This is to their credit, in my opinion.
Greenwald methodically lays out his case, dotting his i's and crossing his t's, and documenting every detail many times. It's like a lawyer's case. It's the same kind of thing I say, but I don't go much farther than to allege that there are a lot of rabid, murderous zombie fascists on the right, and that's easy to dismiss. I just don't have the heart to research this stuff, keep records, and then lay it out in an organized, detailed way. So anyway, thank you Gless Greenwald.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:47 AM
Right, it's not as if, but for the sock puppetry, Patterico would be saying, "wow, Greenwald really convinced me."
Emerson, my complaint is not "he isn't punchy and fun."
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:52 AM
Just a general point: the names of the sockpuppets look very much like the ones a South American would choose as a generic US-of-American name -- Wilson, Ellison, etc. -- because those names are common in South America but are still recognized as of English origin. They do not look very much like the names a New Yorker would choose.
Unless it's all a brilliant double-blind stupid move in a stupid game.
Also, MW, I had to return the fruit basket. Sorry.
Posted by Halfway Done | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:59 AM
That's my interpretation of "I find Greenwald to be longwinded, tedious, and over the top from time to time". Your praise of Greenwald was pretty faint.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:00 AM
but I think more because it would remind me of times I've made an ass of myself in similar ways.
Baby, I never minded that. It was never about you. You know that. It was me: I had to get somethings straight in my head.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:02 AM
And "those people are bad, so anyone sticking it to them is all right by me" is lame as well, by my lights.
Look, that's really, really not the point I was trying to make. The point is that Greenwald does good work on subjects that are significantly more worthy and notable than the War Against Sockpuppets, and this is a transparent effort to discredit his efforts in those areas on the basis of something trivial and unrelated. It's the equivalent of attacking an opposing counsel because you saw him pick his nose.
And yes, it really, really, really does matter that the people who are pushing the sockpuppet line tend to be apologists for torture and unlimited executive power. Do you think there's no substantive consequence to this kind of smear campaign?
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:03 AM
"attacking an opposing counsel" s/b "attacking an opposing counsel's argument"
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:08 AM
I'm with Strasmangelo 100%. The sock-puppet question has drowned out the substantive question (which, since we've all forgotten, is a lot of "joking" in the rightwing blogosphere about attacking Times reporters in their homes and lynching the Supreme Court).
Greenwald's opponents threw up five character-assassination diversion: sexuality, law licence, job history, residency, and sock puppetry. None wer ein any way relevant to the case Greenwald was making, and four of them turned out to be ineffective even as character assassination. But the sock-puppetry issue is sticking.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:08 AM
26 is right.
23 is right too. I knew it was you all along, Tim. It's never me. Everyone knows that.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:12 AM
I don't see how this could make Greenwald less useful for our side. I feel a little bad for the guy, but there's nothing to be alarmed about, afaict.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:16 AM
For the rest of us, of course, it was always both Tim and B. But they only think of themselves and each other.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:18 AM
And "those people are bad, so anyone sticking it to them is all right by me" is lame as well, by my lights.
This is wrong, though. I think this all of the time; I think most people do. Who doesn't feel happy in the humiliation of his enemies, and appreciation towards the person responsible for it?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:19 AM
John: I like Kevin Drum a lot, but he isn't punchy or particularly fun. I think that where I disagree with Greenwald is where I disagree with you, though, so it's probably not worth hashing out.
SJ:
I don't think it does matter, and I don't think there is a substantive consequence. These blog disputes matter far, far less than their participants sometimes seem to think. (See 20-- do you seriously think that anyone who would otherwise listen to Greenwald will stop doing so because of this?)
Remember that I wasn't saying that I endorse the general political viewpoint of any of these people. I was saying it's embarrassing and stupid when a smart, grown-up sort of pundit like Greenwald engages in this sort of thing. It's not important, but then again, this is a blog.
So I guess saying "but those people are really bad" strikes me as a non sequitur, just as "but Clinton did bad things!" does. Maybe I should write more posts about torture apologists, but once we've reached criticism of what people do and don't post about we're more or less at rock bottom.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:20 AM
FL, my main point is that a swarm of near-fascist zombies has succeeded in neutralizing a very substantive post on the basis of a medium-sized point of netiquette, and you seem to be going along with it.
There is a real analogy to the Dan Rather case. The orchestrated hoopla over one piece of doubtful evidence had the effect of completely obscuring the substantive case Rather was making, which was pretty strong without the doubtful evidence. (Granted that uncritical acceptance of forged evidence is a more serious offense than sock-puppetry.)
It does seem to be a center-left thing to raise every question possible to some kind of punctilious meta-level -- in this case netiquette as opposed to death threats. (A completely disastrous center-left thing, I might add, and one which leaves the center-left open to being played.)
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:30 AM
Tim's just trying to get me back because Ben's out of the country.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:31 AM
It does seem to be a center-left thing to raise every question possible to some kind of punctilious meta-level -- in this case netiquette as opposed to death threats. (A completely disastrous center-left thing, I might add, and one which leaves the center-left open to being played.)
And it was ever thus. See Hazlitt's essay On the Spirit of Partisanship not, alas, online last time I looked.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:35 AM
So I guess saying "but those people are really bad" strikes me as a non sequitur
It's not that "those people are really bad," it's "those people are enabling bad things right now." Torture and warrantless wiretaps aren't things that happened back in 2003; they're current policy, and much of the right wants to keep them as current policy, and there is a debate going on right now as to whether we should change that. Right now that debate does not look good for the side of democracy, and we need every voice on our side that we can get.
And while I don't think anyone's going to say, "Well, Glenn Greenwald's wrong about executive authority because he used sock puppets in somebody's comment section," I do think it's obvious that the intent is to trivialize him by making him into a punchline. "Oh, Glenn Greenwald? The sock puppet guy? Oh ho, I remember him! Let me send you this oh so hi-LAR-ious link to a blog post which imagines him as a kind of muppet!" The intent here is to dismiss him, not to rebut his arguments.
Already we're talking about the sockpuppetry as if it's a proven thing ("it's embarrassing and stupid when a smart, grown-up sort of pundit like Greenwald engages in this sort of thing") when it's not clear that he was responsible for those comments at all. I really don't see how any of this is a non sequitur.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:40 AM
John, I don't follow you at all. What's being neutralized? I haven't drawn any conclusions about GG's legal or political acumen from his apparent weird habit. Pretty much anyone who would take Greenwald seriously in the first place knows that there's a difference between the validity of his arguments and his netiquette.
Contempt isn't a zero-sum game. I can loathe multitudes. You make it sound as though my saying that GG looks like he's being a tool about this means that I move that much closer to voting like Ace.
And if fascist zombies say things like "Dick Gephardt wields a +5 ring of protectionism," sign me up.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:40 AM
I'm not overly familiar with the case. Is it just one sock-puppet? Because then the partner defense is quite likely. (Armsmasher has posted in defense of MY from the same location. Not that you two are life partners.) I can see a roommate or friend making an account to support a friend's loony internet debate.
This sort of like the scandal on Amazon when anonymous reviewers were praising books and were discovered to be either the authors themselves or friends of the authors. Mildly scandalous, but lame to get worked up over.
And 31 gets it right. 'But they're meanies' isn't a defense against sockpuppetry, but getting that worked up about it is pretty lame, too, and getting worked up about it so you don't have to talk about torture is worse. Ban the puppet, realize your hobby doesn't matter that much, and move on.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:42 AM
On more substantive issues: The linked post? Not funny. Not even a "Histopher Chritchens" for us. And the +5 ring of protectionism got a lot worse when I realized the dude was trying to use that format for substantive criticisms.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:47 AM
35:
You make it sound as though we're part of a very serious, very influential conversation about the future of democracy, when really we're a bunch of people BSing in the comments section of a much-loved but not very popular blog.
Does this boil down to "You shouldn't say bad things about GG, even if they're true, because saying them empowers the enemies of freedom"? I think you vastly overestimate my influence.
I know that the intent of Ace, Patterico, etc. is to dismiss Greenwald on spurious grounds. I still say: sock puppetry is toolish. I also say: but Greenwald's arguments must be examined on their merits. You might think that by saying this I'm playing right into their hands in some way, but I think that's silly.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:47 AM
"But they're meanies" isn't the argment, Cala. "But they're trying to destroy democracy in the United States and you're being a little bitch about sock puppets" is. See 35.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:48 AM
Matt, the puppets had moustaches! Of various sizes and styles!
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:49 AM
I don't see anyone talking about Greenwald's original post any more, here or anywhere else. It was actually a very powerful one. The Greenwald story, here and everywhere else, is now sock puppetry.
This kind of orchestrated diversionary swarming is a major fact of American political life, both in the blogosphere and in the commercial media. (The Swift Boat story was a prize example). If a story harmful to you seems to be getting some traction, figure out a way to change the topic slightly, change the spin, and suck up all the oxygen. As far as I can tell, that's happened with this particular story.
In this case, it's also substance (talk about lynching) over process trivia (sock-puppetry).
I read the Greenwald thread comments, and there were perhaps a hundred right-wing sock-puppet posts. Not a single one of the posts or blog entries I saw discussed or responded to Greenwald's substantive story, and soon the thread was about sock puppetry. Character assassination trumped debate.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:49 AM
What original post, John? He has a lot of them.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:50 AM
My funny bone demands an Evil Michael Knight soul-patch and Humpty-Hump glasses.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:51 AM
39: I'm not overestimating Unfogged's influence or even Greenwald's. I'm saying that it took lots of little suckers making harmless little jokes to convince the country that Al Gore was a wacko who thought he invented the internet.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:51 AM
You make it sound as though we're part of a very serious, very influential conversation about the future of democracy.....
That's what Greenwald was trying to do, but we chose not to pick up on that.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:52 AM
Wow, that would be funny.
I'm actually really confused about the FL-SJ-JE conversation because I don't know what's at issue. It seems to be that my posted view is inappropriate to assert though it is not false.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:57 AM
How influential can it be if most of the country doesn't read weblogs?
Al Gore, the Swift Boat, the flip-flopping, weren't solely or even primarily Internet phenomena. Character assassination always trumps debate; this is nothing new.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:58 AM
46: so this really is a "you shouldn't post on X, you should post on Y" complaint?
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:00 AM
How influential can it be if most of the country doesn't read weblogs?
That's a weird point. Most of the country doesn't read The New Republic, or even the New York Times. One was once considered influential, and one still is.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:00 AM
The NYT articles are reproduced in dailies everywhere. One doesn't need to subscribe to the NYT (or the other big papers) to be reading its articles. This just isn't true of weblogs.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:02 AM
How influential can it be if most of the country doesn't read weblogs?
Somebody reads them. You don't forfeit all responsibility for what you say on a blog just because you're not saying it on primetime TV.
Character assassination always trumps debate; this is nothing new.
Do we have to participate in character assassination just because it's happening? I don't understand how this is even a response to the issue at hand.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:04 AM
Emerson is completely right. "Suck up the oxygen" indeed. It happens time and time again in American politics.
And yes, people here are just BSing in the comments section of a silly blog. But did anyone pay attention at all during the 2000 and 2004 elections? Al Gore anyone?
Posted by Barbar | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:06 AM
If we were going to talk about Greenwald, I think that we should have taken into account that he has been trying to engage in a very serious.... conversation about the future of democracy..... (leaving "influential" out of it). His sock puppetry, if any, was unfortunate but no big deal, and I don't think that we should have let that become the topic.
Greenwald, Niewert, and I think that the Republican Party has been taken over by a near-fascist cult of personality, and that they're still working to gain control of the country as a whole (far beyond what they have so far). I think that the Israel-Lebanon Syria war (and possibly Iran too) is going to work to neutralize the Democrats in the Fall elections and advance the Movement Republican program.
This is the political picture I see. If you want to know why I'm so surly, that's why. When Unfogged touches on politics, my choice is usually between remaining silent, and violating comity.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:09 AM
51: It remains true that The New Republic was considered influential, as are any number of other small publications, because of the audience they reach. I think you could make a pretty good claim that, for example, dKos or Eschaton or Instapundit, is influential. (The same seems true for any number of small movies that gain "important" status despite lousy box-office numbers. Again, it's a matter of the audience reached.)
OTOH, I don't see anything wrong with FL's post.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:12 AM
Yes, I am saying that we should post on Y and not X. Is that another violation of netiquette? When we saw character assassination beginning, we should not have said "You know, their fifth attempt at assassination actually had some validity."
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:14 AM
Somebody reads them. You don't forfeit all responsibility for what you say on a blog just because you're not saying it on primetime TV.
No, but the claim that this thread on sockpuppetry ruins any attempt to take Greenwald seriously and that this internet based phenomenon -- "[is] trying to destroy democracy in the United States and you're being a little bitch about sock puppets.." -- is overwrought.
Do we have to participate in character assassination just because it's happening? I don't understand how this is even a response to the issue at hand.
Very simple. Your claim seems to be that because of the sock-puppet charges, Greenwald's good post will never be discussed (potentially true) and that this will have crazy results just like all of the other trivial character assassinations that the Internet produced, like the Swift Boat campaign. My point was that the Internet wasn't as big in the Swift Boaters' campaign as the blogosphere would have you believe, and even less so in the 2000 election. And so the claim that being a little bitch about a minor writer on a corner of the internet will ruin democracy is overwrought.
Plus, FL doesn't seem to be endorsing it; he seems to be calling the people running it lame.
If you want to read that as an endorsement of character assassination, okay, but I think we both know that's straining credulity.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:16 AM
Wow, BitchPhD is really hot!
That's why Chris Muir keeps putting her in his cartoons!
Satan
['Maybe Glen Greenwald is really Chris Muir.']
Posted by Satan | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:16 AM
FL: The clearest statement of why you shouldn't post like this even if your posts are true is SJ's 45. To repeat it more loudly, George Bush is President and more than a hundred thousand people are dead in Iraq because people picked up and ran with the "Al Gore lies so much that it's really funny," line that the right was spreading. Not every facet of that line was false -- he did mistakenly claim to have flown to a particular natural disaster with the head of FEMA, when the head of FEMA hadn't flown with him on that occasion. That doesn't mean that it wouldn't have been wrong and harmful for someone to agree that the right had a point on that one -- the line is bullshit, and the line is harmful, and the fact that many voters believed it killed people.
You're right that this event is a much less big deal -- GG isn't anyone in particular, not many people are reading this. But if it matters at all, you're doing something bad by pushing the sock-puppet flap as equivalently important, or more important, than the substantive stuff Greenwald is writing about.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:23 AM
The function of the sock puppet accusations was to suck up the oxygen and change the subject. This move have been successful. How many people even remember what Greenwald's original post was about? (I just told you, but how many knew before I did that?)
The problem with diversions is that you don't have to agree with the people changing the subject. If you let them change the subject and argue with them about what they want to argue with, they win and you lose.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:23 AM
53:
But did anyone pay attention at all during the 2000 and 2004 elections? Al Gore anyone?
Have you read our posts from election season?
54: it's not like I've never linked to Greenwald's blog in the past, John.
I don't think that we should have let that become the topic.
It's not the topic. Note the links to very serious ObWi treatment of prisoner abuse issues and a discussion of civilian culpability. I posted about the goddamned Misha thing after seeing GG's post on it. There have been serious discussions of Greenwald's issues; there will be more in the future.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:24 AM
FL, there will be more serious discussions of your mom in the future.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:28 AM
In the future, everyone's mom will be discussed seriously for 15 minutes.
Posted by M/tch M/lls | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:30 AM
I fully support the Gayatollah, and any mission into which he may lead me. This really isn't important as regards GG's reputation--I still find it unlikely that he was the one actually sock-puppeting--or the issues he discusses. One of the nice things about the blogosphere is that anyone can take GGs work and build off of it; even someone who has never been accused of puppeting. At worst, Labs's post is an example of being drawn into the punji stick trap of the right. It happens.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:32 AM
I asked about which of GG's posts you meant, John, because I wasn't sure which of his posts, besides the "personal response" one, was directly tied to the sock thing. I didn't know what "Greenwald's original post" was about because of the ambiguity of that phrase, not because the sock issue has driven all knowledge of the Evil Right Wing from my head. If you mean the GG bit on Misha's post, recall that I linked to it and quoted the "five ropes" bit.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:34 AM
Having just returned from the future, I can tell you that Labs' future-mom is hot.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:34 AM
66: Yes, but is she bothered?
Posted by M/tch M/lls | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:36 AM
No, but the claim that this thread on sockpuppetry ruins any attempt to take Greenwald seriously and that this internet based phenomenon -- "[is] trying to destroy democracy in the United States and you're being a little bitch about sock puppets.." -- is overwrought.
I never claimed that this thread "ruins any attempt to take Greenwald seriously." It certainly contributes to a campaign to do so, however unintentionally, though. And considering the fact that Greenwald is part of a different campaign opposing the increasing de-democratization of America, no, I don't think it's overwrought.
And so the claim that being a little bitch about a minor writer on a corner of the internet will ruin democracy is overwrought.
Again, I'm not claiming that the smearing of Glenn Greenwald, in and of itself, will ruin democracy. But the smear campaign against Glenn Greenwald is part of a larger campaign by a bunch of people who really do want to destroy American democracy - people who are consistent apologists for torture and unlimited executive authority. It should really be pretty obvious by now that there are sides here, and when a writer known best for his work on the NSA's illegal domestic spying program is targeted by a smear campaign on the basis of obscure netiquette violations, and center-left bloggers start linking to said smear campaign and calling the guy "lame," that's really not helping.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:37 AM
Greenwald is not as small-time as we are. His book seems to be making some bestseller lists. I expect to be reading much more about his sock puppetry.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:40 AM
Greenwald, Niewert, and I think that the Republican Party has been taken over by a near-fascist cult of personality, and that they're still working to gain control of the country as a whole (far beyond what they have so far).
Royalist, not fascist. And I doubt they're that intelligent.
Anyways, didn't some ancient right-wing professor type get caught out doing something similar a coupla years ago, and didn't his credibility take a nose dive? Likewise with whatever that blogger kid's name at the WaPo was.
That would be trading one of yours for two of theirs. Well, unless you want to include Deb Frisch.
Anyways, if Ista-Fuckit had done the same, D's would be all over him like white on rice, and deservedly so. Apparently the dude thinks he's Terribly Important. Which sorta implies that his writing is Terribly Important and maybe should be taken with a grain of salt. And the best weapon is the truth, not someone's well-written possibly ponderous possible exaggerations.
The thing here is, is when shit like this happens, you ditch the loser and go with somebody else. If your entire case depends on Glen Greenwald, you have much more serious problems than losing a blogger. Worse, backing the guy after he just fucked you is bad tactics. (See Dan Rather.) Hey, the evil fascists want you to stretch out your defense of this guy as long as possible, so they can continue to beat you with it.
Ditch your losers, let your winners run. Or go broke and the other guy walks home with the piece of that one-in-a-lifetime IPO.
Note: Glen Greenwald is not, unless I'm mistaken a starving orphan or a dude living in a ghetto, [if he is, that WOULD be interesting] so the Sally Struthers routine would really better serve somebody else.
max
['So who is the Greenwald dude, anyways?']
Posted by max | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:42 AM
didn't some ancient right-wing professor type get caught out doing something similar
Yeah, that was John Lott, whose sock-puppetry was just a facet of a wide range of bizarre lamenesses -- it seems pretty clear to me that the folks who discovered GG's alleged sock-puppetry are trying to turn him into a left John Lott.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:45 AM
Yup, I realize now that Glenn Greenwald is a plagiarizer who makes up evidence to support his bogus claims. Thanks "max" for proving Emerson's point once again.
Posted by Barbar | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:45 AM
One might think that a willingness to acknowledge the toolishness of sock-puppetry grants one greater authority in emphasizing what's right about Greenwald's position; furthermore, one might think that refusal to say that, yes, this series of alleged actions is toolish appears from the outside to be just the sort of close-ranks-around-leader that Greenwald sees in the conservative movement.
LB, you inform me that
I would think my post is not like "Al Gore is a liar!1! About everything!" and more like "Al Gore can be a tool sometimes," said right after utterances that make it perfectly clear that I think Gore is right on the big issues. If you find saying things like that to be problematic, I think we'll just have to agree to disagree.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:46 AM
Jesus, Max. Thanks for letting us know how your mind works.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:46 AM
Likewise with whatever that blogger kid's name at the WaPo was
Ben Domenech admitted to plagiarizing other people's work, which is a far cry from being accused of sockpuppetry. I don't know what "ancient right-wing professor" you're referring to.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:49 AM
Closing ranks is sometimes the right thing to do. Not as much as the Republicans do it, but way more than liberals and Democrats do it.
Orwell and Gandhi said wonderful things, but they aren't very good as a handbook to practical American politics. And neither was as passive and self-defeating as Democrats are.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:51 AM
Y'all are letting partisanship addle your brains. Sockpuppetry isn't just a violation of "netiquette," it's dishonest, and anyone who does it deserves the loss of credibility that results from its discovery. We're supposed to keep quiet about it because Greenwald is on our side? No thanks. He screwed himself (uh, assuming he did it), and if they got him, they got him.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:54 AM
Both Lott and his liberal adversary (Bellesiles) were accused of tampering with data and doctoring statistics. Lott's sock-puppetry was quite secondary and increased the ridicule he got, but he wasn't discredited simply for sock-puppetry. The other cases mentioned here were plagiarism, which Greenwald is not accused of.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:55 AM
I posted 77.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:55 AM
70/71: John Lott made up data, which is not just bizarrely lame but which legitimately means that nothing he says should be taken seriously--because you can't trust that it's not also made up. And he still gets to write op-eds in places that should know better. (cf. Michael Bellesiles, who was rightly drummed out of the academy and of public discourse for making things up.) Even if Greenwald sock-puppeted, and no one seems to have any evidence that it wasn't his partner, that doesn't reflect on his credibility in the same way.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:55 AM
I'm just kidding about 79, by the way.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:56 AM
Closing ranks is sometimes the right thing to do. Not as much as the Republicans do it, but way more than liberals and Democrats do it.
I buy that. I just don't buy that here. GG isn't up for election now. As long as the left blogosphere doesn't abandon him, this won't hurt him much. (Which is to say, max is completely wrong.) Limbaugh got popped on a drug charge, and that hasn't seemed to hurt him very much.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:56 AM
I would think my post is not like "Al Gore is a liar!1! About everything!" and more like "Al Gore can be a tool sometimes," said right after utterances that make it perfectly clear that I think Gore is right on the big issues.
FL, I really don't think the average right-winger looking for ammunition of the "Even The Liberal Unfogged" variety is going to hunt for that level of nuance in the following: "This Greenwald thing is really embarassing. I noted below that it's odd to be so interested in it, but it's much odder and more shameful to go around pretending to be other people on the internet. So, so dumb."
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:56 AM
Talk about internet myopia. Greenwald wrote quite an important book on an important topic, and we're supposed to not read it because of sock-puppetry? Or are we supposed to read it, but reject his data and arguments? Or maybe we should not simply reject them, but should just mark them down by 10 or 20%?
Unfogged's silly non-partisanship has always been its weak spot. What world do you people live in?
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:58 AM
83:
SJ, let me clarify something. Suppose for argument's sake that Greenwald did sock-puppet his way through various comment sections. Do you find that odd or shameful or dumb? (Ignore for now the judgments about relative oddness, etc.)
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:00 AM
Not to mention, the question of how partisan to be is something Labs and I have gone back and forth on a lot here, and I think we both basically decided that we don't have the kind of partisanship in us that folks like Emerson would like. We're liberal, but not so liberal that the sockpuppet cartoon doesn't make us laugh. (I shouldn't really be speaking for Labs....)
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:01 AM
assuming he did it
That's the point, isn't it? But anyway, his honesty isn't an issue in relation to his substantive writing -- he's not showing up with new data, he's making arguments. Changing the subject from what Greenwald is talking about to whether he or his partner is minorly dishonest in a self-aggrandizing way is changing the subject from something important to something unimportant, and from something that serves our political goals to something that serves the goals of the right.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:02 AM
It strikes me as odd and silly, at least, and if I knew him I'd say something about it.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:02 AM
"The function of the sock puppet accusations was to suck up the oxygen and change the subject. This move have been successful. How many people even remember what Greenwald's original post was about?"
That's a strange and inaacurate claim. "hanging the subject" can be very effective for winning crucial news cycles, and sometimes making a story go away forever. This is a function of the strange way the media functions. None of that is applicable to the way the blogosphere functions. There are no news cycles per se, and individual posts aren't important, hammering away at issues and memes over months and years is. There is no original post.
Can the sock puppet flap harm Greenwald's long term ability to push memes? Possible, but I don't think so, as long as he's still seen as credible by leftist bloggers. The lefty blogosphere is, if not a noise machine, a meme machine, and the mainstream credibility of an individual blogger doesn't impact their ability to push memes, forunately since the establishment dislikes them all.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:03 AM
The first part of 84 only refers to things said or implied by maxash, right? Because no one else has come close to suggesting that. And maxash seems to be saying, seriously, that he doesn't know anything about Greenwald. So perhaps he's less of an authority here than on other issues.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:03 AM
Unfogged's silly non-partisanship has always been its weak spot. What world do you people live in?
John, presumably what's written here isn't the sum total of anyone's political engagement. It's nice to have a place to go where one doesn't have to read and seethe constantly, no? (And if you'd rather seethe, it's not like there's a shortage of sites to read, right?)
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:05 AM
re: 86
My impression, though, is that Emerson isn't really a liberal.*
* Nor am I, for that matter. But since I'm not American the same terms don't really apply anyway.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:05 AM
changing the subject from something important to something unimportant
Right, we could be altering poems so that they're about clownfucking.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:06 AM
Wait, so is that really ogged, or not? I thought FL was indicating that the earlier "ogged" was a puppet.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:06 AM
FL's 85 assumes something that his main post doesn't. Greenwald said that he didn't post under other names. Is he a liar about that? That sock puppet link isn't even funny unless you assume it was Greenwald rather than Greenwald's partner who was posting under other names.
Posted by Joe O | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:06 AM
94: Dude, ogged has always been a puppet. His real name is Mickey Kaus.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:07 AM
For the record, I have not posted under ogged's name; I was making a joke.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:08 AM
Sockpuppetry isn't just a violation of "netiquette," it's dishonest, and anyone who does it deserves the loss of credibility that results from its discovery.
No, I'm sorry, that's bullshit. What you say in a comment section is what you say in a comment section, and it only has an inflated sense of importance to some people who attach way too much significance to what they say to anonymous strangers in comment sections (see: us). Glenn Greenwald could be Coco the chimp for all I care; it's what he says and advocates for on his blog that matters, and in general he defends democracy and human rights in a way that The Link In Memory Of Ogged does not.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:09 AM
I think that the specific "lynch the Supreme Court" issue is pretty much dead now in the blogosphere. All the people who were implicated in that stuff (by their linking) have been allowed to talk about sock-puppetry instead. This same kind of issue will rise again, and the lynching issue will be referred back to, but right now it's dead.
Greenwald is also now in the national media with his book, and we can expect to see the sock-puppetry inserted into the national media. It's not just a few little bloggers.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:09 AM
Swimming is the least gay of all sports.
Posted by Mickey Kaus | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:10 AM
These comments are really me. I'm slowly moving back into the world of the sitting.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:10 AM
The problem with this is that there's something odd or silly about everyone, and if there isn't, something can be made up. (Again, Greenwald isn't a huge issue -- I'm getting het up because of what happened to Gore, and what happened to Dean, and what happened to Kerry.)
We've got a whole lot of people working on making anyone who's doing good work for the Left into the butt of a joke, not for the sheer joy of making fun of funny people, but because it works. Laughing along with them is playing into their hands.
And Labs -- if you posted something like this:
"Al Gore can be a tool sometimes," said right after utterances that make it perfectly clear that I think Gore is right on the big issues.
in the context of right-wing attacks on him during a contested election, knowing what you now know (say, if he ran in 2008) I'd think you were being an idiot, and an irresponsible idiot.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:11 AM
it's what he says and advocates for on his blog that matters
In an ideal world. sure, but if someone is going to play the partisan game, and hands his opponents a big stick to beat him with, it is, as Labs says, so, so dumb. Or maybe no one should date Brazilians. Not all the facts are in.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:13 AM
I love Unfogged when it's frivolous and genuinely nonpolitical. But the handling of politics here often drives me nuts.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:13 AM
102: If you thought that, I'd think other mean things, but we should probably leave it at that, at least until 2008.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:16 AM
I don't think this post reflects well on Labs, but that kind of attitude is no longer a widespread problem in the lefty blogosphere. It makesyou sad when one of your imaginary Internet friends is being slightly stupid and obnoxious, though.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:16 AM
Or maybe no one should date Brazilians.
That is so, so wrong. I still remember a picture of some former SI covergirl, taken when she was something like 45. And I think I saw that picture a decade or two ago. We should all date Brazillians.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:17 AM
When someone in your party stupidly gives the other guys a stick to beat him with, isn't the normal response to start hitting the guy with the stick in order to defend your stupid friend? Or do you just stand back and say "That was a dumb move, buddy!"?
There can be too much partisanship and too much loyalty, but I don't think that Democrats or liberals nationally come anywhere near that point. (In Massachusetts, for example, they do, and people say they do in Hawaii too. But nationally Democrats are feeble and disloyal.)
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:18 AM
Suppose for argument's sake that Greenwald did sock-puppet his way through various comment sections. Do you find that odd or shameful or dumb?
I find it lame and silly, but also beneath notice.* People do a lot of stupid things on the internet, and like I said, I don't really attach opinion writing to personalities all that much (at least not on dry political blogs). I do realize I'm atypical in this, however, and that a charge of "Pundit X did Stupid Thing Y" is often has the effect of "ingore Pundit X's argument because of Stupid Thing Y."
*As a point of comparison, there was a story about Andrew Sullivan that Atrios used to bring up a lot - and which I'm not repeating because I have no idea how accurate it was - that always used to make me pissed off at Atrios, because even if it were true, and even if it made Andrew Sullivan a bad person and someone I wouldn't like to know, it had nothing to do whatsoever with anything Andrew Sullivan was writing about, and it really got me mad that this was becoming, for a while at least, the Official Atrios Line on Andrew Sullivan.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:19 AM
101: Yay sitting!
I'd agree that sock puppetry is odd and dumb. My assumption is that it's the partner rather than Greenwald, because I have a fair amount of faith in lawyers as tending toward the literally truthful when pinned down. I'd still call it regrettable and dishonest, but I don't particularly care at all about the honesty of significant others of prominent liberal bloggers.
Even if it were Greenwald, I'd give him a hard time about it if I knew him, but it's not a big deal, because what he writes doesn't depend on his credibility.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:19 AM
Kind of ironic is it not that all of the strife on Unfogged today is occurring on a thread titled "On a lighter note".
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:21 AM
105: (Pencilling in 'Rumble with FL' for 2008. 'NB: Buy slingshot.')
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:21 AM
We should all date Brazillians.
Maybe, and get them their own IP addresses.
Anyway, we've had this "how partisan to be" "what kind of space is this" discussion a lot, haven't we? It's not like we're going to come to a consensus. Someone post pictures of Brazilian hotties or something, I've used up my sitting time for the day. Later!
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:21 AM
I'm slowly moving back into the world of the sitting.
Wait, could you actually not sit up? How did you eat? Was your throat just full of tubes for weeks?
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:22 AM
114: Snoozed. Lost.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:25 AM
Emerson in 108: I don't think that Democrats or liberals nationally come anywhere near that point. (In Massachusetts, for example, they do, and people say they do in Hawaii too. But nationally Democrats are feeble and disloyal.)
This is very tre. Democratic legislators in Mass. are very loyal to eachother. I think that they may take it too far. We are ruled by a hackocracy. Some of the problems with the Big Dig (did you all catch taht a major tunnel was closed because of a death?) were related to the spreading of graft.
Also, Scott Harsbarger went after corruption as AG. Bill Bulger, an old-school conservative Dem, Senate President and borther of a mobster, didn't care for that so much. The machine did not come out for Harshbarger when he was a gubernatorial candidate. Thus we got Celucci for an extra term.
There are some people who say that the Dems in the legislature don't really want a Democratic governor. Right now, they have veto-proof margins, and they can set the Democratic agenda. If we get a Democratic governor, they may be knocked down a peg or two.
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:32 AM
Yeah, there's good loyalty and bad loyalty. NYC Democrats have a tendency toward the bad sort -- personal loyalties within an organizational context -- that keeps them from getting much done (and makes local politics completely incomprehensible if you aren't absolutely up on all the players.)
But ideological loyalty - recognition that there are some people out there working toward the same goals you are, and so you should be working to build them up rather than tear them down - is something that, as Emerson says, Democrats are weak on these days.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:36 AM
re: 117
But ideological loyalty - recognition that there are some people out there working toward the same goals you are, and so you should be working to build them up rather than tear them down - is something that, as Emerson says, Democrats are weak on these days.
My impression, as an outsider, is that a big part of that problem is that many Democrats seem, to me, to just be Republicans with a veneer of bourgeios respectability and a (genuine) distate for the worst 'Fuck the poor' and 'Yay for killing brown people!' rhetoric/policies of the Republicans.
In that sense, they aren't really ideologically loyal -- there isn't an ideology for them to be loyal to.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:50 AM
re: 108 and 116
Too true. Growing up in Massachusetts left me thinking I was a Libertarian for quite a while, because governor Bill Weld seemed to be a lot more sensible than the aptly titled Democratic 'hackocracy' that otherwise ruled the state.
But then I started spending more time on the internet and realized that libertarians were insane.
More troubling was the realization that, outside of the Northeast, Rebublicans were also insane.
Posted by skippy | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:56 AM
A lot of the criticisms of FL for doing this post are a bit much.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:57 AM
It's a vicious circle. Labor issues get very little support among middle-class Democrats because labor has been personally demonized -- anyone working for a union is assumed to be corrupt, useless, attempting to destroy the company they work for out of sheer malice, etc. Likewise anyone who advocates social programs (we would be known as 'poverty pimps'). Every ideological element of a left-wing position has been defined as personally unseemly or distasteful or an indication of a deep spiritual flaw in the person who believes it.
It's not that most Democrats couldn't be talked into support for labor if they came to it cold, but they 'know' that labor is corrupt and counterproductive and risible just like they 'knew' Al Gore was a liar.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 12:00 PM
119: Yup, and most Massachsetts Dems aren't terribly liberal. Liberals don't have that much institutional power at the state level.
Kerry Healey (Lt. Gov., presumptive Republican gubernatorial nominee) alsoseems to be nuts in a peculiarly Northeastern way. All of her TV ads talk about rescinding teh gas tax and rolling back the income tax. She also want to get tough on crime in a very anti-civil liberties way.)
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 12:03 PM
Skippy, are you the Bush Kangaroo?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 12:05 PM
This whole thing makes me think of Meet John Doe only without the suicide on Christmas Eve thing.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 12:10 PM
120: Yeah, fair enough.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 12:19 PM
Basically I spent some time on Greenwald's site, reading the trolls swarming his thread, and then dropping by some of the anti-Greenwald sites and seeing how they had succeeded in ignoring all of Greenwald's points while zeroing in on the sock-puppet issue (the only one of their five smears to stand up.)
And I realized that I could expect the sock-puppet issue to appear most of the time when Greenwald's book is discussed, with a reasonable chance that Time will have Wonkette review the book from sock-puppet angle.
And then I came here.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 12:31 PM
Why not take it all out on Greenwald's site, John?
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 12:39 PM
re: 123
Nope, I just had an uncle named "skippy" and always liked the name.
re: 121
All those points are true, but I think you can't discount the fact that many people's experiences with unions (apart from being in one) are simply pretty negative.
For instance, you take an academic who might be very 'pro-union' in general, and you'll still hear them bitch about the unionized support staff at the university in terms of rewarding incompetence, inflexibility, nepotism, and inability to be fired (ironic, coming from someone with tenure, no doubt).
This isn't evidence that "unions are bad" of course, but I think there are often less abstract reasons for people to have anti-union feelings than those you mention.
I think a better approach to increasing support for unions is to simply hammer home the idea that they are a necessary counterbalance to corporate power. Yes, they come with all the requisite warts that power brings, but we're much better with them than without them.
Posted by skippy | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 12:40 PM
FL, because I'm a regular here and not there, and because you posted about Greenwald.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 12:44 PM
Well, but I work with an office with non-unionized support staff, and I have stories about "rewarding incompetence, inflexibility, nepotism, and inability to be fired"; you get stories like that in workplaces, not in unionized workplaces. While there are certainly union officials that do bad things and there are bad unions (just like there are corporate executives that do bad things and bad corporations), this is a bad argument for opposing the labor movement generally. But it's been built up into a perfectly respectable argument for despising labor. Once the personal loyalty was broken, the ideological loyalty broke down in its wake.
I think a better approach to increasing support for unions is to simply hammer home the idea that they are a necessary counterbalance to corporate power. Yes, they come with all the requisite warts that power brings, but we're much better with them than without them.
Absolutely. But the 'Unions are protecting the job of that annoying guy where I work, and so the labor movement is an obsolete drag on the economy' argument is a bad argument, and anyone who's generally on the left but buys into it has been played.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 12:46 PM
This substantive discussion of unions is just a diversionary tactic to keep us from discussing whether or not Labs should have done this post.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 12:47 PM
Are unions corrupt? Of course.
Are unions more corrupt than big business? Don't make me laugh.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 12:55 PM
Nope, I just had an uncle named "skippy" and always liked the name.
Sock puppet.
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 12:55 PM
You know, I was thinking of tying it back in -- the justification for berating Labs about is the desire to grab him by the shoulders (acquiring a small but sturdy footstool for the purpose of bringing them within reach first) and shake him, saying "Labs, you got played on this. You get in the habit of laughing at their jokes and spreading their shit, and we lose." It doesn't matter if the joke is funny in isolation (which it might be) or if the point is fair in isolation (all sorts of bad stuff that could be truly said about individual unions). When it's part of the right's narrative, and we're spreading it, we lose.
But then I decided that that would be making too much of it, so I didn't write the comment.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 12:56 PM
130: There either is or isn't some truth to the claim that unions, in the past, were pernicious. If there isn't, the unions got absolutely crushed in the PR battle of the 80's, because I remember them as being quite powerful in the 70's. What unions are like now is a different matter, but as skippy says, I don't think attitudes about unions are simply a function of today's anti-union PR efforts.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 12:56 PM
Sure. Making the leap you suggest is indeed illogical and I wouldn't defend it.
I just think it's worth keeping in mind that people are often speaking from experience, not just parroting talking points from some interest group.
A trivial point, I know, but it seems to often get overlooked in political discussions.
To get people to look past their anecdotal experiences, you need to grant them the validity of the experience first. Otherwise most people will tune out.
Posted by skippy | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 12:57 PM
I think there's a valid argument to be made against unions from their tendency to oppose the deployment of technological developments that make jobs obsolete. Automation is a really good thing from a worldwide point of view, even if it's painful to people whose jobs it replaces.
On the other hand, this downside probably doesn't outweigh the plus of protecting the rights of labor against corporate exploitation, and in any case the propriety of government regulation of unions is a whole other question.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 12:57 PM
Damnit, you caught me JL.
Posted by ron jeremy | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 1:00 PM
There either is or isn't some truth to the claim that unions, in the past, were pernicious.
'Some truth' is a pretty low standard. Sure, there's some truth to it. There's also some truth to the fact that a member of my nuclear family pulls whiskers out of cats with pliers. (She was four, she did it once, the cat never seemed to hold it against her. She just wanted one to play with.) It wouldn't tell you much that's useful about her.
The question is whether society is better off with strong or weak unions, and the answer is pretty clear, from my point of view, that we're better off when unions are strong.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 1:01 PM
But then I decided that that would be making too much of it, so I didn't write the comment.
That's probably for the best, because, had you commented that way, this thread really would have degenerated even further.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 1:03 PM
Yeah, see, that was why I restrained myself. Because all of the counterarguments about "Isn't the truth of an individual claim the most important thing about it," and "Isn't it ridiculously self-important to think that what jokes we're laughing at on a C-list blog have any effect on society," are also very persuasive, and arguments where both sides have reasonably defensible positions get ugly.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 1:08 PM
139: You're addressing two different issues, though. The first is, "Why do people who lead Democrat have anti-union preferences?" The second is, "Should there be strong unions?" In conflating the two, you're assuming a method of judgment that I don't think actually operates for most people.
It's really not that different than (rank speculation) what has happened to the US car makers. As I understand it, they now make quite good cars. But if given a choice between a new US car and a low mileage used foreign car, I'd opt for the foreign car. Because somewhere in the past I learned that US cars are poorly made. There was probably some truth to it, and perhaps more was made of it than should have been. But those remain my preferences, and JD Powers studies aren't going to change my mind; it's going to cost them more than that.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 1:09 PM
My answer to the first is "Because they bought a right-wing narrative, and started blaming everything bad they ever heard about a union or experienced in a union context on the fact that unions are just bad lousy things."
My answer to the second is that strong unions do their membership and other workers, even non-union ones, in the same industries, a great deal of measurable good. They do any other participant in the marketplace very little measurable harm. Netted out, they are a great social good if you value economic equality and security for working people.
I don't think I'm conflating the two.
Your foreign car analogy works if your opinion that US cars sucked were the result of a long-term marketing campaign by foreign car manufacturers, and wasn't based on anything systematic about US cars at any point.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 1:16 PM
FL, we disagreed with you. The thread didn't degenerate.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 1:20 PM
I can't help with any more degeneration anyway, I'm all angried out.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 1:29 PM
Lb, I meant, in particular, that
Labs, you got played on this. You get in the habit of laughing at their jokes and spreading their shit, and we lose
misses the point in a sort of obnoxious way. You see it as a matter of getting played precisely because you see our joint membership in Team Left as having a status that, for me, it doesn't have. Only if I bought into that (and the thread makes it clear that I don't) does this sort of thing fall under "getting played" rather than "recognizing a funny way of saying something true."
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 1:30 PM
recognizing a funny way of saying something true.
Dude, wrong on both counts.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 1:35 PM
No, duuude. You're wrong on both counts. (I take count one to be "funny!" and count two to be "sock-puppeting is so, so lame." Mwha-ha-ha--two! two counts!)
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 1:40 PM
Speaking abstractly, I'm not sure if sock-puppeting is different in kind rather than in scale from astroturf operations, and I'm no fan of astroturf. Even inside baseball should be played on grass.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 1:44 PM
Wait-- the light bulb just went on. I accuse Weiner of Comic Moralism! You pitt guys are all alike.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 1:49 PM
Count one is 'funny' and count two is 'true'.
Count two first: It seems like when most people get caught out doing stupid shit, they wind up with a series of collapsing defenses: "my notes got burned in a mysterious fire," "the plagiarized copy was inserted by my nefarious editors," "I have three sources that say that Rove is going to be indicted! I stand by my story!", that sort of thing. Greenwald pretty much right away said something that could be read between the lines as "Someone else in my house posted this," and no one's come up with anything to shake this. (As you pointed out, Ace's request to phone interview his partner is creepy and weird.) He just doesn't sound like a guy trying to weasel his way out of something he's nailed on.
As for 'funny', once you hear "It's about sock puppets and it features pictures of sock puppets!" you have all the funny in it (admittedly pictures of sock puppets are funny). "Homesock"? I'm dying, but I wish you were. The punchline, "That guy's got issues." "Serious issues": so, so, so not funny. Repeating myself, go talk to The Poor Man to see how this is done.
(Yeah, yeah, I know, funny is in the eye of the beholder.)
[On preview, 150 is funny.]
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 1:51 PM
Less wordy: That is funny with a moustache.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 1:55 PM
No, I'm sorry, that's bullshit. What you say in a comment section is what you say in a comment section, and it only has an inflated sense of importance to some people who attach way too much significance to what they say to anonymous strangers in comment sections (see: us). Glenn Greenwald could be Coco the chimp for all I care; it's what he says and advocates for on his blog that matters, and in general he defends democracy and human rights in a way that The Link In Memory Of Ogged does not.
There's a parallel here that I think is important, and it's forming the basis of why I agree with FL & ogged on this.
Sock-puppetry isn't a big intellectual sin in general. It doesn't affect whether his book is any good or his analysis is original and worthwhile. But, like the faked Amazon reviews influence people's perceptions of the books, sock-puppetry does influence the shape of Internet debates. It can direct how a comment thread goes; it can direct what informations is brought up. It can direct how persuasive a group finds an argument (cf. groupthink, echo chambers). Especially since most internet debates seem to rely on force of numbers rather than logical persuasion. ('Lots of people agree with that Greenwald guy... must be something to it...')
It's nowhere near plagiarism, of course. But the importance and influence of a blog or a writer can be tied to the influence of people who comment on it. ('Most people at Unfogged are X' only makes sense if you believe we're different people.) So to the extent that the desired influence of the writer is important, sock-puppetry is important.
If you think blogs are sort of useless and nowhere near as hyped as they are, then fine, sockpuppetry isn't an issue anymore than lying in my diary is. If you want them to be meaningful tools to influence debate, the sock-puppetry is going to increase in importance. If you hold the former, it's fine to mock someone's sock-puppetry. If you hold the latter, you should probably call the sock-puppetry lame, point out that he's still worth reading, and move along.
Is it so big a sin that Greenwald isn't worth reading or engaging? Of course not. Does that mean we have to say it's not a problem at all in order to justify continuing to engage his argument? I don't think so.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 1:57 PM
Team Left as having a status that, for me, it doesn't have.
Yeah. I would like to persuade you toward my view of Team Left, because I'm strongly ideologically committed to its goals (which I think you, roughly, agree with me about) and I think the fact that those on the left seem more likely to share your distaste for team play than those on the right makes it more difficult to achieve those goals.
I can sympathize with wanting to admire the play as play rather than as competition, but I care how the game comes out, and it kills me seeing people on my side applauding an impressive three-pointer rather than blocking the damn thing.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:03 PM
So now Fontana is undermining democrats and supporting torture? Cheering as that prospect is to me personally, I fear it’s a weird and wrongheaded way to view his post. And it seems like despite his attempts to clarify, people still look at it this way (a la 134).
One disease endemic to the bloggosphere appears to be the confusion of actual moral/practical engagement with the shadow play of bullshitting about politics. The latter may be fun, informative, and can maybe lead you to learning more and changing your mind, but it is emphatically not a canonical case of moral action. Almost nothing that happens on blogs with respect to political content is part of moral life (how you treat people is, of course).
The moral distinction between laughing at (funny!)* sock-puppets and putting sugar in the Hillary! ‘08 campaign bus is an absolute abyss. They aren't even in the same universe. If, however, one's moral self-conception revolves around (or to be more fair, substantially includes) a vicarious struggle for The Cause, maybe you can mistake these things. Of course, this mistake suggests that you have become a loony tune. And is this not also the gravamen of the 101st fighting keyboardists jibe? The error is not supporting the war without fighting in it, but rather that confusing posting on myspace with smashing Osama defines "delusional."
*And obviously it's funny. You could laugh at those puppets absent any knowledge of the left/right polarity of Greenwald. I have basically no idea who this guy is and found it funny. It would have been funny with John Lott. Sheesh!
Posted by Baa | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:05 PM
What's funny, Weiner, is that we agree that the things you point to are not funny. What is funny:
(a) the Greenwald puppet is funny
(b) the moustaches are funny
(c) Dear person I've never met personally: Thanks for your note. As a matter of fact I did write a New York Times bestselling book on executive authority, and I am indeed the person who broke a story on his blog about wiretapping that led...is a little bit funny.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:06 PM
The real baa spells it "baa," puppet.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:07 PM
LB, we're watching at home. We're not playing.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:08 PM
Maybe the post has SNL circa 1993 syndrome; a little bit of funny drawn out to painful lengths. Visible at small scale in point c; there would be more funny there if there was less not-funny.
Posted by Matt "pot, kettle" Weiner | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:10 PM
Almost nothing that happens on blogs with respect to political content is part of moral life (how you treat people is, of course).
To the extent that this is true, you're right. I'd argue with you about the extent to which it's true. Bullshitting about politics has some moral value in person (the moral or immoral view you advocate may get to and influence someone with the capacity to act on it), and a greater value online, given that more people read blogs than are involved in most RL conversations.
It's not a huge deal -- really pretty small -- but it's not nothing. I think it would be a mistake to take the length of this thread as a measure of its heat.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:11 PM
>we're watching at home.
Perfect. Or maybe we're calling talk radio. I can't believe that bum gets paid $10M For $10M I would hustle on every single play!
Posted by "baa" | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:12 PM
but I care how the game comes out
AAAAH! yes, when you look at my life, you will see a profound indifference to political outcomes. There has been no donating, no volunteering, no self-abasement in the service of a cause.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:13 PM
There's something I'm still not clear on. Let's say we accept that the alleged sock-puppeting was done by GG's Brazilian Partner (GGBP).
Did GGBP post as Pseudonym A on one blog, and as Pseudonym B on another blog, or did he post as both Pseudonyms A and B on a single blog?
The first is most decidely not sockpuppetry. The second is, especially if it was done on the same thread in a single blog (of course, if it was GG himself doing the posting, then of course that's sockpuppetry).
I'm counting on someone doing or having done the research I'm unwilling to do. Don't disappoint me.
Posted by M/tch M/lls | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:13 PM
159: I didn't read the whole dialogue; I just looked at the pictures, and it did appear funny to me.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:15 PM
159: yes, the only reasonable thing to say at this point is that I found it funny because I read so much faster.
161: thanks for the vine, Jim, first time long time. Now, about this trade for two soldiers...
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:15 PM
re: 130
But the 'Unions are protecting the job of that annoying guy where I work, and so the labor movement is an obsolete drag on the economy' argument is a bad argument, and anyone who's generally on the left but buys into it has been played.
See, this is what I struggle with when I hear people talking about certain segments of the US political scene as 'left' or liberals as 'left'. I just don't see much left there.
The left, to the extent that it does have a consistent ideological vision or visions, suffers from the fact that a huge group of people who identify themselves as of the left don't share much of that ideological vision at all. What they share is a certain squeamishness about the worst excesses of the right.
That makes it pretty damn hard to maintain much of a consistent front against the right or to articulate strongly what's so bad about the right's political vision.
re: 137
Automation is a really good thing from a worldwide point of view, even if it's painful to people whose jobs it replaces.
On what criteria of good? Good in what sense? That's a serious question rather than a piece of snark.
Good for the workers? Good for the consumer? Good for the 'global economy'? I'm not even sure how to make sense of the last of these three, btw. In the sense that it's not easy to see how it's the sort of thing that has a good except to the extent that that good supervenes on the good of people.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:17 PM
Yes, but as a sports event, this blogspat is (improbably) even less important and less interesting than the Tour de France. However, It would still be funny to watch one of the riders cycle headfirst into a wall. Especially if he was wearing a big, Mexican moustache.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:18 PM
I actually thought the sock puppet thing was kind of funny, even though I don't really believe the charge against Greenwald (as 151 notes, he's provided, if in a rather circumspect manner, an explanation that I find at least plausible and have no reason to doubt. I'd also note that it's believable to think that someone not deeply involved in online activity might not realize the potential shitstorm an accusation of sock puppetry against his partner might cause.) It was kind of cute, a rare quality in right wing humor. The contrast between the huffy, pompous Greenwald puppet and the other two who simply wanted to talk about the pirate movie was sort of amusing, though deeply disingenuous.
What really ruined it, as someone above noted, was clicking on to the main page and scrolling down; to see the same or similar devices employed as the primary mode of a blog gave a rather different impression of who it was with serious issues.
On another note, a cousin of the SO moved to Brazil some time back in order to live with his gay Brazilian partner. Could Glenn Greenwald be her cousin's sock puppet? I say that until we know the truth, we must consider the 4th Amendment suspended.
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:18 PM
Really, Cala, I don't have the energy to go through this again, except to say that the crime of sockpuppetry seems utterly dwarfed by the various crimes Greenwald would like to draw people's attention to. You can try to frame it as an "honesty" issue if you'd like, but even so a dishonest person who opposes torture and unlimited executive power is far, far more valuable to me than an honest person who wants to empower my government to spy on me, torture prisoners and kill with impunity.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:19 PM
162: Absolutely didn't mean to imply that you don't, or that you don't do many things in service of your political views which are far more effective than maundering on about politics on a blog.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:22 PM
The sock puppet pictures were funny because, as baa says, sock puppet pictures are funny.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that, as members of Team Left, we shouldn't repeat nasty Team Right rumors about our teammates. But I think this particular instances is mitigated by
1) the fact the lefty teammate in question is an (albeit influential) blogger, not a candidate,
2) Labs's post didn't say "so let's all forget about everything that Greenwald fellow has ever written. I'm sure that any Unfogged readers who were fans of Greenwald's writing before will remain so even after seeing the nasty puppets, and
3) It's Fontana Labs, posting on Unfogged, whose influence is somewhat limited compared to those nasties in the so-called liberal media. If the big blogs ever start saying "even the liberal Unfogged," well, then we'll know the site has Arrived.
I'm all for teamwork and team spirit, but we also have to be able to debate tactics and strategy and to disagree from time to time. Complete uniformity of message is a little creepy, no?
Posted by mrh | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:25 PM
Hmm. Should have closed the quote after "written."
Posted by mrh | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:26 PM
There has been no donating, no volunteering, no self-abasement in the service of a cause.
Didn't you canvass for Kerry or something?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:26 PM
Worse yet, he stopped talking to some attractive girl the day before the election in order to continue to canvass for Kerry in some crappy battleground state. All I did for Dick Cheney was donate blood.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:30 PM
173: Ah. I'm an idiot. Maybe there's a place for emoticons, after all.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:30 PM
166:
The left, to the extent that it does have a consistent ideological vision or visions, suffers from the fact that a huge group of people who identify themselves as of the left don't share much of that ideological vision at all. What they share is a certain squeamishness about the worst excesses of the right.
This is partially why I'm getting bent out of shape (and being quite reasonably mocked by FL and baa for it.)
I don't think American liberals actually disagree with much of what I'd think of as reasonable leftist ideology. But lots and lots of them don't identify with it either: they find it, and the people they associate with it, kind of embarrassing. And they find it embarrassing because they've been bombarded with right-wing nonsense like this all their lives, and other liberals are laughing at the right-wing jokes and taking the fragments of right-wing arguments that can be made sense of seriously.
Americans are ashamed to admit they have leftist beliefs, outside of some very limited areas like anti-racism and (less so) anti-sexism. But it's not ideological disagreement, it's social pressure, which is why the social stuff like this post gets me all cranky.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:31 PM
169: a dishonest person who opposes torture and unlimited executive power is far, far more valuable to me than an honest person who wants to empower my government to spy on me, torture prisoners and kill with impunity.
It's not like we're deciding who gets the last seat on the lifeboat.
170: actually, I don't, I just wanted to seize the moral higher ground in an obnoxious way.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:31 PM
Automation is a really good thing from a worldwide point of view, even if it's painful to people whose jobs it replaces.
Automation certainly made genocide more efficient. Pity about all the German executioners it displaced though. Those guys shoulda had a union! (Hi, Godwin!)
I am reminded of this:
A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Posted by M/tch M/lls | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:32 PM
Here you go, apo.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:32 PM
. All I did for Dick Cheney was donate blood.
For his supper, you mean?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:32 PM
171: The sock puppet pictures were funny because, as baa says, sock puppet pictures are funny.
Meet 151... then MEET MY FIST!
Aesthetically, this is reminding me of a painting in a museum I've been to a fair number of times, but I don't think it's the Carnegie in Pittsburgh, so I'm guessing MoMA. It's post-WWII history rendered in a continuous cartoon, with pictures of bears (for Russia) and missiles, I think, also depicting the assassination of the Kennedys and MLK... and from a distance it looks like a really great piece, but if you get close and read the text interweaved among the pictures it's kind of eh. So, my mistake here was reading the text instead of appreciating the funny sock puppet pictures simply as such.
JL, Smasher, have you any idea what piece I'm talking about?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:36 PM
Even better.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:39 PM
Acutally, that might should be a bumper sticker:
Unions: We Prevent Genocide
Posted by M/tch M/lls | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:39 PM
182 and 179 are to 167, obviously.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:40 PM
The second clip is pretty funny, but would have been much, much funnier with a sombrero and a moustache.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:42 PM
Illustration:
Funny.
Very funny.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:44 PM
>For his supper, you mean?
As I understand it, he just likes to have some on hand.
Matt:
I know exactly the painting you mean (it's in the MoMa in NYC), and I liked even on closer observation. Do tastes differ? Only for fascists.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:44 PM
a dishonest person who opposes torture and unlimited executive power is far, far more valuable to me than an honest person who wants to empower my government to spy on me, torture prisoners and kill with impunity.
What FL said about the lifeboat. Plus, there's presumably plenty of other people (I hear that Gary Farber guy has a blog) who draw people's attention to issues without sockpuppeting; Greenwald's probably pretty replaceable. Otherwise, I suspect you and I just disagree on how important a front of solidarity is.
Or,
I don't think American liberals actually disagree with much of what I'd think of as reasonable leftist ideology. But lots and lots of them don't identify with it either: they find it, and the people they associate with it, kind of embarrassing.
A plausible third option isn't that they find it embarassing, but that they simply (I include myself in this number) don't strongly identify with it. It's not because I find it embarassing, but I think from issues-to-party affiliation, not the other way around. Being called a liberal isn't nearly as important to be as being in the right camp on individual issues; I don't look at fellow liberals as members of my family to be defended. I didn't grow up going yay Democrats.
If this makes me a bad liberal, fine, because I'm not all that attached to the label.
I also don't think Greenwald was sockpuppeting.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:50 PM
re: 167
Yes. I'd agree with most of that.
Obviously, I think that most people would agree with key parts of a broadly 'left' political platform absent the various socio-cultural factors you allude to. I say 'obviously because I'm not an authoritarian asshole who'd want to impose my beliefs on everyone absent their agreement.*
* He says with a wry smirk. Do emoticons still count as objectively evil if they're written out in prose rather than conveyed by annoying ASCII?
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:53 PM
FL, I understand that your blogging is not serious, but Greenwald's is. I understand that you refuse to be part of Team Left, for whatever reason, but you don't have to heckle from the sidelines.
I've been encountering this refusal of partisanship for a decade or more, and I have no idea where it comes from or why people are so proud of it. It really seems like a fossil of the early Clinton era.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:53 PM
Doesn't there need to be a blog where liberals can call other liberals tools?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:54 PM
Besides Kaus, you mean?
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:55 PM
191: Wait, this isn't it?
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:56 PM
Don't be such a tool, ogged.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:58 PM
I understand that you refuse to be part of Team Left, for whatever reason, but you don't have to heckle from the sidelines.
Shorter Emerson: How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:58 PM
re: 191
Or a blog where liberals can call other 'liberals' to stop calling themselves 'liberals' because they aren't actually very liberal at all?
Sort of like the libertarian versus 'schmibertarian' distinction. Or, the Henley and Silber versus all-those-other-assholes distinction? Only with fruitbaskets and cockjokes.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 2:59 PM
181: Doesn't ring a bell. I'd be happy to try and answer any questions anyone has about Roman art, though.
It sounds '70s-'80s to me; Smasher probably knows it. I hate to say it, but I hardly ever get to New York, and when I do, I find it hard not to go to the Met and/or the Frick (I haven't yet been to the new MoMA once.)
Your description at first had me thinking Rosenquist, but then the text didn't sound right for him.
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:00 PM
191: Wait, this isn't it?
Precisely.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:01 PM
188: Nobody's replaceable. In case you haven't noticed, the anti-torture, anti-permanent emergency powers side is losing right now. It's not like Greenwald is going to turn things around all by his lonesome, but it's not like we can afford to start chucking people over the side for the sake of precious fucking netiquette. If it hasn't sunk in yet that the circular firing squad needs to stop, I have no idea when it will.
And the "lifeboat thing"? The notion that it isn't enough that it's not enough that we're arguing to uphold democracy and basic fucking humanity, but that we also keep our net handles sorted when we comment? That's pretty fucking asinine.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:02 PM
It's not because I find it embarassing, but I think from issues-to-party affiliation, not the other way around. Being called a liberal isn't nearly as important to be as being in the right camp on individual issues; I don't look at fellow liberals as members of my family to be defended.
I used to think like that, but the last five years have definitely changed my mind. I have a core set of issues that turn out to matter a lot to me, and a judgment that any Republican-controlled government will be more hostile to it than any Democrat-controlled government. I am a lot more comfortable being in the wrong camp on issues I don't really care about. (I'm not quite where mcmanus is, though.) I'm a lot more comfortable supporting-through-silence things that I think are wrong and even bad.
But none of that says much about what's appropriate for a small blog that is distinctly personal and somewhat intimate in temperment. The proper response to a right-wing comment in real life is to ask the winger, loudly, if he still belongs to NAMBLA. Here, not so much.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:06 PM
Seriously, Strasmangelo, if it turns out that I've seriously undermined democracy and basic fucking humanity with my post, I'll buy you a beer.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:07 PM
John Emerson's humorlessness is the very face of the Left today.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:07 PM
"Pointing to a funny sockpuppet comic" != "chucking someone over the side."
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:09 PM
I was going to vote Democratic until I read this post, Labs. Guess the next round's on you.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:09 PM
202: If only he'd wear a sombrero.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:09 PM
203 is exactly right.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:10 PM
Ogged, my pleasure at having you back is tempered only by the fact that you pwned me in 202.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:10 PM
OK, I remain ill-tempered, so I'll continue.
I see the US in the middle of what may end up being a fascist takeover. Greenwald has described aspects of that takeover very well, and he's made the fascists mad, and they've caught him in a no-no and put up a mildly funny cartoon about it, which will form part of a broad-based attempt to discredit his character. To me, joining in on the hilarity is just wrong.
We have a two-party system, which means that functionally our efforts to participate get channeled through one party or the other. So a degree of partisanship is necessary.
I can see avoiding partisanship if both sides were similiar or both parties equally bad, but I don't think that that's been true for a decade or more. To me the lines are pretty clear.
"Team Left" isn't even in play any more. The Democrats are "Team Center" or "Team Not Quite Crazy".
I understand the facticity of Unfogged's refusal of partisanship, but I don't really understand its motivation or justification. It seems to amount to pretending that the US is a much different, much nicer place than it really is, as if lovable old Everett Dirksen were debating Hubert Humphrey or something.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:11 PM
Ogged, I'm not humorless about everything. I just don't understand the reasons behind Unfogged's political line, and every once in awhile I blow up.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:14 PM
I don't really understand its motivation or justification
Just that not every moment needs to be devoted to fighting the fight, along with the belief that what we say here really doesn't matter; no matter how many people read this thing, I'm still going to think of it more as "my living room" than "a public forum."
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:17 PM
I agree with your diagnosis of the current state of America, John, but Unfogged doesn't refuse partisanship. Everybody here is pretty damned partisan. We can also look at a silly joke and say, "Okay, that's pretty funny." For every post here linking to something right-wing for the intentional humor, there are 200 posts linking to something right-wing to mock it.
That is to say, I don't feel the need to give the finger to everybody with whom I disagree simply on principle. Your mileage may vary.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:18 PM
"Pointing to a funny sockpuppet comic" != "chucking someone over the side."
We've been over how the funny sockpuppet comic does not exist in a vacuum, yes?
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:19 PM
re: 208
Although I'm in sympathy with you, tbh, I don't see why 'Unfogged' as a collective has to be partisan about anything.
It's my understanding, as a relative newcomer, that there is no 'Unfogged' stance. Especially given that some of the regulars bat for Team Objectively Evil and are much liked for reasons other than their Political Eviliaty.
On the other hand, I don't see why individual participants shouldn't be damn partisan -- subject to ordinary rules of politeness and cockjokery -- and I'm with you on that one.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:19 PM
"We've been over how the funny sockpuppet comic does not exist in a vacuum, yes?"
Indeed we have. That still doesn't make linking to it equivalent to chucking someone over the side, moreso because Unfogged isn't exactly the heaviest of hitters.
(ATM.)
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:22 PM
Unfogged isn't exactly the heaviest of hitters.
I'd hit it.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:23 PM
Labs, why do you hate America?
You know what's funny about this entire discussion? Looky here:
Side A: "Being a sock puppet in an internet comment thread is bad and embarrassing."
Side B: "What? Who cares about what gets said in internet comment threads?"
Side A: "It's the principle of the thing!"
Side B: "By adhering to this principle, you're undermining the important things GG said in his blog!"
Side A: "Who cares what people say on blogs?"
It's like, either blogs matter (in which case sock puppeting matters) or they don't (in which case it doesn't). But we seem to have mixed and matched the game pieces somehow.
For the record, sock puppeting in some instances would, I think, be extremely fucked up. In this case, I think it's at worst (if indeed it happened) a minor embarassment, but it doesn't seem that GG actually *used* the sock puppet (if he did use it) to, like, fool anyone or get someone in trouble, or even embarass someone by showing them to be agreeing with person A who is really person B with whom they always disagree, or something. Or whatever. I don't really give a rat's ass. *And* I don't read GG's blog, because I am bored with political blogs for the most part. *And* I think blogging matters anyway. SO THERE.
Also, I have a headache. Home Depot is the seventh level of hell, people.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:25 PM
OK, let me start over. One of the powers of the right wing is to spread memes (in the slang sense). Gore was killed by memes. On TV and in the newspapers, silly young people (often people who voted Democratic and called themselves liberals) invented memes about Gore and threw them out. There were a dozen of them or more, and a few of them were true.
Someone gets tagged with a meme, and it sticks to him. Kerry did indeed change his position about this and that, but the meme "flip flop" got stuck to him by deliberate malice.
To me the sock puppet things is a rightwing meme. If they're able to, they'll tar Greenwald with it, so that his name becomes "Sockpuppet Greenwald, the way Kennedy's is Chappaquiddick Kennedy.
To me, you just don't play that game. It's something to deal with, but not something to join in on.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:27 PM
That still doesn't make linking to it equivalent to chucking someone over the side, moreso because Unfogged isn't exactly the heaviest of hitters.
It's participating in a smear campaign, and given FL's commentary, it's not simply saying "hey, this cartoon is funny," but it's saying "hey, Glenn Greenwald is a sockpuppet and is stupid and I'm embarrased to be associated with him." I don't particularly care that Unfogged isn't Atrios or Instapundit; I care that it's going along with something shitty.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:28 PM
Emerson: To defend Unfogged's non-partisanship (because I'll argue both sides of most things), there are a couple of things about it that make sense.
First, not all that many people read this, nothing we say here matters, we're just kidding around and it's no big deal. Myself, I know this is literally true -- readership isn't all that high -- but I find it unsatisfying. Self-aggrandizing it may be, but I really want to believe that what I say about politics matters on some micro level -- we may be talking about one or two votes, but you do what you can. I can't really defend this as rational, but I'm with you -- when there's an important fight going on, it's unseemly not to be doing what you can on the right side, even if what you can is pretty imperceptible.
Second, and IMO more persuasive, to the extent that we're trying to win politically, there's a virtue to engaging people on the right if we can do it without giving anything up. The country's split 50-50 (well, maybe not still, but it was). Being willing to engage and persuade rather than dismiss seems like the only way to change that division.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:32 PM
That said, I've exhausted both myself and the only point I had to make way too often, so I'm off and I'm sorry for making this thread any nastier than it had to be.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:33 PM
One of the powers of the right wing is to spread memes (in the slang sense). Gore was killed by memes.
Disagree with that. Gore lost the election because people didn't like him, or were uneasy with him. The right-wing memes just gave them a justification for acting on that dislike, or an explanation for that unease. If our leaders were any good, we would commit to making the right seem as hateful as possible, and offer justification for voting against them rather than for us. But they're not, so the best we can hope for is a tie of some sort.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:34 PM
>"We've been over how the funny sockpuppet comic does not exist in a vacuum, yes?"
And some people say the left is humorless
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:34 PM
Unfogged seems to have a definite policy of being non-partisan. It's not just an absence of partisanship, but some sort of prohibition. Knowing this, I bit my tongue for a long time, but I've lost my ability to do that.
I've run into a lot of people, and I see people in the media especially, for whom being a partisan liberal Democrat is taboo because it's uncool, so they throw out little jabs at Democrats and liberals from time to time while still being mostly liberal and mostly Democratic.
I just don't understand that fear. At this point there's no reason not to be a partisan Democrat (forget liberal) because there are only two games in town, and one of them is near-fascist.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:36 PM
I've run into a lot of people, and I see people in the media especially, for whom being a partisan liberal Democrat is taboo because it's uncool, so they throw out little jabs at Democrats and liberals from time to time while still being mostly liberal and mostly Democratic.
All I can say to this is: whatever.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:39 PM
Which is to say I don't think that's the motivation here.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:39 PM
Unfogged seems to have a definite policy of being non-partisan
This is nuts, Old Man of the Mountain. There's no way anyone would mistake this for anything but a liberal blog.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:40 PM
Tim, people knew Gore through a meme filter. The Gore they diliked was the meme Gore. It's not like people knew him.
The Dean Scream is another example. Careful editing and sound-processing made Dean seem like a madman. It was fake. You could have done that with Martin Luther kind.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:40 PM
Gore lost the election because people didn't like him
No, Gore won the election. He didn't become president because the Supreme Court has an Asshole majority on it.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:40 PM
Disagree with that. Gore lost the election because people didn't like him, or were uneasy with him. The right-wing memes just gave them a justification for acting on that dislike, or an explanation for that unease.
I think you are absolutely, absolutely wrong about this. Every candidate we've put up for the last twenty years has been somehow, 'oh, I can't describe it, personally lacking. Voting for them -- you just wouldn't do it because they weren't the kind of people you feel comfortable with. It's not the issues, it's the character -- you know it when you see it. None of them were comfortable in their own skin.' Clinton overcame this by being the most charming human being on the face of the planet, the rest lost.
This is not a huge coincidence, it's a publicity campaign, and it works. If you think that the 'Gore is a liar' meme worked because it crystalized the American public's hidden unease with Gore, you're dreaming -- it worked because people believed it and it made him a joke.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:43 PM
"Second, and IMO more persuasive, to the extent that we're trying to win politically, there's a virtue to engaging people on the right if we can do it without giving anything up. The country's split 50-50 (well, maybe not still, but it was). Being willing to engage and persuade rather than dismiss seems like the only way to change that division."
That's so wrongheaded I don't know where to begin. One persuades unattached people, not wingnuts. Trying to engage rightwingers is extremely counterproductive.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:43 PM
On balance, I think that this is a pretty reliable political blog precisely because it isn't always blindly partisan.
I also like it as a place to hang out because we can joke about shit without dismissing the importance of partisanship, or hating on people for having strong feelings about politics.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:45 PM
This thread reminds me that I need to change my voter registration from independent to democrat.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:45 PM
223 is wrong taken literally, but there is a policy of actively being pleasant and friendly to conservatives who wander through, and making an effort to engage them non-abusively. I'm all for it, and it's not non-partisanship, but there's something that resembles what Emerson is talking about.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:45 PM
re: 223 There's a difference between partisan and totalitarian. Obviously, unfogged skews democrat. That's understood. But it's more than partisan to believe that one can never make fun of democrats because of the cause. That's what is at issue here (and what is a leading indicator of being crazy).
re 216: what's wrong with Home Depot? You can buy a huge tub of grout there for like $8 bucks! Clearly it is *you* who hate America!
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:46 PM
Blogging doesn't affect change by persuading individuals, but by pushing memes, changing the zeitgeist, and mobilizing people.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:46 PM
That's so wrongheaded I don't know where to begin. One persuades unattached people, not wingnuts.
I don't know about this. Anyone who's unattached is so politically disengaged that persuading them, rather than waving pictures of kittens in their face and saying 'look at the pretty kitty, vote for us!" seems unlikely. Someone who's rationally persuadable is going to either agree with me or fervently disagree with me -- I'm not expecting a lot of success in working on the latter, but it's not impossible.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:48 PM
We may be having trouble with defining terms here. As Ogged says, there's no way anybody would see this as anything but a liberal blog. The sympathies here are not remotely obscure. I get the feeling that what John is saying is that we aren't personally nasty enough in every interpersonal encounter we have. To which I can only say, 224 gets it exactly right.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:48 PM
Trying to persuade people who are rationally persuadable is a waste of time. Opportunity costs.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:50 PM
I think that prior to the primaries people would have said: (a) Dukakais is boring and charmless, (b) Gore is boring and charmless, and (c) Kerry is boring and charmless. Impossible to believe anyone thought that about Reagan or Clinton. The Bushes--GWB has a reputation for charm that I don't understand and that we didn't attack, and HW ran against Dukakais on the tail of a very popular president.
Basically, I don't think that many moveable people vote on well-defined issues, but on how much they like the Presidential candidate. And I think it's much harder to make something stick if people like the candidate--Clinton was dead several times over, and he still managed a win.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:53 PM
John Emerson evidently feels otherwise, but one of the things I particularly enjoy about being a liberal Dem with a 3-digit IQ, and not a Bush-worshipping Republican, is the sensation of NOT having to refrain from criticizing my own team when one of them fucks up.
"Things have come to a sorry pass
When a man can't cudgel his own jackass."
Posted by Anderson | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:53 PM
But it's more than partisan to believe that one can never make fun of democrats because of the cause. That's what is at issue here (and what is a leading indicator of being crazy).
This seems right: the idea that we oughtn't make fun of instances of toolishness because it undermines our unified front is just bizarre on both highminded and pragmatic grounds.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:55 PM
I need to take a step back here.
I don't mean to say you shouldn't try to persuade rightwingers, but that liberal bloggers shouldn't think about persuading rightwingers when writing blog posts. Trying to persuade rightwingers you personally interact with is a good thing.
My posts got kinda heated for some reason, I hope I didn't seem like an ass.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:55 PM
I need to take a step back here.
I don't mean to say you shouldn't try to persuade rightwingers, but that liberal bloggers shouldn't think about persuading rightwingers when writing blog posts. Trying to persuade rightwingers you personally interact with is a good thing.
My posts got kinda heated for some reason, I hope I didn't seem like an ass.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:55 PM
Home Depot is the shit. So is Garrison Keillor. Every day I thank god that I don't have to deal with the bitterness of knowing that my breasts looked much better twenty years ago.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:56 PM
244: Do you think the fact that you're recovering from cancer is going protect you from her?
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:58 PM
232: Me too.
it's more than partisan to believe that one can never make fun of democrats because of the cause. That's what is at issue here (and what is a leading indicator of being crazy).
Yeah, but I don't think that *is* what's at issue here. I think what's at issue is whether, at this moment in political history, one should value the cause over particular Democratic failings, like sock puppetry. I don't think anyone's arguing that it's always bad to mock your own, or that major scandals or assholery should be tolerated.
Home Depot sucks because I just want this fucking project to be done, and I don't want to spend a ton of money, and frankly most of their stuff like vinyl flooring and so forth is so motherfucking ugly (not that I care, b/c we're moving soon) but it bothers me to settle for ugly flooring because it's good enough and it costs 1/3rd of what the decent-looking stuff costs. I hate doing things in a half-assed way. I'd much rather spend a month tootling around wholesalers or suppliers or importers and finding something that's really neat than an hour in Home Depot debating on whether the grayish fake-tile vinyl pattern matches the bathroom paint color better than the beigeish fake-tile vinyl pattern with the little godawful flowers on it.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 3:58 PM
244: That teddy bear is stuffed with asbestos.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 4:01 PM
That teddy bear is stuffed with asbestos
It's too late now for me to get it back from the homeless dude I gave it to.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 4:03 PM
Asbestos Bear is only a health risk if you suck on him. You won't find ogged sucking on burly leather-clad plush toys, no.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 4:04 PM
I'm not sure if I'm causing the DPs (ATM).
FL, the problem with this post, and I don't mean to make a big deal about it, isn't that you're not in general not hackish enough, it's that it's kinda oafish. You shouldn't give Greenbaum shit, beacause he doesn't deserve it.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 4:05 PM
Especially given that some of the regulars bat for Team Objectively Evil and are much liked for reasons other than their Political Eviliaty.
"Evilianality", you mean.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 4:05 PM
226, 237: Being liberal is one thing. Being partisan is a different thing. And you can be ever-so-liberal and still put too much energy into disavowing the uncool parts of liberalism and uncool parts of the Democratic party.
On the specific issue here, I wasn't asking people to be nastier, but just to refrain from relaying a right-wing meme. In the same way I'd hope people would refrain from passing on Barney Frank fag jokes, even if they were grounded in truth.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 4:08 PM
248: Hey, whatever. I skimmed off the top of the donations, it's not me whose gift you gave away. Plus I'm sure the homeless guy needed a teddy bear more than you do, you spoiled Whole Foods shopping yuppie.
Also, omg: 250 comments and finally someone gets it exactly right. I endorse 250.
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