And also the sweetness and light of them going after Thers & NYMary's kids. That was really moving the conversation to a "higher" level of asshattery.
I saw that too. Fucking slimeballs.
Dearest Watertiger,
Its not alpha male behaviour. He punk assed wannabee he-man, master of the universe fake alpha male behaviour...
fucknut is now a coward, was a coward, and will always be a coward.
Yeah, this has nearly driven me out of the blogosphere as well. I'm really tire of this shit.
.
Well the man asked in his blograte if he was the idiot. Um, Yeah. Yes, indeedy. I've had it with repug word spin and making of the meanings when it suit you. I really don't care to hear about ethics, morals, or good Christian behavior from repugs again. They ain't got none of the above!
That's a low blow. Some people are just plain stupid or very disrespectful. Or even, both!
The man obviously has very, very small testes and no character whatsoever.
Reminds me of the saying about not wrestling with a pig, because you both get dirty, and the pig likes it.
This is the blogosphere.
Shit happens.
In the greater scheme of reality, I just read again the title to an article "The Little Girls Died Screaming" about a US Marine massacre of civilians. Having read enough about the My Lai event...I could read no further.
Cruelty surrounds us. There are those who wish to reduce violence in the world and there are those who wish to promote violence. It is an ongoing duel without rules.
And while words have power, the focus must be at all times on what can be done to promote civility, thoughtfulness, helpfulness, community.
Ignorance prevails in the world we live in. Assholes abound... it's the simple truth. Stuff like that which happened to Thersites and NYMary will continue to happen. The nature of the beast. If you're not eaten for dinner, but merely nibbled on, you get to continue.
Remember, for them it's all about "winning" (although their definition seems a bit unclear - something about imposing their fevered sickness upon the world and generally tainting the joy of rational people), and any recognizable sense of propriety or right & wrong doesn't enter into it.
Also, take note of the strategic approach here: Thers and all of us are now too disgusted and shaken to continue doing battle with this particular den of freaks (a withdrawal I heartily endorse), which means that the freaks can declare "victory" by default. And any future liberal crusaders who might want to take them on will have to weigh whether they want to brave a gantlet of creepy intrusions and vile attacks on their family.
In other words, the desired result is a chilling effect, to make it harder to call bullshit on their bullshit, which is most assuredly bullshit and needs to be called as such. This is the Plame tactic writ small, right down to the thin veil of deniability over the obvious reality. It is the desperate tactic of people devoid of both character and logically defensible positions, and I worry that our country is just far gone enough in its reality-TV-watching, ruthless-is-good fog for it to work.
Thank you, Eli.
As always, most eloquently put.
I really don't have an answer for this kind of brutality. With the horrors that surround us daily (as JacqueItch points out), I find myself in overload mode, and despair.
I'm sure the right wing blogger in question will now be roundly shunned by his peers, yes?
I kind of hate that Thers took down all the comments on his site, because the other blogger made quite an ass of himself over there last September, after Eschacon. Using plenty of coarse language, making fun of the participants' appearance, etc. It would have made an excellent Exhibit "A". Oh well.
I truly hate that this happened to Thers. and NYMary. Hope it doesn't drive them off the blogosphere.
Just what was the "aspect of literary theory" that started this ruckus?
Ah, yes, the Virgineers. People who came West seeking to spead the gospel of Abstinence.
I can tolerate anything but intolerance. Or, as Tom Lehrer put it, "I know that there are people out there who do not love their fellow man, and I HATE PEOPLE LIKE THAT!"
Eli, you called it perfectly.
watertiger -- mr. jezebel and I feel the same sense of overload and despair. We talk about it often. To the extent I can find any comfort at all, it is in believing that the world naturally tends to equipoise. There is good to balance out evil, kindness to balance out cruelty, beauty to balance out ugliness, joy to balance out grief. Work hard to find and cherish the good things, and speak out against the bad. You're doing your part well with Dependable Renegade. Keep it up - no giving in to despair allowed. Pay attention to the course of your life, learn what you came here to learn in this lifetime. If we're lucky, maybe we can move on from this world to someplace a little less painful. That's about as much as I let myself hope for.
Did we give up when Germany bombed Pearl Harbor?
my advice to you is to drink heavily.
Just remember that your despair, and ultimately leaving the field, is the trolls' raison d'etre (they can't possibly be trying to win people over to their POV - they only make sense as psyops), which is why I refuse to give them the satisfaction.
They can piss in the punchbowl all they want, but if you look around, this is still a pretty great party we've got going here, and I would hate to leave early.
Or maybe I'm just hoping to get lucky.
I ain't going anywhere invective or otherwise. We keep fighting the good fight.
Please don't any of you give up and leave the internets to the right wing asshatery! I don't know how I would get through these dark days without all of you.
[crushes beer can against her forehead]
Obliquely speaking to FMC's point: With a thoroughly corrupt and captive corporate media, the lefty blogosphere is one of the last bastions of truth-telling left. I despair that its audience will ever grow to an influential size, but it's a fantastic open-source resource for fact-checking, strategy, and wordsmithing for those who care to make use it. My hope is that the Democratic establishment someday begins to take us more seriously than Klein or Cohen or Broder (well, maybe not me - my top two posts at the moment involve bear suits and Batboy...).
Remember, for them it's all about "winning"
Digby at Hullabaloo pointed out some time ago that it wasn't the winning... it was the fighting that is was all about.
...
(Equipoise--beautiful, jezebel.)
Bill Clinton succumbed to hubris, but that said, look how he kept getting up in the morning and going to work, despite all the crap the conservatives threw at him, for years and years.
So I'm choosing to model his grit and determination, a commitment to the common good, rather than the meanness, pettiness, amorality of the right.
[crushes beer can against her forehead]
Atta girl.
Wow. what everybody said.
Strength to your sword arm, wt, to quote the title of a Brenda Ueland book I'm reading.
Lies and smears are all the the wingnuts have left anymore. When I argue with them about anything I know when they start to lose I'm going to be called a homo, a traitor or a haji lover.
Sadly it comes with standing up for the republic.
"...by a rightwing lunatic who just simply cannot accept the fact that he's wrong."
This is the most indefensible statement to come out of the entire kerfuffle. You are both intellectually dishonest and ignorant of the whereabouts of the supposed "threat" against his family.
If you want to exit the blogosphere, let me show you the door. In the meantime, next time I want shit from you, I'll come over and squeeze your little head.
Silly dipshit.
There should be a website . . . troll.com to give a virtual tour of the FEVER SWAMP!
Thanks, my friend. Sorry for the troll.
Trolls are narrow minded, mean spirited, ignorant cowards who border on being psychopathic and sociopathic. They're best left to starve.
Note the troll's common use of the "strawman" - point out to me where I said they were threatened. I said they might face retaliation because yes, your hero allowed a comment to stand that bore both Thersites' and NYMary's relevant workplace before he deigned to redact their email addresses. It's called "extrapolating," you blustering tool.
And any time you want to go a couple of rounds with me in the ring, you just let me know. I'd welcome the chance to beat the crap out of you.
That's why trolls should be banned immediately. If someone wants to present a well-reasoned opposing point of view... that's fine. But being vicious, attacking and derogatory is completely unacceptable.
A tu quoque argument should always be good-humored, for it has nothing else to recommend it.
Benjamin Disraeli in his Speech in the House of Commons, 05/24/1855
(tu quoque is failed logic...literally, "you're another!")
Even though vanquished he could argue still. Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village
The GOPers show this tenaciousness frequently.
It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them. Caron de Beaumarchais's Le barbiere de Seville
As Thersites' and NYMary's opponent has amply demonstrated.
As for publishing e-mail addresses and dragging in uninvolved family members, those are the acts of a very particular kind of coward and intellectual fraud.
By the way, I am a literary theorist (but published only in "all the free copies you can eat" journals). I'm a knitting theorist (but cannot knit). I'm a cooking theorist (but cannot cook). I'm a political theorist (but can't understand how Bush got elected).
It doesn't take much to proclaim oneself an authority. Proving it is the hard part.
next time I want shit from you, I'll come over and squeeze your little head.
Brian, you wouldn't happen to be an Information Management Coordinator, wouldya?
xristim,
have I told you I love you?
"And any time you want to go a couple of rounds with me in the ring, you just let me know. I'd welcome the chance to beat the crap out of you."
Great. Where do you live?
"As for publishing e-mail addresses and dragging in uninvolved family members"
You don't know what you're talking about. Get educated on how this all came to pass, and you won't need to spread this canard any longer.
"Thanks, my friend"
No problem, Mary. You need all the friends you can get. Can you update us all on exactly all the threats that have occured and have been carried out against you and hubby in the last 24 hours as the result of this kerfuffle? There surely must be news crews at your home to capture the aftermath of the carnage, right?
Brian, you wouldn't happen to be an Information Management Coordinator, wouldya?
Life gets pretty boring out in the Inland Empire, I suspect.
Great. Where do you live?
I'm in NYC. Let me know next time you're in from California, 'kay?
"have I told you I love you?"
It's about time you told me you LOVE ME, dammit! I keep you honest.
Brian,
you do keep me entertained. Your little goalpost shifting dance is funny.
Good heavens, Brian is from California?
Have we been piping water in from Texas?
Well, at nearly 72 and with cancer, I might not win in physical combat. But, then, I never found anything logically convincing about fists. One can be struck to the ground still thinking, "God, he's got a helluva right. But he's still wrong."
Be calm, Brian. Be calm.
Don't none of you good people leave. If this brian guy can't stand the truth,
I guess he was on the same bus as the
idiot in charge, when they were handing out brains. Tell me Brian, have you ever served in the military, or in combat, or
lost a loved one over a lie? You guys are all alike. You boost of your prowess
but when it comes to put up or shut up,
you start blaming other people. The
american people did'nt start this stuff going on. Your buddy from bum-
fuck Texas did, just so he could show
up his daddy, and also out of greed.
We had the same bull during vietnam,
and I know, I was one of the first
there, and it was all lie's, just like
now. So be nice, or go back to your own bunch and tell your buddies how
you scared a lady with cancer. I hope
you understand...
Tigre, please give me a heads-up before your date with Brian - I'd like to get some pictures.
Goldstein's relentless support of Bushco and the Iraq War should be ample indication of his sociopathy, ignorance, and emotional and moral bankruptcy. To argue with him on any point is obviously a fool's errand. The only thing left to do now — as hard as it might be, since it's oh-so-fun to laugh at his delusional writings — is to ignore him.
You need a backrub, some water, a fresh towel, you let me know, watertiger. I'd like a ringside seat when you tear this asshole a new one.
Hey, who gave Brian permission to use "dipshit"?
That's the thing with trolls. You give 'em and inch and they take a mile. Stop feeding the trolls, I say.
And trolls don't keep anyone honest. They just try to intimidate.
WT, illegitimi non carborundum, my dear.
These nasty little twerps got nothing, and they know it. They also know that where they are now is as good as it's ever going to get for them. All they've got is the impotent fury that consumes them every time they run across someone who throws their sorry little lives into high relief. Unfortunately for them, this happens a lot. More to be pitied than censured and all that.
Let's just look at them as they are, shall we? Definitive proof that Man can't possibly be Nature's last word.
Be of good cheer, Watertiger. You've got more strength and integrity and capacity for a good and positive life in your little finger than they've got in their entire pasty, pustule-ridden bodies. And don't you forget it, girlfriend.
Brian's new favorite word is kerfuffle.
I sometimes wonder about the wisdom of allowing anyone to post on these blogs. Ideally everyone should be encouraged to voice an opinion. It helps prevent a blog from degenerating into an echo chamber. However over the last couple years that I have been reading blogs I see very few interesting ideas coming from trolls. The troll comments are as useless as the comments that bait the trolls. Although I suppose it is amusing to smack some trolls from time to time.
Even though I occasionally like to post my pathetic comments on various blogs, I would gladly give that up to see the end of trolling. I guess what I'm getting at is suggesting that all blogs have registered commenters only. Sorry about the incorherent rambling. See if you required registration this comment would never have appeared.
This all makes me so sad. And now Thers has deleted his blog. Yup, this is how the bullies do it.
Mmm... kerfuffle... Because this is all just a trivial, mountain-out-of-a-molehill situation manufactured out of whole cloth by us crazy hysterical liberals. I'm sure that if someone outed Brian or made an obscene comment about his toddler, he would be grounded and mature enough to shrug it off as nothing more than "boys will be boys". We would all do well to learn from his presumptive example.
AvoidingWork,
I'd like to believe that the principles of free speech still have a home here. But realize that the purpose of a troll is to disrupt the conversation, nothing more. They're quite proficient at hiding behind straw men and moving goal posts because they cannot substantiate 9/10ths of what they say.
Whether or not they're on the RNC payroll is anybody's guess.
You have been linked, though it was not my "intent."
And it is good you didn't leave the sphere-O-blog. Where would people go for laughs?
Well, it is odd, isn't it, how we allow some faceless hateful morons upset us so? The trolls are dreadful creatures and it's a pity that Goldstein found it necessary to whip up his colleagues so. As a friend of mine this morning said to me of some radio wingnut:
Pandering to the lowest common denominator, and IQ, is easy to do, but I don't know how anyone smarter than the average city pigeon can do it without becoming physically ill.
Before getting too upset about this, always consider the source.
Thanks, wt. I'll be back, and soon.
I still think back fondly to the mykeru versus the right-wing idiot dust up.
Even the rwi's friend's abandoned him.
There is ONE way to deal with people like that. You have to physically beat the shit out of them. Sometimes it;s one punch to the nose, sometimes you really have to break a bone or two. After a bully has been physically hurt by his intended victim, he's not so tough anymore.
Sad but true. Verbal sparring means nothing, and a wingnut will always come back. But once that wingnut's nursing a broken nose, maybe not so much.
I can't add anything to this because you all are so eloquent.
But I feel ya, watertiger...
What alarms me is that this whole mess resulted from a debate over...literary theory. I mean, seriously. What kind of sick fuck gets so violently obsessed with a debate over how much importance to place on what you think an author intended in his or her text, and what a "text" really is, and who quoted which footnote correctly, to react by "outing" a blogger, posting his personal information and that of his wife and children on a site full of rabid freaks who apparently think that sort of thing is fun, and making nasty, personal comments about said blogger's wife and children? (I realize that these actions were not all necessarily performed by the same fuckhead, but the mob mentality was well in place.)
That's some seriously mentally disturbed fuckheadedness. And whatever's infecting this particular batch of fuckheads seems to be a large part of what's infecting our country right now.
Hatred. Divisiveness. Thuggery. That's their vision of America.
Bravo, Thers.
Jezebel, I made a similar comment in an e-mail today - my theory is that if it had been an argument about "Which Is Cooler: Torture Or The Constitution?", it would have been contentious but not as personal. But since this particular argument exposed the emptiness of the right-wing idiot's academic chops, him and his minions took it as a personal threat or attack and responded (in what their sick, vicious little minds believed to be) in kind.
This is in no way meant as a defense or an excuse of the asymmetric vileness, just a behavioral theory as to why arguing some arcane literary/linguistic/philosophical point had such an uglier outcome than the political arguments that go on all the time without ever going this far.
You may well be right, Eli. As you often are.
I would have given Goldstein some leeway until he re-published Thers' and Mary's names, employer and city (more than once) in a comment on the issue. There's a certain sociopathy involved in Goldstein's compulsion to "win" on this issue and I find it creepy, at best.
Glad you're sticking around, AquqTigre. I'm sticking around, too, which means I should really post something on my own scrap of the web tonite.
Dear Brian SmallBerries,
an ass is an ass is an ass, and here in watertiger's house, we decide who's a Dipshit. That would be you.
Cheers,
Goo, everywhere. What a mess.
Hang in there Watertiger! I visit your blog several times a day and enjoy it very much! It must require a ton of your time to keep the content fresh (your postings are very "dependable").
FWIW, you're running neck-and-neck with Atrios in terms of my blog reading, which means I visit your site way too much from so-called "work".
.
YAYYYYYY BWT.!!
Picture of Brian here
ManonBlog and all my other wonderful readers,
I'm not going away. And I have it on good authority that Thers, who wound up taking down his site, is already back up and running with his new one.
So to all the paste-eaters: Up yours.
You are both intellectually dishonest and ignorant of the whereabouts of the supposed "threat" against his family.
If you want to exit the blogosphere, let me show you the door. In the meantime, next time I want shit from you, I'll come over and squeeze your little head.
Shorter troll: We never threatened anyone, and if you say we did I will squeeze your head.
Sadly, I agree with the comment posted by Brendan. The horrid cretins that occupy the rabid right can not debated using rational discourse. The only form of communication they comprehend is brutish thuggery.
If only we had some folks on the left who were completely devoid of ethics, we could actually play by their rules. It's getting dangerously close to Josey Wales territory:
"Now remember, things look bad and it looks like you're not gonna make it, then you gotta get mean. I mean plumb, mad-dog mean. 'Cause if you lose your head and you give up then you neither live nor win. That's just the way it is."
You are both intellectually dishonest and ignorant of the whereabouts of the supposed "threat" against his family.
When you have four children, you take anonymous sexual comments about a two-year-old seriously. Period.
It doesn't matter who posted the comment; Eschaton regulars get harassed and stalked by trolls all the time, and it could've been one of them keeping tabs on the debate and trying to escalate things.
Doesn't matter. The point is, after you see something that vile, you err on the side of caution. You do not out people in that situation. (Putting aside the fact that you don't out them anyway...especially when you've signed a pledge stating that you won't.)
The bottom line: A person who feels compelled to lash out like that in response to criticism - no matter how insulting that criticism may be - has no sense of perspective and no common sense. Normal, intellectually secure people do not do what Goldstein did. Period.
The fact that his only real payoff is the adulation of people like you, many of whom would've supported him just as confidently if he'd been arguing against "radical intentionalism," is what makes the whole fucking thing so farcical. Grow up, for Christ's sake, and stop defending the indefensible.
Not much to add to all the comments, WT, but you, and Thers and NYMary and the rest make my life a whole lot better.
Thanks!
"Brutish thuggery?" Oooo! Evey once in awhile it pays to give in and "mix it up" with the knuckle-dragging clones from the Chimposphere. Helps relieve stress.
Hubris is right - it's not alpha male behavior - it's alpha jerk behavior.
Dear smart watertiger,
Its awful that this happened to Thers. and NYMary. I hope they dont let it drive them off the blogosphere. And please dont let it drive you off. I love reading your blog.
peace to you!
I am thinking that BrianTheWastrel, himself is the kerfuffle. Dear WaterTiger, leave is idiot to his own malaise. As you know the wingnuts are going ape shit over the blogosphere, as these villains are exposed, almost on a daily basis these days. I hope, NYMary and Thersites, can recover from this bitter blow dealt by that human waste. We wouldn't want to lose what little sanity there is. And this goes for you too as well, Tigress. Peace!
As Ann Althouse has succinctly said, Thersites had a habit of insulting non-anonymous people from a position of anonymity, and thus his outing is not a bad thing. He deserved it. If he and his wife are going to be sacked on account of this, then so be it.
Also, if Jeff Goldstein is not willing to agree with the "truth," then why was Thersites wasting his time with him.
Lastly, it is deeply unbecoming of a Professor (even if he only teaches at a Community College) to call another blogger "pasty" and "paste-eater" among other epithets.
Yours anonymously,
Anon.
Oh I forgot to add, inside sources tell me that it was Thersites people who wrote that about his daughter... to make Goldstein look bad.
Yours anonymously,
Anon.
It is unreal how human garbage like "anon" have wrangled their functional illiteracy and flipper limbs in such a way that permits them to manipulate a computer and post on blogs at all.
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