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February 28, 2008 - February 21, 2008

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

MAWRITES WILL BE MAWRITES. You know how it goes. You take a stand, you put your self on the line with that stand, and then someone who's supposed to be on your side betrays you by proving that your side is as bad as their side. That's how I feel right now. Who could possibly have picked a worse time to defend Ann Coulter? I mean, she just called John Edwards a "faggot."

This time I feel as if it had been done to me. I throw my not (in)considerable weight behind the greater civility of conservatives and then, as if on cue, the one conservative who does need some defending goes out of her way to make a total monkey out of me by calling John Edwards a "faggot."

It's just terrible. Unforgiveable. Captain Ed was actually too restrained in his condemnation of Ms. Coulter's tactlessness:


She called him a faggot. Just imagine how hurtful that is. The poor man suffers every single day from the fact that his sexual proclivities could finish his political career off in an instant -- just like NJ governor Jim McGreevy -- and he goes throuh the daily torture of watching youthful and athletic aides dash by him with their spectacularly tight buns while he can't do thing one about it, and then comes the unkindest cut of all. What could be worse? It's like stripping the man naked and putting a photo of him in that state on the cover of a book for everyone to jeer at.

So now I'm speaking to Ann Coulter. Not to all the justifiably outraged liberals. Just to Ann. Please please try to put yourself in John Edwards's place. Try to imagine what it would be like to be made a figure of lewd fun by those who have the power to scoff and humiliate on the national stage. Have you given even a moment's thought to how how it must feel to be John Edwards -- a truly handsome man with a fat old wife -- a youngish fiftyish fellow with golden locks, a boyish face,  and an insatiable appetite for beautiful young men who would be as attracted to you as you are to them, if only you didn't have this messianic passion for saving the world from the heartless trial lawyers who whore themselves out to the richest pricks of all for cold hard cash?

For God's sake, woman. How would you feel if mere political adversaries used the crudest possible sexual humiliations to sabotage your message? You'd probably feel kind of angry and vengeful, wouldn't you? Think about it. That's why you need to listen to the wisdom of Captain Ed, and Michelle Malkin, and Laura Ingraham, and especially Captain Ed. You know. Women can generally take the vilest abuse without turning a hair. They're only women, after all. But a man -- particularly an old man -- has an ego as fragile as the most delicate Venetian glass. It can be shattered by a mere word, at a great distance, in the softest whisper. Think what you've done to Captain Ed, woman.

Aren't you ashamed of yourself now?

I'll bet you are. Bitch.

Thursday, March 01, 2007

WE'RE NOT RESPONSIBLE. So the Internet's a lot like Carl Jung's supposition about synchronicity in the universe: Ask a question and the universe will answer. More about that in a later post, but for now, hats off to the News Buckit, the site that met our challenge of yesterday in considerably less than 24 hours. Clap hands, everybody:


Many thanks to Glenn Reynolds and to all the commenters who helped sort out the technical issues, as well as the other blogs who spread the word. All that remains is explaining why this predicted result is actually meaningful, whether the lefties understand it or not. (They don't, of course. And they won't. Here's a good example of a "liberal" response to our little experiment. Don't expect much more than this from anyone on the left.)

It's not about prudery. At one time or another I've used all the Carlin words right here at InstaPunk. And I've said them all a great many more times than I've ever written them. It's no longer the case that anyone can pretend there are ears which haven't already heard these words, including the six-year-old golden angel who is your daughter. Go to any sports stadium in the nation and the person sitting just behind you will be yelling all of them at the top of his lungs. The freedoms provided by our culture have produced a general coarseness of speech so pervasive that even to decry it is to appear naive.

So why does it matter? Because we all know that these words are automatically offensive to somebody somewhere. Even the most profligate cussers censor themselves in unfamiliar company whose disapproval they don't want to engender needlessly. That's also why we use them when we do. Because they're an explosion of rejection. All those lefty bloggers -- male and female -- who curse like Scorsese mobsters have people in their lives around whom they would be embarrassed to utter the words they pour into their electronic diaries.

But if these words are so effective as communication instruments, why would anyone be embarrassed to say them at any time? They're good Anglo-Saxon words, aren't they, with all the virtues of that mother tongue -- short, direct, onomatopoetic, and oddly evocative of the things they name in ways that the other mother tongues of English, Latin and Greek, simply aren't. Consider what many would consider the most offensive word on Carlin's list. The preferred, polite word is 'vagina,' whose origin is conceptual, meaning in its generic sense 'sheath,' which conveys shape, purpose, and use without any resort to the senses. It's this very conceptualness which makes it polite, allowing us to understand the meaning at one remove from its essential physicalness, to distance ourselves from the fascinatingly perfect evocation of the thing itself embodied in the word 'cunt.'  The Anglo-Saxon locution is a word that's not about diagrams in medical textbooks or euphemisms in conversations where ladies and children are present. It's the exact right name for the unnameable inspiration of the male sex drive, entirely physical, and possessed of other entirely physical connotations without end. It's a word of power, almost magical in its astonishing identity with its subject, and it therefore represents an outer limit of what words can be and do. Beyond it, there is only the blankness of what words cannot be or do. (Also consider what it is so many women object to in this word: the utter reduction it represents to the purely physical, as well as the unnameable things below that physicality which, at the limit, suggest that they are but disposable things.)

Recollect that I said an outer limit. There's more than one. I don't know what the record is today in our high-tech world, but when I was a kid (a long long time ago) the word we all accepted and therefore took pride in knowing as the longest word in the English language was 'antidisestablishmentarianism.' Whether it's still the longest word or not, it will do as an example of the other outer limit of words, the purely conceptual. It offers absolutely no appeal to the senses, and its denotation is so specific that it has no synonyms. It is, in fact, a word of pure cerebration, so exact in its identification of a particular school of theology that it almost seems to create its subject by the magical act of giving it a name. The great children's book author Dr. Seuss once published a work titled "On Beyond Zebra," in which he created a new alphabet that began where our A-Z alphabet ended. Does anyone else find it ironic that the same philosophy which gives us the coarseness of the blogosphere has also given us the "post-modern" academic community in which so-called scholars are engaged in the process of creating a world of meaningless words that could be titled "On Beyond Antidisestablishmentarianism"? Read any academic journal in the humanities, particularly in what should be understandable disciplines like literature, sociology, and education. No matter how high your IQ, if you're not a professional academic, you won't understand a single paragraph of what you read.

So there are at least two limits -- an upper and a lower. (For an outstanding fictional depiction of the consequences of such limits, see the Ambrose Bierce story, The Damned Thing.) The upper limit is conceptual. The lower limit is physical. When these limits are transgressed, many if not most people are offended. Not because they're stupid, but because they're not. When poseurs try to create distinctions out of thin air by semantic gymnastics that have no correlative in the physical world, people suspect artifice and fakery and start to read the fancy neologisms as meaningless blanks. When advocates resort to primitive physical words in supposed support of what are claimed to be lofty ideals, people suspect that scenery-chewing theatrics are being substituted for accurate observation and read the coarse strings of words and phrases as meaningless blanks.

This is the answer to an age-old paradox of literature and theater. People have always used coarse language in their conversations with one another. The Roman poet Catullus is the exception who proves the rule. He used all of George Carlin's words and more in his "lyric" poetry. (He once compared the mouth of a dowager gossip to "the cunt of a pissing mule." In iambic trimeter.)  But for the most part, writers of every age -- drunks, whoremasters, thieves, and damned souls though they were -- tended to use Carlin's words sparingly. They understood that the written word, and the performed word, is somehow different from every-day life. The great 20th century male chauvinist drunk and lecher Hemingway never used the Carlin words, and not because he couldn't have gotten away with them. He distinctly articulated his conviction that these words have an impact in print that is so disproportionate to their impact in real life that their presence on the page is intolerable. If he had known the term "black hole," he probably would have made that comparison. Why?

Two reasons. Both have a common source. First, a writer as good as Hemingway uses words to control the response of the reader. He wants to communicate what he sees or thinks without the words getting in the way. He's even willing to make up new words because they can't possibly have any connotations other than the ones he gives them. But he's incredibly reluctant to use words for which the reader has some vast pre-existing set of unknown connotations. If he makes you too much aware of the writer who's writing what you're reading, he is no longer a writer but a performer. (Edgar Allan Poe, for example, routinely used words he could not have expected his readers to know, and today the only way to appreciate Poe's writings is as performances.)

Second, a writer as good as Hemingway also understands the limits of words. If he ventures too high into the stratosphere of polysyllabic German psycho-babble, he knows readers will read the words they don't know as blanks. He also knows that if he descends to the level of coarse Anglo-Saxon obscenities, it's a confession of failure. When you write at the lower limit of words, you are telling the reader there are no words for what you're trying to communicate and every time you use an obscenity or scatology you're actually inserting a blank the reader will have to fill in for herself, from her own experience. If you use the word 'cunt,' regardless of your intentions, you've suddenly inserted a placeholder for the whole universe of personal connotations she's developed for this word. And inevitably, those connotations will instantly redound to a judgment of you, the person who precipitated the process. All words at the limit are duplex channels of this sort.  No matter how you slice it, that's loss of control. Whatever your purpose in writing.

But imagine that your purpose in writing is to persuade, to make a rational argument, to display your own superior logic and insight to those whom you regard as ignorant or somehow in need of instruction. Why would you choose to load up your prose with blanks that allow readers to interpret those blanks as statements about you rather than your chosen topic? Why would you choose to be regarded as a mere performer instead of a locus of reason and morality?

One reason. Because you are irresistibly drawn to that lower limit. Why? Because your own mental process really is filled with blanks -- half-formed thoughts you can't articulate, unmanageable hostilities you don't fully comprehend, a need for attention that can't be earned but only extorted by a sudden shocking explosion of pure physicality, an irrational plea for help because here you are at the frighteningly dangerous edge of what hundreds of centuries of words cannot describe.

For a writer in any arena, repeated reliance on George Carlin's words is a signpost of failure, incompetence, desperate insecurity, and utter abandonment of reason. (And, yes, Carlin's words are only a shorthand for the innumerable other pejorative Anglo-Saxon terms, idiomatic phrases, and pungent anatomical imagery favored by the damaged children of the web.) Here's a final exercise: Go to Alicublog's self-satisfied denunciation of this exercise and read his obscenities and scatologies as blanks. Fill in the blanks for yourself. Then report back on your appraisal of his state of being.

And for all you Ann Coulter "haters," my sympathies. You're never going to get your wish, which is to have wild passionate sex with her. That's an eventuality almost certainly reserved for men who have more than blanks to offer.

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

THE WORD. I followed the links today (h/t Malkin, Reynolds) to Patterico's takedown of Glenn Greenwald. For any InstaPunk readers who don't know what I'm talking about, here's the background. A blogger at the Huffington Post reported that an attempt to "assassinate" Dick Cheney in Afghanistan failed. Then a veritable flood of Huffington commenters exclaimed their anger that the attempt had not succeeded. Some conservative bloggers then inferred that such comments reflected a sizeable constituency of leftist opinion in this country. Glenn Greenwald, a fairly famous liberal blogger, wrote a column at Salon arguing that rightwing bloggers always blame the lefty blogs themselves for nasty comments by isolated crackpot readers, who are representative of nothing and should never be cited as such.

Patterico replied with a thoroughly documented post (read the whole thing) that quotes the heart of Greenwald's piece and observes:


He proceeds to quote at length numerous examples of Greenwald's own behavior and provides links to multiple others. He concludes by referencing a Huffington Post blog entry not mentioned by Greenwald which did, in fact, call directly for Cheney's death by heart attack, a positioned echoed by countless commenters who heartily endorsed the sentiment.

Patterico's piece was so devastating that I was curious to see whether or not Greenwald had responded, so I looked at the Salon column, which featured four updates but no mention of Patterico. I did, however, find these juicy morsels of liberal cant:


Patterico's argument is powerful enough not to need to deal with these details, but I think they are worth speaking to as a sort of mop-up operation after the slaughter.

The statement that "most of the largest right-wing blogs do not allow comments" is as disingenuous as everything else in Greenwald's post. By "most," he means Michelle Malkin and InstaPundit (as one of his first commenters immediately specified), because there are dozens of popular rightwing blogs with very active comment sections, including such biggies as Hugh Hewitt, Little Green Footballs, Protein Wisdom, Ace of Spades, LaShawn Barber, The Anchoress, et al. Greenwald fails to mention that Michelle Malkin was compelled to disable her comments section because of the many obscene, disgusting, and frightening attacks on her from the left, which have been abundantly documented. And InstaPundit has explained more than once that the tendency of the liberal MSM and lefty blogs to attribute commenters' remarks to the blog author without clear differentiation is the reason he doesn't allow comments. I might add that in InstaPundit's case, he is more linker than thinker in terms of his format, which seriously diminishes the value of comments -- these undoubtedly accrue to the benefit of the posts he is linking to. In a word, Glenn Reynolds's "no comments" policy is actually quite generous to his fellow bloggers.

The Ann Coulter reference is hilarious because it's the first thing all the lefties cite when someone calls them on their constant over-the-top rhetoric about Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the truly vile debasements lefties spew at them every day. "But look at what Ann Coulter says," they shriek. "She wanted McVeigh to blow up the New York Times! And you think we're violent?"

Coulter's the first outrage the lefties cite because they don't have that many other examples to cite. If she didn't exist, they'd have to invent her. Who else? Pat Buchanan? At any given time, a majority of conservative bloggers object more strenuously to his excessive rhetoric than liberals ever do. Protein Wisdom and Ace of Spades? They're comedians, and you can see that because they're actually funny. Michelle Malkin? She may take extreme positions, but her vocabulary is a very far cry from the intensely obscene and scatological screeds you can read every single day at Firedoglake, the DailyKos, Democratic Underground, Atrios, and the babes John Edwards hired to run his blog. You can actually hear Michelle blushing when for the sake of accuracy she quotes such language from a lefty post. She may be an iron lady in terms of politics, but she is most definitely a lady. Oh, and yes, she does make fun of people she disagrees with. How awful.

Which, come to think of it, is the real distinguishing characteristic between the firebrands of the left and the firebrands of the right. There are plenty of verbal attacks launched by both right and left in the war of words that constitutes political discourse. You couldn't have a free political system without them. What matters is the quality and tenor of those attacks. Political passion is fueled by emotion, and emotion in an adversary situation results quite often in extreme analogies, ridicule, unfairness, and even cruelty. Yet there is a vast difference between employing verbal wit as a weapon of ridicule and employing the foulest lowest-common-denominator cusswords available to describe one's political foes and to wish for their physical destruction. The latter is not wit, which it resembles only insofar as word choices have the power to shock. When endless repetition makes them a thudding refrain used again an again and again without any attempt at irony or illuminating juxtapositions, it's merely gutter-mouthed drivel. Its only intent is to injure, not to educate, persuade, or delineate. A simple test: is there an actual punchline anywhere in sight? Or is there only an irrational need to scrawl the ugliest possible graffiti on the biggest possible wall?

Ann Coulter, for example, is a political satirist and at her best a political humorist. She can be mean, indeed, but there is always a punchline, an actual definable point she is making that pertains specifically to the topic she is addressing. You can easily prove this to yourself because she almost never uses dirty words of any kind. People are offended by her point of view, not the graphically violent nature of her imagery. Therefore, the substance of her inflammatory effect is ideas, not lists of the repulsive consequences she's wishing on her enemies. When she made her crack about the terrorists not targeting the New York Times building -- and she did use the word 'building' -- she was inviting everyone to imagine what tack the lords of the NYT would have taken in the War on Terror if they'd had their own landmark headquarters destroyed. It's irreverent, yes, and perhaps in dubious taste, but it's an exercise in wit, not a prayer for the violent death of all NYT journalists.

Compare this to the comments Patterico cites in response to Tony Hendra's "prayer" for the death of Dick Cheney. There's no actual learning point in the post itself. Its whole purpose is the shock it's supposed to induce, and the affirmative recognition the writer expects -- correctly -- to receive from his audience. It's a form of masturbation, as are the comments, quite a few of which are confined to the word "Amen."

This is exactly the same sentiment we have seen countless times from the left. From those who attempted verbal rape on Michelle Malkin as a "filipino whore," repeating ancient schoolboy speculations about the shape of her private parts, to those who wished Laura Ingraham to die from her recent experience of cancer. Qualitatively, these kinds of abominations are no different from the sentiments of those who openly advocate the assassination of the President and Vice-President or, more sneakily, defend the appropriateness of media vehicles which advocate the same thing.

Disagree? Well, I propose an exercise to be perfomed by those who have the software and expertise to carry it out. The exercise is this: Search six months' worth of content, posts and comments, of the 20 most popular blogs on the right and the left. The search criteria are George Carlin's infamous "7 Dirty Words."

I am absolutely certain that the left will far exceed the right in the number of usages of all these words, which will go a long way toward proving that it's the right which is still concerned with ideas while it's the left that's obsessed with the lowest kind of hateful invective.

Anyone care to take up the challenge?

UPDATE. For those who already knew something about Greenwald and his own history as a nonrepresentative "sock-puppet" commenter on behalf of his blog, you'll get a huge kick out of Wuzzadem's treatment of today's contretemps.

UPDATE 2. Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link (& for correcting my attribution error), and thanks for all the early interest in the challenge. But we do need to pool our resources here a bit. Some of you know how to go about searching in a systematic way. (Is it really best to do this through Google, or to identify the target sites first and process their copy individually? You tell me) Others know which sites track blog traffic in order of popularity. I'm fairly sure that Malkin, Reynolds, and Hewitt are in the top 20 list on the conservative side, and I'm also fairly sure that DailyKos, Atrios (Eschaton), Democratic Underground, Moveon.org, and Firedoglake are in the top 20 on the left. But my intuition is no substitute for an actual ranking by a site that does this as its mission. People who know something, please put in your two (or five or ten) cents. You can also feel free to argue about who is left, right, or otherwise, although I'll pretty much insist that Andrew Sullivan is neither and shouldn't be included in this experiment.

As to the commenter who pointed out that there will be leftist offenders on righty sites and vice versa, I think we have to live with that. The lefties are notorious for outright banning of righty commenters who disagree, and the righty commenters seem to gang up on lefty trolls until they go away of their own accord. Either way, it seems safe to assume that most commenters at a given site are more likely to agree with the blogger than oppose him. Rest assured, there will be offenders on both sides of the divide; I'm merely confident that there will be a very significant difference in the totals.

Whatever you can offer, however slight, will be appreciated. Thank you.

UPDATE 3. The internet is indeed a miraculous thing. The results are in, thanks to the News Buckit. We have no idea how much work and sheer intellectual firepower was involved, but we're grateful nonetheless. Our analysis of the results and what they actually signify is here. Thanks again to Glenn Reynolds for making an idle question into a fascinating real-world experiment. Oh. We almost forgot. Those of you who are here because of Alicublog's post, do read the latest post. You'll find it a special treat if you can somehow make it to the last paragraph.

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