Incivility
by digby
Boy that Washington Post chat with bloggers sure was fun, huh kids? It’s really cool when guys like Glenn Reynolds cojmpletely misrepresent themselves in a national forum. It shows once again how out of control the left is.
Here’s Glenn:
My own sense is that it’s very hard to preserve civility — or even a good ratio of interestingness to flaming — on sites that have high traffic without a fair degree moderation. There’s some sort of a threshold after which things tend to break down into USENET-style flamewars, which some people like, but which I’m tired of. I find the comments on Atrios, Kos, or for that matter Little Green Footballs, to be tiresome.
[…]
I love open comments, just as I love free beer, free pizza, and other giveaway goods. But I’m not entitled to them. And those who partake, I think, owe a certain degree of civility to their hosts.
Yes, and one certainly shouldn’t celebrate such incivility and encourage your readers to participate, right?
THE NYC TRANSIT WORKERS’ UNION has an unofficial blog, and it’s getting an earful in the comments. Here are some excerpts:
[S]econdly, if i could meet the masterminds behind this strike, i’d personally spit in each of their faces. I know fifty people at my campus who now cannot return to their families for the holiday season, and are being forced to spend their break in a hotel off campus until the transit system is running again. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves doing something this stupid this time of the year. Every single worker participating in the strike is extremely selfish and short sighted.
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You guys really have a lot of balls. All you do is drive around in circles. Your job isn’t hard at all. You get paid as much as cops and firemen, while much more as teachers. Something is wrong. You’re asking for way too much here.
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I am thoroughly disgusted with the TWU. Who are you to think you’re above the law? Who are you to take well-paying jobs (for your education levels) serving millions of people and then hold us hostage by striking?
I have a 16 month old son who will be taken to day care today in his STROLLER. In 20 degree weather. I am paid hourly and will lose today’s salary.
But they’re standing up for working people!
Meanwhile, Bloomberg has to be asking himself, “What would Rudy do?”
(More here).
UPDATE: Apparently someone woke up long enough to remove the comments. [LATER: CraigsList removed the link, which was to an item featuring pictures of transit workers asleep at their posts.]
Glenn Reynolds knew exactly what he was doing when he linked to that blog and sent his massive readership over there to flame them. That’s within the rules of engagement. But it’s chickenshit when you don’t have comments yourself. And it’s dishonest in the extreme to pretend that you don’t engage that way when you do.
Jeff Jarvis: Glenn: I agree with your assessment of those particular sites. I wonder whether that is a function of size or topic or host’s tone.
I hate it when the host’s tone creates a tiresome atmosphere that promotes flaming ,don’t you? For instance, how about this for tone?
Instapundit:
There was a time when the Left opposed fascism and supported democracy, when it wasn’t a seething-yet-shrinking mass of self-hatred and idiocy. That day is long past, and the moral and intellectual decay of the Left is far gone.
Reynolds doesn’t have comments. Fair enough. He prefers to play hit and run. Which is also fair enough. But he is in no position to be lecturing about civility. He’s a rabid partisan who knows exactly how the game is played.
It appears to me that this chat today was structured as a combat between Jane Hamsher and Jim Brady, with Jarvis and Rosen there as filler — and Reynolds there to promote hte idea that lefty blogs are uncivilized in contrast to the upslifting atmostphere of the right wing (oddly similar to Brady’s interview with Hugh Hewitt.)
But let’s review the history of civility in our recent public discourse, shall we? Let’s take a look at some of the words of people who are brought on the highest rated television shows to give political commentary, who are paid hundreds of millions of dollars to pontificate freely on radio day after day, who are welcomed into the homes of major establishment players in Washington:
I mean, if there is a party that’s soulless, it’s the Democratic Party. If there are people by definition who are soulless, it is liberals — by definition. You know, souls come from God. You know?
I said at the conclusion of previous hours — part of me that likes this. And some of you might say, “Rush, that’s horrible. Peace activists taken hostage.” Well, here’s why I like it. I like any time a bunch of leftist feel-good hand-wringers are shown reality.
Liberals have a preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason. You could be talking about Scrabble and they would instantly leap to the anti-American position. Everyone says liberals love American, too. No they don’t. Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy. This is their essence.O’REILLY: It’s a good question, Juan. And I don’t see it as a threat. I mean, I think you have to say to people, as we do with all our guests here, this is what’s likely to happen. And if they continue, those people continue to attack people personally, as Frank Rich does almost every week, and Keller allows it, then we’ll just have to get into their lives.
O’REILLY: All right, and that brings us to the other group. And you know, certainly ABC News is a responsible organization. They made a decision. And the folks can decide for themselves whether — who they agree with. The ACLU, I think, is a grossly irresponsible, irresponsible organization that is going out of its way to help Al Qaeda, that I don’t think ABC News is in that category at all. I mean, I think they’re doing what they think is best for the country. The ACLU is doing what they think is best for the country they envision, not the country we have now, but certainly is aiding and abetting the enemy.
The radical Democratic left is an army of soulless ghouls. Being of the living dead, they live in a world of death and try to impose it on we the living. Witness who led the charge: a radical homosexual, Barney Frank. A radical abortion Mafiosa, Barbara Boxer. What is difficult for we the living to comprehend is the reason they can engage in such anti-life abominations is because they have no souls.
That’s the tip of the ice berg. These are people who are feted by the president of the United States, who appear on the cover of TIME magazine and are profiled as merry jokesters, people who mainstream journalists refer to as “wonderful.” The Washington Post and NBC news referred to at least one of these people as “mainstream.”
Please, please spare me the crocodile tears about leftist incivility. We are living in a political world formed by rightwing commentators who have made a fetish of harsh eliminationist rhetoric hammered over and over again into the ether until it sounds like normal discourse. And we’ve been waiting for more than a decade for the mainstream media to notice that rightwing celebrity pundits, who reach millions upon millions of listeners and viewers a day, routinely accuse liberals of treason and celebrate our deaths. It’s made us a little bit testy. When important news outlets like the Washington Post see “leftist incivility” as a topic worthy of the rending of garments and gnashing of teeth it makes us wonder if they are even living in the same universe we do.
Famous and wealthy toxic political commentators like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly are routinely lauded as normal mainstream partisans while ordinary readers of the Washington Post are excoriated for incivility when they complain about inaccurate coverage that benefits Republicans. This is bizarro world. It is insane. It is a sign of a very sick political culture.
Update: Jane’s not done with Brady yet.
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