Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

So I was told I really should read Jeffrey Goldberg--that he is really good, and has a new weblog at the Atlantic. And so I surf on over. And I find that he writes:

Hezbollah and its Apologists: Hezbollah has been doing a bang-up job this week undermining Lebanon's future on behalf of its sponsors, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Syrian intelligence. It is simultaneously doing effective work undermining its apologists in the West. We've heard the arguments over and over again: Hezbollah is social service agency; Hezbollah wants to join the Lebanese political process; Hezbollah is not in fact dominated by murderous Jew-haters. And so on...

And my first reaction is: "We have? Over and over again? I haven't! Who is he talking about here?

But there are no names in Goldberg's first paragraph. No names in the rest of the post either--just a reference to "many of Hezbollah's friends" and to "those on the left... who wanted to whitewash Hezbollah's violent, anti-democratic program," and a pointer to Michael Young.

So we surf on over to Michael Young at Reason.

First paragraph: no names of Hezbollah apologists, just a reference to intellectual "collateral damage... in academic departments, newsrooms, think tanks, and cafes far and wide...alleged "experts"...

Second paragraph: no names of Hezbollah apologists...

Third paragraph: no names of Hezbollah apologists, just a reference to "an embarrassing number of writers and academics"...

Fourth paragraph: no names of Hezbollah apologists, just a reference to "writers and scholars, particularly Westerners, who lay claim to Hezbollah sources... edited with minimal rigor"...

Fifth paragraph: no names of Hezbollah apologists, just a reference to how the Party of God "though it is religious, autocratic, and armed to the teeth, often elicits approval from secular, liberal Westerners"...

Sixth paragraph: no names of Hezbollah apologists, just a reference to the "primary emotion... prompting secular liberals to applaud armed Islamic groups... hostility toward the United States, toward Israel... toward what is seen as Western-dominated, capitalist-driven globalization"...

Seventh paragraph: no names of Hezbollah apologists, just a quote from Fred Halliday warning of "dangers in the accommodation between Islamists and the left"...

Eighth paragraph: A name! Norman Finkelstein! And Norman Finkelstein again in paragraphs nine and ten!

Eleventh paragraph: A name! Noam Chomsky! And Finkelstein in paragraph twelve! And Finkelstein and Chomsky in paragraph thirteen!

And that's it. Fifteen paragraphs--three from Young and two from Goldberg--to denounce the Noam-Norm axis. Yes, the denizens of "academic departments, newsrooms, think tanks, and cafes far and wide, the "alleged 'experts'," the "embarrassing number of writers and academics," the "writers and scholars, particularly Westerners," the "secular, liberal Westerners," the "secular liberals," the "left" all turn out--though their names is truly Legion--to be two whacko guys, Noam Chomsky and Norm Finkelstein, each of whom breaks out in oaths and curses when miscalled a "liberal."

Now don't get me wrong. There's nothing I love more on the internet than to hear the horns of Elfland summoning me to join the Queen of Air and Darkness and the rest of the Unseelie Court on their wild nighttime hunt through the skies in pursuit of the those twin beasts of the apocalypse Noam Chomsky and Norm Finkelstein, especially Noam Chomsky (see here and here and here and here). But neither Goldberg nor Young have any quotes from Chomsky at all! And Young's quotes from Finkelstein make him look (falsely) reasonable--quoting him as stating that Palestinians have a right to wage war on Israelis occupying their country, that Lebanese have a right to wage war on Israelis invading their country.

This weblogging has to be carried out with style: with actual quotations (ideally weblinks) from real targets and with a much higher information density than two barreled fish in fifteen paragraphs. At the least put some facts about Chomsky in apposition--Chomsky, who classified Holocaust denier Faurisson as an "apolitical liberal of some sort"; Chomsky, who compared Pol Pot favorably to Charles de Gaulle; Chomsky, who claimed that Milosevic's massacres of Bosnian Muslims were the key struggle of our time against global imperalism because the U.S. had selected the Muslims of Bosnia to be its Balkan clients."

On the internet, if you are to be successful, you need to recognize that you are not S.I. Hayakawa with control over the megaphone. So:

• You need to name, quote from, and link to your targets--real targets, important targets, not ineffectual and marginalized loons (unless you are just in it for entertainment value)--or else people will point out that you did not do so, and you will appear and will be either ignorant, lazy, mendacious, or off-base.
• You need to get to the point quickly: there is lots to read on the internet, and people who chase pointers through fifteen paragraphs only to come across nothing but a weak-tea denunciation of the Noam-Norm axis will be snarky.
• You need to bring information to the table that your readers lack--at least one of these three: new information you have, information others have not been aware of that you can point to, analyses that have not occurred to your readers.

Whether Goldberg will eventually acquire the... sprezzatura, I guess... to make a success of the internet is unclear. But I'm not optimistic about a weblog that seems not to reach beyond "cooking with Elijah Muhammed" and denunciations of the Noam-Norm axis. Surely the Atlantic can find someone better suited to the medium?