Circular Rebuking...
Jim Henley rebukes Conor Friedersdorf:
To Crush Your Enemies, Who Are AWESOME! To Drive Them Before You, Since They Do So Much For Us; And To Hear The Lamentations Of Their Charming, Gracious Women: Look, Conor: You can’t shiv a man while kissing his feet. Okay, maybe you could shiv him in the ankle. That would hurt. But then maybe he falls on you. That’s the best case. The worst involves his boot, your teeth, and parabolic arcs. More straightforwardly, there is no nice way to call someone a bitter, disingenuous hack, which Friedersdorf does, to his credit. Trying not to hurt your target’s feelings in that circumstance is like packing a suicide bomb into a Strawberry Shortcake knapsack and singing the Barney theme while showing off pictures of baby otters at play: it doesn’t really take the sting out of the flying nails. More murder and less art next time...
Conor Friedersdorf rebukes Glenn Reynolds:
Instant Pithyness Corrupts Instantly: [N]ot yet ready for prime time one-liners end up inscrutable... deciphered by the few people who already share all the assumptions.... All this helps us understand the most aggravating characteristic of Instapundit... [who] often writes posts whose pithiness comes at the expense of substance, accuracy or integrity... publishing posts that are political commentary, ideological point scoring, or a critique of another writer, and reacting to the inevitable blow back by ignoring his interlocutors or else blaming them for misunderstanding him, even when they read his words in perfectly reasonable ways. This alternating evasiveness and passive aggression is somewhat puzzling....
I find myself nostalgic for the Instapundit of old. I wonder whether I am remembering it accurately, or whether it’s me that’s changed. Unsure, I dip back into the unread posts on my Google Reader with cautious optimism, and quickly enough become frustrated by the Pajamas Media version of Instapundit, where the unpredictability is gone, the typical reader is never challenged, and instead of an intelligent voice having interesting arguments with ideological opponents there’s just Twitter length sniping at them. Why has a tenured law professor who doesn’t need the money or even the page views settled on this particular approach to the medium? So many posts either panders to or coddle the movement conservative’s ideological preconceptions — so you have controversial plank X in the Tea Party platform, and Professor Reynolds signals his agreement with it, almost always without any argument about why it is correct. Other times he actually disagrees with plank X, something he’ll occasionally make known, but very seldom does he actually argue against plank X, or try to change anyone’s mind about it. Instead he’ll note that while he happens to be against plank X, other people who are against it are silly or annoying or hypocritical or ham-handed in their advocacy or approaching things in the wrong way or are the subject of a really funny Mark Steyn one-liner.
Instapundit punts on the substance of so many matters, choosing instead to make the pithiest point that jives with his readers’ sensibilities. There’s a climate change conference? Well is it cold there? Did anyone fly there on a private plane? Did any MSM reporter betray bias in their writeup? There’s your Instapundit climate change coverage for the day....
Then there are the occasional times that a Glenn Reynolds post is particularly egregious in its pandering, or wrongheaded... he is called out on his post in the manner familiar to everyone who blogs. “How can you say that about Y?” his critic demands... sometimes there is a response, almost always evading or pithily dismissing the critic’s point without addressing it, or else feigning shock, shock that anyone could ever think that his post was saying that — I’ve never said or meant that — never mind the peculiar way I wrote my post, or that I link almost exclusively to people who think that, always mock opponents of that, and never mock or even argue with anyone who does think that. Sometimes Professor Reynolds has half a point in the resulting exchange. I take him at his word that he really is against torture, for example, though I still find it absolutely bizarre that he is less against torture than he’d otherwise be because Andrew Sullivan annoys him....
Every time I’ve done an “Instapundit sanity test,” where I show one of these kerfuffles he’s occasionally engaged in to apolitical friends clueless about the blogosphere, they’re sympathetic to the person accused of having misunderstood him. “Wait, he’s against torture? Well don’t just show me this ‘heh’ post that set off the kerfuffle, show me the post where he makes the best case against torture. Oh, you can’t ever recall having read one like that?”...
[T]hese lamentable aspects... are trending in the wrong direction... makes the blogosphere a worse place: one where pithiness is prized too highly, cheap demonstrations of pseudo-hypocrisy and insubstantial zings take the place of considered opinion (or substantial zings!), and too many bloggers on the right try for an Instalanche by producing more of this Glenn Reynolds bait than they otherwise might.... Perhaps this background information will help Professor Reynolds understand why I reacted so unfavorably when I saw him uncritically link a Pajamas Media piece titled, “Dear Mr. President, Your Policies Are Hurting Women the Most.” That’s the most cliched kind of identity politics, I wrote, akin to that old New York Times joke: “World Ends, Women and Minorities Hit Hardest.” Then Professor Reynolds updated his post, claiming, “Conor Friedersdorf is immune to irony.” So I re-read the Pajamas Media letter. Hints of tongue-in-cheek? None. Ironic tone? Certainly not. What’s going on here? Querying a few friends, I didn’t find anyone who took it ironically either. And let’s be honest, do numerous Congressional Representatives ever co-sign ironic op-eds?
Querying Twitter, I got a response from John Tabin, who hazarded that “appropriating the language of identity politics to tweak the left is not the same as embracing identity politics in earnest.” In other words, it quacks like a duck, but isn’t one.... Instapundit jumped back into the fray. “JOHN TABIN takes the time to explain,” he wrote. “I thought about doing that, but it spoils the pithiness when you have to help people who don’t catch on. This blog is for serious blog readers. The rest will have to keep up if they can. Hang on tight!” Spoken like a tenured professor! Unfortunately, I’m not the only kid in the class who is having trouble keeping up....
[T]he Glenn Reynolds approach to argument, where pithiness rules them all, detracts from rather than facilitates that conversation...
Still missing: Glenn Reynolds rebukes Jim Henley:
