Truly, truly, truly outrageous

[agrumer]

Arg, no thanks to John Gruber, I spent some time this afternoon perusing Eric Raymond’s blog. No, he hasn’t gotten any better.

I was amused to see a few election-related posts - all dating from that brief period around the end of August and early September when McCain’s numbers looked good - gloating about how Obama’s campaign is doomed, doomed.

Comments

[nancylebov]

I like to think he's gotten worse. I don't remember him having that mean streak twenty or thirty years ago.

Are you sure ressentiment is the right description for either you or Eric? In Eric's case, he's said that he enjoys annoying left-wingers.

[redbird]

So he's practicing garden-variety emotional sadism on the unsuspecting?

[nancylebov]

That's at least a part of it, but why "unsuspecting"?

[redbird]

"Unsuspecting" on the admittedly untested assumption that he is looking/addressing people who are expecting honest argument and instead getting deliberate nastiness. By honest argument I mean that someone is defending a position they in fact hold, and trying to give valid arguments for it. They may be using mistaken information, but not deliberate lies; they may argue that X is bad because in the past it led to Y, but not if X has never been tried or did not lead to Y.

From another angle, honest argument is intended primarily to convince. It may, especially in public fora, be meant mainly to convince the bystanders rather than the person addressed, but if I am arguing honestly, I would be pleased to change the other person's mind and displeased if they responded by screaming insults at me. If the goal is not to convince, but to anger, the other person, it's not honest argument. Outside a Monty Python sketch, that feels dishonest.

[nancylebov]

Thanks, and it nicely collapses a distinction I was thinking about. I'm not sure whether Eric wants to annoy actual liberals, or to annoy the invented liberals in his head. For purposes of this discussion, it doesn't matter. And either way, it's a bad motivation.

I don't know if Eric argues for anything he thinks is false-- I'm inclined to think he doesn't. I suspect he's framing things he believes in more aggressive and insulting terms that would be needed for straight argument.

I also suspect that after enough years of taking pleasure in annoying liberals, he's drawn to bad arguments which will annoy them, like his nonsense about Palin.

[agrumer]

Actually, I thought his piece on Palin wasn't too bad. I just skimmed it, but I was expecting a Rich Lowry-style wankfest.

It's true that most modern liberals have no idea of what a real right-wing extremist believes, just like most modern conservatives can't tell the difference between a liberal and a leftist.

[nancylebov]

I was thinking of Read My Lipstick, not the more serious piece, which I seem to have missed.

[agrumer]

Oh, that. Yeah, that was pretty stupid.

And pretty emblematic of one of ESR's main writing problems. He's got a hefty chunk of ego invested in the notion that, as a libertarian, he's hovering above the partisan fray with his vast and cool and unsympathetic intellect, analyzing us in an objective manner.

But he's not. His emotions are as fully entangled as those of any life-long Big Two Party member. Maybe moreso. Plenty of actual Republicans are horrified by Palin, perhaps because they realize that she reflects badly on their party. ESR doesn't care as much about that, because he's seeing everything in terms of whether it gives him an opportunity to taunt liberals and leftists.

[james_angove]

[Warning: Much, old USENET inside BB follows]

Annoying or not annoying liberals per-se isn't the goal. Its still a bystander effect. This was the underlying premise of the MA/PM attack on on LK on RASFF all those years ago: to indite the idea of being liberal as specifically criminal, and to assault certain kinds of past youthful efforts as self-discovery -especially those mixed the the sort of nostalgia most feel for their early adulthood - and there by indite liberalism as essentially violent. The part where they did there damnedest to make LK cry and feel personal pain was secondary, and largely about MA's need to proof that as a grown up, he's a bigger, better bully than the people he went to highschool with.