A man and his friends
I don't understand this. There is an American conservative I know who has considerable stores of intellectual honesty, learning and understanding. I like him and I appreciate debates with him, even when they get tetchy, because he understands what facts are and has a good store of them. But for some reason his LJ seems to draw the very dregs of conservatism. For the second time I have felt forced to defriend him, not because of anything he said or did, but because of the hideous crew to be met in his comments threads. To make a comparison, he is rather less extreme and arrogant than johncwright, but his comments threads are consistently less interesting, because his f-list is a roster of intellectual thugs who share neither his learning nor his decency - whereas johncwright seems to attract a reassuring amount of independent and argumentative minds. And that is what really stumps me. He is an upright person. Why can't he see that many of them are no better than online thugs? Does belonging to the same party necessarily have to blind you to the wrongs of others? I don't think so, but I can't see any other reason why some kinds of filth appear in the company of gentlemen.