Sunday, January 16, 2005
COLLECTIVE MINDS READ
Cartoonist August J. Pollak, who would like you to believe he traffics in “subversive leftist propaganda”, discusses the psychology of the blogosphere:
[Conservative] bloggers don’t care. They just don’t. They don’t care if anything they say is one hundred percent pure bullshit. If they can feel good about themselves and extract one more day of joy out of their meaningless non-blog lives by snarking in someone’s comments section, they will.
The accusations about Kos being a Armstrong Williams-esque shill for Howard Dean are bullshit. Everyone knows it. Why are we even bothering trying to legitimately counter it? It’s bullshit, we all know it’s bullshit, the right-wingers all know it’s bullshit. But they know the “Al Gore invented the internet” line is bullshit too, and you still see it in weblog comments ...
They don’t care. They don’t care about their own self-evaluations. What matters- the only thing that matters- is that they said something they think was really clever on the comments section of some person they’ve likely never met.
In the three years I’ve been blogging I’ve seen college professors knowingly lie. I’ve seen gay men sell out their very soul for the sake of pretending that their President doesn’t consider them an abomination. I’ve seen brilliant women with the most clever minds for pop culture force themselves to act stupid for the sake of convincing themselves of the infallibility of recent foreign policy. The right-wing blogosphere has removed itself from any realm of rational discourse and instead established only one principle: win the argument.
I’ve never met Mr. Pollack, but I suspect “winning arguments” isn’t a circumstance in which he often finds himself. How is it that the right wins arguments while at the same time existing outside the realm of rational discourse?