The Discerning Texan
All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
-- Edmund Burke
Saturday, July 29, 2006
Darkness descends on the Blogosphere: a plea for sanity
Rick Moran has a very disturbing post about the psy-ops-like warfare being conducted by left wing anarchist nutjobs against center-right bloggers. For one thing, Deb Fritsch is back. But there is more. It is getting ugly--very ugly.
You should read it all--there are a lot of ugly and very disturbing details about this new phenomenon. I am quoting Moran's conclusions about all this liberally here because what he has to say is very important, and because he writes very well:
Couple this with the ongoing drama involving Seixon, Larry Johnson, Jason Leopold, and God knows who else and you have an extraordinarily disturbing picture. And I would say to my friends on the sane left who I know visit here from time to time and are kind enough to disagree with me rationally that the time has come for larger lefty blogs to stand up and be placed in the decency column by using some of that vitriol they hurl at the right and at the President with such practiced ease and send some of it in the direction of the guttersnipes, the bullies, and the dirty necked galoots who are making the internet a sewer and a place of dread.
I don’t like the direction that the blogosphere is going at all. All the great hopes for this new communications medium engendered in the lead up to and following the 2004 election are being subsumed in an avalanche of filth and threats that have gone far beyond bad jokes, inappropriate humor, or simple flame wars. It is no longer enough to “fisk” a post by a rival blogger. Now you must destroy the blogger himself, lay him low with withering personal invective of a kind that borders on threats to his person or even more disturbing, to his family.
I mentioned in my Seixon post that these tactics are a kind of hardball politics not seen on the internet before but not unfamiliar to those who have been involved in politics on the national level. Whispering campaigns of a vile nature carried out against opponents, the call in the middle of the night, siccing friendly reporters on rivals by rumormongering, digging up dirt on people’s personal lives, even veiled threats have all been part of The Big Game in Washington for decades. Somehow, you would think that the citizen journalists who inhabit the blogosphere could have immunized themselves from that kind of nastiness.
Alas, the stakes are considered so high by most that the old saw “The ends justifies the means” becomes a battle cry for those who seek the brass ring of power and the prestige that comes to those invited into the outer rings of the Councils of State. It is the politics of Court transmogrified to 20th century America. It is a game played for keeps. The victims are those who see politics as something less than life or death. And in that kind of contest, those most determined to prevail generally do.
Unless the blogosphere as one rises up in righteous anger and condemns without equivocation, without qualification, and without regard to ideology or party affiliation those who seek to sully this medium with the poisonous tactics of bullying, or threatening, or crossing over from the virtual world into the physical world in order to carry out vendettas against opponents, we will become a sideshow, a gaggle of carping, sniping, irrelevancies who deserved to be laughed at rather than taken seriously for our ideas or beliefs.
It’s not to late to take a stand. And I urge everyone that reads this to take that stand with me.
Count me in, Rick.
You should read it all--there are a lot of ugly and very disturbing details about this new phenomenon. I am quoting Moran's conclusions about all this liberally here because what he has to say is very important, and because he writes very well:
Couple this with the ongoing drama involving Seixon, Larry Johnson, Jason Leopold, and God knows who else and you have an extraordinarily disturbing picture. And I would say to my friends on the sane left who I know visit here from time to time and are kind enough to disagree with me rationally that the time has come for larger lefty blogs to stand up and be placed in the decency column by using some of that vitriol they hurl at the right and at the President with such practiced ease and send some of it in the direction of the guttersnipes, the bullies, and the dirty necked galoots who are making the internet a sewer and a place of dread.
I don’t like the direction that the blogosphere is going at all. All the great hopes for this new communications medium engendered in the lead up to and following the 2004 election are being subsumed in an avalanche of filth and threats that have gone far beyond bad jokes, inappropriate humor, or simple flame wars. It is no longer enough to “fisk” a post by a rival blogger. Now you must destroy the blogger himself, lay him low with withering personal invective of a kind that borders on threats to his person or even more disturbing, to his family.
I mentioned in my Seixon post that these tactics are a kind of hardball politics not seen on the internet before but not unfamiliar to those who have been involved in politics on the national level. Whispering campaigns of a vile nature carried out against opponents, the call in the middle of the night, siccing friendly reporters on rivals by rumormongering, digging up dirt on people’s personal lives, even veiled threats have all been part of The Big Game in Washington for decades. Somehow, you would think that the citizen journalists who inhabit the blogosphere could have immunized themselves from that kind of nastiness.
Alas, the stakes are considered so high by most that the old saw “The ends justifies the means” becomes a battle cry for those who seek the brass ring of power and the prestige that comes to those invited into the outer rings of the Councils of State. It is the politics of Court transmogrified to 20th century America. It is a game played for keeps. The victims are those who see politics as something less than life or death. And in that kind of contest, those most determined to prevail generally do.
Unless the blogosphere as one rises up in righteous anger and condemns without equivocation, without qualification, and without regard to ideology or party affiliation those who seek to sully this medium with the poisonous tactics of bullying, or threatening, or crossing over from the virtual world into the physical world in order to carry out vendettas against opponents, we will become a sideshow, a gaggle of carping, sniping, irrelevancies who deserved to be laughed at rather than taken seriously for our ideas or beliefs.
It’s not to late to take a stand. And I urge everyone that reads this to take that stand with me.
Count me in, Rick.
