It is normally the province of the ombudspants* to hear the pleas of the commentariat, but given our esteemed leader’s enniu, we present some red meat to him: our respected colleagues at Whiskey Fire have seen fit to throw down against the Somerby.
This will not, I fear, end well.
Worse still, our beloved Professor of Dangeral Studies has taken up arms against him as well. Perhaps our last summoning attempt left him in a foul mood? We are unsure.
However, we encourage Mr. Pinko to examine the situation in an even-handed fashion, before smiting appropriately.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled agonizing.
*We also note that use of the noun “pants” is in this case discriminatory towards non-bifurcated organisms of various species. We welcome alternative classifications in comments.
*wonders what kind of pants a basket star wears*
Fractal pants, the secrets of which are shared only among the ophiuroids.
We welcome alternative classifications in comments.
Socks?
Sue those libs?
So Bob S. has thrown in with the The American Trial Lawyers Association ?
I expect to see flying cows outside my window any moment now.
~
I need to really ponder the situation. I already went off half-assed half-cocked, but I shall return and ponder some more.
I think you came close to full ass over there. Well done.
I tried to cover P.P.’s ass, but I am no Christo.
~
How does my ass look in orange?
Thanks, MenD. You just made me write 5000 more words of barfwagon. Now everyone is going to hate me. It would take me several hours to construct an actual point-by-point argument as finely nuanced as I would like it to be. And of course I genetically don’t have the ass for that, so I am suing you. Hopefully the Supremes will rule that I have standing, but if it comes to sitting, they will find me only half qualified.
I will happily file an amicus curiae (which is just some dirty-sounding thing) on Pinko Punko’s behalf.
He didn’t know what he was doing, it was all an accident, and furthermore, it’s all YOUR fault.
I rest my case.
~
Filthbot reads the title of this post as “a beef injection”
I think you need to file a dimidium solum.
Don’t worry, PP, flthbot is running around flogging goats.
I guess this is a bad time to ask if anyone would work pro-bono?
Jennifer will.
Eh. I think I’m currently on the Thers side of the debate. But I’ve already spent too much time on it on another blog.
OH NOES!!! I disagreed with Pinko!!!
Oh, all right, I replied. I think this should settle the Somerby / “Monkey Man” controversy once and for all.
If not, we can always take that thread to 1000. As a personal favor to Thers.
I think it is appropriate that smapulator put Mr. Bérubé in the penalty box, although with trepidation I think I go to my execution. Let me see if I can slither out of this, as you know I am a cold Italian pizza.
Also, if you wish to claim the authority of the Supremes, I feel I must counter with precedent.
smapulator put Mr. Bérubé in the penalty box
Now I feel shame. Then I get free.
Pinko you brought the whiskey and fire to that comment thread. that was so sweet.
Pinko’s response was indeed cogent, but if he insists on calling me out on other blogs, I will be forced to take more drastic action. My attorney is polishing his antlers in preparation.
This bit was great, though:
The instigation of The Good Professor, though, will not win you any friends.
I did feel like pointing out at Thers’ place, but will point out here instead, because if it is a half assed idea it will be welcomed rather than savaged like a goat at a dingo convention, that Hunter S Thompson and HL Mencken BOTH managed to be substantive, serious, as well as adding “you giant fucking asshole” where necessary.
So it can be done.
Not saying Somerby is HST, but hey, we’re all human, we all fall short of our ideals, but there’s nothing wrong with striving….
I thought it was a good discussion over there. There are two individuals who were trying to bait someone but someone didn’t let them.
Of course I felt like Jenna from 30 Rock as the hill-witch just word barfing. I wish I could dance around something obliquely while silently eviscerating my adversaries, but then if I did, my title would be Professor of Dangeral Studies. I guess it comes down to the fact that the pile on Bob would be fine if he got credit for his good points, which he doesn’t.
The Howler is NOT the same everyday, nor has it been a broken record for the last five years. Has Sadly, No been a broken record? Has Atrios been a broken record with his daily wankers that commit eerily similar crimes as the days before? Bob sees a broken system and he sees new meat being fed into the sausage grinder. Where do the chumps at TNR come from? They seem so young and they seem so the same.
The biggest fallacious argument against Bob is that he’s boring, when all he does is cross-reference. If serial cobag commits a new crime, Bob shows the new crime and then shows that the crime fits a pattern. I mean he seems “one note” about media malfeasance, but doesn’t Greenwald seem one-note about something as quaint as civil liberties?
He’s also been pretty awesome in illustrating how the entire genre of education reporting is totally and completely made up. Possible similar to our pre-Iraq reporting, and our Bush v. Gore reporting, and a giant chunk of our Obama v. Clinton reporting. Since most handy bloggers, except maybe Greg Sargent, don’t ever even pick up the phone and ask any questions, they just speculate, I really like Bob showing the gaping holes in various posts/assertions on a daily basis.
I agree with much of the Professor’s critique, save maybe the Lieberman bit. Lieberman likely is much more insane now due to 9/11. He has always been a little bit of a cobag, but I guess I’d like to know how the conventional wisdom and constant media bullshit affected the Veep choice for that election. It is hard to isolate that poor decision from the rest of the crap going on at the time.
Somerby’s work on education reporting is awesome.
And depressing. Very, very depressing.
I have had a drink now.
I agree that the Lieberman selection was a sop to the righties and ‘moderates’ and see where that gets you.
Fish has turned into a fishdick.
Posted by: ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© | March 06, 2009 at 01:31 AM
So THAT’S why I felt like cr@p all day at work today.
Dammit!
~
Pinko @ 1:51: To answer your three third paragraph questions, yes, yes, and big, stupid pods.
Like the Spinal Tap Rock and Roll Creation set. That’s about right.
Filthbot reads the title of this post as “a beef injection”
By which you mean your own inner-filthbot… I notice you come up with the filthbot responses before almost anyone else.
Ahem.
~
That is not the same Jennifer. Most of these people know that.
I didn’t!
But now I do.
~
I agree with much of the Professor’s critique, save maybe the Lieberman bit. Lieberman likely is much more insane now due to 9/11. He has always been a little bit of a cobag, but I guess I’d like to know how the conventional wisdom and constant media bullshit affected the Veep choice for that election. It is hard to isolate that poor decision from the rest of the crap going on at the time.
Thanks! Let me try to convince you of the Lieberman bit. Thing one, he was always a Sith; the great Ellen Willis called him, with some justice, “a Christian rightist in Jewish drag.” Thing two, Gore chose him in order to inoculate himself from the Monica fallout — at the urging of (are you sitting down?) his other Harvard roommate, Marty Peretz. So the choice of Holy Joe had everything to do with the rest of the crap going on at the time — which Gore totally bought into. And I say this as someone who applied industrial-strength clamps to his nose and voted Dem anyway, on the grounds that Bush was going to be far far worse than anyone imagined, and that the other veep selection was the tipoff. Really.
Anyway, sorry to join in on the dogpile. I should’ve given Somerby his due before remarking that the Benen swipe was kinda nutty. Because Somerby’s done a lot of indispensable work over the years–
Dogpiles are no fun unless people join, Perfessor B.
P.S. I submitted “sith” and “lieberman” to the Google.
Result.
~
It is unbelievable that I had not known about the Peretz angle until now. Seriously. My world is upside down and I’m seeing stars. And I want to barf.
I’ll agree with Dr Dangeral in the last comment, to a degree.
Look, PP in my comments drew my attention to the BSom column where Bob went after Atrios with words like “Massa.” I’d actually missed that. But, that I will venture is not a bit beyond the pale — it’s a lot beyond the pale! Somerby called Atrios a *slave owner* because Atrios said something incorrect about the number of Republicans on Sunday talk shows. Wha….? A slave owner?
I really meant no dogpile on anyone. I found the Somerby column I objected to via Talk Left via Memeorandum. And I saw problems with that column, and I think still I’m right that Somerby comes across badly there. And I said so.
I respect what Somerby has done over the years. But, yeah, I think he’s been a dick about some stuff also. For no good reason, either. “Massa”? That’s crazy.
If I could edit Somerby I would. He shoots himself in the foot or some would say the face sometimes. For what it’s worth, Somerby was right to point out Atrios being lazy (see my comments in the Eschaton thread). Atrios, likely because he always gets prickly when he is criticized just ignored it- but I also give him the tiniest possibility of being subtle instead of lazy. Somerby had a point in that a bunch of commenters just went with the post without thinking at all (acting like the porverbial rubes). The Massa bit was fucking terrible I certainly agree, but I think it was terrible because it distracted from his main point and he could have easily gone elsewhere for hyperbole that would be less jarring. Additionally, it seems that Bob said he wrote a Howler on the topic and deleted it because he was too rude or incivil that day- now I don’t know if that Howler was ever posted or not, so I can’t say what its contents were.
The backstory is you can just watch Bob be unable to keep his shit together on Atrios and JMM, which I think he has on Atrios because Bob just feels like he’s being ignored.
There is probably additional backstory that I don’t know about and I think it drives the unfortunate over the top behavior. “Massa” was beyond the pale as you say, but ignoring the word, the “tribal” behavior of commenters just following Atrios’ lead was pretty scary. Atrios could have posted that up is down, and a good chunk of the people might have taken his lead. Now, to a commenter’s credit, one person was “WTF?”
Somerby v. Atrios goes way back of course, perhaps to the mysts of time, but I’ll just mention one incident. Bob was right to point out the blogosphere’s bet-hedging on the first Obama-McCain debate. Watching the debate and following the internet in real time gave that very distinct impression. Of course the debate was a little bit weird but the searching for a consensus opinion on who won was like watching people search for a plot for their novel- JMM being the worst, with Atrios being cryptic and likely away from his blog. The point was he was being pretty non-committal. Somerby called out this behavior. A. then mentioned a comment from Mrs. A that of was never posted, Somerby made a remark to the effect that Mrs. A’s opinion was never in evidence in real time or joking that A. was hiding behind Mrs. A (Atrios had never posted any opinion in real time), and then Mr. A chose the path of deep offense that Somerby was either calling him a liar or dragging his wife into it. The emotion of being offended allowed the point to be dodged. It is the usual game in these arguments. Everybody is just emotional enough that someone will say something stupid (of course they need to be called on it) but it is also important not to use that wedge of stupid to dodge what could be substantive points. What I mean to say is that I certainly believe Atrios was just being lazy and that his behavior just happened to fit exactly with many others behavior, so he should have just taken the criticism because sometimes the appearance of “impropriety” is sometimes what matters. It seemed nobody had the guts to say “I honestly couldn’t tell who won the debate when watching it, but the polls say this and I can understand and now agree with X, Y, Z.” Instead, lots of people really seemed to hedge the night of the debate and miraculously their opinions coalesced into a conventional wisdom the next morning. Those opinions didn’t come about in a vacuum, and it appeared everyone was waiting to see what everyone else was thinking- because nobody wanted to be wrong or miss the boat. I thought it was pretty disturbing at the time.
Another point that maybe is tangential but is part of the fabric of the idea that their does seem to be a club or a tribe amongst the liberal web- when John Aravosis says totally ridiculous, stupid stuff, he gets called out by lots of the littler or medium people on the web, but never the big boys- leading one to believe it’s a big club. I’m sure some people make their thoughts known on Town House, but that’s neither here nor there is it?
Anyhow, thanks for the discussion. I like being able to talk about stuff without everybody just screaming at each other.
Also, Thers you missed our Ann Althouse’s Twitter Feed is so boring thread.
I thought Somerby’s posts on the reaction to that Obama-McCain debate were way off the mark. I didn’t even think he was fair to Joe Klein, and I agree that Klein is about is about as hacky as they come. It was examining those posts of his that led me to the conclusions in my own post from a couple of days ago.
He has this thing about “group narratives” which as far as I can tell he sees as a sickness of our media courtiers, when it’s actually just how human minds work. It’s his treatment of narrative thinking as an affliction of other people that could never apply to him that bothers me. And is what makes me dubious about his willingness to acknowledge the conclusions of social psychology and neuroscience.
This is the quote that really got me:
But then, this is a pattern we’ve now observed for a good many years. It surprised us when we first encountered it—when we first saw mainstream journalists reinventing their real reactions to get in line with emerging Group Narratives. We had reached a rather late point in life before we ever so much as dreamed that any real people behaved this way; in the case of the insider press corps, we didn’t know that mainstream journalists invent bogus stories, then agree to pretend that they’re true. But as we’ve learned in the past ten years, people behave this way all the time! And we’ve learned something else in the past few years: The gruesome habits of mainstream journalists are attractive to “liberals” too.
He seemingly can’t imagine that anyone who is committed to reason as he defines it (i.e. a “real liberal”) would engage in narrative thinking like this and thus treats it as pathology rather than an ordinary element of human reasoning.
This kind of thinking is disgusting in our media not because media figures do it — everybody does it — but because one of the purposes of media in a Democracy is to help people sort through the competing narratives, and thus media figures who adopt any passing narrative without betraying the slightest indication that they know they are doing so, who make no attempt to sort the narratives they are hearing from the narratives they create in order to report effectively from the narratives they are personally part of, are generally worse than useless. (And there is a big difference between what might be expected from someone who blogs for their own purposes — which further depends on how they present themselves — than someone who is paid to be the face or voice of a media or political organization and thus are agents of its reputation.)
Somerby’s posts about that debate largely came across to me as him wedding the facts to his own narratives about media figures, not as any kind of meaningful assessment of what might be going on in his targets’ posts.
I’m not convinced here. Yes, perhaps he was wedding responses to this election’s debates to the framework of the Bush-Gore debates- where everybody thought one way while watching, and then some people now claim to remember things differently even though they are on record, or they don’t even remember the debates as they happened and make claims contrary to fact. This was a major part of the 2000 election where I felt I experienced the dissonance between the media coverage and subsequent spin and what I saw with my own eyes in real time. In 2000 the tribal narratives were contrary to fact.
As for this election’s debates, I was following the online pundits specifically attuned to the hysteria running up to the election- the constant “Obama needs to do X so he doesn’t blow it”- “Obama is letting the narrative be controlled by other people- he needs to rip Bush’s head off and attack, attack, attack”- everybody wanted to be a backseat driver, and I personally felt like people were subjugating their gut instincts to the prevailing narratives of the time- as a scientist I call this “being in love with one’s model.” It seemed to me that many of our budding pundits wanted first and foremost to be perceived as “right” and we willing to wait out their views until the tribal narrative revealed itself. I thought the first debate was weird. I truly felt like nobody wanted to say that Obama really scored- not in individual debate points, but in overall perception. I remain convinced that all the “now that I’ve slept on it, I think this” comments were covers, and were a little deceptive. I think the honest response would have been “I couldn’t quite tell last night, but reading many other people’s takes, and looking at the polls, it appears that Obama performed thusly, and these perceptions X,Y were key to the debate audience.” The difference in 2008 through the primaries, the tribal narratives were hyperbolic and hysterical, and during the debates were opportunistic and/or careerist. I may not be explaining myself well, but I do think there are definite distinctions between 2000 and 2008 and that Bob may be falsely equating them, but I think stuff happened in 2008 that was beyond a group coming to a consensus (I know this is how people think and groups work). However, this of course can be a dangerous process because once the eyewitness testimony of the whole group is suspect, then we are through the looking glass as it were.
I wasn’t necessarily saying that there was nothing to criticize about how people presented their takes on the debate, just that none of Somerby’s assessments seemed fair to the target (and that his take on narratives and thinking seems mighty dodgy).
There is a distinction that seems missing from this whole conversation — IIRC Somerby generally elides it in his debate posts — and that is between any given commentator’s personal reaction to the debate, and that commentator’s assessment of the way the debate played overall.
How much of the “wait and see” aspect of some of these posts is precisely because the person is trying to get a sense of the different reactions that are out there before giving an opinion on the effect of the debate? Without at least some acknowledgment that there are two separate processes going on here, one of which (personal reactions) is likely to be paramount during a live blog and the other of which (assessment of effect) will likely move to the fore in post-debate reflection (in different ways and at different rates for different people), the appearance is that the conclusion that people are being deceptive may be being reached by comparing apples and oranges.
speaking of AA’s twitter feed. This is the best recent entry:
it is a link TO HER BLOG.
dear dog.
p-
My feelings on the debates and the formation of the narratives were that I felt there was either conscious or unconscious careerism at play, and given the disconnect between admitting to a personal reaction and then later adopting group narrative as ones personal reaction (it would be fine if the cards were on the table)- it seems the elision by the reactees and not Somerby is the problem for him. The black box nature of the responses, or the appearance of impropriety makes it seem to him that it could formally be the same as during the 2000 debates. More later, I guess. I have to do something actuall important!
I think AA misspelled American Idle.
PP-
I had meant to say something in my previous comment about your concept that these commentators should have been more straightforward. Your version of transparency seems like a fairly appealing ideal. Though I wonder how well it meshes with any of the personalities involved.
It’s not clear where this discussion goes from here unless we actually get into analyzing the debate posts. At the time, I found Somerby’s analyses off-base, and, in my own analysis, found little deception or hedging of the kind you or he are seeing.
In the clearest case, the posts by Atrios which poached Somerby’s dander and for which he provided his narrative of rube-running struck me as random, short-attention-span blurts, not the stuff of deception and careerism. Can you square Somerby’s take on Atrios with Atrios’s basic laziness? “Running rubes” implies active manipulation to me, and I don’t see that in Atrios’s posts. AFAICT, at best, Somerby is rhetorically misleading, and more likely engaged in over-attribution of conscious motive.
Kathleen: this may amuse you.
MenD, you gotta give some warning. You could hurt someone…
ATTENTION ALL BULLSIES:
VISIT CHROME BEACH AND VOTE FOR LILEKS. MAKE MEN-D READ LILEKS EVERY WEEK. HE MUST SUFFER FOR HIS ART
I knew it!! It was all a plot!