Bane rants, quietly:
I note that some of his commenters bring the manners prevalent in Vox’s sandbox to mine, and it scrapes my last nerve raw, some. For the most part, ya’ll settle down, and I appreciate that. This is not a debating arena, parliamentary and shouting.
I prefer a library setting, with small groups off discussing a mutual project in low tones.I suspect Vox not only tolerates it, but encourages, believing somehow that he is whetting his sharp mind against their dull stone. But let me tell you, fine steel is ruined by a cheap whetstone.
I scroll down his various discussions lately, and sometimes dip my toe in, and I am faced with such a babbling crowd of frantic-eyed, semi-literate, unmedicated ADD children, that I have to go off somewhere quiet and rub my temples and calm my twitching trigger finger.
I’m actually very much in agreement with Bane’s opinion and I wouldn’t blame anyone who gets tired of the write-response-rinse-repeat cycle that invariably follows every controversial column. And while I was a little disappointed at first that so few liberals, and to a lesser extent, Republican supporters of the current administration, are so uninterested in reasonable, substantive and civil debate, I got over it.
Those are the sort of conversations I have with my liberal and socialist friends over a bottle or two of wine, not as often as I’d like, but often enough to me to realize that it’s primarily the medium that inspires these insult-focused critiques, although I suspect that the age of the critics also has something to do with it. I don’t think its an accident that the only similarly uncivil discourse takes place at the college level; most of these knee-jerk reactions appear to come from college students who combine cluelessness with the certainty that comes from a lack of real-world experience.
So, while I would prefer if people could hold off on the wild insult-hurling for at least the first round or two, that’s just not possible due to the reason many of the non-regulars come here in the first place. The people angrily blowing their stack this week are not the same people who were doing so three months ago, and neither group are the same as those doing it last year. It’s only the identical way they behave when they show up that makes one feel that sense of deja vu.
But different blogs serve different purposes. This blog started out primarily as a means of interacting with my readers, friendly and unfriendly, and allows me to respond once to twenty very similar emails. And while I’m under no illusion that sparring with people who are foolish enough to inform me what I was thinking when I wrote something – interesting logic there – is going to sharpen my mind, I do enjoy clashing with people like Res, the OC, Scintan, Franger and even Cedarford.
For example, Cedarford will likely never convince me that security is more important than liberty, or vice-versa, but the mere fact that I know he will be on any mistake or logical error related to his areas of interest prevents me from getting lazy when I write about the subject. The same holds true of many of the regulars here with regards to their areas of particular interest.
The one thing I would encourage regulars to do, however, is to hold your fire with regards to the one-liners and throwaway insults when the critics come by, even if you rightly suspect they’re drive-bys. Unless you’re a Bane-class flamethrower – and very few people are – all it does is sidetrack more interesting discussions and allows the critic to evade being pinned down and dissected.
Remember, a good intellectual vivisection is far more amusing and educational than a pedestrian name-calling.