Comments on Was I wacked at HotAir? by CK MacLeod

That's interesting about "HA commenters," since I never used that phrase, either in the main post or in the comments above. Where I happen to refer to "commenters" at all, it's either clearly referring to the problem commenters (MadCon and his fine friends) or being used as a neutral term. (Search the page if you care to check.)

It seems that my offensive behavior exists in MadCon's mind, and, as usual, that's good enough for him.

@ MadisonConservative:
I find your obsession with me and your projections even less interesting now than I found them at HotAir. I take that back. Now that I think about it, it is just a little bit more interesting here than at HotAir, because of what it suggests about his interest. He could have left things, but for some reason feels the need to renew the relationship.

Anyone here who didn't bother to sample the comment threads on the posts I linked, or wasn't following along at HotAir, now has a polished and practiced version of the same comment he felt the need to leave over and over again on post after post. He's even reprised some lines that he seems to be very proud of.

@ strangelet:
Your Palinphobia has always led you to mistake attempts to appreciate Palinism and Palin's strategy objectively for infatuation with la Palin herself. The former is impossible as long as you're stuck on personal politics and ideological-cultural biases, which you have in spades, heck in all four suits jokers incl., for the "WECs" and anti-intellectualists. True Palinistas and those capable of reading between the lines were always aware that I wasn't really on that team.

I moved more explicitly into criticism/opposition in my post faulting her for buddying up with Beck, and in a series of comments/discussions of her failure to come clean on the resignation and how it suited her self-interest. I've just reviewed the extensive discussion under the Beck post - one of our majorer threads - and you were right in the thick of it, especially in the beginning.

I've been back-pocketing a post idea discussed in that thread - what would I rather SP had done with her (now) year post-resignation than what she actually did - not an alternative history, but an alternative way of looking at what's missing without getting diverted into too much social psychoanalysis and personal-cultural spit-wadding. (Tho I find some of that unavoidable and even illuminating, I confess.)

strangelet wrote:

AllahP is smart enough to scope the demographic timer.
he’s makin’ a buck while he can.

I've got nothing to say on the second part, but "demography is destiny" is an old saw, and the basis of a thousand dispensable radicalisms going back to Malthus, and in a way going back much, much further. It always seems obvious in retrospect, but extrapolating forward, and projecting ideologically and politically, is way beyond mortal men and grrrls. However, to the extent that culturally defensive conservatives - i.e., the cultural Right as opposed to evolutionary conservative Right (American Burkean, progressive conservative, etc.) - sense the dangers you speak of, it helps to explain their fierce emotional and unexaminable attachment to the very things that would be endangering them - their separateness and self-superiority. And it may also help explain the "crazed" reaction to the big Ø

@ strangelet:
You seem to have missed the headlines on me and Sarah. I stopped answering her calls months ago, but she just can't stop talking about me as tho we're still a thing.

@ strangelet:
Are you sure you and AP were "friends"? Maybe he just thought you were a potential date.

My view on AP is that positions on two things mainly establish his "conservative" identity and are also the main ideological anchors at HotAir: Islam and Immigration. The rest would just be conventional Republican coalition politics, but hostility toward Muslims and illegal immigrants (or toward any compromises on the subjects) skews the community further to the right, favoring those politically drawn to cultural self-defense out of whatever mixtures of panic, paranoia, apocalypticism, bitter childhood experiences, radicalism, etc.

Even the name "Allahpundit" operates as a blinking neon invitation to anti-Muslim blasphemy and bigotry. (This has always bothered me, incidentally.) As for his attitude on immigration, I see it somewhat as compensation for his "candy-ass RINO" stance and professed atheism. Also, opposition to the comprehensive immigration bill was a major identity formation experience for the rightroots, esp. HotAir, propelled in part by Malkin, but also a big moment for Ace O' Spades, who has much in common with AP.

Ed's a centrist by temperament as well as inclination. He wants to get along with everybody, across a broad coalition and extending to the other side. So the posts of his that draw the most attention are the ones where he diverges from the hard right perspective in favor of more traditional politics. I don't think the HA hardcore will ever forgive him for coming down hard on Palin when she resigned her governorship, for instance.

As for my situation, it was the divergence on the GZ Mosque that brought things to a head - the public back-and-forth had been preceded by the only private argument AP and I had ever conducted. Again, I wasn't kicked out over the "line difference," but the existence of the difference on this emotionally important issue interfered with any residual sympathy - made them less emotionally invested in me, and influenced them to side with the kind of people who, in a word, hate me, including the hard right types who rather than compulsively insult me, would complain bitterly and threaten to leave the site when my posts were promoted to the front page.

The final point touches one other element in the "last e-mail" that I haven't yet mentioned in all of this thrasing. During the clash with the commenters, I had urged them to go somewhere else if they couldn't stay on topic. Ed brought that up and told me not to say that kind of thing (tell people to leave the site - which I don't think I did, really). I don't know that they're highly concerned about site traffic and membership, but it also represented a kind of culturally self-defensive reflex. I understand it, but I'm against playing things safe - "conservatively" - in that sense.

@ fuster:
In the e-mail addressing the deleted comments and my conduct, Ed mentioned among other things that they couldn't review the deleted comments to help them render a judgment on the controversy. In my never-answered reply e-mail I told them where the comments could (of course) be found (on the "Pending" page where "unapproved" e-mails go first before possibly being "Trashed" on the way to, finally, being "Permanently Deleted"). I found out later through the commenters themselves about their victory.

Don't see why any explanation's necessary. Ed had already indicated that they disagreed with how I had exercised my prerogative as moderator of my own thread. As a result of their intervention, HotAir enjoyed the benefit of having a handful of "neener, neener, neener, CK's an arrogant schmuck" comments restored. Beyond that, and the only real effect, was that CK was reprimanded, embarrassed, and demeaned, while MadCon and OhioCoastie were endorsed, vindicated, and raised up (as all right-thinking people of course deem proper).

As for being "too something-and/or-other," my sense of s-a/o-o-ness has grown as I've reflected on the events. Before it could sink in, AP had "called me out," which I took as a possible gesture of respect (I can't really know - he may have thought he was showing me up).

That led to the second Fight Them All Together post. One reason I haven't gone back (other than a minimal comment here or there), is hesitation about disturbing the parting tableau: My "last post," ending with "Peace Be Upon You." A relatively short (for one of my posts) comment thread coda (including a kind of farewell to the commenters encore), and then, finally, a last insult from OhioCoastie (he calls me a "gasbag"). It's like a blog-opera or something.

If AP had responded again - either in a post or via e-mail, or by promoting the post - it would have shown me something. He chose not to show me anything.

narciso wrote:

this is how they rationalize every word and deed first of Communism, and now Salafi and Wahhabis

And that's where you get schizo-paranoid. GR is still rooted enough not to argue that the news sources you name "are on the other side." He makes the argument regarding certain activists or writers, and usually in regard to very narrow issues. "They" is paranoid talk. I interpret the antecedent as "everyone within a maximally broadly defined group in addition to whoever actually deserves to be defamed by the extreme charges I'm making."

Your next move is to characterize this comment of mine into a supposed reprimand of anyone who dares to utter a peep in criticism of Salafism, Wahhabism, or Communism, or media enablers - as though the import of your statement was merely a peep in criticism rather than a blanket indictment on charges of treason.

narciso wrote:

that kind of strikes me as unwarranted,

Was there a particular antecedent to the initial pronoun?

Otherwise, you tempt me to sacrifice the righteousness of my opinions on the altar of payback. I'll just say instead that I thought my criticisms of Ed and AP were quite mild compared to what someone who didn't care about sacrificing the righteousness etc. might say.

Rex Caruthers wrote:

I’m I being unfair here?

No, you're just writing like a demon android Hell-bound freak. And a commie, too.

We treat the "other world" as though it's inferior, but the thing that's supposed to make us superior is the thing we suppress in order to treat them as inferior. It's supposed to be our willingness to see the world without blinkers on, to begin with subjective uncertainty and let the "market" decide, but events force us to enter the market ourselves, submitting our limited subjective certainty against all the others.

Take the "chief export is suicide bombers." First of all, that's false. Ludicrously false - though I'm not supposing you ever believed it. The chief export of the "Islamic world" is very likely petroleum, unless it's Muslims, unless it's Islam. Reasonably or supposedly intelligent and rational people can be found uttering your line, perhaps having forgotten that it was a joke, or reading it without giving it a second thought, because they're on the subjective team in which everything is justified if the team captains and coaches say it advances the ball. That's ideology and polemics. It has no independent truth value. It's merely consistent with the paramount goals of unity in aggression and destruction of the other side. It's only in a schizo-paranoid universe in which reality and its mediations cannot be distinguished from each other, in which symbolic exports are measured by the eye of the beholder, that sentences like "their chief export is suicide bombers" make sense. To be charitable, for a few days or so in September 2001, there was some material truth to it. To be less charitable, why wouldn't the schizo-paranoids on the other side be at least as justified in saying that America's chief exports are bombs, missiles, soldiers, and destabilization (incl. esp. financial "products")?

Morrissey and AP face numerous challenges, among them being a certain distance between their own political outlooks and the ones that dominate in the HotAir community. The community is important, because it's not like the two of them all by themselves, even if they were superduper geniuses, could consistently generate more and better content than FrumForum, Daily Beast, the Corner, the Weekly Standard, and any other site of potential interest to the same people who might drop by HA. Without the community, it's just a two-blogger commentary on the headlines, with annoying coding problems (in Firefox anyway). The community has been shaped in part by factors not entirely under their control, but to the extent it's in their power to cultivate it, I think they've made some wrong moves.

I'm biased, but the way I see it, they were promoting my work, and using it to incite debates, as though they were interested in creating a broader community where intellectual debate was possible, and then, at a moment of decision, they decided to back the yahoos. They sent me a very Hollywood e-mail: Oh we so love your work, let's do lunch... someday. Then embraced the commenters' position - not even answering my e-mail or acknowledging my position, or responding to my concerns on issues that I consider fundamental.

I shouldn't have to tolerate that kind of treatment, while doing the ideological work they should be doing on their community, unpaid. They made a choice.

Do I have to?

@ narciso:
An explicit orthodoxy might actually be preferable to an implicit one, though the problems go well beyond orthodoxy.

Parson Logic T ReFog wrote:

Take a little time and chew on it till it’s cool.

It would be unrealistic to exclude that as a possibility - keep hitting refresh. But I think it would take some things happening that I don't see happening, and some things not happening that I see happening.

For instance, I had originally intended to post THIS post there - but wouldn't it just be taken as an attack? Why isn't the insane guy right - that I don't belong over there (and am worse than Stalin in the nude)? It's not a "general interest political web site" or trying to be one. It's an asylum for conservatives owned by a conservative media syndicate and committed to a keeping things that way. My only reason for being there would be to change their minds about who and what they are against their will.

You visited there and participated. Did you get the impression that I was doing my position more good than "having made my point and bowed out" does?

What, you want me to write the same post all over again?