You point out that people say insanely ridiculous things. And you do it with a good (if pointed) sense of humor.

As far as I’m concerned, that’s the social equivalent of saying to someone “pardon me, but you’ve got a bit of spinach stuck in your teeth”.

Okay, maybe it’s “Pardon me, but you’ve got a bit of spinach stuck in your teeth, Popeye”. But still, the point stands.

Mean really seems to come from the other side of the aisle – like posting fantasies about people you don’t like wanting to have sexual relations with your dog.

Not to say that there isn’t some well-timed snark on the other side of the aisle (just because I’ve never seen it doesn’t mean it isn’t there), but that it just seems like the bulk of the nastiness is.

Honestly, I don’t think it matters. Unless someone is obviously an actor playing an obvious role, how they act when I see them is all I can base my opionion on. It doesn’t matter to me how they treat someone else: if they treat me like shit, I will respond in kind.

This applies even more to the “outrageously funny” pundits like Rush, Coulter, etc. They do not admit to being character actors, and ther never “drop character” in public: they claim to believe the crap they espouse, and they encourage other people to do likewise. So long as they choose to act that way, it is completely irrelevant whether they love fluffy pillows or brake for animals.

If you act like a misogynist, racist, inflammatory asshole, and you *are* a misogynist, racist, inflammatory asshole until you repudiate those actions. I don’t have any way to know whether or not you “really mean it”, and the damage is not lessened one bit if you are “only teasing, jeez!”

Now, I don’t know about you but I am pretty certain in this country we have laws against using trademarked logos and turning a profit without paying out royalties to them.

Would this be considered “war profiteering”?

MJ’s real soulmate is Vincent “Brown Bunny” Gallo.

“The louder he spoke of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons –Emerson

It’s quite possible Goldstein is personally pleasant, and can even be cordial with leftists.

But if a person expresses opinions that are racist, or misogynist, or homophobic, does that make him a racist, misogynist or homophobe in private life also?

I don’t care how many liberals you have tea with, blogging in the service of evil still makes you a bad guy.

Shortly being defined as sometime in the future…say about 10,000 years.

Hm. I was talking about this to Jeff Goldstein yesterday.

He’s actually friends with a lot of folks like Jeralyn at Talk Left, and it’s a long story, but my point was that one of the things we try to do here is to be full-bore nasty only in blogland, while trying to be courteous and nice in private, no matter who we’re dealing with or what differences we might have with them.

I don’t know how that works in terms of being an asshole or some fraction of an asshole, but I’d like to think that it neatly divides ‘public’ from ‘private,’ and that the two can coexist as separate things for separate occasions.

I mean, that leaves out the comparative morals of the left vs. the right in terms both of tactics and policy, which is also a huge thing. Backing an immoral position doesn’t strike me as an acceptably non-asshole use of the power of public speech. But then, when we start talking about moral grounding and the function of rhetoric in the public sphere, it’s probably time to call the doctor, honestly.

This new guy is some smarmy dickhead from Redstate.

His argument was that the personal attacks are unwarranted. Apparently people have made comments about his mother, and called him a dickhead.

But most of the commenters (including some who are apparently in the same circle of friends) have said what you did.

Maybe he is a personable guy, but his internet persona is that of a bigoted and delusional asshole, and people have responded in kind.

Ever since the Coulter fiasco at my school it has become clear to me that all these people are trying to do is bait their opponents with insults so that when they respond in kind they can point to it and say ‘see how mean the liberals are.’

But it also brings up a philosophical point. If I am capable of cultivating and exhibiting the persona of an asshole, doesn’t that make me, at least in part, an asshole myself?

Aristotle says that good nature is the result of repeatedly performing good actions. Is the reverse also true? If day after day I act like a racist conservative jerkoff, then wouldn’t it be legitimate when people said that I was?

I hate that argument. It doesn’t matter if someone’s a “nice guy” in person. If they’re being an asshole in their writing, you have a duty to respond in kind.

One of the commenters remarked that Stalin was also rumoured to be a real hoot at parties, once the vodka started flowing…

Which means that Benny-Ben’s new-fangled weblog with have a comments section for about 13.8 seconds, let’s he get his wittle feewings hurt.