I dissent. Pantload’s main thesis is that Slate sucks because it’s liberal. The rest is just accusing them of writing in bad faith. Which may very well be true in some cases, but consider the source.

My problem with Slate is that it’s so smarmy.

What’s funny with the anti-contrarian argument is that I remember very well a piece in Slate a few years ago by Jack Shafer arguing against Lewis Lapham on the very same grounds. Pantload’s been cobbling from others, again.

Slate’s not contrarian, really. It’s a bullshit kind of contrarianism, but not the sort that Pantload describes. What Slate does is what TNR does: find a way to state stupid conventional opinion in the most hackneyed way possible. It’s merely the simulacrum of contrarianism.

‘Contrarianness’ ain’t a proper word. It’s contrarianism.

There’s no need to pat JoGo on the head every time he says something semi-sensible. Stopped-clocks, twice a day. But slavishly partisan fools like O’Reilly, Hannity, et al. all make a huge point of their occasional, minor disagreements with the Leader (the Dubai ports deal!) to claim political independence. Don’t cede them any ground. A hack is a hack. They deserve ceaseless mockery and spite, nothing less.

That’s the same Goldberg who said he won’t let inconvenient facts sway him from his careful thoughtout (*snicker*) political positions, is it not?

Side Note: The header is running past the right hand side fields on the screen.
I’m running IE6. Lord knows where the fault lies, I sure as hell don’t.

P.S. This comment window is also stretching to the right.
P.P.S. Bush-Palpatine ’08!
P.P.P.S. That last comment, also runs to the right.

You must learn to control your liberal instinct to forgive or see the good in people. As much as the left’s humanity will save civilization, it will also make it a hell of a lot harder then it has to be. If a winger cannot display reason, mercy, compassion or understanding we should not take it upon ourselves to change their ways. We should elminate them for the good of the gene pool. A huge contradiction I know, but really I think Spock said it best – “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”.

I dissent. Pantload’s main thesis is that Slate sucks because it’s liberal.

OK, yeah, I should have mentioned that. I thought he had a good POINT in his argument, not that his argument was right as a whole.

And yeah, my problem with Slate is that it’s smarmy to the point of not taking ANYTHING seriously. Plus they employ Mickey Kaus.

You must learn to control your liberal instinct to forgive or see the good in people.

This isn’t about seeing the good in people. This is about acknowledging, however fleeting or accidental, a good point from Jonah Goldberg.

You must learn to control your liberal instinct to forgive or see the good in people.

You couldnt be more right.

Billmon made the point that basically David Horowitz et al are Leninists when it comes to debate. And he is right. And so liberals are kind of begging to be punched in the face when giving any benefits of doubt to such assholes. No mercy for them, because they arent about to give it to us.

So the remedy is to be Leninist back. But without lying and being insane. And no, this isnt a “point of view” thing either, in case someone tries to argue that. WINGNUTS are wrong and liars and, more often than not, concentrated evil. Fuck them. So with facts and reason they should be eliminated.*

Think of it as the adversarial system, which works well enough in anglo-saxon jurisprudence: each side tries to destroy the other and in doing so, the exuberance and cut-throatery on both sides sort of cancels each other out, and in theory, the truth wins.

Which it usually does.

*I’ve always disliked Neiwart’s use of this word. It’s perfectly necessary, considering today’s political climate, to want to eliminate one’s political enemies. To mop the floor with them, to thoroughly annihilate their reputation, to expose them forever as frauds and hypocrites and cretins and liars and moral abominations. To render their viewpoint, their ideology NULL.

This is NOT the same as the Hitlerian wingnut tropes of Glennocidal Tendencies & etc., which are properly termed “exterminationist”. This is not the same as wishing to wipe PEOPLE from the earth. I want Jonah Goldberg to live a happy life and believe what he wishes; I want him to enjoy all the proper accoutrements of American citizenship. But Jonah Goldberg as PUNDIT, I want utterly destroyed, I want him to be forever a figure of ridicule and contempt by the most people possible. I seek his annihilation as public-discourse-polluter, as member of the chattering class.

Hence, mockery and invective and condemnation. Though wingnuts can feel no shame, some among their audience can feel it for them. So it should be our goal to humiliate wingnuts like Jonah Goldberg, with the aim that forever in the public’s mind his awful awful beliefs will be flushed down the toilet of history.

Bradroquette —

Do you see what droog is talking about? Gavin’s out, so I’ll try to fix what I can, but I dont see a formatting problem through my screen.

But Jonah Goldberg as PUNDIT, I want utterly destroyed, I want him to be forever a figure of ridicule and contempt by the most people possible. I seek his annihilation as public-discourse-polluter, as member of the chattering class.

Hence, mockery and invective and condemnation. Though wingnuts can feel no shame, some among their audience can feel it for them. So it should be our goal to humiliate wingnuts like Jonah Goldberg, with the aim that forever in the public’s mind his awful awful beliefs will be flushed down the toilet of history.

Please understand that it’s not usually my cup of tea to give Jonah his due. Unlike that nice chap Ezra Klein, I don’t think Jonah is secretly a brilliant policy wonk who needs to be saved from the clutches of NRO in order to develop a free and independent mind. I know that Jonah is hacktacular and that his ideas should be dismissed out of hand.

HOWEVER, I thought in this one instance Jonah captured very well my opinion of why Slate sucks. Now it’s very possible that he cribbed it from someone else- such is his style. But it was one of those situations where I had been thinking earlier in the week how goddamn annoying professional contrarians are- people who like to contradict and trash their supposed allies just to show their own intellectual and moral superiority. And BANG! I wake up early this morning and find that Jonah Goldberg of all people expressed what I was thinking in a Slate piece. Hence, I linked to it.

Does that make sense?

Retardo: droog raises valid issues, but they need to be fixed at the stylesheet level. There’s nothing Gavin (or I) can do, afaik. Stay tuned…

Oh and no, I don’t see what droog is talking about. I will note though that he was late showing up to the Moloko Bar last night.

I have that problem as well… the comment field extends to the right side of the screen… and under the frames to the side. I can’t read what I type under it.

Brad!

You’re missing the point. Jonah is not just an idiot — he’s a meta-idiot.

His whole job is not to make any sense at all. And, as you can see, even that level of consistency is beyond his capabilities.

No worries Brad, we all love you in a straight kind of way. It’s just any sort of affirmation of the wingers is BAD, BAD, BAD. Never turn the other cheek, never blink, never smile (unless you are laying a smackdown).

FYI I also have the same formatting problem – can’t read the headers, and the comment box extends right off the edge of the page…

Martin Wisse stole my comment! Ah, well, here’s a link anyway.

I evaluate the Doughy Pantload on the totality of his work, and in that respect, it’s bad, bad, bad; it has done actual, material harm to public discourse. I had a brief e-mail exchange with him recently (which I will not cite because it would out me) and he has the intellectual maturity of a 13 year-old, on top of being simply out-to-lunch on too many issues. That’s just not forgivable for someone who is around my age.

You must learn to control your liberal instinct to forgive or see the good in people.

Hear hear. I forgive when I see real, material and sustained contrition. Not before.

Foer has written the afterword to the patchy but interesting Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup, pondering what kind of regime best guarantees a World Cup win. In short, democracy wins narrowly over military junta.

And I suspect that Pantload doesn’t like Slate because no-one’s prepared to provide him with tailored one-sentence summaries of all the pieces.

And I suspect that Pantload doesn’t like Slate because no-one’s prepared to provide him with tailored one-sentence summaries of all the pieces.

No kidding- he should really hire Travis G. to work on that 😉

Anyone that hires both Kaus and Hitchens is suspect. The content as a whole has degraded from Michael Kinsley to a cheap imitation of Kinsley.