The sadism of Patrick Frey

STRONG LANGUAGE WARNING:

On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 1:53 AM, Patterico wrote:
But hey, if it will toss his ass off the Internet, maybe I’ll do it. . . .
Maybe I’ll dribble it out over a couple of weeks. . . .
This is going to last a WHILE.
Oh -- and I know a few people too. I’ll be telling them what a fucking psycho he is. He was going to write a book? Good luck.

That was in March, you see, that Frey was planning to drive Jeff Goldstein off the Internet, and endeavoring to prevent Goldstein from publishing a book. All because Goldstein took issue with Frey's criticism of Rush Limbaugh. Now, nearly nine months later, the vendetta against Goldstein continues.

Just because you're not paranoid doesn't mean people aren't actually out to get you.

A friendly note to James Wolcott

Jeff Goldstein could kill you with his bare hands. And probably should, but I doubt he will. However, it would be unfortunate if I were to log on one day and see this top headline at Memeorandum:

MANHUNT FOR GOLDSTEIN
Police Seek Blogger in Columnist's
Brutal Dismemberment Slaying

Don't hate the player, hate the game. The viciousness of online discourse has been pondered from many perspectives, but it really comes down to the fact that people think they can say anything they want and never get their asses kicked for it.

Remember the Sparkman case? Sully was wetting his pants over "Southern populist terrorism" and Rick Ungar was screaming "Send the Body to Glenn Beck." In that atmosphere of fear-mongering pundit panic, I decided one Saturday night to try to do some actual reporting and, after a couple of calls, managed to get a law-enforcement official in Kentucky on the phone:

"You'd be surprised what some of these morons write on the Internet . . . that they wouldn't say to somebody's face," the official said in a brief telephone interview.

Exactly. I guarantee that under no circumstances would you, James Wolcott, taunt Jeff to his face. But you have no compunction about sitting there at your computer, on Conde Nast's dime, making fun of a guy you've never met and whom most of your readers never heard of.

Pretty, Popular and Vicious
This "Mean Girls" vibe is an unexpected consequence of online discourse. When I was a kid in school, I used to marvel at the way girls were always doing that evil gossip-clique thing: "You can't be her friend because she said such-and-such to so-and-so and I hate her."

Girl culture is so much more vicious than boy culture because boys are naturally prone to settle matters with their fists. The biggest boy in third grade may be an obnoxious jerk, but his superior potential for violence means that other boys are faced with a choice:

• Stay out of his way;
• Try to be his friend; or
• Form an alliance with other pipsqueaks so that if the big kid gets mad at you, he'll have to fight more than one of you.

Because girls don't routinely risk violence in their conflicts, their viciousness toward each other is unrestrained, and the clique mentality reigns in girl culture -- back-biting gossip, secret rivalries and all the rest.

Girl culture can also be described as the "culture of niceness," because popularity among girls is so largely a function of who is superficially "nice," in terms of appearance and comportment. This is why girls are so keen on fashion and grooming, whereas boys don't care about that crap. If you score the winning touchdown, nobody cares about your hairstyle.

Mean Girls in the Intelligentsia
Now, to bring this back to the blogosphere, you see an extreme example of a problem that is ubiquitous in intellectual life and more generally in "civilized" white-collar environments, where physical violence is considered an impossibility.

When a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation gets upset with a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, the one outcome that can be ruled out in advance is that the Heritage guy will jump in his car, drive over to Cato, storm into the office of his antagonist and invite him out to the parking lot to settle their argument like men.

This is all for the good except that, absent the possibility of an occasional ass-kicking, denizens of the think-tank world start behaving like girls on the third-grade playground, constantly backstabbing each other and forming snobby little cliques.

Steiner's Law -- "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" -- expresses the essential bogusness of virtual discourse, where a flame-war between rival bloggers passes for a Titanic Struggle for the Soul of America, even though it's merely a collection of words posted online and read by a few thousand people in a nation of 300 million.

People don't like to be insulted and, in a real-world setting, civilized people refrain from insulting others directly -- especially if the person they're insulting is someone who might kick their ass. In the real world, Jeff Goldstein is not accustomed to being insulted and if you, James Wolcott, had ever met Goldstein, you sure as hell wouldn't be taunting him with lyrics from a Village People song.

It's extremely unlikely that Goldstein will show up on your doorstep, brandishing a blood-spattered arm -- torn from the corpse of a California Jew-hater, prior to driving cross-country to confront you -- and bellowing in murderous rage: "Wolcott, you cowardly bastard, come out here and meet your doom, or I'll kick down your door!"

Extremely unlikely, I say. But crazier things have happened.

UPDATE: Moe Lane's Quote of the Day. Moe is an easygoing, mild-mannered guy. Most people don't realize that Moe's day job is ninja warrior.

Meanwhile, one of the glories of the post-racial Obama Age is that it's once again safe for guys named "Schultz" to suggest violence against guys named "Lieberman":

What is the feeling towards Joe Lieberman? I mean how do you, you know, go into a room without punching the guy out after what he’s done to the progressive movement in this country?

Ed Schultz is speaking on behalf of the progressive movement, so he can't be held responsible if somebody actually does a beatdown on the Jew. I'm sure Joe will be deeply moved when he and Hadassah get a Happy Hannukah card from their progressive friends at MSNBC.

UPDATE II: Little Miss Attila is upset that I haven't linked her. Donald Douglas at American Power links with some vintage punk rock, and Jimmie Bise at Sundries Shack also links (but without punk rock).

A woman has the right to change her mind

"I’ve changed my mind. I’ve decided that you can prove a negative, and that Stacy must now prove he is free of racism. Can’t they do that with an MRI these days?"
-- Little Miss Attila

What a zany cut-up, that one. More madcap misadventures in miscegenation!

True fact: One day in the newroom of the Rome (Ga.) News-Tribune, I was making fun of something -- I forget what -- and with an expression of mock horror used the word "miscegenation."

One of our reporters, Marla Edwards (who subsequently went to work at CNN's Web site) looked at me and said, "Wow, I've never heard anybody say that word out loud before."

The word has an interesting etymology, evidently having been coined (from Latin roots) in 1864 as the title of a pamphlet distributed by New York Democrats, who accused the Republican Party of promoting miscegenation. True fact.

And here's another true fact: "Racism" is of 20th-century French origin. (Unlike "collaboration," which the French did not invent, but merely perfected.)

One of the basic assumptions made when somebody goes to accuse a Southerner of racism is that the accused is an ignoramus, to whom the accuser is so intellectually superior that the ensuing argument is going to be a slam-dunk victory for the accuser.

Like I ain't been around this track a time or two, y'see? If anyone ever wants to schedule a panel discussion about stereotypes, just give me a holler. I've been stereotyped from birth.

Since we're dabbling in a bit of linguistics, semantics and other elements of forensic rhetoric here, y'all go take a gander at what Jeff Goldstein has to say in this matter.

(And don't let Attila fool you, boys. You know who she'd rather have beers with.)

Jeff Goldstein gets to the nub of it

Those Jooooozz, they're like that, you know:

The question is, why? Is it to "out" "racists" who may damage conservatism at large by dint of their being attached to the movement publicly? . . .
Finally, are there other motivations at play here? — a wish, for instance, to preen unsullied amid the harsh spotlight of political correctness at the expense of forever closing down legitimate areas of inquiry and the free exchange of ideas.

You can read the rest. Like I said a few posts ago, I sided with Goldstein in his debate with Patterico about Rush Limbaugh's "I hope he fails" comment, and fear that Patterico's engagement with me might be the result of smoldering embers of a long-held grudge. That is (we hope) irrelevant to the present discourse, but it does show how what Hollywood calls the "back story" can come into play in such discussions.

What sometimes occurs is a basic problem of organizational dynamics, where personal ambition and personal grievances are externalized as arguments about something else -- anything else. People don't want to admit to being envious or insecure, or to talk about their own fears and doubts, so instead they find someone to scapegoat.

This kind of scapegoating attack is dishonest, because it's not about what the attacker says it's about. Andrew Sullivan's wild obstetric speculations about Trig Palin are an example of this. Any rational observer -- and Sarah Palin's Uterus is admirably reasonable -- can see that Sully is actually suffering from borderline personality disorder, and all his demands for an investigation of the evidence are merely the externalization of his own underlying psychopathology.

Goldstein and Patterico might each accuse the other of scapegoating, each claiming that his opponent's arguments about Rush Limbaugh weren't actually about Rush Limbaugh. I am here to mediate their unfortunate dispute, because it is my heartfelt desire that all men should live in the harmony of universal brotherhood and . . .

What the hell? No, scratch that universal brotherhood crap. Patterico sucks, Goldstein is inarguably Da Man, and you can cue the soundtrack from the rumble scene in West Side Story, baby.

When you're a Jet,
You're a Jet all the way,
From your first cigarette
'Til your last dyin' day.

That's how I roll. If Patterico wants a rumble, we'll give him a rumble, even if it's just me and Goldstein against the whole damned blogosphere.

BTW, I'm not making any accusations or anything, but the first sign that Charles Johnson was going nuts was when he went after Pamela Geller. Patterico's March attack on Jeff Goldstein . . . just a coincidence, I'm sure.