Good lord do I agree with this article. I started leaving comments on a conversative blog (already a bad idea, with me being a liberal and all). At first, I was leaving angry comments, and then -- a moment of epiphany! -- I realized that I was being, you know, a dick. I made pledge to myself to never again leave an angry comment on Salon, Slate, etc., etc... On the conversative blog-site, I apologized and tried leaving polite comments. These got a certain percentage of nasty comments, no matter what I wrote. I started leaving comments discussing my (fairly obvious) revelation that if online conversations were to have any merit -- or future -- we all needed to start being nicer to one another. This got a certain percentage of nasty comments, no matter what I wrote.

I stopped leaving comments on the blog.

I guess a certain percentage of people in the blogosphere just like getting in fights. And it takes a serious effort of will not to get involved in fights with them. One guy -- while I was leaving longer and longer comments calling for internet civility -- left me progressively ruder responses, until I called him a dick. And once I fell into this (obvious) trap, he was then able to write, "Oh, look who the real a**shole is! The guy who's calling for civility just wants to fight! Dude, you're the real jerk! Blah de blah bloo."

It's hard. You have to train yourself not to respond, and by doing this, you leave yourself wide-open. It reminds me of when political candidates make a pledge to go "all positive" with their ads. ...What happens? The other side just runs attack ad after attack ad until the poor bastard finally crumbles and respondes. ...And what then? The other said says, "Oh look! 'Mr. Positive Campaign' guy is the real a**shole here."

I don't know if I have a real point here, beyond "it's hard," but man, is it hard. It takes a sense of humor, a sense of empathy, stoicism, and possibly the occasional foray into saying to some rude commenter, "You're just such a hopeless dick that I will never reply to anything you write. So go ahead; knock yourself out."

I guess. ...Or is there another way?

Here's the link to my blog where I vaguely discuss this. I leave you the link because I'm annoying like that:

http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/nervevideo.aspx?id=144e15079#15079

cheers,

Oliver

Gosh, Dana Runs, I didn't know that we could use this space to plug our important, important blogs. Here's mine:

http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/nervevideo.aspx?blogid=144

And Dana, reading your stuff, the following quote can only come to mind: "The world is made for people who aren't cursed with self-awareness." (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bull_Durham) Don't worry kid, full speed ahead! Just keep on insulting others and never questioning your own beliefs. You're gonna do just fine!

--om

Anonymous said--

"Your essay struck me as a fairly weak rebuttal of Aravosis' argument, and your tone of condescension towards him certainly didn't help. You conveniently ignored the pragmatic thrust at the heart of what he said, which was that the passage of non-inclusive amendment is far better than a complete failure. You also failed to address the more general point that he made about why the right has been so much more successful than the left in getting their policies passed because they're willing to take their victory in small increments. In fact, I would go so far as to say that your ideology falls squarely into a toxic category that Aravosis was alluding to when he said that liberals tended to be happy with 'noble failure'."

***

I agree. Totally. Aravosis managed to write a calm, even-handed, even somewhat apologetic article whose main point was the frequent inability of us liberals to compromise in the short term. Ms. Strker, on the other hands, seems mainly in a race with herself to see how many snarky phrases she can pile into a single paragraph.

It may be fun to write academic faux-tough-speak like:

"In Aravosis' homocentric cosmology, men may not be from Mars, nor women from Venus, but transgender people are definitely from Pluto..."

or

"[Arvosis is]an ex-Republican, former congressional aide, Georgetown-educated, inside-the-Beltway lawyer who studied under Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and who has spent the past decade working his political connections in order to hold corporate America's feet to the fire on gay rights... Puh. Leeze. John Aravosis is in the nosebleed section of the social hierarchy; if he gets any higher up the food chain he should be issued an oxygen mask."

Whoo! Snarky!

But there's a word for this kind of rhetorical technique; it's called an ad hominem attack. Cicero explained what this was two thousand years ago: it's when -- instead of responding to your opponents argument -- you belittle him as a person, thereby muddying the waters.

It must be fun for Ms. Stryker to take quotes out of context and write sarcastic little pithy things about how he's a rich jerk (or something). But it sure don't have much to do with Aravosis's original article, which open-endedly discussed the need of the left to learn the value of short-term compromise.

On the plus side, Ms. Stryker is well on her way to an exciting career as the transgendered Bill O'Reilly. So, um, congrats.

--om

So many typos in my previous comment; so lame.

--om