Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Nine Days in July: Nuclear Diplomacy
in the Conservative Blogosphere

While I was trying to get ready to make a reporting trip to D.C. today, I made the mistake of checking my e-mail, thereby discovering to my horror that Donald Douglas has somehow pushed things to a full-blown DefCon2 alert.

The details are irrelevant, to those unaware and uninvolved. With all the humor I could muster, I've tried to broker peace. Now, however, the pilots have been scrambled, the jets are fueled and fully armed, and if a stand-down order is not issued soon, I cannot be responsible for the thermonuclear consequences. What I wrote in the comments at Cassandra's is, I hope, all that remains to be said:
This entire "Erin Andrews nude" episode is like one of those wacky hypotheticals that a college sophomore proposes in a dorm-room debate, after about the third or fourth bong hit: A bizarre or possibly even nightmarish scenario that is amusing to contemplate simply because it's never going to happen.
Except this time, it actually did.
As I've said offline, this is one of those things that bloggers discuss over beers for years to come. If blogger-over-beer were the Oxford Union, the debate proposition would sometimes have to be: "Resolved: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?"
It appears Erin Andrews was Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Professor Douglas was Gavrilo Princip. There may yet be peace, but we stand on the brink of Armaggedon.

7 comments:

  1. A response from a gentleman:

    http://www.ordinary-gentlemen.com/2009/07/youre-surprised/

    ReplyDelete
  2. Here's an idea to bring about peace...

    Everyone, including you, with the least smidgen of respect for women stop posting semi- or full-blown porn pics, along with this not posting links to them or in any fashion use them, in order to get more hits on your blogs.

    That should solve things, methinks.

    ReplyDelete
  3. @Jerry,
    If peace was that easy, I'd not only blow off any babe linking, but go back and blow away all the existing posts.
    I am as serious as lung cancer on this one.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I would just let the big brouhaha die. Just drop it. There are no winners here. Stand down.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I"m with Stogie. Back in my Usenet days we had a saying, "Don't feed the trolls". There is also this corollary via Robert Heinlein - "Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it annoys the pig."

    ReplyDelete
  6. "Stand down"!? The Rule 4 blogging was just starting to get good!

    ReplyDelete
  7. @Jerry Agreed.

    @smitty1e It might not be enough. But it would be a step in the right direction.

    I’ve been reading this journal for a while, and to be honest, I’ve never particularly cared for Rule 5. But I dismissed it as a harmless (if irritating) foible. And then Mr. Douglas posted the video of Erin Andrew.

    What he doesn’t seem to understand is that filming that video was a form of sexual assault. It was, in fact, a crime. When he posted it, he was explicitly hoping to benefit from that crime. He was saying that his right to increased traffic, and his readers’ right to look at naked women, were more important than Ms. Andrew’s right to say no.

    The quotation in your header says, “One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up.” Is that what you believe to be the truth?

    ReplyDelete