Marginal Utility

by Tom Bozzo

One of the right's knocks on the left blogosphere that I find particularly annoying is the suggestion that comments functions on the major left blogs turns them into seething cauldrons of vitriol and vulgarity.(*) This came up in my recent exchange with Joe Malchow of Dartblog, who said:

I would also advise Tom to take a look at prominent left-wing sites, like Kos or Eschaton, and he'll see blind ideology and pure vulgarity are far more prevalent there than in the rightist blogosphere.

I let this mostly slide with a reference to a recent post in which I said:

Regarding the politics of blog comments, my observation has been that large-readership righty blogs with comment functions are as good at recirculating their own ideas without making them any more palatable to the other side as their lefty counterparts. I would argue that there is a large class of blog comments, common on both sides, that could be freely exchanged between the hemispheres simply by replacing references to the one side's heroes with references to its villains.

Today, Joe posted, under the headline "Clowns to the Left of Me" a MyDD comment that had been picked up on Daily Kos: a bit of piffle about how a simple Democratic strategy is to do the opposite of what Republicans say Democrats should do. I think there's a kernel of truth to this (and that the comment was a little facetious to boot), but what Joe cites is certianly not vulgar.


Anyway, I went to Little Green Footballs (at #4, a "Higher Being" in the TTLB ecosystem), which happens to be just above me in Joe's blogroll, and went scrolling through the comments to a post entitled "The Old Gray Lady Has a Thin Skin." The hot-button topic of the post was Michiko Kakutani's review of Ari Fleisher's memoir. What sort of comments do you think this would attract? Here are a few (all asterisks to bleep bad words are mine):

Aww, the libs are just jealous. I'll bet Ari wrote it without alot of
help either, something the Dems can't do :)

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I think all this is good news. The leftoids continue to be too stupid to
learn from their past mistakes and string of election defeats.

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If the NY Times hates it, then it must be good.

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The MSM continues to show its opposition to freedom simply because
George W. Bush is for it.

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Actually, the LLL's could kill two birds with one stone, they now have
the chance to prove that Evolution, that old, old motheaten "theory" of
how we came to be, is true, if they can prove that Bush is a Chimp.....
I suppose the scientists at the Kennedy-Kerry School of Scientific
Research Related to Evolution and Chimp Rulers are hard at work trying
to figure it out....

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[quoted from earlier comment:] BTW - You might be interested to know
that Frank Zappa was half Arab.......the other half being Italian. [end quote]

That would be the good half...

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[quoted from earlier comment:] We can't
forget that there were over 50 million votes for Kerry, or against
Bush... those voters still read their daily dose of dribble... [end quote]

they need their daily dose that results in dribble. They need their
Thorazine.

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The NYT is so full of pussies.

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Isn't it canuckistan that always points out what a staggering success
Bosnia was still is?

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Translation of review: This sh*tty book gives us leftist wacko's no ammo
to use against the administration...........Awwww too bad, you will have
to create some more false stories ala CBS. Liberals hate doing hard
work....

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Ari was awesome, he had a way of telling the press to eat sh*t, and they
didn't even know they had been had.

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Note to the Times and every piece of sh*t scumbag who works for them:

Stick to being the propaganda wing of Al Qaeda. Its what your good at...

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By the way, TImes:

If you dont think the terrorists pay attention to US media and your glorification of their acts (yes- it is perceived as glory in their eyes) your f***ing retarded. Or evil

A Daily Kos diarist is on this, too.

So to blog pals who might be inclined to pull out the one about nasty lefty commenters, I say cease and desist. Jeremy discovered the Little Boy of link bombing. I'm in the process of perfecting the equivalent of the multistage fission-fusion bomb (or, given a sufficiently prolific link source, the Vorlon Planet Killer) of link status subversion — a joy of working with a Unix-like OS — and think the whole link-exchange-economy-status-ranking thing is a game at best and a pretentious game at worst. So don't think I won't use it!


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(*) If the comments function here should ever descend into virtriol and/or vulgarity, expect ruthless comment moderation.