…almost as much as I love eczema or ringworm. But no matter. I’m watching it for you.
****
This is absolutely despicable. I responded in the comments.
****
Ann has closed comments over there—apparently the “bullies” who “attacked” her with their “uncivil” logic and phallocentric man-facts have “forced” her to close the record to rebuttals. The “spirit of blogging” demands that Ann Althouse be able to criticize without receiving any reply in return. And since those of us who are the objects of her charges can’t take the hint and just fucking accept it, Ann must burn the village to save the country. Just so’s you know she’s doing it keep blogging FREE and INDEPENDENT!
Or is she battling “unprofessionalism” and the presumptuousness of the proles who dare question Her Majesty’s dictums?
Who knows anymore? Althouse is, from what I can tell, incapable of being intellectually honest on this subject. So quick to judge others and ascribe to them base bad faith, so loathe to look inside herself. You can read her original post and my responses over there and judge for yourselves who is the aggressor here. But no amount of post-hoc victim-whining is going to keep my from defending myself or my name.
Anyway, in one of her updates (peppered with sympathetic reader responses) she suggests that Dan Riehl’s piece on the wisdom of researching pre-parade weather conditions (linked here in its entirety in the comments, by the way) offers “a very sharp and constructive criticism” of yesterday’s liveblog, a criticism that was met with—grab on to something now—a response by me! Of course, Ann doesn’t frame it that way. Instead, she says that I “go after” Dan until he “actually rewrites his post to ‘correct the emphasis.’” Poor Dan. So weak. So unable to withstand the force of my rhetorical penis.
Unfortunately for Ann—but not surprisingly—she has her facts wrong again. Dan Riehl emailed me both the text and link to his post. Unsolicited. I responded to him via email and on his site.
He got back to me back to say he’d prefer to discuss this more via email, which we did. Ultimately, he realized that the argument he’d made had little to do with we were hoping to accomplish with yesterday’s liveblog (which was coverage of the coverage—kind of “Beavis and Butthead” watch CBS watch a parade—which is why it was meant to be read live as it happened and as readers watched the parade themselves). My response pointed that out. And Dan changed his mind and altered the thrust of his argument.
You’d think a law professor would respect a good and effective counterargument—particularly one that compels a change to the original premise.
Guess not.
Anyway, in the “spirit of blogging,” I just thought I’d better correct the record. I’d have done it over on Ann’s site—currently the MOST FREE and INDEPENDENT SITE IN THE BLOGOSPHERE—but alas, she’s closed off comments.
For our own good, of course. AND FOR FREEDOM!
****
I will say this, though. At least Althouse puts her own name to her criticisms. Unlike some of the new sites that have sprung up to cash in on the traffic one receives these days for criticizing PJM.
Brave man!
There is no more sure sign that a person’s entertainment career is on the skids, than seeing them “do the parade”.
Question?
Are you a ‘phile or a ‘phobe?
Balloons I mean.
Hey! Just askin’
I enjoyed the parades before they turned into a showcase for the latest top-40 idiots to show off their lip-syncing skills.
A real parade with floats, bands, balloons, etc., is still quite enjoyable, particularly if it happens to occur about six weeks before Easter, and incorporates a lot of gold, green, and purple decorations.
Oh, and breasts.
TW:mind
losing it dealing with the extended family
Question: do you think you’d be able to discern the difference between Michael Moore walking down the street & a Michael Moore balloon? I’m guessing not.
After the fifth pointless bit of chat and the third “Broadway Spectacular” set piece I started cussing at the television – as my son and wife were in the room I had to Mutley-Cuss –
“This isn’ta ratzem-fratzem parade – where are the marching bands? the floats? Why won’t Katie just shut the fu … hel…heck up?
If Christine Applegate isn’t walking the parade route with the cast of Sweet Charity, she should be forced to perform in ‘Married w/Children: The Musical’
Floats, Bands, Big-Ass Balloons.
We may put on Miracle on 34th Street in a bit.
.
The best lip-syncers are always the massed tap-dancers.
Jeff, since your the history buff, did you know that pResident ChimpyMcHalliLincoln made Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863? It was the reality-based reason Wilkes Booth asssassinated him. Wilkes Booth was 6 percent Choctaw and didn’t find it amusing that his dissent was being trampled by cranberry sauce.
If you think about it, Lincoln was the first president to use turkey to distract the population from a war. Talk about manufacturing consent, tasty consent…mmm.
FOX Cable 12:04 PM 11/24/2005; New York: Balloon hits lampost, debris rains down on family, Balloon held without charge under Partiot Act, had converted to Islam while in prison, Michael Moore to make movie, developing…
Baghdad: Troops celebrating Thanksgiving
Jeff,
I have to know—what is the parade’s exit strategy after the attack by the insurgent M&M? As a fourth-rate CITIZEN JOURNALIST, I DEMAND ANSWERS!!!
And was the float inflated with White Phosphorus? Show us the way, Kos!
TW: Tax, as in “We need a balloon safety tax. Think of the children!”
You weren’t even watching the parades. Ann Althouse is gonna be so pissed.
TW: either. As in “I can’t think of anything funny to say about it either.”
I don’t understand – you guys go into chatroom mode and we’re supposed to read it? I know you’re all really important bloggers and all that – but is there an audience for ‘blog-comments-without-the-ability-join-in” these days?
Yes, confused. It’s the law that you read it.
Now don’t just sit there whining—go fetch me some green bean casserole!
BEOTCH!
Confused – If there’s an audience for the Macy’s Day Parade, there’s an audience for anything. And that audience is me.
So, how come everyone else was a monkey?
Sean M  Those weren’t monkeys; they were Manhattanites…
Sean M has a good point.
Were your monkey privileges revoked?
Is this a sign of a schism within Open Pajamas Media?
Come on, let’s hear some dirt.
Here’s the dirt.
“Do you seriously think the live-blogging of the parade was top-notch work?”
Well, it wasn’t as top-notch as a blog post about how it wasn’t top notch, that’s for sure.
I was completely confused. I live in Central Time and was still watching the parade after you all had already stopped “live” blogging and tried to find some sort of place to start and…I basically didn’t get it. Were you all funny when it was happening?
Oh…and I had no idea who Ann Althouse was until you started mentioning her…just thought I’d point that out.
You might have been watching it on NBC, which showed it at 9 AM no matter where you are in the country.
We actually blogged it in real-time—CBS started it at 6 AM on the west coast, 7 AM here in Colorado.
As for Althouse, whether you heard of her or not, she gets 10K hits a day and Glenn links her all the time. That she is implying that we are monsters who laugh at pain troubles me.
If you aren’t interested in this stuff, skip it.
Hm. That’s quite a toxic level of self-righteousness displayed on Althouse’s part.
It must be hard to eat Thanksgiving dinner when everything tastes like bile.
FWIW, I think you do yourself a disservice by responding to the nattering nabobs of negativity.
Althouse has morphed into a troll on anything PJM-related. With all trolls, giving them the attention they crave just encourages more of the same.
Picture her spending Thanksgiving Day reading the live-blogging of a parade on a site she openly despises, hoping to find something to criticize. It’s sad, but pretty obvious what’s going on here. The poor woman has gone mental.
The best thing would be to ignore her, IMHO – you aren’t going to change the mind of someone so single-mindedly determined to drag you through the mud.
What’s with all the self righteous rules-of-blogging commenters all of the sudden? I think every post over at INDC gets a, “That’s not funny! You shouldn’t joke about that!” comment these days.
Althouse is just that guy writ large.
Ann is SO jealouse Jeff. Oh wait is that the bell… OK well I guess I’ll see you after 5th at Gym huh?
GOD it read like being in high school again. You make the point yourself. Without Glenn no one would have ever found her, and now she’s affraid of being left out of the revolution.
It must be hard to eat Thanksgiving dinner when everything tastes like bile.
No, you just have to smother everything with brown gravy.
Sure everything tastes like gravy then, but hey, it’s gravy. That’s still pretty good.
Matt: PJM initially claimed they were going to make blogging serious and palatable to The Man. I think any humorless captains of industry tuning in to see the future of news and getting the PW we all love are going to be confused and possibly angry. A lot like Althouse’s reaction, actually.
Based on the roundtable they just had it looks like they’re going in more of a free-form “do whatcha like” direction. Like blogging, oddly enough. I think it’ll be huge.
Next up: Jeff insists they aren’t editing or censoring the content of member blogs, yet they have a big flashy editorial board. I detect an opportunity for some big cost savings…
TW: “moral”. I’ll leave that to Jeff Gannon.
It’s going to be a sad day if I have to post the image of Goldstein’s corpse being unloaded from his chrome-blinged, bullet-riddled Lincoln Navigator.
A sad day indeed.
Increase the peace, yo.
Before this ends in blood.
Elmo stumbled his way in to Althouse’s comment section. It’s really pretty cool the way he crams three parenthetical thoughts in to each incoherent sentence. You probably wish you could do that, but Roger L. Simon won’t let you.
Hey, Jeff–
Althouse gets “10K hits” a day?
Do you mean visits? ‘Cause I’m getting 10K hits a day lately, but that’s only 500-600 pairs of eyeballs…
Wait a minute… we’re NOT supposed to take pleasure in hurting people? Then why am I hurting people? Did I miss a memo?
Is she actually accusing you guys of enjoying tragedy? Then she “proves” it by saying she apparently struck a nerve?
What utter bullshit.
Did that little hypothetical conversation prove something about me or something about Ann?
Anyways, Jeff, this is all beside the point. Let’s get to the heart of the matter. Are you still beating your wife?
Helium is a chemical, you heartless bastards! A dangerous, chemical-filled WEAPON! What if that balloon hit a Mosque full of Innocent Brown Babies? I’m sure you would just LOVE that; you neoKKKons would just get a big kick out of Proud Innocent Muslim Babies crying in pain with really high-pitched voices like that fascist Donald Duck (he’s a SAILOR, just like those modern-day Marquis de Sades, the SEALs–who hide behind the name of a Noble and Proud species to hide the fact that they are really TORTURERS who TORTURE Babies and Other Living Things, you torture-supporting torture mongers).
Don’t even get me started about those RACISTS at the Mars company who purposefully made the BROWN M&Ms the crappy ones no one wants to eat.
HAPPY THANKSGIVING, FUCKERS
Ain’t that the truth.
Obviously a slow news day.
Jeff writes in the comments at Ann’s:
Ann responds:
Which is odd, I guess, because the way she has acted the last week, I thought she was 12. At any rate, I am 35, and I did watch the coverage, albeit on NBC, which had it in HD. My parents, well in their 60’s, watched it as well. Woe that is us that we can not be as mature as precious Miss Althouse.
You know, Ann is so damn worried about her independence, she seems to have forgotten about another “I” word- integrity. She prints an egregious smear, Jeff corrects the record, and she taunts him and does little more.
But hey, Roger Simon hung up on her, so she has a right to be a malicious liar. She better cherish that vaunted independence. She is going to need it when she has no friends left.
Jeff, Ann, et al  Here’s the which of the what on PJM—at the end of one or two fiscal quarters, if it isn’t bringing in a satisfactory amount of ad revenue to satisfy the backers, it is going to go away. Is that likely? Now, for my part, the big headlines I’ve seen when I’ve gone there have been “Harry Potter Boffo”, “Fry Turkeys Outdoors” and live coverage of the Macy’s Parade. This may be a threat to Parade magazine, but it doesn’t strike me as a formula for success on the internet.
I could be wrong. We’ll know in six months or so.
Maybe Ann would understand lawyer-speak better than Jeff’s crazy blend of language
Ann:
Post hoc ergo jeez Ann lightenup hoc
She just deleted John’s comment over there. Geez.
richard mcenroe —
I’ve said since day one that this thing was going to have to find its niche organically. Today, the editorial board discussed things openly here.
Looser, more original content, etc.—stuff that I’d like to see.
It remains to be seen if they realize that not all original content has to be serious citizen journalism—that sometimes my kind of CITIZEN JOURNALISM is what readers want.
But we’ll see. Personally, I think they should offer me an “editorship” and let me put together a PJM-type Onion. But then, I ain’t running this puppy.
And I think they should get rid of the term “editorial board” and make it an “advisory board,” because they aren’t editing so much as they are deciding what gets covered. It’s editing by omission.
she just closed comments.
i guess there better be an AltHouse Watch Dead Pool so we can bet on when she has a complete psychotic break over this sexism issue.
Drum, Black, and now Kos?
She can’t be real–she’s a bot, right?
The lawyer version of a LISA program.
She’s been trying to avoid talking about OSM/PJM? What ten seconds was that?
She’s gonna remind me of that Mac Davis song:
Oh Lord, it’s hard to be humble,
When you’re perfect in every way.
I’m not even going to see if my dissent is quashed over there.
She deleted a bunch of comments, called the way we handled the situation abysmal (ignoring what I’ve told her time and again we weren’t aware of in the way she LATER was), told me to “back off,” and suggested that my posts defending myself—which were eminently reasonable—were lower the level of civilized discourse on her site.
She’s off her nut.
Heh. This cracks me up. I guess any conversation can be ‘civil’ when you silence everyone who disagrees with you.
Still, I guess it’s her blog, and she has the right to do what she wants with the comment section. For the record, though, calling yours or John’s comments “uncivil” defines that term so loosely as to make it meaningless.
Sure, she has a right. But I was straightforward, relatively calm, and certainly reasonable in my arguments—and treated her with a respect she sure as hell didn’t accord me.
sheesh, i’m not even talkin’ about OSM/PJM anymore–i object to her makin’ the rest of us grrls look bad by screaming “sexist attack!!” everytime someone disagrees with her. She’s mixed it up with LGF, Atrios, Drum, and Kos–who’s left?
I’d really like to know what Jill and Lauren (the “sane” feminists, who also seem to have a sense of humor) think. Is she speaking for them?
I put my comment here.
For the historical record, of course.
Has she always been this batshit insane? I remember seeing Glenn link to her all the time, and I occasionally would read something she had written, but I don’t remember her being a lunatic. Is this a recent development?
I agree. Your comments were more respectful than mine would have been under the circumstances.
Damnit, APF—I hate it when some stupid lefty makes idiotic comments that could be proven wrong with Google and the ability to read English.
Seals are not a “noble species.” Seals are Family Phocidae.
Ass.
She also deleted my comment, which wasn’t even about her obsession with Jeff and PJM, but a response to some other moron who claimed :
For the record, my response (from memory) :
Why she deleted that post – and left the comment I replied to, now unchallenged – is beyond me. All of this brought to you by the woman who claims to be worried about freedom of expression? Oh, the irony.
And the moral of this flame war is:
DON”T pick a fight with Jeff if you’re wrong and the coverup is always worse than the crime.
TW “didn’t”
Anne: I didn’t, didn’t, didn’t
Jeff: Oh but you did
I think this is the moment we’ll all remember when we think back as to when the kneejerk brand of Pajamas Media criticism utterly imploded.
Thanks Ann.
Normally I treat the Kos Kidz with the disdain and disrespect I reserve for a puddle of steaming diarrhea (no offense to diarrhea) but Ann has a post up about a run-in with the Kos Kidz that is just dripping with delicious irony.
Says Ann :
Oh no, they were “attacking” Her Majesty! Surely the Kos Kidz know that the right to “attack” rests solely with Ann Althouse, and the right to defend oneself against attacks rests solely with, well … Ann Althouse?
Ann, in her last comment, sez to Jeff –
Huh?!? What does Baldy have to do with all this?
I can’t believe Ann’s descent into madness. Have those brutal Wisconsin winters finally gotten to her? Sheesh.
TW – writing. Ann’s been writing some fucked-up shit lately.
MisterPundit—Yeah, Ann’s posts lately have made for some strange bedfellows. Check out Ace kinda sorta defending Atrios here.
Ann to Jeff @ 2:16pm, “You’re putting up material to be read and blogged. You want to be immune from getting blogged? Try putting good material up if you don’t want to hear criticism.” Ann to Jeff @ 8.00pm “You come over to my blog and rant as if you’ve been given the assignment to be my personal Baldilocks? Really, you need to back off now” Ann shuts down comments. Oy. Wymyn.
daniel et al–check her comment on this post at baldy’s.
one of my comments she deleted just pointed to that post, thass why she wal’n out on baldilocks.
lol, in her comment at baldy’s,she say she jus’ doin’ it for the sistahs!
i don’t want her doin’ it for me.
heh. gotta wonder who she’s gonna call on for help now since Jef has leveled an unfair sexist attack on her.
She has yet ANOTHER post up, using the editorial meeting that I linked to earlier to PROVE that she’s been right in criticizing PJM all along. She seems to miss the point that what people have objected to are not all her criticisms per se, but rather the tone of utter contempt and condescension with which she’s been delivering them. And delivering them. And delivering them. And delivering them. And delivering them. And delivering them.
That the editorial board chose to discuss what they perceived as problems out in the open—and in doing so, expressed almost to a person the desire to better capture the anti-corporate feel of blogging—well, this, according to Ms Althouse, is all part of their conspiracy to corporatize the uncorporatizable by making the uncorporatizable appear uncorporatized, even while they secretly attempt to corporatize it. Or some such.
Luckily, though, Ann is there to protect the PUNK ROCK of blogging.
She has set herself up as arbiter of What The Blogosphere Should Be. Which is ironic, given that she claims to be working to keep it freewheeling and independent.
Easy, Jeff. Take it easy. It’s just a blog, repeat after me, it’s just a blog…
Here, sit down, stop pacing, And STOP STRANGLING THAT DOLL!
(NURSE! 5mg Thorazine, stat!)
This clearly calls for a photoshop.
Seriously. Ms. Althouse should be ignored. That’ll hurt more than anything. Her 15 minutes are up.
tw: nucular. In Texas, we call that the nucular option….
Trackback
TW: test; It sure is.
Seems Ann has a new comment policy. She loves debate, mind you—just not debates that she feels she’s being embarrassed by.
But that’s my way of putting it. Here’s hers, from a comment:
Ann quoted something that only proved embarrassing because she quoted it out of context—a context that I explained and that she pointedly and repeatedly ignored.
I’ll no longer mouth the tired platitudes about how, aside from her obsession with PJM-bashing, she’s a bright and engaging person.
Because she’s not. She’s like many of those I know from my academy days: self-righteous, defensive, supercillious, and intellectually dishonest when it suits her purposes to be so.
She’s like many of those I know from my academy days: self-righteous, defensive, supercillious, and intellectually dishonest when it suits her purposes to be so.
Ann Althouse – the Maureen Dowd of Blogdom.
My inner Oprah says:
The holidays can be hard on some people. Picking fights left and right and making snarky links to your ex’s blog on Thanksgiving eve can’t be good signs.
If only I, like Oprah, had a giant bosom to nestle that girl in.
I’ve been a little leery of Althouse ever since she said that the cool thing about a “traditionalist” wedding reception—where the bride and groom are virgins, at least to each other—was the “wonderful glow” imparted by the knowledge that the happy couple were hanging out with their friends, when they could finally, legally be off rutting like crazed weasels. (I paraphrase some.) And, in fact, that if the attendees did not have the satisfaction of knowing they were keeping the bride and groom from their first sexual encounter, then it wasn’t really worthwhile going to the wedding.
Her ultimate point was that fourteen bridesmaids are just way too many, especially if you’ve been living together. I tend to agree, but the part about speculating warmly on the couple’s wedding night was just way too creepy for me.
Maybe Ann didn’t notice the livebloggers were mostly MONKEYS. That might have informed her that it wasn’t too SERIOUS.
I don’t know why everyone’s so shocked. I mean, it’s not like this is the first time Althouse has come off as a little humorless and thin-skinned about something.
The most off-base argument about the parade blogging yet, courtesy of Dan Riehl:
My response:
Anybody? Am I missing his point? It’s possible, I guess—it’s late and I’m heavy with gravy. But I don’t get the criticism at all? Are we to be chided for not being able to move the cameras with our minds?
As it stands, I beat CBS to the punch by suggesting someone might be hurt before they did (but only by a minute, at most); but we’re not a news bureau, and our purpose wasn’t to take the parade seriously in the first place.
But when we found somebody might be hurt, we did take it seriously—though, like CBS, we mostly went right on with the (meta)show.
I believe Althouse likes to think of herself as a Pejman/Oxblog/Dan Drezner/Volokh type–an academic blogger who is merely engaging in ‘polite’ ‘professional’ learned debate, and never but never stoops to the sort of merry and/or vitriolic ad hominem mud-wrestling that the blogosphere does so well. Such bloggers always respond with a certain disdain or discomfort to all the more tendentious and uncivil arguments, not to mention arguments which are simply internecine blog warfare over trivial inside baseball issues, and which they generally scorn as beneath them (presumably since none of the goings-on and few if any of the participants are being published in an academic journal or funded by a research university). It’s an attitude which only occasionally comes off as classy rather than snotty. Of course, in this case, Althouse was the one to throw the first punch, so to speak. Nonetheless she continues to claim that her having been and continuing to be an asshole to a broad selection of the largest blogs is merely the product of her disinterested academic analysis of the situation–and that, really, it’s the folks who are insulted by her utterly dispassionate, scientific evaluation of OSM as–what–pus and semen?–it’s those folks who are behaving in a manner unbefitting a cool and rational thinker. (Just as, say, your overweight daughter Agnes is being unreasonable when she takes exception to my calling her a ‘fat cow’–she should, after all, be open to constructive criticism.)
I swear to God, Jeff, when I said Ann would be mad at you, I thought I was making a joke.
Ah, but she’s also an attorney, which gives her an unfair advantage in that last category.
No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth. – Jean Giraudoux
Give Ann some virtual flamingos and you’ve got yourself the Red Queen of Blogging.
….
As for the criticism –
Ann and Dan were expecting aggressive reportazh on PJM – not the MST3K-like experience offered by Jeff. Though, in point of fact, Jeff doesn’t mention whether these were the funny, early MST3K episodes, or the later ones, after Joel left, which kinda sucked, especially when they changed the theme, and maybe Ann thinks Jeff is just ‘Dixie’ … but I digress ….
This looks to be the same sort of criticism leveled at Greg Gutman over at Huffington. Perhaps Jeff should do what Greg does … do profiles of half-naked women in strip clubs and test the latest in men’s care products.
Or PJM could just run humor pieces in a different font to help Ann&Co. get the point.
For the record … maybe it’s genetic, Ann’s grandmom wrote a nasty letter to the editor regarding the broadcast of “War of the Worlds’ … make that ‘allegedly wrote.’
.
..
I miss MST3K.
I do not care whether PJM succeeds or not; I wish them no ill, but won’t waste a nanosecond in grief if the venture fails. But I do care how the bigger bloggers disagree with one another, and Ann Althouse has made a totall @ss of herself in that regard.
She is vicious and dishonest in her personal criticisms of Jeff and others, imputing to them the most savage bad faith—as opposed to merely criticizing PJM per se— all whilst avering that she stands aloft as a supposed paragon of civil blogospheric commentary. Puh-leeeeeze.
The woman is clearly obsessed with the PJM enterprise, and the moment I realized she is batshit insane on the subject is when she declared that she—St. Althouse—would stand alone (sic) if need be, to defend the sacred spirit of independent blogging against the vile corporatizing whores. (My paraphrase, of course.)
Then she plays the sexism card. Oh, Christ. Well, I’m female and 49, so let me say it: she is menopausal, off needed meds, or something. Initially I was prepared to think ill of Roger if he rudely hung up on her. But seeing her neurosis on public display this past few weeks, I feel his pain and likely would have done the same thing.
Now she deletes the comment criticisms she so richly deserves. Fine. Her blog. But I’m done reading there (I popped in every week or so), unless someone I still respect links to her.
PJM is not the only issue, Ann. The integrity of the conversation among bloggers is important as well, and you hve pissed a gallon in that pool.
and plays it.
and plays it again.
and plays it still again.
Real slow learner for a supposed law prof, wouldn’t you say?
JUST LIKE BUSH SHOULD HAVE BEEN PREPARED FOR KATRINA!
The Ann and Dan show elevated their reasoning to moonbat level with this one …
Blogging is what it is, not what Ann Althouse wishes it to be.
I’m serious. Ignore her. She’s full of shit and concentrating on her is giving her too much power. Let her dry up and fade away.
I hate to burst Dan’s bubble, but had Jeff gone online and determined the wind speed, direction, and gusts for the area and correlated that information with the safe-handling characteristics of Macy’s Parade Balloons (source: Janes Parades Weekly) – I would be sorely disappointed if Jeff did not “live-blog” about Underdog’s rope handlers being swept up in a particularly big gust and carried all the way into Hoboken.
.
What’s hilarious is that by deleting that slew of comments and shutting down any further conversation on the topic there, Ann is editing and censoring you “corporate whores” an awful lot more than your “evil PJM masters” seem to be.
Also, I believe she was looking for a new tagline for her site a few weeks ago. May I suggest something along the lines of:
Ann Althouse, vigilantly defending the free and independent spirit of blogging… by criticising the way other people blog and heavy-handedly suppressing polite dissent within her comment section.
(Reminds me of all those “People’s Democratic Republic of wherever” that were actually dictatorships which weren’t Democratic, weren’t Republics, and offered no voice to the People whatsoever.)
I’m serious. Ignore her. She’s full of shit and concentrating on her is giving her too much power. Let her dry up and fade away.
Agreed, henceforward, my suggestion is that that is exactly what Jeff et al. should do. However, until this episoide revealed her demented obsession (and she likely manifests like this on other issues as well, and maybe invites people to hang up on her), Althouse was pretty highly regarded as one of the credible and creditable bloggers. I mean, if Glenn Reynolds had suddenly started spewing crap condemning the purportedly murderous glee of the “parade bloggers,” given his rep and power one would expect the accuseds to strenuously object. Not that Althouse is Glenn, but she had respect and relatively high traffic, so it made sense for folks to want to reason with her and defend themselves.
It doesn’t make sense any longer. She is clearly off her rocker in a vicious way, and until she addresses her issues, she should be ignored.
I’m always amazed by the idiocy of rioters. For examples think New Orleans post-Katrina, Paris for the past weeks, or the L.A. riots of 1992 ala Rodney King. The thing that has always puzzled me is that the rioters burn and destroy <objects familiar and near to their doorstep knowing they can retreat home in short order. (assuming others have not burned <i>their</i> home in the melee)
These attacks on OSM/PJM by Dennis the Peasant and Ann Althouse (and others) have some of the same qualities. They smack of an underlying frustration that manifest as a bizarre enthusiasm for pointing out each and every flaw and failure of every facet and action by PJM.
As a blogger it’s almost too easy to see the flaws other bloggers make: hell you’ve been there yourself. Content issues, style, direction, speed, spelling and grammar, sourcing, originality, and the list goes on.
But the flaws of PJM, accurate though pointing them out may be, are also found to varying degrees on every other website on the ‘net. Of every form of media, really. So this fascination with taking down the folks who comprise/support/contribute to PJM strikes me as having some (many?) of the same characteristics and motivations as a riot—harming those you know best simply because they’re familiar and have known weaknesses that can be exploited.
But to what end; for what cause? It’s certainly not adding value for anyone involved and only seems to be tearing down and breaking things within our own community. And the purpose behind all this is what again? I’ve forgotten.
So fine, continue to point out the myriad problems with PJM’s site as though you’re doing it out of duty, or love, or because that’s just what Bloggers ‘do’. But be aware that your efforts are pushing real estate values down for everyone, yours included.
Yeah, what you said.
Well, yeah. Criticism is an intellectual exercise, schadenfreude an emotional one. In Dennis’s case, the reason for the emotion is clear. The rest of them, not so much. That’s why they come off as so gratuitously nasty and mean-spirited.
Look, the elephant in the room here is money. Not the money being paid to the contributors; I mean the $3.5 mil that Charles and Roger got for the launch. With all that dough, it’s fair to ask why the PJM website looks so sterile when you can get nattier designs for free from Blogspot. But content is a different matter. There seems to be a sense that because Pajamas got millions to put this thing together, the content over there should be millions of times better than anything else in the ‘sphere. Which is completely idiotic, but serves the schadenfreuders well insofar as you can use that logic to shit on anything PJM does, no matter how fun or interesting it is. E.g., “Oh sure, I enjoyed the paradeblogging. If it had run on Jeff Goldstein’s site, I probably would have linked to it. But this is PJM. They got $3.5 million for this?”
Find me a blog—find me any individual pundit, new media or old—against whom that same reasoning couldn’t be used. “$3.5 mil for Instapundit?? All he does is link!” “$3.5 mil for Kos?? That place is moonbat central!” “$3.5 mil for Charles Krauthammer? It’s just neocon talking points!” “$3.5 mil for Maureen Dowd? She’s a high-functioning retard!” Frankly, the one and only pundit I can think of whose writing might be worth $3.5 mil is Mark Steyn’s. The same Mark Steyn who’s an advisory board member of … Pajamas Media.
It certainly would be nice to see them use part of the seed money to pay bloggers to do original reporting. That’s the next frontier, presuming it’s financially feasible. Seems strange to me to bitch about content, though, when what you have here is essentially an aggregator where the blogs being aggregated were all (or mostly) thought to be perfectly good, worthwhile sites until the VCs wrote Charles and Roger a check. But who knows? Maybe the critics will gin up some content that’s a few million times better than Jeff’s or Glenn’s stuff and really put Pajamas to shame. From what I hear, Steve’s working on a post right now about skillets that’s going to blow the roof off this joint.
Ya’ll gotta lot of spare time on your hands, is all I’ve got to say. That catfight must have taken all day!
Striking off into unknown territory is one of the more wonderful and creative of humankind’s traits.
No one who’s ever taken a risk has known in advance if the results would be what was originally envisioned. Sometimes we fail, but sometimes we succeed beyond our wildest dreams.
We tend to forget that highly successful people fail oftener because they attempt more; they reach higher, for places where the possibility of reward is not yet known. We must applaud them for it. When they succeed, we all succeed. Think of air travel, the smallpox vaccine and liberating Europe during WWII.
I love living in a world where guys like Donald Trump exist. You know, if he were bankrupted tomorrow, he’d be back in business by Monday. He has the kind of personal courage on which the success of humanity depends.
The alternative–sitting on one’s fat and throwing stones from the sidelines–is the mark of a defeatist. It’s the refuge of those who have neither the brains nor the character to create. It’s the realm of pessimism, self-doubt and defeat, the realm of the timid and the lazy.
And it’s motivated primarily by fear or jealousy.
Let’s all aspire to reach a higher level.
to the tune of ”detachable penis”:
“Rhetorical penis…”
I dimly recall some snide brush-off I got from Althouse after emailing her what I thought was a valid point of interest. Fine. Won’t waste my time again either, Ann.
Jeff, love your random comments in the upper left: My current page had this to say:
By contrast, what we get over at Althouse, in the semi-permanent title line of the damn place, is “‘Formidable law blogger Ann Althouse.’ – Slate and ‘The divine Ms. Althouse.’ – Terry Teachout.”
I hate to burst Dan’s bubble, but had Jeff gone online and determined …
It isn’t about Dan’s bubble, it’s about what can eventuate from something like a PJM. And I believe Jeff and I have discussed it and reached some reasoned points. Suggesting what can be, and believe me, what I offered up CAN be – isn’t the same thing as tearing down or simply criticising what is.
Ignore whom?
Hey guys: should I make a post out of some of the comments here that support my contention that Ann Althouse is a self-important and intellectually bankrupt borderline obessive?
Oh. And which is it, Ann? Are we “attack poodles,” or are we ferocious and bullying attack PENISES?
For when and if she deletes it.
Jeff, I don’t care for myself if you employ any of my comments in the manner you propose, but I question whether doing so wouldn’t be counter-productive. A lot of folks have recognized the possibility of clinical sickness by now, but those who haven’t, and who support her in her comments and elsewhere, won’t see it no matter what you do. She is alienating a good-sized swathe of the blogosphere, and it might be best for you to just leave it.
Most people who follow you seem to be outraged at her attacks on your reputation, and it doesn’t seem that much more need be said. More will just keep her in the spotlight, which feeds some emotional disorders.
‘sides, you are reported to have a penis. So maybe you should leave it to Baldilocks and other self-hating womyn to finish whatever needs finishing.
My .02.
Yeah, I wasn’t really planning on doing that. Just being ironic.
I haven’t even done a separate post about any of this stuff. Just remarking here as it unfolds.
From her comment at her blog, “Straighten up, Jeff. Back off. You are harassing me. Is that clear enough?”
The first rule of Althouse club, “Don’t try and defend yourself when I smear you.” Ann said they were laughing at tragedy. Jeff corrected her. She said she must have struck a nerve and went into victim mode.
The second rule of Althouse club, “Be stupid.” For instance, say that Goldstein, Ardolino and, yikes, John Cole are rabid animals destroying the once pristine ecology of their semen and pus club. Of course, people actually read blogs and the above mentioned three aren’t often considered such barbarians. ‘Cause, well, they aren’t and there is a history online that shows it.
Now that is what blogging is all about! One-sided smears that can’t be answered and blatantly laughable claims of victimhood!
Althouse is amazingly shameless. Was it you who coined the phrase, “It’s like the pot calling the bone china black?”