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September 16, 2004
Shrill Steelcage Smackdown
I used to wonder if supposedly greater beings in the blogosphere noticed when lesser blogs spent an inordinate amount of time and energy criticizing them. Musclehead spent a lot of time over the recent months heaping derision on Professor Bainbridge and Dylan spends even more time criticizing Professor Leiter (and his guest posters).
It appears that Prof. Leiter finally noticed. As I've been keeping up with very important Times New Roman Kerning scandal, I've been reading Dylan fairly regularly and took notice of a recent upsurge in Leiter-and-his-friends-are-commie-appeasers posts so when I hit Prof. Leiter's blog today and read the first few lines, I knew exactly about whom he was talking.
As I've noted in the past, one of the decidedly weird aspects of the blogosphere is discovering that one is being denounced as "ignorant" or "stupid" by noxious mediocrities, individuals of no discernible accomplishment or intelligence, whose denouncements themselves often contain conceptual, factual or argumentative mistakes. (Remember Joe Carter from L'Affaire VanDyke?) Have these people no critical distance from themselves, no sense of their own limitations, no perspective on how out of their depth they are? Or, perhaps, as the psychologists report, "the less they know, the less they know it."
Now Prof. Leiter is probably a little too harsh on Dylan. He's a decent guy after all, even if he is more than a bit to the right of me.
I was just about to write that I was looking forward to Dylan's response when I noticed he's already responded. It's too long for me to read right now but it looks to be quite self-deprecating and a little bit funny. And boredom in class pretty much gives one license to do just about anything.
Anyway, I've never really thought to criticize a Prof on-line. I'm not anonymous or semi-anonymous so I try and watch my mouth when it comes to other people as much as I can.
I was credited on Prof. Leiter's site way back in January when I emailed him. One thing I've found is that many of the bigshot bloggers who don't have comments do respond to emails either personally or in their blogs. That's my preferred method of voicing agreement or disagreement. It probably saves me a hell of a lot of embarrassment.
Posted by Half-Cocked at September 16, 2004 10:57 PM
Comments
I have heaped a couple on Prof. Leiter, too. He is waaaaaayyyy to my left and so when he writes something about political strategy or economics, I cringe. But as long as he is wacking Bush, creationists and the other sundry troglodytes, I nod along in agreement.
Posted by: musclehead at September 19, 2004 03:06 PM
I've never noticed your Leiter rants. I think your Bainbridge ones are more frequent, although I haven't seen one for awhile.
Posted by: Steve at September 19, 2004 10:15 PM