Monday, November 03, 2008

It's a simple principle, really.


Shorter "Western Standard" usual suspects: "Nope, nobody here votin' for the nigger, why do you ask?"

(Wag of the tail to Dr. D.)

19 comments:

Dr.Dawg said...

Hah! Way ahead of you.

CC said...

Geez, Doc, you didn't even give me time to add the attribution. :-)

Renee said...

(Awaiting the vehement sounds of denunciation from the right about the use of "the n word.")

Mike said...

I understand even some Neo-Nazis prefer Obama to the insanity of a McCain Palin ticket.

Wow, if you've lost the Nazi vote when running against a black opponent, time to drink the hemlock,...

Mike said...

Incase you think my last post was hyperbole...

Its official, the Western Standard and the drooling masses at SDA are more right-wing and racist than the American Nazi Party...


(ht to Balb and SL).

Mike said...

4 more years of pissing off Muslims on a global scale, giving more tax breaks to the rich, robbing the poor, going slow on global warming, etc. That would be just fine with the Standard folks.
What a surprise.
What assholes.

P. M. Jaworski said...

Canadian Cynic: I don't think your comment is fair at all. You don't even bother linking to the WS contribs and their responses. Bob Barr gets five votes, and "would not vote" gets five votes as well.

It seems obvious why Obama wouldn't get a vote from us. Obama is no libertarian. I don't see why you think that's at all surprising or criticizable on grounds of race.

What's surprising is that only one WS contributor would cast his ballot for McCain. And reluctantly at that. Oh, and since you didn't bother reading the actual submissions, you should take a closer look at Aaron Lee Wudrick's.

CC said...

Oh, great ... I'm getting lectured on journalistic integrity from someone at The Western Standard. Can this day possibly suck any worse?

P. M. Jaworski said...

It's not a lecture on journalistic integrity. It's my taking umbrage at your summary of the responses. It's hardly a result of racism, and you would know that if you took a closer look.

And even if it was a lecture, you should take it as a lecture from me, Peter Jaworski, not "someone at the Western Standard." If you think my journalism is shoddy, that's one thing. But you do your readers no real service by casting my lot in with preconceptions you have about the Standard (it's under new management, by the way.)

Terrence C. Watson said...

Cynic, do you _really_ think that only a racist could fail to support Obama?

What about people who aren't supporting anyone? Are they racists as well?

Now I know you'll have a sarcastic response to these questions. Fair enough. What I'd still like to see is an argument for the position that all of those who fail to support Barack Obama, including WS contributors, are racists.

Since I'm a social liberal, regular defender of marriage equality, anti-discrimination law, etc., I would be interested in seeing why you think my limited opposition to Obama is rooted in latent or not so latent racism.

Ti-Guy said...

Terrence/Jaworksi: This is really the type of dialogue geared to refinement and better articulation of ideas that should be going on over at the Standard and hopefully, in an atmosphere free from the toxic personalities some of us find too repellent to even acknowledge by even paying attention all that closely. And not necessarily because of racism, bigotry or chauvinism (although that certainly doesn't help) but overwhelmingly because they don't understand the difference between an assertion and an argument.

If I ran The Standard (not altogether unthinkable; believe you me I'm probably closer to conservative/libertarian than I am to Marxist; I subscribe to the principle of being liberal in what you are prepared take in and conservative about what you are prepared to give out), I'd start off with an online course on elementary logic, reason and evidence-based dialogue for a generation of libertarians/right wingers who are missing out on those fundamental elements of formal/informal education.

P. M. Jaworski said...

Or you might, as some do, ignore the comment section and read only the posts, Ti-Guy. Believe me, it's extremely difficult for Terrence, myself, and the crew to put up with some of the comments.

I agree with your assessment of the basic argumentative skills of some of the commenters (okay, too many of them). Since Terrence and I are both PhD students in philosophy, it's particularly irksome to see ad hominems, and a veritable cornucopia of other common fallacies on full display in the comment section.

I know it takes more effort than it's probably worth for you to follow the posts and comments at the Standard, but there is a feeling of hostility between the posters and the commenters. The commenters, many of them from pre-ownership change WS days, are beginning to notice that we're much more libertarian, and much, much less conservative. And they don't like it. So they respond with anger and idiocy.

Especially (especially, especially) when we post pro-marijuana legalization posts. One thread is pushing 500 comments...

Dr. Dawg has taken time out of his day to check out our blog more frequently, and he seems to approve of the posts, but disapprove of the comments. Warren Kinsella has said nice things about our blog. And I've done my level best to engage a variety of bloggers with different political philosophies as much as possible.

But we only control the posts, Ti-Guy. People should judge us on that basis, not on the basis of what lunacy and madness might lurk beneath.

Separately, I just posted Mike Brock's contribution (he's part of the WS). Canadian Cynic and others might take comfort in the fact that he would vote for Barack Obama. So there you have it. WS contribs would give one vote to McCain, one to Obama, five for Bob Barr, and six for "wouldn't vote."

Hugh MacIntyre said...

Mike, I reject your conception of the political spectrum. In my mind anything that can put those that agree with Frederic Bastiat next to those that agree with Hitler is a faulty paradigm.

Hugh MacIntyre said...

Also I second Peter's comment about the hostility between Western Standard posters and commentators.

Dr.Dawg said...

he seems to approve of the posts

Er...nor all of them. : )

Dr.Dawg said...

Let me add that one vote for Obama, even out of 26, is surprising, but it doesn't negate my point.

Commenters at my place have asked, fatuously, what about the ACLU? What about Canadian Dimension? To which there can be only one response: nobody, with reason, bothered to conduct straw polls in either venue.

Ti-Guy said...

But we only control the posts, Ti-Guy. People should judge us on that basis, not on the basis of what lunacy and madness might lurk beneath.

When it comes to genuine blogs that have comments, I do judge them by the how the blogger facilitates the discussion. It shows me that a) the blogger is invested in the quality of the discussion and b) blogger participation is the best mechanism I've seen to control trollage/bad faith discussion without imposing all kinds of restrictions such as registration or speech codes. Kind of like saying "this my house, these are the rules."

Otherwise, why bother with comments at all?

P. M. Jaworski said...

You're right, Ti-Guy, and you'll see that we put in an effort to try and raise the quality of the comments.

But, sometimes, it takes time. In our case, it looks like it will take a very long time. Maybe a really, really long time.

But Dr. Dawg pops by once in a while, and when Terrence and he get into it, I think most of the trolls and idiots get intimidated. We also have Fact Check, whose comments I look forward to with distinct pleasure. He disagrees with us, often, but his comments are always so clear, so well-formed, so etc., that it makes me boil over with joy.

I really do wish our comment section was much more cosmopolitan, cultured, and, well, just basically decent. But it isn't. And while we take responsibility, since it is our product, we are actively trying to court more voices to drown out some of the more devastatingly stupid posts. Maybe, over time, they'll finally be as embarrassed as some of them ought to be. Maybe.

But we didn't start from scratch. And it is easier to build a culture from scratch than it is to alter it once one has built up. We're doing what we can, and you can always shoot me an email with suggestions. I'm all ears. Really.

Ti-Guy said...

Ok. We've reached a point of agreement. However, I'm not a libertarian, nor a populist (more of a populariser of elitism), so I'm not all that invested in the ideas that are going to be refined over at The Western Standard. But I wish you luck, I really do. We need decent online publications.