So, it's been a couple of days since Wizbang blogger "Jay Tea" embarrassed his immediate family by whining about how, no matter how hard he rubbed it, he just couldn't seem to find any thoughtful, scholarly left-wing writing out there in the blogosphere. So let's check in on Jay this morning and see how all of the advice he got in the meantime has transformed his work:
Stardate, Aug 11, 2005:
Last week Paul took me to task for my piece lambasting Wal-Mart over a sewage hookup. And when confronted with what he and numerous commenters said, I reluctantly had to admit I had, indeed, been talking out of my ass. I'd built my entire piece on a single fact that had been utterly wrong. I ate so much crow I'm still coughing up feathers.
Super. Wal-Mart, sewers and talking out of his ass. Suddenly, my piece on the recent international decision against the United States on the softwood lumber dispute seems so ... so ... puerile.
WizBangBlog. Their new motto: "Approaching scholarly, intellectual right-wing discussion very slowly and quietly from downwind, so as not to frighten it off."
2 comments:
I confess I'm missing your point here. The discourse of the blogosphere is sui generis: a mix of the pungently colloquial and the thoughtful, even the scholarly (on occasion). In the piece quoted, the man is confessing to being mistaken, in colourful language. Good for him. How many bloggers admit error?
So, what's the problem here? I don't get it.
There's nothing wrong with making a mistake and admitting it afterwards. But it's a little more grating when you do it shortly after you've just bitched and whined about the lack of thoughtful scholarship in the left-wing blogosphere, then promptly admitted that you weren't just wrong, but embarrassingly, gloriously, spectacularly wrong and that you were just talking "out of your ass".
See the difference?
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