Worth a look:
- John Ray’s got a good review, with links and instances, of the hatred that dares not (or at least does not) speak its name, leftist hatred. Diogenes continues the theme with a discussion of the Edwards bloggers. The analysis isn’t perfect, but as usual he does say some useful things. To my mind the worst thing about the Edwards situation is the blank refusal common on the left to acknowledge there’s an issue. (Here, by the way, is a summary of what the Edwards bloggers actually said.)
- One of several recent publications covering the Dark Side of the feminine preference for the up close and personal over the institutional and hierarchical: Tripping the Prom Queen: The Truth About Women and Rivalry, by feminist academic Susan Shapiro Barash. If everything is personal then enmities become absolute. The Touchstone magazine blog explores Professor Barash’s analysis and remedies and finds them inconsistent.
religion
You said, with respect to Edwards and his bloggers:
“To my mind the worst thing about the Edwards situation is the blank refusal common on the left to acknowledge there’s an issue.”
I’ve seen two reactions from and by the left that caught my attention:
1. The gutter validates itself by its mere existence. In this case, the gutter is “the blogosphere.” The thinking goes like this: Because the blogosphere is an intellectual and moral gutter, any excrement from that gutter should be evaluated by the standards of the gutter itself (which is to say, by no standards at all).
2. This point could be subdivided into several parts, but in its purest form is simply: Ridicule of the Christian religion is not only warranted, it is a positive good. The reasons given for this evident truism vary, but the proposition remains. Underlying the proposition is the axiom that the participation of “transcedental” or “revealed” religions in the public square is a positive threat and evident evil. Any effort by a Christian religion to comment upon issues of public moment warrant hostile attack, not upon the merits of any argument or position but upon the effort itself.
The info highway and its gutters
In the mainstream published left (e.g., the NYT) they haven’t called the blog-world a gutter, they’ve said it’s “rough and tumble” or some such and perhaps quoted one of the less objectionable phrases from the two women. Sometimes that response has been combined with references to Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh or whoever. There’s been a refusal to deal with the specifics.
Rem tene, verba sequentur.