Further thoughts on the GoV thread

I read through much of the Gates of Vienna thread yesterday, and I see again that, contrary to all the lies that have been told, I did not start the “personal” business there. Not in any way. I was the target of several individual hits that coalesced into a gang hit grossly misrepresenting almost everything I said and basically trying to destroy me in other people’s eyes. Among my attackers’ Big Lies was that they were really my friends seeking discussion with me, but that I by my impossible behavior was driving them away. However, I see a couple of points in the discussion where I made things worse. After “Zenster” had attacked my honesty, called me underhanded, and equated my comments with the ultimate smear factory, Charles Johnson’s Little Green Footballs, simply because I had made a critical but legitimate point about his ideas and language, and after I replied at length explaining my criticisms and showing that they were legitimate, he replied in a polite tone, thanked me for my reply and then, without having retracted his smears or shown any consciousness that he had said anything wrong, declared that he wanted to start a whole discussion with me about Islam. At that point I said that given his insults and his lack of any apology I had no interest in talking with him. I was correct in not wanting to talk with him. But I stated it in a high toned way that gave fuel to those who were already spoiling to get me. It enabled Zenster to say that he wanted to talk with me but that I refused to talk with him. And this fed into the Swede fantasy that Auster is a tyrant who can’t defend his ideas.

Again, I did not start the personal stuff, but my sweeping denunciations of the personal stuff directed at me gave the other side more to shoot at.

Another mistake in one or two of my GoV comments was saying that the behavior of my attackers exemplified certain negative cultural phenomena. This added to the contentiousness. I should have just stayed with the behavior at hand.

Meanwhile, as the argument with Zenster was developing, Conservative Swede, whom I had ignored throughout, had along with his allies been increasingly swiping at me, gratuitously bringing in supposed past sins of mine that had nothing to do with the thread, telling outrageous lies about me, and no one including the host of that site, did anything to stop it. (There were also anti-Semitic comments about me from another member of the group, the anti-Semite Tanstaafl, though I’ve just read those comments for the first time during my re-reading.) However, my just but high toned indignation at Zenster gave them a further target. I should have dealt more coolly with the whole thing, avoiding saying anything that would allow my adversaries to expand their attack.

The underlying problem is, how does one deal with people who are without intellectual conscience, who allow themselves to say anything, and who in some instances have malign intentions, yet who are accepted members of a discussion group in which one is participating? In retrospect, as soon as the personal attacks began to appear, I should have simply said that such language was not compatible with discussion, and stopped posting.

Meanwhile, the campaign of lies against me continues, and, once again, the practical question becomes, how to defend myself adequately from it without triggering more of it.

- end of initial entry -

Rachael S. writes:

You write:

Meanwhile, the campaign of lies against me continues, and, once again, the practical question becomes, how to defend myself adequately from it without triggering more of it.

Answer: You can’t. I read some of the posts and became turned off by what I perceived to be an adolescent, gang mentality. “Swede” said that he admired a will to power, I think this reflected that he has disdain for politeness, etiquette, etc. which would of course be signs of weakness in his ideal world where “will to power” is the greatest good. The people who jumped all over you must have some affinity for his argument, or they are a clique. There is no wedging into the clique dynamic without descending to their mean-spirited level. People just have to evolve out of it themselves.

Charles M. writes:

The lot of us remind me of Lenin and his acquaintances back when they were nobodies, drifting around Europe, issuing programs, writing unreadable theses, holding party conferences attended by other riffraff in dingy halls and ceaselessly excommunicating one another. Of course, had it not been for World War 1 they’d have stayed nobodies. I wonder if we’ll have our catalytic cataclysm.

Posted August 5

Dean E. writes:

You ask:

The underlying problem is … how to defend myself adequately from it without triggering more of it.

I read through that thread. Any sort of posting on other’s blogs opens one to that sort of ignorant, vicious discourse. The blogosphere is not a drawing room. Any masked poltroon can walk in and say any fool thing. Much of it is not worth responding to. (Like I need to tell you.) You’d do well to post only on VFR. If you must engage another’s blog entry, do it at VFR, and link to the referenced thread. Let them come to you, and fight on your own ground.

That said, I would engage this comment from the GOV thread, by commenter, “Us or Them”:

Do I really need to go thru VFR to count and list the number of persons you have attacked without provocation. You have alienated many good people, who would otherwise be glad to call you an ally, with your writings about their hypocrisies and dishonesty, and cowardliness. That, sir, is foolish and reckless.

I have followed VFR closely for four years. I have never seen you “attack” someone without provocation. Rather, I have seen a consistent engagement with ideas. And one of the most valuable views described at VFR shows how the liberal premises of ostensibly “conservative” policies are actually subverting our defenses and imperiling our civilization. That is why VFR has criticized Steyn, and Phillips, and Bush, and Spencer and others on the right—it is their ideas and policies, or lack of them, that are criticized, and criticized legitimately as ineffectual at achieving their supposed goals, and is one of the very few blogs demonstrating either the courage or intelligence to do so.

And for that VFR is criticized for not going along and getting along, for “alienating” people, who, if only VFR would say the honeyed and soothing things they want to hear, would be happy to be VFR’s ally. If only VFR would take to heart Dale Carnegie’s, “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, and whisper sweet little nothings, all would be well! Baloney. I don’t read VFR for “kinder, gentler” blather. I read it because every day I find intelligence and decency forthrightly applied to discerning truth and goodness, while letting the chips fall where they may. I’ve learned more by thinking through VFR’s critiques of the right than I have reading any number of right blogs. I’ll take “foolish and reckless” on VFR any day, thanks.

A final note—I appreciate VFR spending so much time editing comments, weeding out the nonsense, and offering up the best. Too few blogs bother. VFR has good judgment for the value of comments, pro and con, and it’s one of the very few sites whose comments are consistently worthy of reading, and doesn’t waste readers’ time.

Best regards,
Dean E.

PS: I admire tremendously your courage and persistence in saying the things you do, and the way you say it. It requires great self-discipline to keep one’s composure in the heat of battle, and you do a fine job. (Recall that one secret of George Washington’s power was that, though he had an often fiery disposition, he harnessed it with cold discipline.) Carry on, please. Thanks.

LA replies:

Thank you so much for this. I’m honored you put this kind of thought and good writing into restoring things to a truer perspective.

I’m especially glad you focused on “UsorThem,” because his “method” is particularly sneaky and damaging and I didn’t adequately address it, with his “Oh, I admire you so much, Mr. Auster, but you’re such an unfair, vicious, terrible, horrible, hateful person, constantly attacking and alienating people without provocation, that you’ve driven poor me away.” Right, like all I had to do was not write three quarters of the things I’ve written, and he would just love me.

Haley Barbour, the GOP national chairman some years ago, used to say (though he may have gotten it from President Reagan), “If someone agrees with you 80 percent of the time, that person is your friend and ally. ” Well, “UsOrThem” hates and reviles about 80 percent of what I write, but insists that he’s my friend and ally, and that I’ve driven him away!

Last week UsOrThem sent me a 2,300 word e-mail detailing my sins. I began to read it, but in his very first point he quoted me and then characterized the quote as saying something it simply hadn’t said. So I wrote back to him saying that his initial remark was factually so off-base that I didn’t have to bother reading the rest of his lengthy e-mail.

And the same failure to get basic facts right was also shown in his comments at GoV.

Also, I want to repeat what you said about blogs with open commenting: “Any masked poltroon can walk in and say any fool thing.”

Yes, and notice that all the people savaging me at GoV hide behind made-up names, every one of them; “Baron Bodissey,” “Conservative Swede,” “Awake,” “Tanstaafl,” and so on. So there’s a mob of people concealing their names, all ganged up on a person who uses his real name.

Paul Nachman writes:

Regarding Dean E.’s comment:

I have followed VFR closely for four years. I have never seen you “attack” someone without provocation. Rather, I have seen a consistent engagement with ideas. And one of the most valuable views described at VFR shows how the liberal premises of ostensibly “conservative” policies are actually subverting our defenses and imperiling our civilization. That is why VFR has criticized Steyn, and Phillips, and Bush, and Spencer and others on the right—it is their ideas and policies, or lack of them, that are criticized, and criticized legitimately as ineffectual at achieving their supposed goals, and is one of the very few blogs demonstrating either the courage or intelligence to do so.

You don’t name-call for the sake of name-calling. But when you were annoyed with Heather Mac Donald over something having to do with religion and atheism, you referred to her as “Little Miss Heather Mac Donald.” I’m confident she hadn’t said anything at all about you—I don’t think you were part of the main conversation online—so it can’t have been that she had put you down and you were retaliating.

LA replies:

I don’t think I ever said that, it doesn’t sound like anything I would say, and a Google search doesn’t turn it up.

Did she attack me personally? Of course not. She disparaged all believing Christians, all believers in God, for which she deserved to be disparaged. It’s bad enough when liberals do that. A prominent American “conservative” writer who openly attacks Christianity, and moreover, does it on the basis of complete ignorance of religious issues, sounding like a 14 year old knowing nothing about nothing, deserves to be criticized strongly. My criticisms of her, including my description of her as a “village atheist,” were all based on close reading and critique of her published writings, and were what the conservative movement generally would have done, if there were a conservative movement in this country worthy of the name.

Mr. Nachman replies:

The “Little” was my mis-remembered addition. You wrote:

She thought that all she had to do was present her arguments against a just and loving God, and everyone would agree with her, just like that, poof! Two thousand years of Christianity, three thousand years of Judaism, dispensed with by a couple of wise observations from Miss Heather MacDonald!

LA replies:

You see? I’m not as bad a guy as you thought….

Prejudice is a terrible thing …

LA continues:

Because (as you said to me at the time) you felt I was being too tough on her, you “saw” me saying something personally disrespectful to her (“Little Miss Heather Mac Donald”) which I actually didn’t say. We all make these mistakes. We assume something is there that fits our preconceptions, but which is not there.

Only on rare occasions have I used really disrespectful language, and when I do so, it’s usually deliberate. My strongest personal attack on an individual that I remember was when Charles Krauthammer, after essentially calling all Christians anti-Semites at the time of the premier of “The Passion of the Christ” in January 2004, tried indirectly to make up for it the following December by talking about how much he likes Christmas, yet without retracting the vicious things he had said about Christianity earlier. I was having none of it. I just tore into him. But as strong and angry as my tone is here, is there anything that could be called an unfair or unprovoked personal attack, or anything demeaning of his personality? No.

In any case, I don’t think I have ever said anything as demeaning as calling someone “Little Miss Heather Mac Donald.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 04, 2008 08:22 AM | Send