There are a lot of intense feelings going around the left-wing blogosphere. There are a lot of people feeling let down, or threatened, or afraid by the Democratic response to Judge Roberts’s nomination. People are attacking Dean, attacking Kerry, attacking the DLC, attacking our Congressional leaders, and attacking other bloggers. This is all understandable. Just remember:
Not everyone is as smart as you. Not everyone one is as well informed as you. Not everyone writes as well as you.
And I don’t care how dumb, ignorant, and illiterate you are, there is someone, somewhere who is more so.
So, when it comes to having disagreements and debates and discussions…this is the rule:
Don’t be a prick.
Passion is good. Disrespect is bad.
Everyone expected a SCOTUS nomination that would be controversial, but most people were expecting inter-party controversy, not intra-party.
Kinda makes you think: maybe it’s on purpose.
Anyhoo…I’ll be catching y’all on the flipside. Gotta go and pick up my wife from the airport (I’ve got a five hour drive ahead of me). Part of the joys of living out in the country!
Thanks. Got back safe and sound last night at 4 am, and the baby finally let me get to sleep around 6:30 am. Thankfully I’ve got a few weeks off before another semester starts!
Passion is always good and that is exactly what seems to be lacking in most of our democratic leaders. Passion creates it’s own energy and reaches out to other people. When disrespect creeps in then it becomes counterproductive.
I’m personally enjoying very very much the diaries/discussions going on because to much ‘agreeing’ to me is a bad sign as it can lead to a groupthink which can become unproductive. We don’t want to be clones here.
“Don’t be a prick” sums up beautifully by Boo the number one commandment he made for this site. Rather brilliant. Many people hate rules yet this is one that brings a smile to your face and simply and forcefully reminds you what your obligation is to posting on this site. And yes, anyone who wants to be a member of the bootrib community does have an obligation to help make sure this site is a place where everyone views are respected(barring trolls of course). If certain views are disrespected than people become afraid to share opposing views and negates the whole point of a community like this.
The underlying theme I think on ‘don’t be prick’ is don’t personally attack someone. You may believe their views or ideas are stupid but don’t call them stupid.
Wasn’t it Forest Gump who said ‘life is like a box of pricks…you never know what kind your going to run into?”
In all of these recent impassioned debates, I don’t think I’ve read anyone’s opinion that I thought was stupid. The members of this community are amazingly intelligent and it’s hard not to respect someone who can present their position with reasoned intelligence — even when you disagree with them. So far, we’ve been incredibly lucky to have such high-calibre participants. And there’s been a low incidence of juvenile snark of the kind that provokes personal attacks. May the Goddess of Civil Discourse continue to shine Her Light upon us.
What prompted this appeal? I’d like to see the offending diaries. Please list or link them.
Thanks Choc
I didn’t mean to imply anyone was being disrespectful. I was just adding my 2 cents to what Booman had basically stated. The lively discussions I was referring to mostly concerned the diary and all the great comments from “Ridicule, Shame & Judge Roberts”. Good debate and ideas going on there.
It does seem that any diaries to do with Roberts are fairly passionate..now if only the democrats have this energy in the nomination process they might just be able to show him for what he really is.
to prevent me from posting an “Oy Vey” diary… darn Boo, gotta ruin all my fun…
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Keep your eye on the ball. These are from the NYT and this is the story. Lying America into a frivolous war and how they did it. Winning elections, smear tactics, and abuse of the media to spread lies and slandar.
Ex-Diplomat’s Surprise Volley on Iraq Drove White House Into Political Warfare Mode
By SCOTT SHANE
Published: July 24, 2005
Eight Days in July
By FRANK RICH
Published: July 24, 2005
Eye on the ball. This is one we can win, and this is the whole HOUSE OF CARDS.
word.
http://tinyurl.com/d5waw This link is to a NYT article about how bushco has spent the last year-a whole year-selling Roberts to other conservatives and people like Dobson. They had this guy picked for their nominee for over a year..surprise surprise surprise-not. Very good and telling article.
That’s interesting .. funny it didn’t leak out.
yeah and since they managed to keep that quiet you know they must have a whole truck full of nefarious dealings we may never know about…the ones we do know are horrendous enough.
So they were selling him when he had AT MOST 8 months on the bench. I must wonder what kind of incredible job he must have done in that short period of time to earn a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land.
Obviously a set up and planned for a long time. They didn’t just pull this partisan hack out of the hat when O’Conner resigned that’s for sure. People seem to be mistaking him for some bland conservative based on his looks and I submit the guy is a rabid ideologue from the word go. The most telling is of course that Dobson personally thinks this guy is great. And that’s scary.
Yeah, how convenient bush appointed him to the second most prestigious court in the land a mere two years ago-which is considered a stepping stone to being considered for the SC…the more I read the dirtier this whole deal is.
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Remember Ricin plot of Januari 2003 – during Bush’s visit to London – and the link to Ansar al-Salam, Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein before the Invasion of Iraq? Part of the Colin Powell Act before the UNSC as the world watched.
Blair’s comments come amid concern about the role of the Algerian intelligence services in the case of the ‘ricin plot’. The Observer has discovered that an Algerian terrorist supergrass used to locate Bourgass’s ‘chemical weapons factory’ in north London was forced by his country’s intelligence service to make a telephone call to Britain to ‘provoke’ his associates into further action. Mohammed Meguerba was central to the trial of the alleged ricin plotters, which ended last week when eight of nine defendants were cleared. Since December 2002, Meguerba has been in prison in Algeria, where the authorities are known, to torture terrorist suspects.
The news raises the possibility that Meguerba was working for the Algerians as an agent provocateur. Such was the concern about the intelligence coming from Algeria during the trial that the Attorney General appointed an independent barrister to examine its validity. It was this lawyer who advised the prosecution to disclose the phone calls to the defence.
Although the Algerians first told their British intelligence colleagues that two calls had been made for ‘welfare’ purposes, they changed their story. One call was to ‘locate’ an individual of interest to Algerian intelligence, and a second to ‘provoke’ another person.
Despite repeated assertions in the run-up to the Iraq war of 2003 that a chemical weapons factory had been found during a raid on a flat in Wood Green, north London, no trace of ricin was found.
July 20, 2005 — Appeal lost
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I just wanted to make sure everyone had heard that Khalid Jarrar has been released, he is now in Aman with his brother. I didn’t see any recent diaries on this but know some of you have been following this.
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What great news! Here’s the link to Raed’s post at his blog.
that wasn’t the season finale of Six Feet Under.
Thanks for re-posting the reminder.
There have been some occasions on certain political blogs (is that inspecific enough?) where people have gotten ugly about their monolithic view of reality and called everyone else a tinfoil hat wearer.
No prob, I just avoid those places.
Last night, though, I was reading a mailing list devoted to Traveller, which is a science-fiction role-playing game that’s been around since the 70’s. The dominant topic of the day was a fictional civil war in a large interstellar state, and when one list participant questioned whether a series of events more than a century ago could trigger a civil war in the present day, I said that there were lots of real-world instances where lingering resentments were exploited to trigger conflicts. One example I gave — among others, mostly from previous centuries — was the recent US presidential election, in which the vote in the eastern US was divided very closely along lines established in the 1860-1865 American civil war.
What I got back blew my mind. In part, it read:
Whoa, I thought we were discussing a roleplaying game. In this particular case, I restrained myself and only responded to the small portion of this guy’s post that concerned the game. What I really wanted to do was go off, especially since I’ve been in the thick of several blame-the-South threads on political blogs speaking in defense of the South and Southern liberals, but that wasn’t the point in this case: I was stunned that I was getting the sort of treatment I would expect on a high-traffic political blog, and suggested that sort of argument might be better carried on within such a blog.
This worries me a bit. I certainly hope the self-appointed guardians of left-wing political reality can be contained in their “reality”-based blogs and don’t spill out over the landscape, injecting their nastiness into — fer chrissakes — a mailing list about a game. There’s a word for situations where people insist their opinions are reality and everyone else is deluded or worse: religion. Historically, they’ve been anything but reality-based, and when the supposition of infallibility is coupled with contempt for dissenters, bad things happen, not the least of which is that even things like singing, laughing, and — let’s say — playing games become subject to scrutiny and suppression.
Nietzsche warned that in doing battle with monsters, one risks becoming a monster oneself. I certainly hope that the right-wing American Taliban isn’t creating a left-wing American Taliban in response.
Spoof of Bush Wins Faux Faulkner Contest
Organizers of the Faux Faulkner competition are accusing Hemispheres, the United Airlines magazine that has sponsored the contest for six years, of playing politics by not putting Sam Apple’s “The Administration and the Fury” in its print edition — only on its Web site.
“One of the things they asked was that we didn’t have profanity or any obvious sexual content. We watch for that. But anything else, like a political subject, was funny, it was parody. … We felt that that shouldn’t be censored,” said Larry Wells, who organizes the contest with his wife, Dean Faulkner Wells, Faulkner’s niece.
The story portrays President Bush in the role of Benjy, the mentally challenged son — or, as Faulkner himself said, the “idiot” — in his 1929 novel about the wreckage of a Southern family.
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WASHINGTON – John Roberts worked for two Republican administrations, offering private legal assessments that have yet to be opened to historians or the public. Now that Roberts is President Bush’s choice to join the Supreme Court, some Senate Democrats want to see the documents he produced — all of them.
[…]
Leahy, senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said material written in confidence at the Justice Department by other nominees, has been provided in the past — for instance by President Ronald Reagan, when he nominated William H. Rehnquist for chief justice.
“And of course there is no lawyer-client privilege,” he said. “Those working in the solicitor general’s office are not working for the president. They’re working for you and me and all the American people.”