Another reader (something of a "hot shot" on the law teaching market this year) writes: "I confess that one of the joys of your blog is its no bullshit approach." That's gratifying, but the approach is not universally admired. Alas, it would take me too long to link to all the sites that are evidence of that!
UPDATE: As fate would have it, a fine example of someone who won't be joining my blog fan club has just appeared (follow the links therein for more appreciative posts about the "no bullshit" approach).
Although I thought I was beyond being surprised any longer by the depth of navel-gazing in the blogosphere, I was truly amazed that the disputants here assume that the dispute is really about hurt feelings (etc.), as opposed, e.g., to the fact that someone with fairly conventional and parochial opinions who derides an intellectual giant like Chomsky as an idiot is, indeed, an example of "the less they know, the less they know it."
As to the much overrated "virtue" of civility--I'll take that up in a day or two, since it's a key part of the misleading faux-egalitarianism of the blogosphere--surely it can not escape anyone's notice that even the wounded disputant here observes no such norms with respect, e.g., to Chomsky. But that, of course, confirms my repeated experience in these infantile debates about tone and civility: they all are covers for substantive disputes and judgments, since even the proponents of "civility" abandon it on a moment's notice when their underlying substantive judgment about merit changes (witness: Chomsky, Vidal, etc. are derided as "idiots").
UPDATE 10/10: A philosophy graduate student elsewhere (whose feelings haven't been hurt, last time I checked) writes: "I almost wish you'd not link for any reason to Joshua Cherniss's page. It's just so bad. I think perhaps the worst thing is that he thinks he's quite sophisticated, but in fact he's pretty simple. A nice example is his being impressed w/ a short little post from Volokh on the Russian (Soviet) involvement in WWII. This post basically states what
anyone who's not a fool or a propogandist knows- that the Soviets did the
vast majority of the work, at least in Europe, in beating the Germans, that they suffered badly, though they probably would not have suffered so badly if Stalin had been a reasonable person, and that the Soviets also did a lot of bad things both during and after the war. This is all obvious, and Volokh's post was about as simple as one could get on it. But, it all seems to be news to Cherniss, 'student of modern history.' One wonders what's taught at Yale these days."
Well, it is perhaps unfair to generalize to Yale graduates--perhaps just Yale graduates who start blogs!
And elsewhere in the blogosphere, yet another reaction (Mr. Cherniss is "either a liar or ignorant" says Chun--I vote for ignorant).
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