In the past, when I need to cut down on my Internet procrastination time and focus on schoolwork for a few days, I have sometimes declared “blog moratoriums,” wherein I pledge not to post — with certain very limited exceptions, such as “breaking news” and “very brief ‘quote of the day’ type posts” — for a certain specified period of time. With a few exceptions, these moratoriums have usually been spectacularly unsuccessful, as my blog addiction rebels against the chains that bind it and — like a good lawyer — I find the loopholes in my self-imposed rules and exploit them for all they’re worth. :)
So this weekend, I’m going to try something a bit less ambitious, in hopes it will therefore be more successful. I’m not going to swear off blogging for the next 60 hours. (That would be crazy, with USC and Notre Dame football and a Red Sox-Yankees pennant race to blog about, not to mention Tropical Drepression 19.) Instead, I’m simply going to swear off commenting and reading the comments on my blog. That, after all, is what has been taking up a great deal of my time (and in some cases, emotional energy) in recent days.
If something really egregious happens in the comment section that requires webmaster action, please bring it to my attention via e-mail. Otherwise, I would ask everyone to please be civil, remember the bar analogy, and if anyone starts exhibiting trollish behavior, for heaven’s sake don’t feed them.
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Categories: Uncategorized
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September 30th, 2005 at 6:25:30 pm
if anyone starts exhibiting trollish behavior, for heaven’s sake don’t feed them
…especially after midnight.
September 30th, 2005 at 6:32:01 pm
Brendan,
Would you have us starve to death then? Abominable.
September 30th, 2005 at 7:02:52 pm
No, no, snowmen are abominable. Brendan’s planning to move to Phoenix, so it seems unlikely that he qualifies as such.
September 30th, 2005 at 7:48:25 pm
Did anyone see Bill Bennett’s “apology” for his racist remarks on Wednesday?
http://www.bennettmornings.com/agnosticchart?charttype=minichart&chartID=11&formatID=1&size=3&useMiniChartID=true&destinationpage=/pg/jsp/general/featured.jsp#0
He is trying to rationalize what he said. I’ve got a tip for you, you hypocritical, fat-ass Gamblers’ Anonymous drop-out. Whenever on the public airwaves - and they do belong to the public, not to you - and you happen to toy with the idea of genocide, just say, “I’m sorry.” Don’t qualify it. Don’t rationalize it. Don’t defend it. Say, “I made a mistake. I realize now that what I said could be hurtful if taken out of context. It was a mistake and I apologize.”
That’s all the fat-f–k needs to say. Instead he is digging himself in deeper, like Limbaugh did before he lost the ESPN gig…
September 30th, 2005 at 9:04:56 pm
Mike - ” … so it seems unlikely that he qualifies as such.” - well, at least, not yet, eh ?
(innocent smile)
(Ask Joe !)
October 1st, 2005 at 1:08:14 pm
I see this blog is heavily patrolled by the P.C. police.
Of course these are the same people who found Freakonomics “extremely interesting”.
October 1st, 2005 at 3:27:48 pm
When has anyone here mentioned reading Freakonomics in any comment? I’m sure it’s possible–I’ve not necessarily read all the comments over the past month–but I don’t have any recollection of it, so I actually am curious.
October 1st, 2005 at 3:38:25 pm
i’m also curious at the PC police reference myself
October 1st, 2005 at 6:49:53 pm
There’s nothing un-PC about what Bennett said. It was totally idiotic. Anyone who defends him isn’t being un-PC. They are being idiotic, too. The sooner Bennett gets off his Ivory Tower and recognizes he said something inappropriate (George Bush’s words, not mine) the sooner Bennett can make himself stop looking like an asshole.
October 1st, 2005 at 6:58:56 pm
Okay, I’m dropping all pretense now with the comment moratorium thing, at least until the football games are over. :)
I thought these quotes put it quite well:
Michelle D. Bernard, senior vice president of the conservative Independent Women’s Forum, said Bennett’s remarks underscore why many African Americans distrust conservatives even if they share similar values on some social and religious issues.
“In choosing to use the hypothetical genocide of black children as a way to reduce crime . . ., Bennett shamefully traded on the pervasive stereotype that it is African Americans who are responsible for all of the crime in the United States,” she said. “People wonder why black people don’t trust . . . notions such as compassionate conservatism, and Bill Bennett just added fuel to the fire the Bush administration has worked hard to put out.”
Robert Woodson Sr., president of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, said “it was stupid” for Bennett to even ruminate on such an explosive topic but defended him as a good man. “Sometimes intellectuals become detached from common sense,” he said.
It’s true that what Bennett said was technically justifiable as a hypothetical thought experiment, and it’s true that he explicitly said it was immoral was clearly not advocating such an action; quite the opposite, he was using it to contend that what he saw as similar proposals are ridiculous. However, his choice of hypotheticals was unbelievably, block-headedly stupid. That’s one of those things where, it’s so obvious that people will take your words out of context, you simply should not utter them. The inflammatory nature of the remarks was not necessary at all to make his point; he could have made the same point in a way that would not have been so easily and inevitably controversial. And thus, he should have. I usually don’t have much sympathy for PC crap, but I’m with Bennett’s (reasonable) critics on this one.
October 2nd, 2005 at 4:27:16 am
Um, would someone please explain to me why all these pro-choice people are referring to aborting black babies as “genocide”? The irony is just too rich.
I agree that, from a political strategy point, Bennett’s remarks were idiotic and incredibly unhelpful. But it doesn’t change the fact that he was speaking the truth. Fact is, if you aborted all Southerners, the crime rate would go down; if you aborted all males, the crime rate would go down; and if you aborted all blacks, the crime rate would go down.
Bennett should apologize to Republicans for hurting the cause, but he should apologize to anybody else because he’s right.
October 2nd, 2005 at 4:27:59 am
*second “should” should be a shouldn’t
October 3rd, 2005 at 1:05:35 am
Andrew, if you can point me to any convincing data that shows blacks have a higher crime rate than other ethnic groups within similar class brackets then I might just agree with you.
Until then…I’m going to go with the null hypothesis that there is no genetic difference in the propensity towards criminal activity based upon the broad category of race.
October 3rd, 2005 at 1:24:13 am
Umm… I don’t have a dog in this fight, BUT, I just want to point out that Andrew never said there is a “genetic difference” between blacks and non-blacks. Quite the contrary, he compared the higher crime rate among blacks with the higher crime rate about Southerners, which I’m sure you’ll agree is not a “genetic” group.
To claim that blacks are genetically predisposed to commit crime would be a far more inflammatory claim than anything Andrew has said so far. Since Andrew is plenty capable of saying inflammatory things all by himself, I don’t think there’s any need to do it for him. :)