Not that anyone knows, I just thought I should ask.
UPDATE: I mean, wow.
Defending the liberal tradition in history, science, and philosophy.
Defending the liberal tradition in history, science, and philosophy.
Not that anyone knows, I just thought I should ask.
UPDATE: I mean, wow.
{ 19 comments }
I first noticed a change when he parted ways with Pajamas Media. It seemed to me he started turning on some of his former PJM cohorts.
And then he just continued to devolve into petty weirdness….
I have to thank him.
He is the person most responsible for showing me how logic and reason “in-fill” the structure created by emotion and experience.
I don’t think he’d appreciate my thanks, though.
Anyone want to fill the rest of us in on what this is about?
Charles Johnson, who runs Little Green Footballs, went from far right JAFI to a far-left Glenn Greenwald homage in a matter of about eight months. (For Dean.)
Since I was never a big fan, I haven’t been all that interested. A quick look at his home page makes it apparent that he’s decided that all the Climategate stuff is right-wing nonsense, but otherwise looks like pretty standard stuff to me.
In a way I sympathize; you blog for a few years on a daily basis, and your patience tends to run thin. Blogging actually improved my writing in some ways, hurt it in others; I’m simply way less patient than I used to be, and it bothers me but there’s not much I can do about it. You wind up repeating yourself so much you just get sick of it and cut right to the chase. Good bad or not, it’s what happens.
I still say he has an authority fetish. During the Bush years he unreasonably defended the President, now in the Obama years he’s doing the same.
Authority fetish,
I have no real respect for authority, but why should anyone feel obligated to attack and/or impeach a democratically elected president, or to blame every problem on him/her?
It’s boring and unproductive, and anyone who isn’t a raving partisan begins to tune it out after a while.
“Authority fetish”…I like that.
Here’s an example, Dean:
http://www.weaselzippers.net/blog/2009/12/charles-johnson-shocked-shocked-to-learn-there-are-actually-people-who-dont-believe-in-manmade-globa.html
A tangentially related point might be found here in this recent NYT story on North Korean defectors trying to make their way in the South:
“The defectors express shock that the media can point a finger at a head of state. “I don’t know how President Lee Myung Bak can continue running the country after getting so much criticism,” said Cho Eun Hee, 23, a Setnet student.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/11/world/asia/11iht-seoul.1.20104394.html
It’s a really revealing statement, the idea that a head of state has to be concerned with “running the country”. In a system like ours we’re cynically used to the idea that the President’s job is concerned mostly with political maneuvering and consolidation of power, not sitting in a giant control room pulling levers and twiddling knobs that fine-tune the inner workings of the economy and the harvest and infrastructure and train schedules and the like. But the latter is how North Koreans have apparently been trained to think of the world.
Mary’s comment above made me think of this: some people are just so focused on the President as a symbol of all things political that all things political become an argument about the President. For my part, I tend to think of the President (whether Bush, Obama, or anyone but a few icons like Lincoln and Kennedy) as just a pawn in a game played by much larger bureaucratic and political forces that preexist his term and outlast it.
Is Charles Johnson a closet North Korean? I’unno. But “authority fetish” does go a long way toward explaining certain mindsets, and he might well fall into it.
I have to thank you, Dishman. Well put.
I would only point out that it is plausible that Mr. Johnson’s views have changed for more complex reasons, but he hasn’t the patience to sit down and explain how and why he changed his mind.
In my particular case, I know I went from the very early days of this blog to trying to explain in meticulous detail what I think and why I think it, and how I arrived at my conclusions, and these days I rarely have it in me to do that. It’s exhausting and I know, from experience, that people too often don’t read it anyway. And even if some people do, within a week someone will be by who hasn’t read it, hasn’t taken the time to ask me any questions, and starts blathering about what I think and why I think it without asking first, and I just lose it.
Am I whining? No, I’m explaining. There is something weird that happens here, and I think it happens to everyone in this business sooner or later. The sheer effort of constantly repeating yourself and explaining the same things over and over again gets on your nerves and at some point you just don’t want to do it anymore.
I regret this because I know I have had my mind changed by people who were patient with me, and I know I’ve changed minds similarly. It does happen. It’s valuable when it does. But sometimes, you just haven’t got it in you anymore. That may–may–be a big part of Mr. Johnson’s problem.
OTOH he always did seem like a “shoot from the hip” guy anyway, so if you were inclined to agree with him he didn’t have to explain anything. If he’s always been like that, then, when he changes his mind all you’re doing is getting upset at his shoot-from-the-hip style because you no longer agree with him. Was he ever particularly deep, or was he someone you just agreed with a lot? (And no that’s not sarcastic, we all do that, we think someone is “deep” or “thoughtful” or “well-informed and informative” merely because they think like we do.)
“…we all do that, we think someone is “deep” or “thoughtful” or “well-informed and informative” merely because they think like we do.”
I believe you are absolutely correct here, Dean. I know I’ve done it.
I never really kept up with “Little Green Footballs”, even back when I mostly agreed with him, simply because I didn’t care much for his writing style.
I don’t think he was ever very deep. He was always a 9/12 Republican, coming from the left side before that. I followed him for a long time, mainly because it was constant GWoT links, but the comments devolved over time, and I stopped reading before the RatherGate stuff, because I remember seeing his animated GIF from other people’s links, rather than directly.
My impression was never that Johnson was a “right-winger” at all – he was superficially on that side on war-on-terror issues, not in general.
As Phelps said, the comments made me stop bothering with LGF long before Johnson himself went all Andrew Sullivan.
In a post about Charles Johnson, the anti-fascist leftists at Harry’s Place asks “Are there are rational right wing US blogs left?”
Like CJ, the bloggers at Harry’s Place are primarily opposed to authoritarian/fascist groups. That’s why they oppose the Islamists, the commies and the BNP.
If people oppose authoritarians in general, they’re usually not very interested in ‘party loyalty’, defending religious/political dogma and other groupthink routines. When the right turned the word RINO into a slur, they lost their center-right and moderate supporters.
Of course, the left went through the same routine when they were out of power, which means that most rational and moderate bloggers are bound to lose interest in the whole political pundit-sphere. The left seems rational now, but we know that’s a temporary thing. Who wants to put up with a bunch of haters frothing at the mouth because you don’t agree with Rush or Chomsky?
Of course, the left went through the same routine when they were out of power, which means that most rational and moderate bloggers are bound to lose interest in the whole political pundit-sphere. The left seems rational now, but we know that’s a temporary thing. Who wants to put up with a bunch of haters frothing at the mouth because you don’t agree with Rush or Chomsky?
No frickin’ lie. I can barely stand it anymore, what with all the ranting and with all the people who want to turn EVERY conversation into their latest jihad against Party X or Politician Y, with the current President (whoever he is) always in the crosshairs, implicitely or explicitly. It’s part of why I just quit blogging for a while. I didn’t even vote for Obama, I don’t think he’s a particularly great President, and yet if I see one more thread hijacked by yet another “This Latest Outrage Only Proves That America Is Waking Up To… [fill in the blank]” (or “you need to wait up to…”) I may have to take off and nuke the site from orbit just to be sure.
Of course, the left went through the same routine when they were out of power…The left seems rational now
No they don’t. They’re just as nutty as before. Half of them still want Bush tried for war crimes. Half of those are increasingly unsure Obama shouldn’t be on trial next to him.
The left skews young and intemperate and the MSM feeds their delusions. Fringiness is less tolerated on the right precisely because the slightest nuttiness becomes a nine-part series in the NYT.
The problem with LGF is not that Charles had a “hhmmm…” moment and shifted slightly left. You can find numerous examples where he posted with frothy nuttiness about the quacks pursuing Global Warming less than a year old and now he posts with frothy nuttiness about how the right is full of quacks because they are skeptical of Global Warming (just like Charles was less than a year ago). And the evidence for global warming has been going in the other direction over that same time.
Sorry, but LGF is nothing more than a kneejerk reaction to whoever is in charge. Authority fetish sounds about right.
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