Is Dave Weigel's comments section like sex?

"The Red Queen hypothesis for sex is simple: Sex is needed to fight disease," according to PBS's "The Advantage of Sex," we captioned this image of "Alice and the Red Queen" by Sir John Tenniel (1930s) in our October 2005 post "Is democracy like sex," the provocative title of a 1995 Glenn Harlan Reynolds scholarly legal essay.

"We are not responsible for our commenters' opinions, but they may open windows for debate," we twittered Dave Weigel this morning. The Slate/Washington Post [He's BACK!] political reporter was not too happy about our previous post headlining one of his readers' distasteful and profoundly uninformed opinions about black Republicans who don't buy the politically correct "victim mentality/government savior narrative" [Michelle Malkin's words in a broader tea party context]. Our twitter response to Weigel re his reader's comments:

More information, not less. Exposing toxic, Pauline-Kael-bubble notions to the disinfectant light of day.

Now comes a fresh new voice in our own comments, LNSmithee of L.N. Smithee's Reactor blog. We may not be responsible for our commenters' opinions, but we'd be happy to take credit for providing the soapbox:

As one of those rare "African Americans [who DO] know who these Black Conservatives are and what they represent," I say without hesitation that I would rather be represented by them than the idiots at the NAACP who needed to find something to whine about so badly, they claimed a greeting card was racist for making reference to "black holes"!

Oh. About that blogpost title. As suggested in the caption above, it's a play on Glenn Reynolds's 1995 scholarly essay "Is democracy like sex?" An excerpt from our own blogpost on the subject five years back gives the gist:

Reynolds's metaphor [actually, an analogy, come to think of it] comes from Darwinian biologists' attempts to account for sexual reproduction vs. the much easier (at first glance) asexual reproduction alternative:

"To explore this idea, I have chosen as an analogy or metaphor another widely criticized and misunderstood institution — sex. In short, some discoveries resulting from the application of complexity theory to the question of evolutionary fitness among biological systems have important implications for our discussion of the fitness of the body politic. Both kinds of systems face a similar problem — maintaining a balance between adaptability and stability on the one hand, while resisting parasitism on the other. In essence, democracy can be viewed as serving the same function in political systems that sex serves for biological systems — enhancing resistance to parasites."

The argument resonates in the Darwinian struggle out here in cyberspace and on the ground for survival of the "fittest" narrative. We'll leave it to our readers to ferret out the parasites. BradnMS in the comments gets it just about right, and Juliette Akinyi, AKA Baldilocks, has some important things to say about "the narrative" in her "The Herding" series. Part Two now up. Here's a taste:

If the Left has been successful at keeping racial grievance in the forefront of the black American agenda — in indoctrinating black Americans to believe that retaining racial anger at whites is inherent in being black and essential for black survival — it has also been successful in later years of producing a certain mindset in white Americans. Actually this seems to be two mindsets, but it is really a singular one — a two-headed beast. The first is guilt-fear and the second is unproductive anger.

Update: This just in on Twitter as we're about to go to print: Dave Weigel's Slate blog launches today. A taste of "This lame duck will destroy us all":

A general slack in the trust people have in government is at play here — it's not hard to convince people that Congress is being gamed.

Indeed. Sounds downright Darwinian. Related: "Bloggers are 'cracking, popping, drilling and peeling their victims open.'"

Update: Michelle Malkin "Buzzworthy" link!

Update II: Trending on Memeorandum.

Update III: Oh boy. Instalanche!

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Comments

[goomp]

Freedom to hear all opinions has been really enhanced by the internet and the emergence of the Tea Party. We must figtht the moves to suppress by those who oppose having the people informed.

[Nate Whilk]

L.N. Smithee? Very close to Allan Smithee, "an official pseudonym used by film directors who wish to disown a project".

[Saxon-American]

Sissy-
I wanted to thank you, and thanks to Glenn I've found where you live. You're now part of my daily beat!
Many thanks,
Saxon-American

[crump master]

Sweet titty-fucking Christ, who wrote this post? This kind of breezy, written like a blind-item-but-it's-not-a-blind-item, gossipy voice went out of style with Spy magazine. It's stupid and annoying and *awful*. It shouldn't take a fucking flow chart to follow who you are quoting and when.

[LNSmithee]

In response to Nate Whilk: Here's how I came upon the nom de net L.N. Smithee twelve years ago:

I was on DrudgeReport.com when the then barely-known Matt Drudge posted the immortal headline about Newsweek spiking the Monica Lewinsky story hours before press time, eventually forcing the news rag to acknowledge the story existed. Shortly thereafter, Drudge's site was frequently overwhelmed and crashed several times a day.

Matt also attempted to create his own bulletin board via a link on Drudge Report, which I joined under the nickname "Al N. Smithee." Having tired of the vulgar, disgusting content of the troll-infested alt.fan.rush-limbaugh USENET newsgroup, I intended to post something on the Drudge board I had written about Gloria Steinem's March 22, 1998 New York Times Op-ed, "Feminists and the Clinton Question." Steinem claimed that even if the allegations of Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey were true, each incident fell short of having created a "hostile work environment." Why? Because after groping Willey in the Oval Office and exposing himself to Jones in a hotel room years before, Clinton took “no” for an answer. Subsequently, Steinem's essay became known as the "One Free Grope" editorial.

When I finished writing my critique of Steinem, I tried to post it on the Drudge board, but the site crashed again. I tried a second time and my nick "Al N. Smithee" was not acknowledged, so I re-registered again with the nick "L.N. Smithee" and tried again. Yet another crash. When Drudge Report came back up again, the link to the board was gone. Apparently, Matt thought it was more trouble than it was worth.

Having spent a lot of time writing that piece and nowhere to post it, I hit Drudge's link to Free Republic, registered there as L.N. Smithee, and posted it on March 26, 1998. I spent most of the next ten years commenting and posting on FR, but I rarely visit any more due to 1) rules that minimize exposure of original opinion pieces vs. excerpts from news articles, and 2) devolving terms of debate. I finally got tired of telling people not to fall for the tall tales of career criminal Larry Sinclair, who claims to have personal (carnal) knowledge that Obama's on "the down low."

Finally, Nate, here's what's funny about your remark about people "who wish to disown a project" - you know that Gloria Steinem op-ed that was published in the New York Times on March 22, 1998? Try to search for it on NYTimes.com, and you WON'T find it. THEY SPIKED IT, presumably at Steinem's request! You're supposed to be able to search what was in the Times going back to 1851, but Gloria's "One Free Grope" editorial was selectively flushed down the memory hole! Can I prove it ever existed, then? Yes I can, in two ways. First: It was cut-and-pasted in its entirety on an educrat newsgroup here:

http://www2.edc.org/WomensEquity/edequity98/0561.html

Secondly, while the Times got rid of the original piece, a Letter to the Editor criticizing it remains here:

http://tiny.cc/1FreeGropeLetter

[Sissy Willis]

LNSmithee. That's quite a tale. NYT did same thing with Sunday Magazine cover story "Saint Hillary," as blogged here.

[Sissy Willis]

That's quite a tale. NYT did same thing with Sunday Magazine cover story "Saint Hillary," as blogged here: http://sisu.typepad.com/sisu/saint_hillary/

Sissy

[Saxon-American]

In case my comments on Dave Weigel's 9 August Tea Party piece (http://www.slate.com/id/2263422/) are "disappeared", I thought I'd share them with you.

Deconstructing Dave Weigel - read it before the Stalinesque Slate editors erase it.

"Billy Bob Thornton cleaned up for a job interview" = ignrint peckerwood
"Unfortunately, meet-and-greet coincided with Ken Vogel's latest Politico write-up " = "off the record" message coordination scores again!
"floundering campaign ...... happens to be experience that FreedomWorks can use" = because, of course, they're floundering, too
"burn their own time" = waste their own time
"gallery" = peanut gallery
"It's not clear that FreedomWorks has anything at all to fear from the MSM." = all MSM coverage of the Tea Party movement exhibits the impartiality of a Solomon
"a pledge for contenders to make to prove their Tea Party bona fides" = propensity of conservative persons to be “closed-minded” or “dogmatically rigid”; systemic closure

Before this post is sent to Siberia for rehabilitation, this apposite lyric from Lewis Carroll:

“His form is ungainly — his intellect small —”
 (So the Bellman would often remark)
“But his courage is perfect! And that, after all,
 Is the thing that one needs with a Snark.”

[Sissy Willis]

Saxon-American: It looks like your latest comments were, indeed, removed by Slate editor, despite Dave Weigel's having assured me via twitter that said ed had agreed NOT to remove comments following removal of your earlier remarks.

Well, we know we can't trust "these" people -- Slate editors, WaPo editors, Journolist types -- who think we're too stupid to notice, I guess.

Anyway, don't know whether you've seen, thought you would enjoy, Dan Riehl's thoughts on the subject:

Smug David "White Boy" Weigel Angers Slate Readers

http://bit.ly/9MuGTV

[Sissy Willis]

Saxon-American: It looks like your latest comments were, indeed,
removed by Slate editor, despite Dave Weigel's having assured me via
twitter that said ed had agreed NOT to remove comments following removal
of your earlier remarks.Well, we know we can't trust "these" people -- Slate editors, WaPo
editors, Journolist types -- who think we're too stupid to notice, I
guess.Anyway, don't know whether you've seen, thought you would enjoy, Dan Riehl's thoughts on the subject:Smug David "White Boy" Weigel Angers Slate Readershttp://bit.ly/9MuGTV

Sissy