![]() ![]() I'm proud to call Ken a friend, and I only hope that I've earned enough of his respect so that he chooses to use the same word for me. So, anyway, I'd like to explain why I respect Ken, why I respect Vox, and why I think that the politics of personal attack are uncool, and why I wish both my friend and my e-acquaintance wouldn't do it. This may be good tactics, but I'm not in love with it, and – as someone who's got a decent measure of respect for Vox – I wish he wouldn't do it. Vox does this, I think, because years of playing war games and fighting MMA has taught him a fair bit about tactics, and he realizes that these feints lead his opponents to – well, I could invoke some phrases from Clausewitz or Jomini, but, in the parlance of our times, "lose their shit" is appropriate and isn't overstating it – and then he can step back and point, shrug, and say "see what I mean?" "I was just stating a fact – the guy is short, given the median height of Canadians, which is 5' 9.8" according to a UNESCO survey I'm linking to." He often does it in a cutesy way where what he says is – technically – not name-calling. …which isn't to say that Vox doesn't call names. He understands that the effect of deflating someone's argument through logic and facts is a thousand times better than calling them names. Vox is a performance artist par excellence, but he's also a crisp thinker, and usually not a name-caller. I'm sad because I thought Vox was made of better stuff.Īctually, I still do. I'm not sad for Ken's sake – Ken is a big boy and can take a bit of name calling on the net. I told Ken I'd rain hell-fire on Vox, but now that it comes down to it, I realize that I'm not angry – I'm sad. The raining of hell-fire – a desire I don't have at the moment If he says shit, I'll rain hell-fire on him.Īnd then, after Ken put up his great post, I tweetedĪnd now it turns out that Vox has – exactly as some expected, and exactly contrary to my own predictions – attacked Ken for the contents of his post. ![]() Re Vox: he's not a friend of mine, but he is an acquaintance. Which is to say, in pure market terms, it's "not worth it" for you to write on the topic. The cost of writing is centralized (your effort, your potential embarrassment (not that I think there's anything remotely embarrassing about it)), and the benefit is widespread. I'm not a personal friend of Vox's, but I am an acquaintance (I have roughly as many political points of agreement with Vox as I do with Ken, so we run in the same circles, even if I'm not a card carrying member of the "Dread Ilk"), and I thought the idea that Vox would attack Ken for the post was a bit far fetched – I thought Vox wouldn't stoop to that level.Īs someone who wrestled the black dog for a decade or more (thankfully, tho, not in the last 15 years or so), I'm a huge fan of your posts on this topic. He specifically wondered if various folks on the net would attack him for it. The other day my friend Ken asked me (and the other Popehat contributors) for feedback on his idea of blogging about his depression. ![]()
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