Formulaic Responses

Responses to a Tax Day Rant. [Link]

A few days ago I posted a rant about Tax Day. Like a very large chunk of America, I think that the government takes too much of my money, and then squanders it stupidly. So I wrote my opinions on the matter. http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2011/04/15/happy-tax-day/ Apparently somebody found it entertaining because it went viral and the traffic started coming in. I was linked on Pajamas Media and Instapundit, and from there it was linked to several other conservative blogs. I had 3,000 hits before breakfast yesterday, but then I inevitably started getting linked to liberal blogs and the real fun began.

The interesting thing was that the vast majority of the liberal responses followed the same basic formula, over and over and over again.

1. Find something to attack about the messenger.
2. Ignore or cherry pick whatever parts of the argument you feel like. (heck, you don’t need to have read it at all!)
3. Use step 1 and 2 to prove your intellectual superiority over the messenger.
4. Dismiss the argument.
5. Repeat until nobody dares to deviate from the group think.

It was fascinating. Here, on the small scale of just one dude’s minor little blog, was a perfect microcosm of what passes for political discourse in our country. This isn’t just how I’m responded to, this is how anybody who disagrees is responded to. Many of you have probably experienced the same thing.

So I’m going to go through the liberal responses to point out the pattern. This doesn’t apply to all of them obviously, because I’ve got several very regular liberal posters here on this blog. We disagree constantly. In fact, Nick, my token idealistic college student, was arguing in favor of social programs in those same comments before the assault nuts swooped in. But that’s the thing, he was debating a point, not following the attack dog pattern. Several other liberal posters had also joined in, and it was all good intelligent discussion, but scroll down, and you can see when the alert was given to the attack dogs.

So, to break down the response pattern, I’ve tried to categorize these. It would be too much work to respond to all of them individually. (not that they would read them anyway!)  They are in italics.  And of course, since they decided to be mean, so did I. (you know, that whole culture of hate thing. Us right wingers just thrive on it.)

To start off, I wanted to see where all these comments were coming from. I’d been linked on a website that I’d never heard of called Pandagon. (wait, a liberal website named after an animal that’s going extinct because it’s too lazy to reproduce… snort) I was linked under “Batshit crazy” and “economy”.