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23 June 2009 8:00 AM
Interview with Glenn Reynolds, Part II
Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, is one of the Internet's most popular and prolific bloggers--and one of its most impressively productive people, full stop. A Professor at the University of Tennessee College of Law, he is the author of An Army of Davids (a book I've purchased, read, and enjoyed). And he hosts InstaVision on PJTV, the Web video project of Pajamas Media.
PART I of my interview with him is here.
Q. Are blogs making people better informed, or allowing them to cocoon?
Well, both. Though Cass Sunstein famously worried about cocooning,
research -- and my own experience -- suggests that people don't just
read things they agree with. For one thing, you have to read people
you disagree with in order to call them "asshats," which is a key
aspect to the Internet experience . . .
More seriously, I find that there are a <i>lot</i> of
very interesting and well-informed people on the Internet, but that
they tend to be drowned out by the obnoxious trolls. That breakdown in
civility -- or even in serious debate, since trolls never really
debate, they just shout -- is a more serious threat than "cocooning."
With cocooning you avoid people who disagree with you; with trolling
you notice them but write them off as unserious. The latter, I think,
is more dangerous to democracy.
Q. In the past, you've offered your readers valuable advice about disaster
preparedness, advocated for paying more attention to tracking
asteroids, and otherwise drawn attention to issues that weren't getting
enough. What issue is currently off the political and/or media radar...
and ought to be on it?
The biggest under-appreciated looming crisis right now is the impending
public pension collapse. That's tracked at a blog called
Pensiontsunami.com (which also tracks the bad, but not nearly as-bad,
private pension debacle). Between payroll bloat, underfunding, and the
stock market decline, many cities and states won't be able to meet
their pension obligations. That's likely to make the housing
bubble-burst look minor by comparison, but most politicians are just
trying to ignore the problem.
(Yes, it's a short second part. But if you're craving more Glenn Reynolds you're in luck -- he somehow finds time to do an astonishing amount of freelance writing given his blogging output and professorial duties. Check out his law review articles and journalistic work here.)
1. The vast majority of blogs are incredibly bad. They rip 'n' post, they get basic facts wrong, they fail to do research, and on and on.
2. Because of the first, r/w bloggers helped BHO win. There were many stories that, had they been handled correctly, could have reduced his chances of winning. Instead, those r/w bloggers - including those linked by Reynolds - over-hyped or just lied about those stories. That allowed the MSM to come in and debunk those lies. By doing that, they minimized any impact the story could have had. (For an example, see the "BHO wants to bankrupt the coal industry" story. That's not what he said. He did say damaging things, but they had no impact because the MSM was able to rush to his defense over the lies that bloggers told about what he'd said.)
3. Someone who's anonymously trolled me appeared to be posting from Reynolds' school the first time and from Knoxville the second, and both were on pollcode pages involving Reynolds. I don't know whether it was him (it might have been someone else from UT), but maybe he could help find out who it was.
4. Reynolds has endlessly promoted the tea parties, and I don't know where to start. It's incredibly bad politics to complain about not being able to buy another big screen TV while millions of Americans are out of work. It's incredibly stupid to use street protests - something that have no effect without large numbers of people - if your extreme ideology (objectivism) does not have the numbers. It's anti-intellectual to lower yourself to the ACORN level of waving loopy signs on street corners. Some of the people pulling the strings on the movement support massive immigration, something that leads to more power for the far-left and more spending. And, as an example, in a deep blue district when the "tea party" only gets 300 people and over 100,000 had voted for the Dem rep., all that does is make that Dem rep. happy about how weak his opposition is. And, on and on. The truly effective technique that a small number of people can use to get their ideas across is to question politicians to their face on videos for Youtube. Reynolds has once or twice promoted that plan, but only very weakly. And, he and many other r/w bloggers refused to promote that plan before the election, despite the fact that it could have been used to greatly reduce BHO's chances. Of course, that plan requires you to have an argument and to be able to make it, so perhaps that's the reason.
Reynolds trolls for a living (unless you somehow consider links to hyper-partisan nonsense labeled "indeed" useful or instructive comment.)
about cocooning... people don't necessarily read the original piece they claim to disagree with. Much too often, people go to a favorite site & read predigested interpretations of potentially offensive material. In doing so, a person can avoid reading something that doesn't reinforce what s/he already believes while retaining the option of clicking through to call the original author an asshat.
That was shortest interview ever. Even combined with Part I. It was worth it to hear Instapundit use asshat.