Wednesday, September 27, 2006
(9:50 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Free Advice
Never read right-wing blogs. I just spent 30 seconds browsing Instapundit, and my health has already noticeably deteriorated.To be safe, you should probably avoid posts at liberal blogs that seem to be responding to right-wing bloggers as well.
Some libertarians may be okay, but you have to be really careful with that shit. Sometimes you get a charmingly naive person who teaches at the University of Chicago, and then other times you get people who are standard right-wing hacks but feel entitled to be intellectually snobbish about it.
Because I mean -- yeah, it seems like a good idea to be open to other viewpoints, but on the other hand, it's hard to concentrate when you're up to your chin in vomit. Let's say that, as a rule of thumb, it only counts as a "viewpoint" if it doesn't include the word "treason." Just as kind of an initial sorting device.
Look: I'm getting drawn into it. I'm clearly flirting with the idea of talking about right-wing "ideas" at some length. But no -- some utterances don't count as "ideas." In fact, some of them are so fargone as to be an insult to the word "opinion." If you spend a lot of time exchanging words with people like that, you'll forget how to speak intelligible English. Look at what happened to that Colmes guy!
This has been my free advice for the day. Thank you for your time.
