Proof that there is no hope

I just spent the last hour clicking through random blogrolls (I still don't know how to do that myself; if a visitor knows how to setup blogrolling please feel free to enlighten me via the comments, or an email: cjcolyer gmail com ). I started with a post at Althouse, which is yet another continuation of breast-gate. I started reading the comments and became increasingly disappointed in the quality of discourse.

For instance, from Ms. Althouse herself:

What vicious people, eh? I love the way to go out of their way to exclude, eject, and distance people who they might persuade, but this is absolutely standard treatment by the left side of the blogosphere. I have to try to resist opposing their positions because I find them so distasteful. It's anti-persuasion going on over there.

From where I see the world, neither side of the blogosphere is particularly well behaved. Althouse and (more so) her commenters learn hard to the right. But vicious, exclusive, divisive characterizations of the otherside are certainly not restricted to the left.

You can find plenty of anti-persuasion going on in the comments of right-leaning political blogs such as Althouse, the Volkh Conspiracy, or Professor Bainbridge. If you strip out the direction of the contempt, its structure is indistinguishable from what you might read at Daily Kos, or Crooked Timber. [Note, I say comments. I find Bainbridge and the primary contributors at Crooked Timber to be be intelligent contributors to discourse (but hold a lesser opinion of the Volkh contributors or KOS).]

As I read through these posts, I was reminded how empty this echo-chambers is. Most of the commentary was snarky in-group bully behavior. Certainly we can do better than this? Perhaps I'm just sensitive to (and frightened by) the rhetoric of true believers. I lost my enthusiasm for leftist activism in graduate school but am not willing to cross over to the overly-simplistic conception of the world we tend to see on the right. (Yeah, that was probably an overly-simplistic criticism; I'm tired sue me.... I'll write a post sometime about my thoughts on conservatism).

I'm stopping now and am going to go read a book or something.

Note: in the unlikely event that Althouse wanders over to my little corner of the internet, I am not calling attention to her for the purpose of character assassination. Her blog is one of 10 that I check daily and though I don't often agree (in fact, I find her style of argumentation frustrating), I typically learn something.