Wanker of the Day

Atrios used to write one of the best blogs around. His was the first I read, and even if he was a liberal partisan, he had the analytical skills to back it up. Now, however, he is just a populist asshole. It's an unfortunate fact of the internet age, as Cass Sunstein has noted, that people can isolate themselves from any news that doesn't fit with their views and yet continue to reinforce their views with a steady feed of up to the minute party line bullshit.
Anyway, I checked up on old Atrios today and found that I hadn't missed anything in the month or two since I had last been to his site. His site now consists wholly of one line links, such as the "Wanker of the Day", which he uses to send his rabid followers against his "enemies". Today's is a perfect example. The link is to a column by Jim Brady, the executive editor of the Washington Post website. Brady took down the comments section of one of the many blogs on his site after Atrios and others sent their followers to it so that they could complain about the error the author had made in an article. Even though the article was corrected, many continued to insult the author:

To my dismay, matters only got worse on Jan. 19 after Howell posted a clarification on washingtonpost.com. Instead of mollifying angry readers, the clarification prompted more than 400 additional comments over the next five hours, many of them so crude as to be unprintable in a family newspaper. Soon the number of comments that violated our standards of Web civility overwhelmed our ability to get rid of them; only then did we decide to shut down comments on the blog.

So was I suppressing free speech? Protecting the Bush administration? That's what you'd think, judging by the swift and acid reaction to my move. They couldn't get to post.blog, but they sure let me have it elsewhere in the blogosphere. I was honored as "Wanker of the Day" on one left-wing blog. Another site dissected my biography in order to prove that I was part of The Post's vast right-wing conspiracy.

The catch is this: the very article I am quoting above is the one that Atrios links to for his "Wanker of the Day" post today. Instead of confronting this man's argument, instead of looking at the issue objectively, considering it to ask why this person feels he has been treated unjustly, Atrios assumes that his readers will reach the same conclusions he does: that this man is a wanker, a fool, an idiot, someone so dumb that he doesn't deserve to be listened to.
The worst part is that Atrios propagates this kind of crap while pretending at the same time that liberals are the saviors of the world, have everyone's interests at heart, and care more about the troops dying in Iraq than anyone else. Bullshit. This guy has no interests but his own, his readers have no minds of their own, and his site is no more than a messageboard for people who are so intellectually lazy that they cannot look at the news without someone telling them what to think. The Wanker of the Day for me, then, is Atrios: a blogger who once had something to say but is now represents the fact that liberalism can be as dogmatic as any other ideology.