Note: As previously mentioned, when I go international next week, my old friend and onetime colleague Olly Ruff will be taking over this space, live from Down Under. While he gets used to the prospect of posting for an audience on the other side of the world, and as I get ready to depart, he’ll be filing a few guest posts. Here’s one:
There’s still a sense that a blog-fight hasn’t really made the big time until it hits the paper-based media, and the saga of Deb Frisch, former Psychology adjunct at the University of Arizona, has now crossed that Rubicon. As is now a matter of record, Frisch enthusiastically trolled the oft-trolled comments of Jeff Goldstein’s Protein Wisdom, and eventually escalated matters to the point that she was making tasteless comments about Goldstein’s two-year-old son. Frisch abruptly announced her resignation, and the story kept going from there.
Although most lefty observers pointed out that they had never heard of Frisch, she didn’t materialize from thin air, she was not a right-wing stooge, and her antics chez Goldstein were not particularly unusual by her own bizarre standards. (Try this Crooked Timber thread, for instance.) Certainly, everyone who is not crazy can agree that Frisch’s comments were reprehensible. On the other hand, they could not be reasonably interpreted as a threat (to his credit, Goldstein pointed this out himself) and anyone who wastes their lives in comment sections has seen much worse. So how did things progress to the point where Deb Frisch is in the newspaper?
Continue reading ‘L’Affaire GoldFrisch: Part I’
L’Affaire GoldFrisch: Part II
So: Deb Frisch, crazy, said bad things about Jeff Goldstein’s child, pilloried, also used as rhetorical weapon by parts of the rightosphere against the leftosphere. I was thinking it would take a week for allegations of hypocrisy to start flying back the other way, but everything happens more quickly in this fast-paced modern world of ours.
Glenn Greenwald is a relatively recent addition to the leftosphere’s A-list, and he got where he is today by writing posts like this reaction to the Deb Frisch/Jeff Goldstein controversy. By way of comparison, he makes an example of this post by the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler’s Misha. It’s not a hard post to make an example of.
Greenwald makes some valid points: the post he cites is appalling, and its author is not a nobody. The author is no more likely to murder five Supreme Court justices than Deb Frisch was to fly to Colorado and abduct Jeff Goldstein’s son, but it’s still some ugly stuff. Meanwhile, the nut of Misha’s response to Greenwald is:
It seems relatively unlikely that Misha would accept this justification from, say, Deb Frisch. And once the obviously ridiculous death-threat aspect is dismissed, it’s hard to tell what the “hyperbole” defense is supposed to signify. (Perhaps that if the author were not exaggerating for effect, he would have scaled the phrase “koranimal swine” back to the more moderate “koranimals.”)
Greenwald’s main purpose, though, is to accuse his adversaries of enforcing double standards: if Misha — a “prominent blogger,” as he repeatedly points out — is calling for five justices of the SCOTUS to be hanged, where’s the condemnation? Isn’t this a bigger deal than some deranged adjunct saying something tasteless about someone’s family?
There are a few problems here. Firstly, if we’re actually going to take all this nonsense seriously, a death threat from an “obscure person” made in regard to a member of another blogger’s family is actually more likely to be serious than the idea of a furious “prominent blogger” hanging five ninths of the SCOTUS from a tree. Also, accusing righty bloggers of “dig[ging] under rocks” to find Frisch disregards the fact that she came over to Goldstein’s own comment section, unbidden, to have her latest psychotic break. And, with the notable exception of this widely-linked Confederate Yankee post, righty bloggers tended not to require in so many words that their lefty counterparts disassociate themselves from Frisch’s burblings: Greenwald is engaging in his own bit of sneaky guilt-by-association here.
Most important, though, is the argument Greenwald doesn’t make: namely, that the outrage over Frisch’s comments quickly became a cynical thing: another stick with which to whack the other side, and a convenient excuse for people to say whatever they wanted to to Frisch in a spirit of utter moral righteousness. The reason Greenwald can’t realistically advance this argument is that he’s in the same line of work himself:
Right. It’s not clear whether Greenwald genuinely believes his rhetoric, but he can certainly mau-mau with the best of them — and it is, after all, the nature of the game. (Plus, it’s hard not to root for him when he’s going after the “koranimal swine” guy.) Meanwhile, as a bonus for the rest of us, the grudges fomented over the last few days will make things all the more fun the next time a partisan does something stupid.
The Deb Frisch fallout is just the latest bout of a great wrestling match that plays out in comment sections all over the world: holds are tested, leverage is exploited, advantages are pursued, and both sides spend most of their time wearing ridiculous outfits and trying to get different sections of the crowd to go berserk. There’s never been a better time to be watching.