Rediscovering the Blogosphere

Thinking that my mother-in-law would be arriving this evening, I scrambled to put out a lunchtime post . Well, she's been delayed by a day, so I'll report on some web wanderings I did during a few breaks this evening at the lab. I decided to stop by Sarah Beth's blog, Reclaim Your Brain, and found a couple of good posts. One of them, on Mozilla was nothing new to me, but I urge anyone still using Internet Explorer to go there pronto. The title of the post is "Rediscover the Web." The other post, though, is what I really enjoyed. Taking Sarah Beth's advice, I visited a couple of the sites she mentioned and rediscovered the blogosphere after a fashion. Of the two sites I've visited so far, I'm blogrolling both. (I still have to visit Focus Foundry at length.)

Illustrated Ideas

A blog I've visited a few times in the past at the recommendation of Andy at the Charlotte Capitalist, Illustrated Ideas is a blog about visual art (and many other things) by professional artist and fellow Objectivist, Robert Tracy. Awhile back, I had seen a post about Andrew Wyeth, whom my late father greatly admired. I'd meant to comment on the post, but got busy and forgot to return to it.

Thanks to Sarah Beth, I got my memory jogged to revisit that post. A comment by Tracy on Wyeth's technique versus his normal choice of subject matter reminded me strongly of my father's painting and drawing. (To learn a bit more, see the post and scroll down.) Dad was a policeman whose hobby was drawing and painting. He was good enough at it to become a bit of a local celebrity, and made money on the side selling his paintings and even doing the occasional commission. I liked that post since it gave me a little more understanding of my father as an artist, a side of him I unfortunately did not get to know well before he died.

But my own nostalgia aside, this is a superb blog and will nicely round out my collection of regular reads. If "Gus Van Horn's blog template" and "aesthetic wasteland" seem like synonyms to any of my readers, it is not because I am boorishly unaware of or indifferent to aesthetics. It is because I haven't that much time to tinker with my template/switch blogging platforms. I concentrate on writing and taking note of current events. For now, I'll leave art to the expert, and stop by Robert Tracy's blog.

Incidentally, Robert "Jarhead" Tracy served our country as a Marine. It's nice to know that I'm not the only Objectivist blogger who has served in the military.

Moonbat Psychology vs. The Complimenting Commenter

How can I put this? It's a cute idea whose time has come. It's benevolently funny. It's even profound in its own way. It's the Complimenting Commenter! This blogger devotes most of his time to randomly leaving kind comments on other people's blogs, as you can see on my last post!

Why do I call this profound? As a blogger, I've had to scrape up my share of moonbat droppings from my blog's comment sections. Most are forgettable, though they do sit in an email folder for future reference. One I do remember. It had it all: blind hatred, spite, doctrinaire anti-Americanism, and psychological projection. This bile spewed forth for 47 lines and 440 words before ending with, get this: "It never ceases to amaze me how hateful you people are. How do you have that much energy?" Heh! I'm not sure who "you people" are, but a starting point for introspection for this person might be to ask herself the question she ended her lengthy screed with.

Bear with me for a moment. The best policy with people like this is to ignore them, which I usually do -- unless paying attention to them from afar and among friends might serve a useful purpose. Why did this person do this? I suspect that this is someone who grew up breathing the toxic, nihilistic cultural atmosphere of the late sixties to early seventies, eventually succumbing to it. I saw the tail end of this era as I was growing up, and luckily for me, the culture was in an upswing by the time I was in high school in the mid-eighties. Many of my readers are younger than I am, though. Nihilism dominating a culture as thoroughly as it did in the seventies is hard to imagine, but I can offer a helpful vignette. (But even if my pet theory about this person's cultural context is wrong, the basic point made later about the nihilist choosing to reject values as such remains the same.)

Imagine being laughed at for any value you are foolish enough to admit holding dear. Imagine peer pressure from all sides to reject social norms, even if they are objectively to your advantage to follow. (Wear anything a cut above what anyone else wears and you're called "Grandpa" -- because only old fools have standards.) More precisely, you are to reject positive social norms and accept the new, poisonous ones of the counterculture. Somehow, you are to accept these by osmosis and magically know what they are. Of course, unless you cave in so thoroughly that your very soul is hollowed out, you will always end up being ridiculed in a culture like that.

Your basic alternatives would be to surrender or to develop a very thick skin and a high degree of mistrust of others. Many would opt for the "mixed economy" solution, and surrender in most areas, but hide a few dear values, learning how to compartmentalize. The best projection of this atmosphere that I have encountered is in the movie, A Beautiful Mind, after John Nash returned to Princeton following the worst of his mental illness in order to benefit from familiar surroundings and a stress-free routine. At one point, Nash, rumpled-looking and walking with an odd gait walks past a crowd of hippies. One or two get up to walk behind him, imitating him, and the rest laugh at him, if I remember correctly. This was totally unprovoked -- unless you regard "being different from a crowd" as a provocation.

You either become indifferent to that kind of crap or you surrender to it, as the moonbat above has. We may find moonbats annoying, but be glad they are no longer the dominant force in our culture! But still, why do the moonbats annoy? In the end, you either tolerate their droppings, scrape them up from time to time, or make your guests register to leave comments. In any case, their emotional problems inconvenience someone or cost somebody irreplaceable time in their lives, and this, I think, is what motivates them. Of course, they'd much rather have their comment result in a long, drawn-out episode of verbal abuse, but the motive remains the same.

The moonbat sees someone who cares about something enough to spend time blogging about it. The moonbat sees a valuer and, as a nihilist, must trash those values in any way he can. Perhaps this is psychologizing here, but I think this is self-hatred projected upon the valuer. The moonbat sees someone who didn't surrender. Being dimly aware that he, the moonbat, didn't have to surrender, he makes the same fundamental choice he made in the first place. Rather than fighting to defend his values, he fights to destroy those of his "victim," as if doing so will relieve him of the responsibility of standing up for himself, of standing for something, which is a hell of a lot harder -- and far more worthwhile -- than tearing things down. And besides: Since he surrendered his values long ago, he has none.

None of these people give a damn about anything, or they'd actually read the post, consider it, then go on their way or respond constructively whether they agreed or not. If something I say bugs someone enough, they can start their own blog. But aside from that, I suspect that these people, in surrendering many or all of their own, independently-held values so long ago, have forgotten what it really means to value (i.e., to be human beings), and so they are devoid of the capability of having even an ounce of empathy for the human being who authored the blog. This is sad, but, insofar as it is ultimately self-inflicted, it is also reprehensible. So much for moonbats.

Regardless of whether my attempt to read the "mind" of a moonbat has been successful, I can say with certainty that I like the Complimenting Commenter, whoever he is. He stops by and finds something nice to say, and leaves it as a comment. He is the personification of good will, of the benevolent principle of giving a civilized stranger the benefit of the doubt, and of hearing him out. He has reminded me -- and is here to remind us all -- that for the most part, the folks in the blogosphere are a friendly lot. To draw an analogy with colonial America, where the ideological ferment took place in the coffee shops: Surely some intemperate, drunken slob would stagger in and vomit from time to time. Sure, he attracted some short-lived attention, but the staff quickly made it seem like he'd never been there. And the conversations went on, which is the important thing. This is what the Complimenting Commenter has helped me remember.

So, in the name of benevolence, I am blogrolling the Complimenting Commenter right now.

But one dilemma makes me smile! God help the Complimenting Commenter if he ends up getting the Instalanche he deserves! He evidently follows up on visits like mine (click "comments" for the comment window) by visiting the commenter and leaving a compliment! He'll have his work cut out for him if and when that occurs. Ayn Rand once made it clear that she liked the phrase, "God bless America" for its benevolence. In the same spirit, I say, "God bless the Complimenting Commenter!"

-- CAV

Updates

5-10-05: Fixed some typos. Reworded a sentence. Added a clarifying sentence.