July 22, 2002

As nasty as he wants

As nasty as he wants to be...

At this point, I'm officially bored by Brendan O'Neill's periodic anti-blogosphere temper tantrums, as well as by the predictable responses to them. (Warning: this one will be pretty boring, too.) He only does it for attention. The chief interest, such as it is, now lies in how he'll manage to up the nastiness ante after his extraordinarily mean-spirited parody of John Weidener's recent open letter to the people of Iran. (The ante must be upped for the Brendan O'Neill Snarkathon to retain any outraged link-generating salience: otherwise it just becomes a barely-noticeable feature of the landscape.) Pejman Yousefzadeh's response, coming as it does from an actual Persian, is worth a look, though.

I'm pretty sure, however, that Brendan's reference to the people of Iran as "Arabs" was not an error, but rather was intended as sarcasm, as a (manifestly inaccurate) lampoon of the pig ign'ant 'mer'kins who participated in Random Jottings's characteristically unassuming and tasteful "blogburst" effort. I imagine the same sort of intentional irony is at work when he publishes lengthy posts bemoaning lengthy posts, or when he blogs multiple pages of meticulously-composed text intended to demonstrate the pointlessness and irrelevance of the whole blogging idea. Most amusing. I'd say Brendan's extraordinarily bitter ridicule of the worthy sentiments of Weidener et al. did not display a genuine lack of geographical knowledge, but rather a dearth of what I believe they used to call "class." Surely Brendan O'Neill ought to be able to find a more suitable and edifying application for his considerable talents and a better use of his time.

The thing is, when he gets over himself a bit and lays off the hobbyhorses (i.e., a rather precious self-regard as an Eminent Journalist and a fervent crusade against "imperialism," by which he seems to mean just about anything and everything under the sun) he often has quite a lot of interesting things to say. Just don't get him started on "interference" or Serious Journalism.

Posted by Dr. Frank at July 22, 2002 12:06 AM | TrackBack