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Concern Trolls

Jon Chait gets bitten then bites back:

Some would suggest that the right’s newfound obsession with tone is not only hypocritical but an attempt to stifle criticism through arbitrary criteria, much like campus PC-niks. But I would not suggest that because that would be an angry thing to say, and I do not want to do any more damage to civil discourse than I already have.

Quite so. Normally, though, it seems to me that bloggers get bitten thusly, from time to time by Chait. It’s obviously true that the blogosphere (and especially its progressive arm) involves a degree of vulgarity that wouldn’t pass muster on television or in print, but the actual significance of this tends to escape me. Nevertheless, a lot of MSM types seem to enjoy pointing to this arbitrary stylistic difference between bloggers and “real” writers as a means of pre-empting consideration of criticism.

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