by hilzoy
Someone called Instapunk proposed the following challenge:
“The exercise is this: Search six months’ worth of content, posts and comments, of the 20 most popular blogs on the right and the left. The search criteria are George Carlin’s infamous “7 Dirty Words.”
I am absolutely certain that the left will far exceed the right in the number of usages of all these words, which will go a long way toward proving that it’s the right which is still concerned with ideas while it’s the left that’s obsessed with the lowest kind of hateful invective.”
Because, as we all know, using profanity rots the brain, leaving the user incapable of rational thought. That’s why we at Obsidian Wings ban profanity: to preserve our precious bodily fluids rational faculties.
Anyways, Patrick Ishmael actually did the searches, and came to the conclusion that the left is, indeed, fouler-mouthed than the right. Of course, there are a few problems: Scott Eric Kaufman ran the searches again and got lower numbers by rather a lot — e.g., the original results for dKos were 146,000 pages with the dirty words; Scott Eric Kaufman got a mere 9,960. Then Kevin Drum helpfully pointed out that the original searches counted profanity in comments as well as blog posts, and a lot of right wing blogs don’t have comments.
I will add two more points. First, at least four of the left-wing blogs surveyed (dKos, MyDD, TPMCafe, HuffingtonPost) have user blogs, while none of the right-wing blogs do. Second, while our own Publius’ Legal Fiction undoubtedly deserved to be one of the top twenty left-wing blogs, I do not believe it was one. (It’s an unfair world.) The fact that Ishmael included Legal Fiction but not The Washington Monthly on his list of the top 20 left-wing blogs is, shall we say, in need of explanation.
You might be wondering: does hilzoy actually care about this idiocy? The answer is: no. I just needed to set the stage for the next point: Jesus’ General then had the brilliant idea of searching on somewhat more interesting terms, and so he decided to see which right-wing blogs had used the term ‘Walter Reed’ (without the term ‘Code Pink’) during the last three months. Here’s what he found:
Being a thorough soul, I reran the searches, and got slightly different answers, possibly because between when the General posted his chart and now, people at Walter Reed have been fired (news story!) In any case, here are the numbers of stories turned up by the search that concern the current scandal (not counting comments, mostly because I didn’t want to read through the comment threads):
Instapundit: one (on the resignation of the Secretary of the Army.)
LGF: none.
Powerline: none.
Jawa Report: none.
NewsBusters: none.
Blogs for Bush: none.
Dean Esmay: none.
Protein Wisdom: none.
Roger L. Simon: none.
Volokh Conspiracy: none.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: none.
Adding a few more:
Atlas Shrugs: none.
Belmont Club: none.
Michelle Malkin: One (on the resignation of the Sec. of the Army.) [UPDATE: In comments, OCSteve notes two more. END UPDATE.]
Right Wing Nuthouse: none.
Ace of Spades: none.
The Anchoress: none.
***
For the record: I do not think that you can infer anything from the fact that one blogger doesn’t cover a given story. That could be due to just about anything, from not being up on the details to being interested in a different story that no one else is covering to a heavy work week. When a large part of the blogosphere falls silent, with a few exceptions, that’s more likely to be significant. I realize that I haven’t checked everyone — time is fleeting, and all that — so take this for what little it’s worth.
***
UPDATE: I meant to say this before, but: good for Sec. Gates. When the commander of Walter Reed was fired a few days ago, I was initially baffled by his replacement, who was, as far as I could tell, as responsible for what had happened if not more so. Now he’s been replaced, and the Secretary of the Army who put him in charge has resigned.
Think about it: we could have had leadership like this — leaders who just understand about accountability — all along.
Better late than never.
Given the choice, I’d rather be correct and vulgar, instead of polite and wrong to the tune of 100,000 dead. Neener neener neener, motherfncker.
“go a long way toward proving that it’s the right which is still concerned with ideas while it’s the left that’s obsessed with the lowest kind of hateful invective”
lolz.
I’m very f$#%^ng concerned about motherf%#!$ing ideas.
hateful-invective-of-the-left watch: Shunned conservative apostate who-never-sells-any-books Ann Coulter calls John Edwards a faggot at CPAC after being introduced by Mitt Romney. The best part is the round of cheers she gets. Them sure are some ideas.
“Elephant, have you ever noticed in me a tendency to use profanity for emphasis?”
“No, why?”
“It’s goddamn radioactive out there.”
[Gary will remember; I’m using quotes but it’s from memory so I can’t swear to it.]
[Mounts hobbyhorse]
I am very glad to see that hilzoy managed to write an entire post on this story without once using the word “pottymouth” either ironically or seriously.
[Dismounts hobbyhorse]
“Now he’s been replaced, and the Secretary of the Army who put him in charge has resigned.”
Kiley being replaced by Schoonmaker was news to me, and I have been reading Pat Lang and Phil Carter on this. Good for Gates, who is certainly a competent professional. Very fast and decisive.
“Think about it: we could have had leadership like this — leaders who just understand about accountability — all along.”
Gates has a history that limits my complete agreement with this.
Totally OT: MJ Rosenberg posted the text of Obama’s speech to AIPAC here. At the end he says:
Now: Fassuta is the village where the ex-love of my life was born and raised. I have been to Fassuta. I wasn’t aware that many other people had: it’s a tiny little place. It was completely startling to come across it in the middle of a political speech.
I was reading some of the comments on the speech at TPMCafe, and I thought: if you know that Fassuta is an Arab village — as most of the AIPAC audience would — it reads utterly differently than if you don’t.
I may have missed it, but I didn’t see any link love to Jesus’ General’s actual post, so here it the link and the love, which is in a strictly manly, non-homoerotic way.
I can actually understand and sympathize with people who are either genuinely shocked and affronted when “certain words” are used (I know people who aren’t faking it) or who find they can’t read at work blogs where “certain words” are used. (However improper it is to take a blogbreak at the same time as a teabreak, still, who hasn’t done it at times except on jobs where it’s been explicitly forbidden?)
But there was an occasion, not so long ago, where Dick Cheney said “F**k you!” to a Senator on the floor of the Senate – which sentiment may be appropriate if unimaginative in the Australian Parliament, but both the US Senate and the House of Commons have a preferred practice of the bland and deadly courtesy which can be just as telling as an Australian MP roundly telling the Prime Minister that he’s a lying poncy bastard.
If the right-wingers who claim now to feel shock and affront at the language used by left-wing blogs were genuinely among the people who are pained by such words (and I have known such people) they’d have been as shocked and affronted by Cheney – if not more so, since the shock and affront goes up the more inappropriate the language for the setting.
And there may have been one or two who were protesting both Cheney and Marcotte. But I don’t know of any.
“Stacy Beardsley, a soldier’s wife released this week from the hospital after a grueling surgery, watched two men in pressed military uniforms walk steadily to her front door. ‘Tell me he’s just hurt,’ the Indiana woman told the pair, according to family friend Marilyn Piersdorf. ‘Well, they couldn’t tell her that,’ Piersdorf said. Her husband, Army Sgt. William ‘B.J.’ Beardsley, who recently lived in Coon Rapids, died Monday in Diwaniyah, Iraq, 80 miles south of Baghdad, after a roadside bomb went off near his vehicle. The 25-year-old soldier had re-enlisted, in part, for the health insurance to cover his wife’s medical bills. He died the day she left the hospital.”
Carpetbagger Report
From my own experience in troll country (I am not referring to Norway here):
1. Simply looking for the dirty words without a “fuzzy” search algorithm will yield a significant undercount because the worst abusers have a notorious lack in orthographic skills and are able to misspell four-letter words on a regular base.
2. If the comments section is included in the search, lefty blogs will yield a significant overcount due to troll infestation (the types that want to tell those mothrafukkink libruls ware thay can stic thare mptharfzkinc lipralisum)
[OK it will neutralize the dirt counter again a bit when the spellochallenged ones infest the lefty blogs].
snarky remark: spelling by ear seems to be a unique US vice and more a right than left thing.
From my own experience in troll country (I am not referring to Norway here)
Finland, surely?
Another anecdote, ascribed to Lincoln:
Two travellers met at an inn and were sharing dinner:
Do you drink?
— No.
Do you smoke?
— No.
Do you curse?
— No.
I’ve generally found that persons with d*mned few vices have d*mned few virtues.
For the record: I do not think that you can infer anything from the fact that one blogger doesn’t cover a given story.
Agreed. You also can’t infer much from Google games. For instance, you found only one for MM and only about the Army Sec. resigning. Here are two she did specifically about the problems.
I don’t have time to recheck them all, but results will vary depending on exactly how you search.
You also can’t infer much from Google games.
Actually, in the area of language technologies (which includes, amongst other things, information retrieval; i.e., Google et al), “Google games” are used to infer quite a lot in serious research. You’ll see this in pure linguistics too. The trick is, as you suggest, very careful methodology in query formulation, and a firm understanding of what kind of results are and are not going to be produced by the algorithm in question.
re Walter Reed: Kiley was in charge when the problems developed, Kiley was told about them and did nothing, and now Kiley’s in charge again and we’re to believe things will improve? This isn’t full accountability. Supposedly, Kiley is Weightman’s temporary replacement. As soon as they find someone capable of doing the job, he needs to be relieved of duty.
Joe Galloway passes on an excellent suggestion: parents and spouses of the troops who’ve had to endure the endless waits and bureaucratic maze at Walter Reed should be part of the review to fix the problems.
I’m treating this as an open thread, hope that’s okay:
Habeas corpus restoration update:
FCNL is urging people to get their senators to cosponsor the Specter-Leahy bill, S.185, which simply restores the habeas rights that were stripped from prisoners in last fall’s Military Commissions Act.
The Dodd bill that Katherine mentioned recently here (S.567) is much more comprehensive, and complex, and human rights lobbyists feel it will eventually be broken into smaller bills. They see S.185 as the best way to begin, both because it’s simple and because it has bipartisan cosponsorship.
A number of the Senators who voted for the MCA are atoning by sponsoring S.185: Salazar, Brown (in the House at the time), Lautenberg. They did so in the last week (joined by Clinton, Feinstein, and Feingold)so please get your own Senators to continue the momentum.
I think the underlying pattern is that righhtwingers tend to focused on the concrete and leftwingers on the abstract. Nothing is more concrete to a person than their own emotions, but, affter that, comes the things you can see or hear. Hence flag fetishism rather than suppport for the First Amendment, the use of dirty words rather than substance to measure the civility of discourse, the sincere belief that slogans are real because they are an expression of emotion (“I support the troops!” and therefore it is not important to actually DO anythinng about supporting soldiers), the belief in magical thinking (we can win if we have the will but we don’t need to figure out how to pay for the war or get more troops), and so on.
I got into a long argument onn a righhtwing blog about supporting the troops. The blog posters were trying to convince themselves that returning soldiers were being greeted withh spitwads from the left. They hhad no evidence of a pattern of abuse from the lefft of soldierrs but that didn’t stop thhem fromm asserrting that it was happenninng or would happen. I pointed out that there WAS inn fact a pattern of abuse of returing Iraq vets and vets in general, but it was abuse from the right of soldiers who failed to toe the rightwing party line onn thhe war. My examples inncluded the treatment of Webb, Hackett, Fawcett, Winter, Patrick Murphy, Cleland, Tammy Duckworth, and Murtha, all of whom have had their patriotism and ttheir service records challenged from the right. But reality isn’t relevant: rightwingers FEEL supportive and patriotic, therefore they are.
So it doesn’t surprise me that there is a resounding silennce about Walter Reed. There is no emotional need to pay attentionn to a real problem. There is also a resounding silennce about the unreadiness of the National Guard and the overextension of the Army.
Ack. Both Bob McManus and I had it not quite right.
Weightman, relieved of duty as commander at Walter Reed, was temporarily replaced by Kiley. The new commander has been named — Eric Schoomaker (brother of Peter, the Army Chief of Staff).
Presumably now Kiley goes back to being Surgeon-General, none the worse for wear unless the review underway pins him in the way he should be pinned.
wonkie, that’s an interesting point.
It carries over into other issues, too, esp. the Right’s loathing for science (as opposed to technology, which they love, which makes no sense, since technology wouldn’t exist without science).
this is a test…the site thinks my real comment on this thread is spam.
dKos has a lovely little report on the CPAC conference – you know, the one where Coulter called Edwards a faggot, and the audience cheered?
It apparently got even better.
Giuliani, in making his pitch for CPAC support, said nice things about Lincoln. You know, Abraham Lincoln? The guy the Republican Party likes to call itself “The Party of”?
Apparently, that didn’t go over so well with the CPAC crowd, according to the Washington Times:
In interviews afterward, some attendees said Mr. Giuliani lost momentum when he heaped lavish praise on Abraham Lincoln.
Mitt Romney, however, wowed ’em:
“Rudy thought he was addressing a Republican audience,” said Mike Long, chairman of the New York State Conservative Party. “Mitt understood this is an audience of people who are conservatives first.”
Wow.
Wonkie, I don’t think abstract versus concrete quite gets at it. It’s more like parts versus wholes, at least as I see it. Prevailing right-wing discourse gets almost autistically obsessive with particular metrics to the exclusion of all the rest. (And it’s worth saying: this is as foreign to a bunch of conservative traditions as it is to liberalism and non-conservative alternatives. Conservatives have often been the voices for awareness of the system as a whole thing in the face of atomistic tunnel vision.) It’s like looking at soldiers’ per capita fuel consumption without paying attention to casualty rates, or the rates of performing this or that diagnostic procedure without considering patient mortality and fraction of life spent impaired or in treatment, or specific test scores but not students’ ability to understand real-world documents like contracts and math like budgeting. The rate of usage of particular words could complement a consideration of positions advocated, attitudes toward opponents, and so on, but instead becomes a substitute for any of that – even though they’re just as concrete, words written and said about people and events being pretty solid.
Synecdoche is our friend, but not when used like this.
Katherine,
Glad you’re here, sorry you’re having trouble commenting. I was aiming the habeas update at you, among others.
So Kiley is back to wearing one hat: Surgeon General. This is not good news. He was MG Weightman’s superior. He has consistently ignored complaints about the conditions at WRAMC. He is in full cover-up mode. Finally as SG he remains in charge of all Army Militray Treatment Facilities. Kiley must go.
An AP story makes it sound as if Kiley’s not out of the accountability crosshairs yet. Good.
Another broad hint that Kiley may not be long for his job (from the same AP story):
“Some have shown too much defensiveness and have not shown enough focus on digging into and addressing the problems,” Gates said.
I read Obama’s AIPAC speech, hilzoy and the various comments in the thread. What it shows is that even if Obama is truly interested in a just peace, he apparently still feels he has to pull his punches regarding Israel’s crimes when talking to AIPAC. In fact I can’t recall any indication that Israel has done anything wrong–they might have to make a few more sacrifices for peace (a technical term for returning stolen land). He apparently felt no such constraint when discussing the mayhem inflicted by Hezbollah rockets. It’d difficult to see how any American President could be an honest broker if they have to pander like this to win elections. Rosenberg’s hopefulness (and yours?) is apparently based on his ability to read between the lines–if Obama didn’t intend to be an honest broker he’d have pandered a lot more or so the theory goes.
Which is why someone supporting Rosenberg’s optimistic view posted Hillary Clinton’s speech, to show us what world-class pandering looks like. It’s not a completely convincing argument.
Yes, it’s interesting comparing Obama’s speech to Clinton’s. Clearly better, especially if you read between the lines–he condemns attacks on an Arab Israeli town; she lauds the security fence’s protection of a Jewish “neighborhood” that’s actually a settlement east of the Green Line. But it makes me pretty angry that that’s as good as we can expect of any presidential candidate.
I think the reason my comment won’t work is that it involved pasting a small amount of text. Oh well. Not worth retyping. That’s one really annoying spam filter we’ve got.
Actually, Malkin had a number of posts about Walter Reed, just as HotAir had. Most of them were ignorant and partisan, though, like attacking VA because of this story, when Walter Reed is not even a part of VA, and all the rants about ineffective federal government. The next thing to hear from her is probably about the need to privatize the military, because government-ran organization could never be effective.
Is it a coincidence that complaints about a lack of “civility” and “politeness” are being hurled by largely the same people at both atheists and liberals? No, I don’t think so: in both cases, the same people are demanding that different groups be more “civil” in their denunciations of indecency and injustice. Rather than deal with the real problems, they are objecting to the manner in which the complaints are made and the passion with which the beliefs are held. It was Instapunk, remember who recently called for assassinations then tried to dishonestly defend himself — yet he complaints about “bad language” on the part of those who criticize him.
He and others are calling for civility at the expense of and in the place of basic human decency.
…the left will far exceed the right in the number of usages of all these words….
Surely the number is less important than the percentage of usages to total word count.
Also, shouldn’t one distinguish between usage as emphasis and usage as insult?
“Google games” are used to infer quite a lot in serious research. You’ll see this in pure linguistics too. The trick is, as you suggest, very careful methodology in query formulation, and a firm understanding of what kind of results are and are not going to be produced by the algorithm in question.
I agree. I should have stayed away from “google games” as it has a derogatory feel and that was not my intent.
More of a warning I think. I have found that it is easy to structure queries and then “see” my hypothesis confirmed, only to tweak it a bit and then see it fall apart.
In this case, when I read hilzoy’s post I suspected her search had a problem because I knew the posts where there (having read them previously). I had to tweak my query a bit to get them to show up as well.
So I would just caution against drawing conclusions based on Google searches…
Probably it’s a good idea to look at people who both write about this stuff and know about this stuff. On the right, generally, is Milblogs.
On the left, I have no idea. In any event, this is a subject matter that’s just a bit more tricky than profanity, which I think I have been fluent in from birth. Must be the lumberjack genes.
There seems to be a somewhat different standard of civility on the Left and the Right. To the Righties, “George Bush hasn’t done a very good job” is “uncivil”, while “Traitors like you should be taken out and shot” is “civil”.
If that’s “civility”, I’ll take vanilla.