Quitting Time

So I decided to stop reading and commenting at the Althouse blog today. I did this because the politics posts there have become indistinguishable from GOP talking points. When I started putting up comments I was under the impression that a variety of people read the points there. But I turned out to be wrong. There are a few thoughtful conservatives there, and once in a while a misguided person like me turns up, though most of the folks there are hard core GOP followers. But the main problem I have is with the owner, who prefers to be disingenuous than actually make a substantive point. What I mean by this is that there's never a direct engagement with an argument; instead, for example, there's a criticism of the form of criticism. Now, everyone in blogland is certainly entitled to say what they want. But that doesn't mean I have to play along with it. And after I saw the post yesterday about the NIE, I thought enough was enough. Why did that push me over the edge? Because it was a lift of a sentence that a fair reader would recognize as a selective mischaracterization, and used as the basis for a conclusion that was, literally, nonsense, in that it didn't follow. At some point, you realize that people are not interested in a good faith discussion, but only in playing games. To play Althouse games is to lose, since they are, almost without exception, rigged from the start, or simply distractions from the substantive issue at hand.

If, god forbid, someone actually reads this, I am not saying that the owner of that blog is actually a GOP shill. She may be, or not. Maybe she just wants blog traffic. I don't know. But I do know that there's a persistent pattern of playing games in a fashion that's very similar--though not identical--to the administration and the GOP, and that to go along with those games is, in a deep way, to falsify what little clear discourse is out there.