Why do you come here?

[imomus]

Well, Saturday's entry -- in which I advanced the daring view that one Israeli life is equivalent to one Lebanese life -- really did seem to annoy a few Click Opera readers. "I'm arranging a Momus record burning in my yard tomorrow. Just listening to your voice makes me sick. I wish you ill you sick bastard," wrote one ex-satisfied customer with an IP address in Holland.

What puzzles me is why such right-wing people bought Momus records in the first place, or read this blog. Aren't there semantic filters, clues all over the place, political markers? Haven't my political cards always been on the table? Shouldn't right wingers have been rebuffed years ago? Shouldn't this "bigger-than-Jesus"-style record-burning have happened the moment people listened to my records? Shouldn't these people have played the stuff on headphones in Tower or Virgin, concluded "he's a radical", and just bought a Stephen Malkmus record instead?

Speaking of Malkmus, I could understand it if I'd expressed sentiments like those the pig libber shared with Index magazine last year:

"There are things about the West Coast that bug me. There is this really stupid leftism out here. It makes me mad. On September 11, I was at this health-food store on Hawthorne Boulevard called the Daily Grind. It's a ropy kind of place. These young, shiftless hippies hang out there. This one guy was like, "Those workers, man, they deserved it." At first, I wanted to collar him and put him up against a wall and get all Wolfowitzian on his ass. Then I turned into my dad, like, "This guy can hang out and play in his drum circle now, but in forty years he's just going to be a strain on our health-care system. He may be eating health food, but he doesn't know he's still part of the problem."

If I'd said that kind of thing, sure, I'd expect to have ultra-right wing commenters. But I haven't. I'm at a loss. Do these people come here just to "educate" me? Or do they think this white robe I'm wearing is KKK (in fact it's Moroccan), or that the big orange face in the poster behind me is Ayn Rand before she shaved her beard?

Come on, right wing people, enlighten me. What on earth are you doing here?

Comments

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

<< So you think they're trolls? I must admit, I troll a bit myself. In other words, I leave comments on boards whose whole position I find a bit suspect. >>

I get called a troll a lot. I look at the person making the accusation. Is it someone I respect? Can s/he write? I'll back off if someone I respect tells me to do so if I'm being trollsive.

<< habitus: The physical and constitutional characteristics of an individual, especially as related to the tendency to develop a certain disease. >>

Not sure I understand your use of the term habitus here, momus. How is "aesthetically wrong" related to habitus?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

To quote from the Wikipedia entry on habitus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitus):

"Habitus can sometimes be understood as those aspects of culture that are anchored in the body or daily practices of individuals, groups, societies, and nations. It includes the totality of learned habits, bodily skills, styles, tastes, and other non-discursive knowledges that might be said to "go without saying" for a specific group -- in that way it can be said to operate beneath the level of ideology."

In other words, no matter what you argue with someone on the level of ideology, if you don't share "what goes without saying" (and what is encoded at the level of habit and the body, and the instinctive sense of what's beautiful and what's right and how to live), then you won't connect.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

A new definition of trolling, then: trolling is the attempt to connect with someone with whom you don't share what goes without saying.

[dzima.livejournal.com]

Hello Marxy!

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

<< with whom you don't share what goes without saying. >>

My favorite philosophers suggest that it's difficult, but humans should strive to have nothing that goes without saying.

Sartre (Being and Nothingness)
Malcolm Gladwell