They’re such cowards.

Anyway, the only reason this is worth note is that it exposes a couple of patterns that are so common to academia, which for the large part means liberals. I’m counting this guy as “academia” since he went out of his way to mention his dissertation and grad school in his goofy video. He’ll consider such designation on his behalf a compliment, I’m sure.

First, notice how testy he gets when I expose the irony of his criticism. Granted, maybe he’s more testy that I exposed the “I hope this video makes me famous” intent of his video. Either way, he can’t just take it on the chin and laugh it off, even with the playful tone that I used in my opening comment. (Granted, again, tone is a hard thing to interpret in such informal writing, especially when it’s written as criticism as it certainly was.)

Next, notice how he completely abandons the real substantial part of my criticism of his criticism–the part that calls him out for trying to blame Mitt Romney or his campaign for a grammatical gaffe made by some independent support group of Romney’s. On that point he conveniently and suddenly falls mute, instead choosing to focus the full measure of his analytical prowess on whether or not its appropriate to terminate an interrogative phrase with a period, as validated by this or that style guide. Who cares? (Note the appropriate use of question mark.) The only reason I even brought up the punctuation at all was because I found it amusing how his self-congratulations was so vigorous as to make him overlook an obvious grammatical flaw of his own (style guides bah…only academics follow them anyway).

Finally, notice the dead giveaway of a liberal who has lost an argument (again, I can’t say for sure if this guy is a liberal, but he’s sure playing from their playbook). Rather than, “thanks for visiting,” or “thanks for the comment, we disagree,” or “you’re wrong, and I’ll prove it,” he chooses “go away! I don’t care about being corrected, or listening to anyone who doesn’t agree with me…I prefer the Kos-style liberal echo chamber to actual debate!”

So predictable.

Final Note: I submit that I may be WAY over-selling this entire thing. There’s probably not much here at all, really. Maybe I’m just tired of people taking pot shots or making criticisms without any foundation in reality or fact and I took it out on this poor wanna-be YouTube celebrity. So on his behalf, let me say, I hope the DailyKos was watching and that they are about to offer him a regular feature on their totally valid and rational site.

Here are some of the big cowardly offenders:

The Daily Kos

Blue Mass Group

Political Forum

MyDD.com

How ashamed they would be of us today.

With a tool as powerful as the blogosphere at the disposal of everyone with internet access–a tool that exists for the sole purpose of engaging an ever-growing, global audience in conversation–one would think we’d be more interested in actual ideas and debate than in publicity.

I blame Google. Google, which is obviously the Xerox of search (meaning the brand that has become the verb), has necessitated that bloggers concern themselves more with frequency of posts than with substance if the blogger hopes to gain any kind of page rank or authority–in other words, exposure–from Google.

I guess Google isn’t solely to blame though; the ever-shortening attention span of the masses contributes significantly to the problem as well. Google authority, after all, relies largely on backlinks, and backlinks in the blogosphere are earned by posting frequently (and to a lesser degree substantively) enough to keep the attention of the public. The more the blogger is able to keep the reader’s attention, the more backlinks the blog will gain, the better the placement in Google search results, the more people will discover the blog and start paying attention to it, which attention the blogger will have to try to maintain…by posting frequently.

The sad truth, however, is that in my experience, very few bloggers, particularly political and social commentators, are interested in carrying on extended conversation about the issues they blog about, nor are their readers who comment on the posts. Over the past several months, I have made it a point to comment on various blogs–mostly liberal blogs–in an attempt to engage both the blogger and the readers in deeper conversation about the issues raised in the blog posts. Those issues are broad in scope, everything from abortion to Mormonism to Mitt Romney and more. Almost invariably, my comments elicit some kind of response, as is typical when a conservative has the nerve to comment on a particularly liberal blog.

I welcome it.

Unfortunately, however, with few exceptions, the conversation on any particular blog post has a life-span of about twelve hours, if that much. So just when the debate is starting to get good, those who once seemed so eager to voice their opinions suddenly fall mute and vanish into oblivion. (For the purpose of this blog post, the term “oblivion” shall be understood to mean “a more recent blog post conversation.”)

It’s a sad fact that bloggers pursue post proliferation much more passionately than progress. No one takes time to really dig into an issue, they just publish talking points, maybe a few follow-up comments, and then move on.

I think the founding fathers would be ashamed of us. Such a powerful communication medium available to basically every citizen, and yet by and large the bloggers are so intent on monetizing their blogs (which requires frequency of posting under current models) that they can’t afford to engage in real conversation.