Reason™ vs. Reason, Part 1,504
Recently, I was banned at commenting from Hit and Run. Their unwritten policy, it seems, is that lying is one thing, and calling a liar on his lie is another. All this began when veteran attorney and long-time Reason contributor Michael McMenamin wrote a dishonest column alleging that Judith Miller had been “tried, convicted and sentenced to prison based exclusively upon written evidence from witnesses whose identities and testimony were kept secret from her and her lawyers,”when in fact Miller is merely being held in civil contempt for her continued refusal to testify in the Plame affair, and can go free anytime merely by agreeing to obey the law she’s been flouting all along. On Wednesday, ReasonTMable journalist / legal eagle Julian Sanchez (yes, that Julian Sanchez, the same genius who thinks that denial of certiorari indicates disagreement on the merits and only “cryptoracists” care whether illegal aliens are called illegal aliens) posted a credulous link to McMenamin’s screed, throwing in a frivolous Sixth Amendment argument of his own. The next day, Tim “Buy a Fucking Ad Already” Cavanaugh, ever the classy guy in the bunch, threw in his own two cents, again recyclying both McMenamin’s lie and Sanchez’s frivolous extension of the same.
In both threads, I referred to McMenamin’s lie as, well, a lie. While it is common for journalists like Sanchez and Cavanaugh to screw up basic legal principles in ways that just “happen” to favor whatever political agenda they support, I find it wholly implausible that any veteran attorney - let alone an AV-rated partner in a mid-sized firm who’s been practicing this area of law for decades, could honestly not know the difference between civil and criminal contempt, a distinction McMenamin ignored completely in his original article and later pooh-poohed as “a distinction without a difference” in an email to Cavanaugh that was reproduced in Sanchez’s thread.
Then, on Friday, I attempted to post a comment to another H&R poster’s entry, but was given an error message informing me I was not allowed to post comments. I sent an email to the blog administrator to find out what had happened, and was treated to the following email from Cavanaugh today:
We’re not here to give you a forum to call Reason contributors liars. If insults are in any way supported or warranted or even just entertainingly expressed, I give them a pass. Since yours isn’t, I don’t. Best of luck to you.
Tim Cavanaugh
Reason
http://www.reason.com
Just for the record, I don’t call people liars to be entertaining, and I don’t make a habit of calling them liars simply for being hopelessly wrong, even if they are wrong on something they really should have known better about. Cavanaugh and Sanchez should have known better than to write what they wrote, but I don’t think they did know any better, which is why I did refere to their commenbts as “ignorance” rather than “lies.” As to McMenamin, however, if there is an innocent explanation for a veteran attorney missing the distinction between civil and criminal contempt - stating blithely that “she’s still in jail” while neglecting to mention that she holds the keys to her own prison cell - I can’t imagine what that is.
UPDATE: Judging by the comments so far, it appears that the real news may be the fact that I bothered attempting a dialogue with these guys in the first place.
August 14th, 2005 at 7:07 pm
That’s pretty unbelievable. Not in the sense that I don’t believe you, just it’s crazy they would ban you. I mean my goodness. Oh well, their loss. Not much that interesting over at “Meth is just A-Okay” Reason.
August 14th, 2005 at 9:30 pm
Some weeks ago they published one of their regular* threads supporting open borders and I posted a comment including several links. Four to my site, three to my posts at The Immigration Blog, one to marketwatch.com and one to borderlandnews.com. I got a moderated message, and the comment to this day has not been approved.
I immediately sent an email to Cavanaugh asking what happened. I didn’t know whether it was because of the large number of links or because I had been banned. He replied back asking for my screen name. And here I thought my good buddy knew me. I replied, and never got a follow-up reply.
It was on this Kerry Howley thread, in which two comments mention my name.
Since that time I’ve been able to leave a few comments there, so it doesn’t appear I was banned, the comment was just moderated out of existence.
Howley, IIRC, also posted a thread celebrating 100 years of the corporation or some such other nonsense.
* They seem to have posted fewer of these threads since I started pointing out that cheap labor = massively subsidized labor, but perhaps that’s just my megalomania showing. Note also that reason has no control over posting links to them elsewhere. See, for instance, this. Sunshine, disinfectant, etc. etc.
August 14th, 2005 at 10:34 pm
[...] Xrlq has been banned at Reason’s Hit and Run blog, for the offense of calling an apparent lie . . . . a lie. [...]
August 14th, 2005 at 11:19 pm
xlrq–You know it really ticks people off to be caught in a lie and even worse to have that lie called a LIE. From now on I suggest you call it a “DOOZY”. The real question is why are you wasting your time talking to these nut cases? “REASON” is about reason in the same way that the Mendez brothers should have received very short jail sentences for killing their parents because they were orphans. I have been a subscriber to rason magazine for many years—but only because one of my clients keeps sending me the magazine as a gift. I rarely find that I can force myself to read the thing through. It inevitably hits my MPCTTUB (maximum personal capacity for tolerating total and unalleviated bullshit) about a third of the way through. Pick a better group to dialogue with, preferably one which values truthful issues and truth based debates.
August 14th, 2005 at 11:23 pm
I had a similar experience as Lonewacko. In the middle of a lengthy, polite but disagreeing exchange with Cathy Young regarding her article at Hit and Run, I was suddenly awaiting (forever) moderation. Tim C. responded after my second request for clarification that he saw no indication that I had been banned or would have merited being banned. And of course he was correct. I was not banned, just suddenly moderated to oblivian. I never tried commenting again. Why bother wasting time in discussion when your opponent can suddenly moderate you off the board?
Misha at Rottweiler pulled the same stunt during an intense discussion. When I checked back a few days later to see if my comments had been allowed I instead found several comments celebrating that I had slinked off in defeat. So, I consider that ‘moderation to oblivian’ tactic to be rather cowardly.
I can’t imagine why you would be banned, Xrlq. I have had lengthy heated exchanges with you and you were firm but reasonable in your replies. I tried to follow your Hit and Run link to see for my own eyes, but it failed. I have to give you the benefit of the doubt, though, given my experiences with you and H&R. I also do not think calling someone a liar in a comment is beyond the pale, especially if it is objectively true.
August 15th, 2005 at 12:04 am
Just for grins, I looked at my email history for a copy of my “Am I banned?” missive sent to H&R. Below is the final paragraph of the comment that sent me to moderation purgatory.
“Thanks again for your open comments forum. Many websites filter out these days. It’s good to see some still open.”
Oh well.
August 15th, 2005 at 1:14 am
Banned at Reason
Longtime local conservative blogger Xrlq posts that he has been summarily banned from posting comments at Hit and Run, the blog of (loosely) Los Angeles-based Reason magazine. Spotted at Patterico’s Pontifications, which also points to a critique of t…
August 15th, 2005 at 2:02 am
I subscribed to REASON thinking I might get enlightened libertation commentary for the 2004 elections. Instead I got incoherent raving, so I let my subscription lapse.
August 15th, 2005 at 5:31 am
WITHOUT REASON
XRLQ has been banned from commenting at Reason Magazine’s blog for having the bad manners to point out massive factual misstatements by one of Reason’s authors….
August 15th, 2005 at 6:04 am
[...] Xrlq has been banned from commenting at Reason because he called a lie a lie. What is actually worse is the defense of the lying. [...]
August 15th, 2005 at 6:25 am
Liars & Bloggers
Long live the blogosphere, where a spade is a goddamned spade - even if it’s all in legalese.
August 15th, 2005 at 6:54 am
Meanwhile the New York Times on its editorial page is continuing to promulgate the blatant lie that Judy Miller is in jail for refusing to reveal the source for an article she didn’t write. As she didn’t write an article about the Plame case there was no “source.” Consequently what she’s refusing to do do is cooperate with a criminal investigation. Fitzgerald undoubtedly has a host of questions to ask her whther one of them is “Was it Scooter in the Library with the lead pipe?” is mere conjecture — stoked by the Times and Judy allies like Lucy Dalglish. Judy is no journalistic Joan of Arc.
Hell — she’s no Susan McDougall!
August 15th, 2005 at 3:30 pm
Congratulations and join the club, Jeff. They banned me from H & R for mocking one of their anti-Israel writers.
Oops, I’ve been banned here too, so nevermind.
August 16th, 2005 at 9:02 am
I think you were banned because you’re a lawyer.
On the other hand, then that mendacious toad McMenamin should have been banned, too.
Not to teach a lawyer anything about legal vocabulary, but “mendacity” sounds so much more, well, reasonable than “lie”.
August 16th, 2005 at 9:20 am
Good point. I’ll try to use that word from now on, instead. To be honest non-mendacious, I probably would have eschewed both terms in favor of the more semantically deficient “doozy,” had I known at the time of the comment that McMenamin was a long-standing editor of the magazine rather than a one-time guest contributor. I only know it now after looking up his M/H listing, not from anything posted at “Reason.”
August 16th, 2005 at 11:03 am
I just gave up (ie, did not renew) my Reason subscription for similar reasons. (Though they sent me about three free issues with “please re-subscribe!” messages anyway.)
Maybe Virginia Postrel needs to resume the editor post.
August 16th, 2005 at 11:34 am
I allowed my subscription to lapse last year, and got the same three smarmy “we know you didn’t really mean to let it lapse” issues. Sometimes I think the mag went to the dogs when Postrel left; other times I think she wisely left a sinking ship. Gillespie’s leadership leaves something to be desired, but with knuckleheads like McMenamin, Cavanaugh and Sanchez on their staff, I’m not how much better Postrel could do. No one can turn chicken shit into chicken salad.
August 16th, 2005 at 3:41 pm
Gillespie’s leadership leaves something to be desired
He’s married to the chairperson of a Women’s Studies Department, and that tells you all you need to know about him.
Reason doesn’t seem to have much sense of a mission these days; while it claims to be a libertartian rag, it hasn’t pushed a libertarian agenda in ages except where free dope is concerned. But maybe that’s the nature of libertarianism in the Age of Terror.
May 12th, 2006 at 2:16 pm
Well, that’s disillusioning. I guess I won’t mail in that renewal on my desk that I was dithering over.
Reason has some great articles now and then, but mostly they’ve become left-libertarians.