Yet another blogger exposes me for the terrible person I am

(Note: It turns out that the Myrtis Maguin site is a copy of Christopher Roach’s site. See below for explanation.)

A blogger called Myrtis Maguin, in the name of defending civilized standards of thoughtful and reasonable debate, makes the following thoughtful and reasonable criticisms of me:

• Rod Dreher—a conservative who is also involved in the mainstream Dallas Morning News—has raised the ire of armchair commisar of ideological purity, Lawrence Auster.

• Auster appears, as usual, a bit unhinged with a penchant for unfair parsing of words that misses the gist [of] an author’s argument and explanations.

• He’s frequently attacking conservatives because of their deviation from his perfectly synthesized conservatism. The concept of reasonable disagreement is somewhat foreign to him.

• Demonstrating his maturity, he says he probably won’t vote for any Republican presidential candidate.

• he’s always ____ about how he’s been insulted and wronged, even though he mocks the clothing of Ann Coulter, and, in one case, my last name, both of which lines of argument are obviously pretty friggin’ juvenile. Well, obvious to everyone but our Upper West Side Conservative Oracle.

• I’m rooting for Dreher, even though I think it’s a bit much to call illegal immigrants the “Texans” of the year. They’re living in but they’re not Texans any more than Jim Bowie and Sam Houston were Mexicans back in the 1830s. But Dreher’s defense of his argument, his ____ in writing a newspaper editorial, and the like are eminently reasonable to any normal human being. Auster’s attack on him is unfair, extreme, and demonstrates the essential flaws in his character: mean-spiritedness, lack of judgment, and humorlessness.

Whoops. After calling me “unhinged” in my criticisms of Dreher, Maguin agrees with my main argument against Dreher. For anyone who missed it, here is the thread at Dreher’s Crunchy Con blog, “Larry Auster; Blog first, think later,” where I responded to all criticisms, carefully explained all my points, and revealed the real meaning of Dreher’s editorial essay on illegal aliens for the Dallas Morning News. Dreher had no substantive response to my argument that to call the Illegal Alien the Texan of the Year (an idea he approved under his own by-line) was tantamount to calling illegal aliens Americans, which would make it impossible to treat them as illegals, and reveals the falsity of Dreher’s claim to be a hard-liner on immigration.

Here is what people like Maguin really mean by normal versus unhinged. If you indulge in flagrant contradictions, such as calling illegal aliens Americans while calling yourself a hard-liner on immigration, then you’re mentally normal and a regular guy, like Rod Dreher. But if you point out the irreconciable contradiction between those two statements, and keep pointing it out even though people are smearing you for doing so, then you’re unhinged, like me.

In any case, I’m starting to get a taste of what it was like to be a dissident in the old USSR. The defenders of the system label you as mentally disturbed, as a bent personality incapable of rational discussion, as someone to be shunned. Attacks on me such as Maguin’s have become so regular that I can almost set my clock by them.

* * *

Here’s the basic problem. In a society in which the universal default position is liberalism, a society in which (to expand on O’Sullivan’s Law) any institution, person, or position that is not explicitly non-liberal will inevitably turn liberal over time, various writers and intellectuals who dislike some aspects of liberalism will think of themselves as conservatives, when in fact they are still drifting with the prevailing liberalism. Therefore to expose the real meaning—the liberal meaning—of their statements means not accepting at face value their own view of themselves and of what they are saying. While this does not involve personal attacks, it does mean challenging people at the core of their self-concept. This makes them very angry, and they tend to strike back in personal terms. Thus, when I pointed out the liberal elements in Robert Spencer’s thought, when I showed that, contrary to his repeated claims to have taken a serious position on Muslim immigration, he had never taken any position on the issue other than his useless questionnaire proposal, he smeared me all over the place, portraying me as a mentally diseased malcontent (echoes of the treatment of dissidents in the Soviet Union). Then in spring 2007, he admitted that his previous position of screening Muslim immigrants could not work, and he called for the end of all Muslim immigration from Muslim countries. He had never called for such a thing before. Meaning that my earlier statements that he had not called for restrictions on Muslim immigration were correct.

But to get to that point, I had to accept being smeared and personally damaged by Spencer. Given the crystallized yet invisible liberal orthodoxy under which we live, there is no other way to make progress toward the truth.

- end of initial entry -

James S. writes:

That post is not a real one. It has been stolen from Chris Roach’s site (hence the part about you attacking his name), and had the word intellius inserted at random locations probably to increase the search engine ranking of the word. The entire blog is fake and there is no Myrtis Maguin.

By the way, I read the comments at VFR where you supposedly attack Chris Roach’s last name, and it’s clear you just assumed that “roach” was an internet moniker and not a surname, as any person would do. Did you know that Chris Roach is spreading around the idea that in the course of an argument with him you made fun of his name?

LA replies:

Thanks for the info. Well, I don’t know that he’s spreading that false report any more than he’s already done, for example in his attacks on me at the Crunchy Con blog a few weeks ago. Are you aware for a fact that he’s said this elsewhere and has continued to do so?

This phenomenon of fake Web site, which turn up fairly often in Google searches, is very strange and I have no idea what they are and what their purpose is. For example there are sites that are just collections of strings of words and phrases. Who would create the fake Myrtis Maguin (which sounds like a name from The Lord of the Rings, the Great River Anduin), and why? Who would want to increase the number of google results for the made-up word intellius?

I never made fun of Chris Roach’s name. He commented at VFR as “roach,” which, as I explained at the time, I thought was a made-up screen name and I didn’t like it. I don’t encourage odd or off-putting screen names. I like people to use normal-sounding names, or nice nicknames, or classical names, but not low-life or counter-cultural type names like Hot Mama, Cool Daddy, and things of that nature. I said to him at the time that the lower case “roach,” combined with the absence of a first name, made it sound like the insect, which I did not like, so I called him “Mr. Roach” and (as I recall) and said he ought to use his first name. Far from making fun of him, I was trying to get him to use a proper human—humorless stiff that I am. But the semi-hysterical madness that afflicts so many young men in the conservative blogosphere led him to believe that I was making fun of his actual name, when in fact, it was he, by presenting his name as “roach,” who made it appear he was using the name of an insect instead of his family name.

I have made critical comments about people’s names on a couple of occasions: names that were unpronounceable as spelled or too alien sounding. Some people were very offended that I did this. But names are a part of what makes a culture, and I think my point was legitimate.

Stephen F. (who also wrote to me guessing that Myrtis was C. Roach), writes:

I remember some of your statements about names—you made some original observations that changed my mind on that subject. In our liberal culture we tend to think that it is wrong for immigrants to alter their names to fit into the majority culture, but we’re now seeing what the alternative is.

James S. replies:

No not anywhere else. I just wasn’t sure that you had noticed it, because you left it unaddressed in the original comment thread, and then during the TOY debate.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 28, 2008 02:09 PM | Send