Pot. Kettle. Black.

I haven't seen a refutation of Reynolds or Olsen made on your part. Dave Winer certainly hasn't made an argument yet to link to. Instead you are posting with inflamatory headlines like "Blast them all and let god sort them out". Glenn Reynolds and and Eric Olsen have been asking for coherent criticism. Even praising it when it they see it. That is quite a contrast to calling the "warbloggers" school yard bullies or genocidal militarists (implied by you're headline).

Here's an argument Chris. It is a brief one, and there is a depth of discussion underlying even this critical distinction:

There are people you call "warbloggers." I skimmed some of their work for the first time today through the instapundit site. I noticed that they label thinking contrary to theirs as "anti-warblogging." Peace has fewer letters than anti-war. Why don't these people acknowledge their opposite numbers as "peacebloggers?" What I read today seemed pretty naive, shallow, adolescent, and testosterone laden from a political perspective, no matter how interesting it was as war games or situational analysis. (Even then it misses several important marks).

What kind of criticism do Reynolds and Olsen actually seek?

fp re: peacebloggers

Send an email to them and propose it. See what they say. Maybe they will take it up.

Keep in mind there's been many months of analysis and argument on both of their sites beyond what you have read today. I haven't seen much from the "peacebloggers" so far beyond name calling (naive, shallow, adolescent.etc). If you've got sites to recommend I'd love to hear about them.

Chris, your response basically states that Reynolds and Olsen have spent 'months' on this, and we're all 'late', and therefore this means? And you say that we're only indulging in name calling, yet my earlier posting specified what exactly I was concerned about with Olsen and Marvin's writing. There was no 'name calling', and from Olsen's response to my posting (which I will be replying to), he also did not see my posting as indulging in 'name calling', but an expression of genuine distress and what he was saying.

Chris, There's a critical difference between use of adjectives to categorize a written work (naive, shallow or adolescent) and name-calling which implies that I ascribe those characteristics to the authors whom I do not know and would not presume so to label.

Add on... if there have been "many months of analysis" and these gentlemen have gotten to the point where they are hypothesizing urban warfare orders of battle, then I think this may be a tactical discussion not of the order we need as a country to determine and direct public policy.

Re: Shelley

As I didn't say you were "late" I'm not sure what you are talking about. Besides my comment was directed at fp who was commenting on what he read today. As large as the blog world is it is quite possible to be missing an argument being made.

fp:

I must have missed the tatical discussions being made by Glenn Reynolds and Eric Olsen. I have seen a great deal of higher level politcal discussion on who are enemies are, what we should be doing about it, and what the consequences may be.

Still to this point I have seen some but not much discusion on these subjects from the anti-war bloggers. Some hazy concerns, some insults and name calling, not much real analysis. Maybe you can point me to some?

re peaceblogging: thought about it and decided that term grants a premise that I don't think is valid.

Truth of the matter is, he's on the right and you're on the left. Looks like Dave is a leftie too. Both sides of the equation are important. Saddly either side has elements that hold the other in disrespect and disdain.

Karl, telling a Libertarian that they're on the right is an insult ;-)

No, this issue goes beyond a side thing, and if I have issues from this post, they are specifically with Professor Reynolds, as a person, not Libertarian philosophy.

Chris, I suppose I must ask why you don't think the premise underlying the term "peaceblogging" is valid. I have a feeling you see this as some kind of adversarial encounter with a pro and a con. Of course it isn't. There is war and there are those who support it, and there is peace and there are those who support it. The discussions are orthogonal to each other. The interesting discussion in the peaceblogging community has little or nothing to do with the warbloggers. Nor do the war advocates turn their ears to a discussion of peace. How do we steer our country toward an acceptance of international law and an effective use of the tools at hand to peacefully bring criminals to justice? How do we resolve the international justice issues that surround the terrible crimes of September, 2001? How do we discern the truth that underlies US Foreign Policy, acknowledge that truth and correct the democratic and social problems that have allowed this wound to fester?

Peace advocates who allow their position to be corrupted into an anti-war posture have joined an adversarial process that by its very nature diminishes the validity of their stand.

I am not anti-warblogging, but what I read seemed poorly conceived and it was based on a very different understanding of the underlying political and social issues from my own.

There is a debate in the warblogs that I am not interested in joining, but I am interested in participating in a reasoned discussion of peace with people who are so inclined.

Your cavalier dismissal as name calling of my assessment of what I had read in the warblogs as adolescent, naive, shallow, testosterone laden posturing misses the point entirely. You can take my word for it or you can request a textual analysis which I will be happy to provide on a fee for service basis. In other words, you could pay me to read that stuff, but I won't put a lot of my free time into it.

Well, I have gone out of my way to praise people like Jim Henley or Steven Chapman or Dan Hanson who have offered coherent arguments about why invading Iraq is a bad idea -- and that's just in the past couple of days.

But statements likening "warbloggers" to playground bullies aren't arguments. They're more pose-striking: "see how superior I am to these children." And that's what bothers me about a large sector of the antiwar crowd: it's about being the right kind of person -- who naturally opposes the war, just, well, because that's what the right kind of person does -- rather than about making arguments.

As a professor, yeah, I try to encourage arguments with a bit more substance than that and I suppose it carries over to my blog.

As for shutting down the conversation: I can't do that. People can post whatever they want, subject only the the rather small risk that I might say something disagreeable about it. If you can't stand being disagreed with, well, then you should either stop blogging -- or stop reading other people's blogs. It goes with the territory.

But you have an overinflated influence on the baby pundits. And this influence can control the flow of the discourse.

You read one posting and use it to fuel and argument that most anti-war protestations are without merit, as per your quotes. However, you and both know that the few postings that you reference are only the tip of the iceberg. That most of the pro-war arguments are rhetoric, without basis of fact or history. And, as Eric says, most are repeated canned responses.

From what I can see, the anti-war people are, by far, the more eloquent of the two sides.

As the Instapunditwatch site points out, Reynolds is good at holding critical email up for ad hominem criticism, setting the bloggers of war on those who express opinions he can't refute, and ignoring those who prove the biggest flies in the ointment. And as Shelley has pointed out, once he feels the heat, he develops all sorts of condescending verbal tics. His knowledge of 20th-century history is deficient, as Eric Alterman proved recently; he's either profoundly ignorant or a master of selective misreading; he's the Lord Haw-Haw of the weblog generation.

But why should we care? Instapundit's fifteen minutes were up a long time ago. Ignore him, and he'll go away, since it's publicity rather than ability, ubiquity rather than veracity, that sustains his presence.