Kamm You Believe It?

Oliver Kamm has finally accomplished his true aim in life. The one-person circle-jerk.

What else can you call it when he has an op-ed in the Guardian - a newspaper which he despises and has described as the "house journal" of the simple-minded - in which he disses bloggers:

In its paucity of coverage and predictability of conclusions, the blogosphere provides a parody of democratic deliberation. But it gets worse. Politics, wrote the philosopher Michael Oakeshott, is a conversation, not an argument. The conversation bloggers have with their readers is more like an echo chamber, in which conclusions are pre-specified and targets selected. The outcome is horrifying. The intention of drawing readers into the conversation by means of a facility for adding comments results in an immense volume of abusive material directed - and recorded for posterity - at public figures.

The blogosphere, in short, is a reliable vehicle for the coagulation of opinion and the poisoning of debate. It is a fact of civic life that is changing how politics is conducted - overwhelmingly for the worse, and with no one accountable for the decline.

And he then reproduces the article in full over at his blog? Which of course doesn't have comments, thus proving that at least his own small corner of blogtopia* is "a reliable vehicle for the coagulation of opinion and the poisoning of debate."

What an asshat**.

* Yes skippy, I know - but since Kamm hates the word "blogosphere" can you imagine how he feels about "blogtopia"?

** Oliver Kamm is also the author of "Anti-Totalitarianism: the Left-Wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy". I kid you not.