Some People Earn Their Infamy: Chuck Adkins, Terrible "Person"

A reader wanting to cheer me up sent me a link to this site, the horrors of which I don't want to plumb. 

But I will. 

I won't mention that the proprietor of The Populist Blog, "Chuck Adkins," purportedly lives in his parent's basement.  (No reason to put substance to the stereotype.)  Nor will I say anything about "his" decision to insult the recently deceased wife of someone he was arguing with.  (Why remind people of the niceties of online interaction?)  I'm not even going to discuss the remarkable sense of  self-importance necessary to address "everyone" when not a single post on any of his many blogs bears comments. 

I won't speak to any of that ... because I don't believe "Chuck Adkins" exists.  He's a fictional character, confabulated by irate conservatives in desperate need of a straw man.  How else could he embody the worst stereotypes of liberals and bloggers both? 

There's a reason everyone who links to his blog does so with rage in their heart and violence on their mind.  (As a future English professional, I see red every time he Capitalizes Words like a German.  I know he thinks it's "Sort of Bad news" that he "had to nuke the Blog," but if the news is "Bad" and the "Blog" is nuked, doesn't his illogic dictate the News of the Nuking also be capitalized?) 

Were Adkins an actual person, he would occasionally write something that didn't play into the conservative stereotype of vile liberals ... like voicing complaint against kicking welfare kittens for being cute, or demonstrating that Bush misled the country about the threat Saddam's chemical weapons program posed. 

Instead, Adkins always produces material like:

Two words asshole, fuck off.

Further More, what the fuck is it to you? I mean, if you don’t fucking like what you see here, don’t bother fucking coming here.

Update 2: Yeah, I took it off, I wouldn’t want little cry baby azzhat Mikey to cry himself silly, the bitch. Mother fucker lets his Co-Bloggers talk shit about other Blogs, But then WHINES when someone writes a little snark back.  WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! Cry baby assed bitch.  I will forewarn you fucking asshole chickenhawks. THE VERY NEXT TIME, THAT MICHELLE MALKIN POSTS SOMETHING THAT *i* DON’T LIKE, I WILL POST HER REAL NAME, TELEPHONE NUMBERS, CREDIT CARD INFO AND SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS, WITH SHOTS OF THE HOUSE FROM THE AIR. It’s okay for her to do shit, and say shit, but when I do it, I catch hell. BULLSHIT! Even if I have to PAY to get the info, I will get it. Bank on it, bitches.

Update:  Hello to all the readers from ColdFury! I’ve since posted a follow up, you might wanna read it. Like I said on that posting, if Mike wants to be a gentleman and pull the post insulting me, Fine, I’ll pull this one and the one linked. Otherwise, it stays. I’ve never said a THING about anyone over at Coldfury, ever. But yet, they’ll take pot shots at me, well, they should expect stuff to be said back. It all goes back to that “Every Action causes a reaction” kinda thing. Something that Mike and his gang of illiterate thugs just cannot seem to understand.

So I reach out to all the stalwart defenders of the really real, you who believe it your sacred duty to reveal all the truths squirreled away by liberal media ... I reach out to you and demand you prove that this "man" Adkins breathes breaths outside the confines of fertile conservative imaginations. 

Because I don't buy it.

(Note: Why was this supposed to cheer me up?)

Comments

[SEK]

Ahistoricality:

He's not worth your puzzlement, honestly.

Probably not, but someone sent me the link, assuming (correctly) that a little mockery would warm my spirit. (It did.) That I misread him so grossly, well, I suppose that's because 1) he was being attacked by conservatives and 2) poking around, he seemed to be spewing typical maximally irrational politico-speak from the liberal side. (I also mistook the White House in the comic for the one from Doonesbury. Didn't realize it was from Day by Day. The stain will never wash away.)

As to the larger point being discussed -- the needless distinctions between right and left, conservative and liberal -- I tend to agree with Ahistoricality. I think, when pressed, most people aren't movement anything, but possess an idiosyncratic set of beliefs forged from their own experience, the majority of which jibe with the platforms of one party or the other. (Mark Twain wrote this way wittier, but I can't find my Twain and the piece isn't online.)

That said, I still don't believe Adkins exists, only now I think he's some kind of cipher, meant to trick liberals into ... something. ('Cause it damn-well worked on me.)

BJTexas,

all have no meaning or purpose when a commentator attacks someone's dead spouse and sees that as a morally equivalent response to a criticism of one of his posts.

Agreed. I think (make that hope) the one thing that comes through here is that left or right, merely mildly or ragingly insane, Chuck's post was reprehensible.

(Also: I answered Patterico's questions in an email. Don't want anyone to think I'm being rude and ignoring him.)

[Pablo]

That said, I still don't believe Adkins exists, only now I think he's some kind of cipher, meant to trick liberals into ... something.

That's just reality doing what it usually does. ;-)

[Rich Puchalsky]

Blowing off steam is however you do it, I guess, but this whole thing is part of the worst of the Internet. OK, some guy insults someone else's deceased spouse, in what's probably a bid to get attention. Everyone agrees that's a pretty horrible thing to do. Then all sorts of people dutifully post "that's horrible!" on their blogs, because otherwise we wouldn't know that's horrible, and the guy therefore gets attention.

I'm sympathetic to the person who actually had his personal tragedy used in this way, and if there was anything minor that that person actually asked people to do that would help -- and this does not include pointlessly slagging the person who made the remark -- I'd think about doing it. But otherwise, come on. This is non-news. Yes, there are insulting people of uncertain or unusual political affiliation somewhere on the Internet. They exist and will always exist. They don't represent anyone in particular except themselves.

And this kind of group condemnation is cheap, the kind of thing that has no real effect when it's directed at someone who "deserves" it, and can all too easily be directed at someone who doesn't "deserve" it once the habit of following along to condemn is established. (See e.g. the whole Britney / Jesus' General / Casper contretemps.) And there are crazy people who will react to mass condemnation in ways you can't predict. (See e.g. aforesaid.) This kind of behavior is B.S. when "leftists" do it about whichever whitemaleprogressive they're mad at this week, and it's B.S. when conservatives do it -- except that of course they have people who'll drive by and stalk / harass people in person a la Graeme Frost, so they should be even more careful about it.

And of course the world of outrages against people does not stop with someone insulting someone in this way. I won't even mention things happening outside the U.S., but come on. All sorts of vicious racist groups trawl the net constantly. People commit actual crimes, like murder. If you're looking for some individual to condemn you might want to try one of them. I don't know why anyone would be particularly interested, but then I don't know why anyone would be particularly interested in this.

Well, let me take that back. I suspect that people are particularly interested because they see a chance to make this one person represent a whole group in some way. Thus the big discussion about is this person a liberal, a conservative, or what. Well, no, no one elected this person as representative speaker for Group X. Any group will reliably have at least one person who can be depicted as a member of it write something condemnable, without any particularly political action, in any particular week. People who seek out these things as representations of why they are sick and tired of some group are on their own fake perpetual motion machine, and I don't see why anyone should be interested in seeing them run around the hamster wheel inside of it.

[tomemos]

Well said, Rich. The Britney case occurred to me as well. Given the utterly unnecessary hornets' nest that stirred up, and given that, hey presto! we're doing it again, I'm realizing that in the world of internet fights, there aren't victims, only volunteers.

[j.s. nelson]

SEK: stay away from politics, man! you have this problem where you try to address the blatant horrific nonsense of the political skulduggery on the internet using something like rational discourse. when you piss off people operating without a sense of decency, they don't respond in a decent way. so far you haven't been overrun by a flood of assholes this time, but seriously anyone looking to hurt you comes to your site and sees, in all the controversy you've stumbled into, essentially a cookbook of ways to do it.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Thanks, tomemos. Actually, I'd modify J.S. Nelson's "stay away from politics", though -- no one should stay away from politics; interest in politics should ideally be universal. But this isn't politics. No political event worth mentioning took place.

[SEK]

Rich:

Blowing off steam is however you do it, I guess, but this whole thing is part of the worst of the Internet.

The first clause explains the second, really. Reminding myself of where and what I'm not cheers me up, and this did. As for the rest, I don't want to explain the joke, but I think we're on the same page as to why I claimed he couldn't possibly exist. No one like this can, scratch that, should, and it's not about the immorality of his actions -- I agree, it's cheap condemnation -- so much as the evident instability of the ordinary politico. I don't actually believe the man's insane; but he's been driven to a fine imitation because of the level of his discourse:

He's the kind of blogger all non-bloggers think all bloggers are. (Ironically, I'm typing this while in my pajamas, but that's only because I'm waiting for a load of laundry to finish.) (No, seriously, I am. My word is my bond: I'll be panted in fifteen, twenty minutes.) All basement-dwelling vitriol; uncontrollable, quickly regretted, outbursts; Random Capitalization and, idiosyncratic use of, punctuation; &c. This was more a meta-blog post than a political one, then, it just happened to be about politics.

Tomemos,

I'm realizing that in the world of internet fights, there aren't victims, only volunteers.

I don't think this is true in any but the most basic sense: namely, participation in a forum is opt-in, and can always be avoided. But I'm not a fan of saying that some people shouldn't be engaged, despite everything that's happened, because it's provided me with something I previously lacked: intelligent conservatives who engage me in good faith. One way around absolute political polarization is simply to communicate with people who aren't always shouting, and who won't shout you down, or will explain politely why they believe something you find insane. Now, sometimes those reasons are, in fact, insane -- based on untoward or irrational assumptions -- but it's better to know them, so that you can distinguish between the insane, the improbable, and the potentially interesting.

This also goes to J.S. Nelson's point, I think: when you engage people who do have a sense of decency, but with whom you disagree, there's a chance for real dialogue.

Damn it, why do I sound so sullen and earnest now?

[tomemos]

I don't know, Scott. I've taken part in a lot of internet discussions/arguments, sometimes strenuous ones with a lot of strong language. Sometimes they end with mutual respect, sometimes not, but I've never had someone follow me back to my place trying to get me fired. That kind of thing is what makes it a fight, rather than "engagement." It seems to me your "engage everyone, you never know" approach is as inefficient (and as frequently unpleasant) online as it would be in real life. I feel that the best approach is to be able to identify reasonability ahead of time, information which I think is available to us.

Anyway, this is moot, since obviously this guy does not "have a sense of decency"; in fact, that's the whole premise of your post. So what's left aside from fighting?

[Rich Puchalsky]

Well, I understand why it cheered you up to remind yourself of where and what you're not, but otherwise, tomemos is right. If you pass somebody ranting incoherently on a streetcorner to all passersby, that's not a chance for engagement. If two groups of people are shamefully and viciously arguing with each other about which group dissed who around the death of a well-liked community member, that's not a chance for engagement. It's a chance to step back and discover an interest in something else.

[SEK]

Tomemos,

Sometimes they end with mutual respect, sometimes not, but I've never had someone follow me back to my place trying to get me fired.

But only liberals do that. In fact, all my stalkers have been on the left side of the aisle. (I'm including the TOS in the loony libertarian left.)

But yes, point taken.

(And I really wasn't trying to engage Adkins so much as a few of the other people who commented. I'm preparing to go home and will have to deal with literate conservatives galore and am out of practice and generally grumpy, which means things could go very badly if I don't refine my fires a bit before the trip.)

(Esp. since I just finished the fourth season of The Wire, which makes me want to spit all kinds of nails.)

[tomemos]

"In fact, all my stalkers have been on the left side of the aisle."

I'm not really sure where this comes from, since I didn't mention or allude to politics at all. I'm not talking about left-right, I'm talking about rational-irrational. Which goes back to Rich's point: it's a waste of time to try to put a crazy or irrationally hateful person into a political group/belief system, even though that's the main reason bloggers write about such people in the first place.

As a side note, I'm not really sure how you could classify the Troll of Sorrow as liberal, even if you expand the category to include libertarians (which doesn't really make sense anyway in our political climate). He's obsessively anti-Marxist, anti-intellectual, and anti-identity politics, and his comments on my blog (almost all of which I've suppressed) have often included racist and misogynistic slurs. I'm not saying he represents the "right side of the aisle"--he represents being crazy--but his insanity is a variety of that side, not my side.

[j.s. nelson]

rich: I didn't mean stay away from politics in general. Though I am relentlessly apolitical these days, it's not something I would recommend for anyone who has a world view which is any less apocalyptic than mine. I just have a dim view of political discourse on the internet. A characteristic of the internet is that anyone who has access to it can presumably find and participate in discussions. Sometimes this is a good thing. When it comes to politics it's generally a bad thing, at least in my experience. Nasty folks of all sorts are not afraid of bending the discussion to their will and in fact they seem to spend almost all of their time doing exactly that. In cases where it's not malice, it's often just a case of a certain relatively innocent ignorance: people who don't have anything productive to contribute never seem to know it. Productive political discussion on the internet, in my experience, occurs under three conditions:
1) private correspondance
2) between people who already largely agree
3) out of the way sites which escape the scrutiny of the league of crazy assholes

SEK: I'm not saying that there aren't reasonable, decent conservatives out there (some would count me among them) with whom there is a chance for real dialog. I'm saying that more often than not "people who aren't always shouting, and who won't shout you down, or will explain politely why they believe something you find insane" is not a good description of who you engage with.

[David R. Block]

In some internet fights there are only volunteers. In others, there are folks typing things on their blogs who really have no desire to royally tick someone off, but it seems that their mere EXISTENCE drives others around the bend.

In that case, you have an instigator and someone who is ostensibly minding their own business. That seems to be the MO that Mr. Adkins operates under, together with the wonderful people at "Sadly, No," and other sites that I simply won't visit.

The post on Hendrix's wife was untoward and uncalled for. I don't really think that Mike "volunteered" for it. It is typical crass stuff that tends to drive most folks away.

[tomemos]

"The post on Hendrix's wife was untoward and uncalled for. I don't really think that Mike "volunteered" for it. It is typical crass stuff that tends to drive most folks away."

Let me clarify: I wasn't saying that anyone invited this crass statement. In fact, you make my point for me: being driven away is the correct response, because crass people want attention. Giving it to them is enabling at best; at worst, you often end up embroiled in a blood feud with the crass or their crazy followers. That's the kind of volunteerism I mean.

For the record, I disagree with you about Sadly, No!: their commentary is directed at publicly broadcasted ideas, and while they do engage in ad hominem attacks they stay out of people's personal lives. Just about everything I've seen there is fair game; in fact, when overzealous commenters post (what are supposedly) home addresses and phone numbers of conservative commentators, the S,N! people delete them and tell people to cut it out.

[Mikhail Emelianov]

i'm so late to this thread - just reading all comments killed my commenting spirit, but i agree with Totemos on the characterization of Sadly, No! and their style...

[Patterico]

The people at Sadly, No! are good at *pretending* to be reasonable. But they are, unfortunately, quite capable of engaging in vicious innuendo backed up by absolutely nothing.

I have seen this happen at least twice. Once, Gavin pretended to have some kind of dirt on me that he had dug up on LEXIS/NEXIS, and insinuated that I was a sock puppet. Another time, he claimed that Hot Air was funded by foundation money.

Both were straight lies.

What was interesting was the commenters' reaction. In both cases, about 99% of the commenters uncritically accepted the insinuation, and gleefully asked for more details.

As time went on, and no proof was forthcoming (because the lying sacks had none), a small percentage of the usual commentariat -- maybe 5-10% -- got annoyed once they realized that S,N! was engaging in rank insinuation without proof. "Wouldn't we get pissed at conservatives if they did that to us?" they asked.

But the vast majority -- about 90-95% -- had no problem with it. They split into two camps: 1) those who still believed the insinuation, and 2) those who thought it was hilarious that S,N! was engaging in this baseless insinuation, because it made the targets unhappy -- and anything that makes conservatives unhappy is A-OK with them!

I have a lot of respect for their writing ability and I think they're often funny. But they have a nasty, dishonest streak in them which they cover well with their intellect. Basically, they outsmart almost all their readership, and there are very few people who see through them as a result.

Their other failing is continually holding Michelle Malkin personally responsible for some psychopath named Chad Castagna, who sent threatening letters with white powder to liberals -- and then claimed he was a fan of hers. They love talking about him as if she somehow is responsible for his insane behavior. That's like blaming Chuck Adkins on, I don't know, whatever pundits he claims to like on any given day. (I have no idea who that is, by the way; I know only that he says he hates Ann Coulter and Michelle.)

So the idea that these guys are always playing fair is, I'm sorry to say, not quite accurate.

[SEK]

Tomemos:

I'm not really sure where this comes from, since I didn't mention or allude to politics at all. I'm not talking about left-right, I'm talking about rational-irrational.

Why can't you read my mind? What I meant was, in this case, I felt safe, because Adkins turned out to be a conservative. (That I originally thought him a liberal's beside the point.)

I'm not really sure how you could classify the Troll of Sorrow as liberal, even if you expand the category to include libertarians ... He's obsessively anti-Marxist, anti-intellectual, and anti-identity politics, and his comments on my blog (almost all of which I've suppressed) have often included racist and misogynistic slurs.

Have you read his blog? He certainly aligns himself with liberal cause for liberal reasons. I think there's a world of difference between anti-Marxist and anti-liberal, and it's inhabited by John Locke and the like. He's not anti-intellectual so much as a stereotypical analytic philosophy type -- he doesn't think Continental work is rigorous enough to count as scholarship, but he can stomach Rawls. As for being opposed to identity politics, well, so am I for the most part. (Short version: I think class more important than race/gender/sexuality.)

All of which is only to say, he finds Kotsko and the Valve insufficiently liberal, or so academic as to be neutered. As for the misogyny, well, he thinks it's phun to write in jive, Tomemememos, and could care less what lit puppies like you think of him.

J.S.,

I'm saying that more often than not "people who aren't always shouting, and who won't shout you down, or will explain politely why they believe something you find insane" is not a good description of who you engage with.

Point taken, although with a caveat: the only political forums I participate in online are conservative, mostly because I'm more interested in working through my own ideas than having other people confirm them. I don't often discuss them here, because for the most part, nothing comes of those conversations except a better sense of what I believe. (Also, as mentioned before, liberals are the ones who bust my chops.)

RE: Sadly, No!

I have to admit that I read the site, occasionally find it funny, but am often underwhelmed by the content and find the tone grating. Even when I agree with them, the swift dismissals of opposing viewpoints and commenter's swirling self-congratulation annoy. (The same reason I agree with Bill Hicks but don't find him consistently funny.) That said, I think Patterico's not altogether wrong about the commentariat there, but maybe not the percentages:

When the whole thing with Jesus's General as going on, there were a few threads about it over there. Forty percent of the commenters were complete tools; granted, forty percent of the commenters at any big, mainstream political site will be tools, but they were petty, vindicative tools.

As for Michelle Malkin, well, she plays Queen Tool to her many sycophants commenters, and plays as fast and loose with facts as anyone alive.

[Patterico]

"plays as fast and loose with facts as anyone alive . . ."

I haven't noticed that, but if you're right (even granting that your statement is obviously somewhat hyperbolic) you should be able to provide several examples where she misrepresented facts. Would you mind doing that?

[Karl Steel]

Would you mind doing that?

How about if you provide evidence that the SN set "continually" does anything, let alone "continually" linking MM with Castagna.

I suppose, P., that we're about to get into a slog about what counts as "misrepresentation" and what counts as a "fact," but certainly a search for malkin+orcinus will get us far; no doubt Malkin+Frost will get us into the territory of sinister innuendo. I do realize that you have a tendency, P.--not "continual," surely--to fly off the handle when it comes to Malkin (see here, here, and here, but, really, what's your point here? What are you driving at in asking Scott to run through what should be a pointless exercise for any thinking, decent person? You just want to put him through his paces?

Even when I agree with them, the swift dismissals of opposing viewpoints and ethos of self-congratulation annoy.
Not when they're taking down lunatics, fontanelly dingdongs, and frothy ideologues like, respectively, Pam Oshry, Jonah Goldberg, and the Malkins. Why not be self-congratulatory here?

[SEK]

Patterico, I should write something more considered, but off the top of my head, I remember her post about illegal immigrant drunk drivers: it was, as she noted, her response to a story about an illegal immigrant who saved the life of a young child after her mother had been killed in a car accident. That's a positive anecdote -- an indication that illegal immigrants are people with a capacity for good -- but instead of recognizing that the problem was not with the anecdote per se, but that her opponents were trying to discuss policy via anecdote, she countered with two anecdotes of her own in which illegals who had been driving drunk killed people.

An honest response would've pushed aside the anecdotal logic entirely -- would've said, "yes, this is a heart-warming anecdote, but the problems I point to are structural" -- instead, she counters one positive anecdote with two negative ones as if it's a simple matter of addition. It isn't.

The problem is, as they say, the plural of anecdote ain't data, and the most effective way to counter the original story would've been to present statistics indicating the number of illegal immigrants involved in fatal accidents while under the influence ... but even that would've been a stretch, since in the end, the DUI/DWI deaths had nothing to do with the story she was commenting on. The implication is that illegals cause more DUI/DWI deaths than legal citizens, but that's not something that can be proven by anecdote. Hard numbers are required. So the anecdotes were distractions, not from the original story, but from the very point she was trying to make.

Legal citizens who drive under the influence are no less dangerous than illegal immigrants who do. Her point -- whatever it was -- was obscured by her rhetoric, if not constituted by it, and I sense that's how she wanted it. The issue is -- as all issues are -- more complicated than the anecdote; reducing it to one lowers the general level of discourse. (This is where I usually mention that everyone in America should be forced to take a statistics class before they can graduate high middle school. The world would be a much better place.)

For the record, I chose this example because I don't want to fall into the typical liberal/conservative ruts. I'm more interested in demonstrating how her rhetoric works, since that's where the fastness and looseness comes in. That said, I'm not satisfied with this response as an answer. Give me a day to write a more serious critique.