Liberal Blogs More Profane

From Matthew Sheffield at the Washington Times:

Are liberals more profane than conservatives? Online, the answer seems to be yes. Profanity, those taboo words banned from the broadcast airwaves, is a feature of many people’s daily lives. It’s much less so in the establishment media world. TV and radio broadcasts are legally prohibited from using it, most newspapers (including this one) have traditionally refrained from its usage.

That’s not the case with the Web, where bloggers and readers face no such restrictions. That likely comes as no surprise; what may be surprising, however, is to what degree profanity seems to be a feature more common on one side of the political blogosphere than the other.

Which side is that? For answers, I turned to the search engine Google to see how common swearing is in the right and left blog universes by looking up the late stand-up comic George Carlin’s “seven dirty words” in the most popular blog communities.

The results showed that online liberals tend to use profanity a lot more than online conservatives.

Searching for Mr. Carlin’s seven words and some popular variants at the top 10 conservative Web communities yields about 70,000 results. That is dwarfed in comparison to the 1.9 million instances of profanity on liberal sites.

Things aren’t quite that clear-cut, however, since some Web sites have more pages than others. According to Google, the top 10 conservative sites have about 6 million pages, while the top 10 liberal sites have about 13 million.

Dividing the number of instances of profanity by the number of pages of the sites on which they appear, then multiplying the result by 100 yields what might be called a “profanity quotient.”

The top 10 liberal sites (Daily Kos, Huffington Post, Democratic Underground, Talking Points Memo, Crooks and Liars, Think Progress, Atrios, Greenwald, MyDD and Firedoglake) have a profanity quotient of 14.6.

The top 10 conservative sites (Free Republic, Hot Air, Little Green Footballs, Townhall, NewsBusters, Lucianne.com, Wizbang, Ace of Spades, Red State and Volokh Conspiracy) have a quotient of 1.17.

That’s quite a disparity. Liberals are more than 12 times likely to use profanity than conservatives on the Web.

The interesting question, of course, is whether this is merely a superficial matter of style, or whether it’s a question of fundamental character.

There is plenty of evidence of a deep seated nastiness on the part of the left, and shown by its reaction to the death of Tony Show, or British leftists reacting to the prospect of Margaret Thatcher’s death. Indeed, the bigotry of the Huffington Post has been reported right here.

The kind of vulgarity used on leftist blogs betrays a fundamental contempt for the sensibilities of others. That’s because those “others” are thought to be morally and intellectually inferior, and therefore fair game.

New Marquette Faculty Blog

Associate Professor of Theology Mark Johnson has blogged for a while, but he’s recently picked up the pace and turned to political subjects.

Check out, for example, his recent posts “What should Obama do? What does Hillary want?” and “The historical importance of Obama’s nomination.”

Will he turn his attention to campus issues? That would be dandy, although we have no idea whether he is so inclined.

Faculty bloggers at Marquette are terribly sparse. Some might say that that’s because most faculty have better things to do, but we think it’s because faculty are excessively reticent about engaging in public debate -- which can be rather rough and tumble.

Blogs are part of the common culture at Marquette, but not nearly so big a part, nor nearly so involved with the faculty, as they should be.

We look forward to reading his blog, and perhaps taking issue with him if we think he’s off-the-mark.

New Blogs from Marquette Law School Students

We always welcome new blogs on campus.

So we note there are two new blogs from Marquette Law School students.

It might make sense that law students are especially likely to blog, since blogging has taken much deeper root among law school faculty than among faculty elsewhere in the modern university.

If we had to speculate, we might guess that lawyers, unlike people in other professions, have to be good at sitting down and knocking out, in a rather limited time, a pretty decent piece of writing. This would make them the perfect people to blog.

At any rate, we have Brazen Maverick, from a first-year liberal student, and Roaches and Twinkies from one of his first-year conservative cohorts.

Both bloggers are currently pretty active.

We wish them the best, hope they enjoy the blogging and hope that they keep it up during the rest of their Marquette careers.

We especially encourage them to blog on campus events and issues, following in the footsteps of the now defunct Campus Tavern, and the still very active GOP3.COM.

Report, comment, air dirty laundry. It’s fun, and it makes Marquette a better university.

New Feminist Student Blog on Campus

We just got news of this in the form of a comment on our post “Blogs Come and Go.”

A blog called The Word Warrior describes itself as “brought to you by the feminist crew at Marquette University.” They have several posts up already.

We are likely to disagree with their political views, but kudos to them for getting out in the blogosphere to promote their ideas.

Blogs Come and Go

I just finished working on my blogroll, and sadly have deleted some quite inactive entries.

These include (on the right) Marquette Law School Federalist Society and Joseph Kastner’s Office of Homeland Security and leaning left (perhaps moderate left) We Live Our Lives Among Giants and Fourth Blog Politics.

Nothing personal. Students get burned out on blogging. Other people do too.

Happily, we have a new entry, Blogging in the Word from Political Science graduate student Jason Ardanowski.

This still leaves the Marquette campus with too few blogs. Particularly needed are undergraduate blogs that cover campus politics and expose the failures of the Administration.

GOP3.COM continues to do a dandy job, but there is no corresponding liberal blog, and the original three bloggers are getting older and a bit further from undergraduate life -- although Brian Collar is still an undergraduate and the other bloggers sometimes post great stuff.

Any undergraduate who wants to write and comment about campus politics (and broader politics) needs to know how much sheer fun blogging can be.

[Correction]

Brian Collar reminds me, in a comment, that he’s a graduate student now.

I knew that.

Leftist Blogger Laments that Milwaukee Conservative Voices are “Unfettered”

Via Dad29:

It seems local leftist blogger Michael J. Mathias laments the fact that local conservative pundits are allowed -- and this is an outrage -- free speech. He begins by calling Bill Kristol “bloodthirsty,” and then turns to local people:

Locally, we have our own bellicose nutcases, and they are allowed to work, pretty much, unfettered.

That’s right. He thinks it’s an outrage that local conservatives get to freely express themselves.

Just what sort of “fetters” would he impose on them? He doesn’t say, but the history of the leftist blogophere in Wisconsin makes it clear.

If people like Mathias could, they would get them fired, and indeed they were proud in having a role in getting Jessica McBride fired from WTMJ.

They tried to get Charlie Sykes’ blog censored over a parody of the smug “Coexist” bumper sticker.

They will try to use campaign finance laws to shut up conservatives.

Failing that, they want to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine to force conservatives off the air.

If none of this works, in a classic instance of the frustration/aggression syndrome they will attack conservative bloggers and talk radio people. And they will especially attack women conservatives in the most misogynist terms.

We are old enough to remember what liberals were like before “progressive” politics took a huge turn in the 60s. Before the late 60s, liberals prided themselves in being tolerant. In their hearts of hearts, they were no more tolerant than other people, but the preached tolerance, and they -- quite fortunately -- felt bound by their own rhetoric.

Since then, liberals and leftists have more and more come to embrace a series of rationales for shutting people up. They more and more have felt free to express raw hatred of those who disagree with them. Again, it’s the frustration/aggression syndrome. As young people in the 60s or early 70s, they felt that history was moving their way. But it hasn’t, leaving them bitter and frustrated.

Really “Coexist?”

Boots & Kittens is a parody of Owen Robinson’s blog Boots & Sabers by a lefty.

Technically, it’s a copyright violation, since so much of Owen’s code was copied.

But in reality Robinson should be flattered that he’s important enough to parody.

Of course it’s unfair and shows a leftist bias. That’s the point.

But it does have one good image: a parody of the parody of the “Coexist” image that has been so controversial in recent days.



That’s probably a tougher form of coexistence than Christians getting along with Jews getting along with Muslims getting along with atheists.

More Hate Speech in the Leftist Blogosphere

Well, Illusory Tenant has finally gotten it though his head that you don’t call a female blogger (Jessica McBride in this case), the “C word.”

The the anonymous but very hateful fellow who runs Hermes’ Journeys isn’t about to do anything so wimpish as refrain from showing how much he hates those who disagree with his political views.

Let it known throughout the blogosphere that I, Hermes, the veritable Messenger of the Gods, declare Jessica McBride to be a conniving, confused, and consummately clueless conservative who is hurting women everywhere by pretending to have an understanding of feminism. Illusory Tenant was justified in using the definition of the word to mean an unpleasant or stupid person in describing her, for she is an embarrassment to educated women everywhere. Furthermore, Charlies Sykes is a laughable twit and Rush Limbaugh is a closeted homosexual pig of a man who wouldn’t know what a c-word was if he could pull his head out of his own pompous ass long enough to stop hating school and read something other than the Bible. But that would entail focusing on something other than how vainglorious his own ignorant, uneducated, loathsome existence has become, which is understandably impossible for someone as arrogant and contumacious as Rush’s swollen, bloated, gay, vapid, incomprehensible and downright stupid personality has made him.

You see, this is the party of tolerance and diversity. So it’s fine for them to hate people who disagree with them.