And You Will Know Them By the Trail of Dead

Via Roy, I see that a person styling himself Instapunk has devised an experiment aimed at demonstrating the moral superiority of the Right Blogosphere: 

I propose an exercise to be perfomed by those who have the software and expertise to carry it out. The exercise is this: Search six months' worth of content, posts and comments, of the 20 most popular blogs on the right and the left. The search criteria are George Carlin's infamous "7 Dirty Words."

I am absolutely certain that the left will far exceed the right in the number of usages of all these words, which will go a long way toward proving that it's the right which is still concerned with ideas while it's the left that's obsessed with the lowest kind of hateful invective.

Charming. Counting curses is indeed one way of proving just how loving you are and how hateful are your opponents.

I have another metric, though.

Let's count corpses.

How many dead people have become dead as a result of the irresponsible, botched, and dishonest war that is the main reason the warbloggersphere exists in the first place?

How many corpses, Instapunk? Can we even count them all, Punk?

What about the torture, while we're at it? You know, the torture that the wingnutosphere is so desperate to minimize? Punk?

I am unabashedly foulmouthed. But I think this Punk will still be counting up the dead and maimed and tortured long after I run out of "fucks."

Because there are just not enough curses in the world for him and his kind.

Comments

[Dirty Sanchez Callahan]

Do ya feel lucky today, Instapunk? Well, do ya?

[K. Ron Silkwood]

Fucking fucktards do what they do. We can't expect any more than that from them.

[DragonScolar]

They seem to forget that in an America of deficit spending, a pointless war, and disgusting cronyism, we have REASON to swear.

[Fledermaus]

Does anyone else see the absurdity of a self-styled punk being so concerned with the use of vulgar words?

Anybody? Beuller?

[Jake - but not the one]

Oh Gawd, you nailed it. I was all caught up in whether or not Punk counted comments vs just the actual posts, but you skipped over all that and struck at the heart of the matter.

Thanks.

Jake

[iamcoyote]

I'll bet they have more instances of ass rape, too. They seem to really like thinking and talking about it for some reason.

[Ripley]

Yes, the right is concerned with ideas... ideas like nuking Iran and torturing Iraqis and killing brown people and promoting violence toward liberal American citizens, hanging judges, locking up or hanging people who disagree with McPresident, and, of course, slapping their cocks across people's faces.

Oh, I forgot destroying Social Security, ignoring the devastation of the Gulf coast, selling our ports to Dubai, letting our veterans rot in post-war illness and mental anguish, and, of course, living on fucking Mars.

[Righteous Bubba]

the lowest kind of hateful invective.

A new euphemism for fun.

[va]

Instapunk has an interesting theory: the left curses and the right has ideas. I wonder what Instapundit would sound like if he was a leftist...

"We should be fucking quietly, shitting radical mullahs and iranian atomic scientists, jizzing the simmering insurgencies within Iran, motherfucking the mullahs' expat business interests out of business, etc."

[Interrobang]

I'm pretty sure that I read on Pandagon that a lot of those winger sites censor dirty words, whereas I don't know of any left sites that do. Also, I remember someone at Pandagon mentioning that the sampler had left out Ace of Spades, who is likely one of the foulest-mouthed right-wing bloggers out there, on the grounds that AoS is "comedy." And don't forget that a lot of right-wing sites don't allow comments, either.

Sure, if you rig the game like that, of course you're going to come out of it smelling like a fucking rose...

[rc]

Althouse is looking for a blogging heads partner for a women focused blogging heads.

I suggested Altmouse, but I don't know how to get ahold of her.

[freq flag]

Tell ya what, mcfly. Why don't you drag your sorry ass (oops, heavens! I mean "rear end" tee-hee) and your pathetic little 7th grade research project over to Little Green Footballs and lob the name Rachel Corrie into a comments thread (any one will do).

Then stand back and watch your little search exerciser get scorched with all kinds of civilized, right-wing "ideas."

[mike wilson]

goddam, motherfucker, i just love the way you write. well-developed sense of irony. calms my bereaved antipodean heart.

[Stephen Stralka]

This is about the most transparent self-contradiction I've seen in some time. The idea that counting curse words proves anything is just abjectly stupid, and yet Instapunk offers it as "proof" that the Right is more concerned with ideas than the left.

Well, of course, as Ripley suggests up there, he doesn't say the Right is concerned with good ideas.

Let me just demonstrate that the quality (or lack thereof) of one's ideas is in no way affected by the preponderance of swear words. Note that the following rewrite of Instapunk's key sentence expresses precisely the same "ideas" as the original:

I am absolutely fucking certain that the fucking left will far exceed the right in the number of usages of all these cocksucking words, which will go a long fucking way toward proving that it's the motherfucking right which is still concerned with ideas while it's the fucking left that's obsessed with the lowest kind of hateful invective and shit.

[dan mcenroe]

Nice try, Thers - but you know that Vince Foster cancels out any and all deaths the right wing might be responsible for.

[memyself]

I wonder if this comparison includes left sites that encourage thousands of comments compared to rightwing sites that either do not allow comments or just don't generate enough interest to get many. What would be required (if anyone cared) would be a calculation of swear words per 1000 words posted (or some such thing). We may still swear more, but methinks we also are just more of us and writing more stuff as well.