Connoisseurs of Very Internetty meltdowns will enjoy this post by Roger Pielke Jr. I've not been following the trials and tribulations of Mr. Pileke Jr. with any great attention, though he does appear to have Suffered Greatly at the hands of Electronic Malefactors. List O List to his Tale o' Woe.
Here is how it works. The really giant fish -- public intellectuals like Tom Friedman and Paul Krugman -- confer authority on the big fish of the liberal blogosphere. They do so by applauding the work of the big fish and saying that they trust them. This is a useful exchange because the big fish amplify the writings of the giant fish in the blogosphere and do the dirty work of taking down their political opponents by playing some gutter politics that the giant fish would rather not be seen playing. This has the effect of establishing the big fish as people to be listened to, not because they are necessarily right about things, but because the giant fish listen to them and the giant fish set political agendas.
Thomas Friedman is great giant fish who confers authority on Big Liberal Blog-fish by saying he trusts them? I hadn't known this previously. I mean, I'd always figured Tom Friedman was, essentially, perhaps a carp or similar; he's certainly not a writer. As for the Paul Krugman thing, well, absolutely -- as a Giant Fish, he has great trouble playing gutter politics (you try holding a shiv in your dorsal fin). So he makes other people do it, by poking them with one of those little wooden lobster forks. This is, of course, well known.
Much of the rest of the piece is Pielke complaining about the wickedness of Brad DeLong's blog comments policy, a topic that proves surprisingly uninteresting. Also Pielke doesn't like Tim Lambert, who is in turn not much of fan of Pielke's, to say the least.
What is really impressive about Pielke though is how spectacularly incompetent he is when it comes to metaphors. He mixes them more violently than even, say, Tom Friedman:
The big fish then feed on the minnows, for instance, Real Climate and Brad DeLong have cited Tim Lambert as an authority, including on my own work, yet to my knowledge Lambert has never actually engaged anything I've published in the peer reviewed literature much less any substantive arguments that I've made. Of course he doesn't -- he is not qualified to do so. Joe Romm just makes stuff up and even when shown to be in error he plows ahead. They then incestuously cite each other. This creates a valuable political smokescreen for the giant fish. The giant fish then get plausible deniability from engaging in what might seem to be less-than ethical behavior, the big fish get the ego-strokes of acknowledgment from the giant fish and the occasional top-line billing among favorable-leaning media. Similarly the minnows get to parlay inexpertise into a small role in the politics of personal destruction, and are cited by the big fish, but never by the media or the giants, which would be unbecoming....
Right. So, to sum up:
Big fish eat tiny minnow fish, except for one of the big fish, who has a fanciful aquatic imagination and also employs powerful farm machinery for the purposes of forward progress. The large fish and the devoured minnows and the farmer fish are all in the same family and fuck each other -- which is a neat trick, to eat a fish and then fuck it. Don't try this at home. Nevertheless, the fish-family-fucking is really intense; the friction is so great that even underwater it creates a great big giant cloud of impenetrable smoke. HAWT. Meanwhile, the giant fish, such as the Tom Friedman fish, hide behind the fish-fuck-smoke to cop feels off the big fish, the dirty scaly buggers. At this selfsame instant, the media is so taken with all this incestuous fuck-smoke fish-shit that they make these randy sub-marine perverts the headline act at a concert or vaudeville entertainment -- for reasons that I trust are clear. Then the minnows, which have already been in this paragraph swallowed and then fucked by their immediate, larger relatives, go to the track to make risky bets as a means of getting bit parts in a movie, or perhaps politics, even though the giant Tom Friedman fish stubbornly consider them declasse, what with them fucking and getting eaten by other fish they're related to, and fair enough, I suppose. The farmer fish meanwhile is forgotten about.
This is very excellent writing. I hope you've learned something.