Saturday, March 27, 2004

What is BAD? A modern reflection.

It’s spring break and comments are way down. I thought I’d take the time to address some issues that maybe aren’t as interesting to most readers.

For those of you not wont to participate in this site’s comments section, allow me to explain that BAD (Beetle Aurora Drake) is the pseudonym of a person who posts here frequently. He peculiar in the respect that he does not ever, ever, make any statements unless they are to oppose something someone else just said. It’s really quite weird! You can check out his website if you want. Reading it you will see it is clear that he is constitutionally unable to take constructive positions. For a while this was amusing but then it became tedious, then amusing again, then more tedious, the even more tedious than the first two times and then finally interesting. Having finally reached the point where the logical deformity of this odd commenter has became worthy of thought, I now undertake to see if I can piece together anything constructive at all from our misshapen friend.

My first thought was that it is impossible for someone to be completely uncreative. Certainly, there must be a method to his anti-constructivism. Perhaps he savvies himself a disciple of Sophocles, believing that winning arguments prove nothing more than the skill of the arguer. Here then he would seek to prove his point by arguing forcefully against everybody, hoping to show the futility of such exercises. This would make sense except that he doesn’t nitpick and take umbrage with everybody, just liberals. This indicates that BAD is something less profound and shallower then he first appears.

But if he really was conservative and wished merely to confuse and divert “the enemy” you’d imagine that his impact would be overall negative. I thought about this for a while and seriously considered whether this website would be better off without him. In the end, the answer is clear: without BAD to provide us with a false counterpoint, I and other liberals wouldn’t have much to talk about and we wouldn’t communicate as well. So profound is this impact that it’s safe to say that BAD jumpstarts the comments section most of the time.

This is why I tip my hat to you, BAD. You have done more for the Liberal Berkeley Blogs than anyone else. You have put more time into keeping the comments going. You have done more to match certain repellent conservative policies with certain repellent conservative people. You are the greatest Liberal blogger in the whole Berkeley blog-sphere and for that we salute you.

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 12:41 PM

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