Yesterday I posted a piece entitled "Trying to understand right-wing blogging," which I also tweeted — under "Trying to understand (your) right-wing blogging" — to the right-wing blogger in question, RedState diarist "streiff." My somewhat inquiring tweet was among the most earnest of overtures ever, since, like John Kasich, I'm sure we can all just get along.
My puzzlement over streiff's blogging, noted in the brief post, was genuine, even if my tweeted appeal to streiff was not. How, I wondered, could this blogger so rudely reduce homosexual love and marriage to "ritualized buggery" while going out of his or her way not to offend readers by expurgating "bullshit" — as "bullish**"? Entire philosophical tracts have been written on bullshittery and can be found in any well-inventoried public bookstore — On Bullshit, for instance, by moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt (indeed it made the NYT's bestseller list).
Thus streiff's treatment of "bullshit" as a naughty, schoolyard no-no, complete with asterisked tittering, is intensely puzzling, particularly when coupled with such an offensive epithet as "ritualized buggery."
It was this puzzlement, in my tweet, that I posed to streiff. Again, I didn't really expect an honest, intellectual engagement, since right-wing bloggers have a well-known bias against the inconvenience of debate, which has a nasty tendency to upset their comfortable, cloistered world. And sure enough, in streiff's responding tweet to my "Trying to understand (your) right-wing blogging," my expectation has been fulfilled:
Streiff's tweeted response: "If I had to explain it, you couldn't understand."