Worst Post Ever

Kevin Drum has the nominations up for the all-time wingnuttiest blog post competition. In my view, Lee Siegel's "Origins of Blogofascism" is probably the worst work up there in large part because it doesn't even reflect any discernable point of view beyond Siegel's egomania and self-regard. It's not, however, the wingnuttiest post by any means. For wingnuttery, I think it's simply not possible to surpass Steven Den Beste, an internet figure people who've taken up blog reading just in the past two or three years may not be familiar with.

Kevin's chosen example of Den Bestism is "It's the Waiting that Wears" but I actually think Den Best outdid himself with "Suppose There Was Treachery" in which he contemplates the possibility of the United States going to war with France and Germany over the Iraq crisis: "It's evident that no matter how it developed it would be really, really bad. Even the best plausible case outcome would be a catastrophe." And, indeed, it would!

Comments

Read his post, please. It is simply hilarious.

Posted by Eduardo | November 4, 2007 11:40 AM

wow.

Posted by John DE | November 4, 2007 11:40 AM

This is hilarious. If you dereference the DenBeste links above you get a picture of anime characters making faces and:

Beeedaaaa!

GO AWAY!

(Readers of the site you came from are not welcome here.)

Posted by EKR | November 4, 2007 11:45 AM

What I love about the den bestial wingnuttery is the sober, plodding prose that he ties it to. One would think that to truly win the crown of the craziest crazy person who ever crazied, you'd need bizarre, angry rantings and sudden ALLCAPS and perhaps some misplaced and misused ethnic slurs. But instead, den Beste writes like an aspiring popular historian, acknowledging that he is just "supposing" and honestly admitting that the results would be "very bad."

It's hard to recall just how insane the world was in 2003.

Posted by DivGuy | November 4, 2007 12:05 PM

What John said - wow. I especially loved the line:

"The biggest question, and the one I'm least able to analyze, would be how German and French voters would react to this."

Yes that is the one thing you are unable to analyze - everything else you've obviously understood perfectly with your diamond sharp analytical mind.

BTW - why does his blog say 'USS Clueless'? Is he just pulling our legs?

Posted by TOT | November 4, 2007 12:40 PM

Den Beste's externalization of his various personality disorders via blogging could be kind of amusing in the sense that a freak-show might be amusing to some. Unfortunately, his influence was vast and he was taken seriously by a large number of purportedly sane people - just google "Steven den Beste" and skim the first pages to see the whole extent of the madness.

The terrifying thing about all this, and t were it stops just being funny in a sick way, is the fact that the opinions and the schoolyard bully dick wagging exemplified by SDB were not only popular within the rather limited confines of he blogoshpere, but within a significant part of American society as a whole, even guiding voting patterns and political decision making.

Posted by novakant | November 4, 2007 12:53 PM

I've seen Steven on other internets. He's not a bad guy. He always thinks he knows more than he actually knows, unfortunately.

Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | November 4, 2007 1:07 PM

This post forces me to choose between evils. Do I give aid and comfort to "liberals" by pointing out a nutty post at a site that kicked me off? I guess so:

redstate.com/story/2004/7/25/155049/493

Note that that not only made their front page, he had follow-ups along the same lines.

As for nutty "liberal" posts, see this site:

matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com

Posted by Why I don't like RS | November 4, 2007 1:16 PM

>BTW - why does his blog say 'USS Clueless'? Is he just pulling our legs?

Nevermind... just read his faq and see that it was a self deprecating name in keeping with the pioneering early days of the blogosphere...

Posted by TOT | November 4, 2007 1:17 PM

I voted, and think all of you should vote for, for that Powerline post. That's really the best expression for how fucked up conservatism/America is right now.

Posted by Sam | November 4, 2007 1:25 PM

I was going to mention the anime faces when you click on links to his site, but was obviously beaten to the punch. Still, this comment thread wouldn't be complete without someone noting that den Beste took great pains to assure us all that he looked away whenever there was underaged nudity in his anime. The man was a veritable saint.

Posted by Justin | November 4, 2007 1:28 PM

i'm newish to this internets thing so i hadn't seen a lot of the choices before. i have to go with the Glenn Reynolds post, tho. sure gets quite a few things wrong.....

Posted by dj spellchecka | November 4, 2007 1:55 PM

Vote "Tribes," goddamnit. Gold like that doesn't come along every decade.

Posted by Kyle | November 4, 2007 2:01 PM

Good God, I'd forgotten about that one. Complete insanity.

Posted by John | November 4, 2007 2:12 PM

Hah, I'd forgotten all about Den Beste's bans on visitors from unfriendly sites. He got his share of troll mail, surely, but I can't imagine that Amanda Marcotte, for example, got less during her mau-mauing. And Marcotte wasn't dainty enough to ban Michelle Malkin readers from visiting Pandagon.

Posted by Dave | November 4, 2007 3:15 PM

Den Beste is just showing the courage of a public thinker who stands behind every word he's written.

Posted by neil | November 4, 2007 3:21 PM

I find it pretty hard to top Michelle Malkin's cheerleader video.

A) It doesn't really make any sort of sense except as some general resentment or wingnutty rage. Senators jobs are to be cheerleaders? We're not winning because they don't clap hard enough? What is the point exactly?

B) More than any other post (though Powerline's "Bush is a genius" is close), it lacks even a shred of dignity.

C) It's hysterical, both in the "foaming at the mouth" sense and the "haha" sense.

I remember seeing that the first time and thinking "I don't believe it -- the right is dead."

Posted by Dan Panorama | November 4, 2007 3:55 PM

The other posts mentioned are foolish to idiotic. The "tribes" post is actually frightening. The clincher is the comments section--hundreds of people wildly proclaiming themselves "grey sheepdogs."

Posted by Mark | November 4, 2007 4:06 PM

Did Drum not place the Family Security Matters post with the following phrase in his top ten because the F.S.M. blogger has tried to whitewash it?

"If President Bush copied Julius Caesar by ordering his army to empty Iraq of Arabs and repopulate the country with Americans, he would achieve immediate results: popularity with his military; enrichment of America by converting an Arabian Iraq into an American Iraq (therefore turning it from a liability to an asset); and boost American prestiege (sic) while terrifying American enemies."

http://wonkette.com/politics/dept'-of-it.s-good-to-be-king/beloved-dc-think-tank-calls-for-bush-to-nuke-iraq-and-become-world-dictator-291885.php

Posted by redoredux | November 4, 2007 4:29 PM

Suppose, just suppose, that Steven van den beste is capable of intelligent thought... Hmmm no can't do it :)

Posted by Eco | November 4, 2007 5:36 PM

Just a reminder to those who don't believe: The Internet never forgets....

The full text:

Stardate 20030310.1726 [ed. my God, what a nerd.]

(Captain's log): It's the waiting that wears.

There's really no point any longer in arguing whether we should attack Iraq. It's going to happen now, so the point is moot. I am glad that it turned out this way, for I fear what would happen if we did not attack. Still, what I've been advocating is that my nation do something terrible, something which will involve deliberately inflicting death and destruction on a lot of people. A lot of Iraqis will die in the war, and some Americans and Brits and Australians will, too.

I've been advocating war, but I doubt that this web site had any significant influence on decision making in the Whitehouse. While I do know that some government workers read it, I seriously doubt anyone in a position of authority even knows I exist. Nonetheless, I do feel a degree of responsibility; since we're going to embark on a war I've been advocating, I can't disclaim any negative results from the war once it starts. There's never any way of knowing before you begin how it will go; you do the best you can in terms of preparing, but then you roll the dice. And sometimes the result is not what you expected.

I want it to be over. I want it in the past, a fait accompli. As I sit, waiting, I feel dread and foreboding. My imagination is working overtime, summoning scenarios which could lead to disaster for us, either before combat begins, or during the period when our troops are in action.

For instance, I worry about the possibility of poison-gas boobytraps. They have chemical weapons but are very short of effective delivery systems. But they might have rigged certain areas so that when our troops enter them, pre-placed canisters of chemical weapons would open. That would take months to set up, but they've had months. (It's too late for them to do it starting now.)

I'm deeply concerned about the French. In January I wrote about my concern that their opposition seemed to go well beyond anything which made sense in terms of any kind of motivation I could identify, and speculated that maybe there was some far more deep and critical explanation for it which was much more sinister. Since then their resistance has made less and less sense, and what I worry about now is that if they think the stakes are so high, no matter why that might be, that they're clearly willing to sacrifice the UN and NATO and even the process of formation of the EU itself just to oppose the war despite having only negligible chance of actually preventing it, then maybe they might be willing to go to even greater lengths against us, extending beyond the diplomatic. De facto they're allied with Saddam even if there's no publicly-declared treaty or agreement; so will they be willing to intervene militarily? Will they smuggle some sort of weaponry in? Or ship it in openly?

If 20 cargo jets take off from French territory and head towards the middle east, what will we do? If they ignore all attempts to prevent them from reaching Iraq, would we be willing to actually shoot one or more of them down?

Just how far are they willing to take their opposition to us? They've reached the point where it seems as if they're willing to make any sacrifice. Do they see the stakes as being high enough so that they might actually threaten to nuke us?

I'm worried about the unassimilated and angry Muslim masses of Europe. The ones in France have been stockpiling weapons, and there are other populations in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany. Will they rise in armed revolt, and plunge most of Europe into civil war? I remember the Watts riots in 1965. There was a period of several days in which a section of Los Angeles became a lawless anarchy. Will there be many large urban areas in Europe where order breaks down? How will the governments respond? How many people will die? Might the resulting disturbance seriously damage the already-weak economies of Europe?

Another fear is that despite the inspections, that Iraq continues to work on attempting to produce, or to purchase, a nuke. If they're close, and if we wait too long and they get it, the result could be an unimaginable tragedy.

North Korea seems to be doing everything it possibly can to try to gain our attention, even to the point of attempting to intercept one of our spyplanes in international space and to force it to return to North Korean territory where its crew would become prisoners, i.e. hostages, to force us to negotiate with them. They've just made a symbolic (but otherwise useless) gesture by firing an anti-ship missile out into the ocean. In their apparently desperate attempts to force negotiations with the US, will they go too far and end up doing something we'll all come to regret?

Some have speculated that there may well be an informal alliance between NK and Saddam, and that NK is doing what it is in order to deflect us from attacking Iraq. Even if that's not true, it seems in part to be the case that they hope that if they can force negotiations while we're busy with Iraq that they may be able to get a better deal than if we were not busy elsewhere. Just how far will they go?

Will any of our pilots or special forces people get captured by the Iraqis? If so, what will be done to them? How much will they suffer before they're finally killed?

Once the troops roll, and come into contact with Iraqi military formations, it's expected that many and perhaps even most of them will surrender at the first opportunity. Everyday soldiers are badly treated and have no love for Saddam, and certainly have no great urge to die for him. What most of them seem to want is to live through the war.

But how many will actually fight? Will we lose soldiers as a result of fake surrenders? If they resist militarily, how many will we have to slaughter, and how many of our people will have to die or be wounded in the resulting combat?

What if they do use chemical weapons against us? Our forces are equipped and trained to fight their way through such things, but they've never actually faced them in war, and it is an extremely unforgiving situation. Small mistakes can lead to death or maiming.

Will the Kurds rise up once war starts, and try to declare independence, while resisting entry of any armed force including ours? Will Syria or Iran or Turkey militarily intervene? How many enemies will we actually end up fighting?

Has Saddam decided to go out in a blaze of glory? Has he decided to directly kill masses of Iraqis, and destroy vital infrastructure, as part of a scorched-earth doomsday scenario? Can we be sure that we can kill him before he can issue such orders? Or at least cut his communications before he can issue them? If he does issue those orders, how many of those set to carry them out will be fanatics who will actually do it?

It's like sitting and waiting for the results to some critical medical test. My fear is that the longer we wait, the more time we give our enemies to plan and carry out operations which will make the outcome worse for us.

I'm certain that we will go to war in Iraq. I'm certain that we'll win. But I'm not certain of anything else, and until it happens all I can do is to sit and sweat it out, and hope for the best.

Update: Another thing I'm worried about is that the First Circuit may issue a court order throwing sand in the gears. I'm apalled they even agreed to hear the case. I believe that this lawsuit has no merit whatever, but one can never be certain what the courts will do. The only blessing is that it isn't the Ninth Circuit; if it were, we'd be in deep shit.

Update: Russell Wardlow comments on the possibility of a EuroMuslim uprising.

Update 20030311: Michele is worried, too.

Update: Ted Barlow and Kieran Healy and Tom Bogg comment. (Bottom line: I'm a raving paranoid. The French are really our best friends; they're actually better friends than the Brits.) Atrios, too. And Kevin Drum.

Porphyrogenitus has his own fears.

James Taranto comments.

Update: This column by Larry Miller also expresses fear.

Update: Amiland has a report on Germany's "high growth industry".

Posted by a little bird | November 4, 2007 6:32 PM

Although he's never produced a singular "worst post ever", I do think Jonah Goldberg should be recognized for consistent shallowness, smarm and hypocrisy, not to mention willingness to toe the line no matter what.

Posted by Ben Cronin | November 4, 2007 6:42 PM

Matt,

In 2003 in the comments section of one of your earlier incarnations, I composed a Steven den Beste haiku. It went like this:

Master strategist
Plots his next move carefully:
I will eat the French.

I can see him writing it.

Posted by Randy Paul | November 4, 2007 6:51 PM

“He always thinks he knows more than he actually knows, unfortunately.”

Egregiously so. I was little aware of his prominence in the right-wing blogosphere because I try to remain as ignorant as possible about what goes on in the right-wing blogosphere.

Unfortunately, den Beste is an active member of MetaFilter, where I'm also quite active. And he's a constant nuisance. On AskMetafilter, in which members answer questions posted by other members, he's a frequent answerer and his answers are quite often wrong. The fact that he feels the need to answer question relatively indiscriminately—and then to do so with a high rate of astonishingly stupidly wrong answer—tells you a great deal about his personality. I went out of my way to publicly ridicule him on MeFi for a while, hoping to at least dissuade him from answering so many questions on AskMetafilter, but it didn't seem to have an effect.

It doesn't surprise me in the least that there would be a mild consensus that something he wrote would qualify as one of the worst examples of wingnuttery blog posts.

Posted by Keith M Ellis | November 4, 2007 7:00 PM

Holistically speaking, "Tribes" is probably the wingnuttiest post on that list. But as for individual arguments made in the posts, there's a fierce contest on. Like is this

And I suppose we shouldn't stress so much that the antiwar folks were really just defending the interests of French oil companies and Russian arms-deal creditors. It's probably a bad idea to keep rubbing that point in over and over again.

more or less crazy than this?

But in the twentieth century, women became more and more involved in the body politic, and in industry, and in the media—and mostly, this has not been a good thing. When women got the vote, it was inevitable that government was going to become more powerful, more intrusive, and more “protective” (ie. more coddling), because women are hard-wired to treasure security more than uncertainty and danger.

Me, I voted for Derbyshire's Virginia Tech posting. Yes, why didn't anybody rush the guy packing two handguns? Those pussies. Gun nuts = old school crazy.

Posted by Lucy | November 4, 2007 7:40 PM

Den Beste had me at 'stardate.'

I voted for Powerline, though. You could give a thousand monkeys a thousand typewriters and let them type for a thousand years and every single page would be more intelligent than the Bush-as-undreappreciated-genius post.

Posted by Woody Bombay | November 4, 2007 8:27 PM

There are many, but one of the unintentionally hilarious aspects of "Waiting" in retrospect is how he ponders his way though every hypothetical scenario he can imagine, and doesn't come within a million miles of anything that actually happened.

Posted by Mork | November 4, 2007 9:59 PM

You gotta be kidding me...I tried to click the links Matt provided, but it took me out of America and straight into China or something. So is that what the Great Firewall looks like? Hmmmmm...

Posted by Herb | November 5, 2007 12:43 AM

Herb, you need to cut and paste the URLs, but he's already scrubbed the first one -- the one in the poll -- from his site, so look in the Google cache.

Yeah, Steven's deservedly up there for that post, but I think you're right -- "Suppose" is a nuttier post. It's more representative of Steven himself, though, whereas "Waiting" is more representative of wingnuttia generally. But I think my vote in the poll goes with Powerline anyway.

I know him at Metafilter and pretty much agree with Keith. He's an autodidact and really, really believes that as a generalist he has the knowledge of a specialist in everything. Not to be too hard; I have the same temptation. And I did participate on his personal forum before he got bored with being a moderator, because he attracted some interesting writers (people who used multisyllabic words) compared with other outposts. And, I was a liberal hawk, whose only saving grace is that I wised up sooner than some others.

That out of the way, the thing about Steven is that he could go down these rabbit holes regularly. He actually opined on that forum once that the Allied commanders of WWII -- Ike and Monty -- were worried, during the closing of the Falaise pocket, that the British and US armies would "start fighting each other". No, not get too close and have lots of tragic friendly fire incidents. Run out of Germans to kill, and be so ferociously fired up a la Full Metal Jacket that they would want to keep killing and only have each other to do it to. So Ike and Monty worried about how to stop this. I just didn't know how to respond to a concept like that. It sounds like something out of a peace poetry reading at a womyn's center, in fact. Around the bend to the other side.

Instead of that scenario, of course, when the two sides met up, a Polish general wrote "We were greeted by the Americans with the joy of a child." By that night, the American and Polish troops had formed a single battle line.

Posted by Dan Hartung | November 5, 2007 4:43 AM

More from Phillip Atkinson, whose post (linked to in above comment) is much nuttier than Reynolds':

"(Bush) could then follow Caesar’s example and use his newfound popularity with the military to wield military power to become the first permanent president of America, and end the civil chaos caused by the continually squabbling Congress and the out-of-control Supreme Court."

Unless Atkinson was joking...

Posted by redoredux | November 5, 2007 6:11 AM

I was thinking of AskMetafilter in my post earlier in the thread. So, I agree 100% with Keith Ellis and Dan Hartung. Steven likes to show up with answers that are about 30 percent right, and hence distracting and misleading.

Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | November 5, 2007 9:40 AM

Den Beste wrote about a possible reason for Germany and France for their anti-war policy:

"It doesn't make sense in terms of trying to preserve economic interests (i.e. contracts, reimbursement of debts). If that's what they were concerned about, they'd have switched over by now to toadying up to us. The more they resist now, the more likely it is that any contracts they've made will be null and any debts owed them from Iraq won't be paid."

The post is lunatic for the most part, but this observation is pretty good. I remember vividly Andrew Sullivan for example arguing that the French and the Germans were driven purely by greed (and anti-americanism). But it somehow never occured to him or the others who argued in this vein that, from a strictly economic point of view, their resistance would have been totally idiotic.

Posted by Patrick | November 5, 2007 9:42 AM

Suppose Best knew that Vice President Cheney broke the law when as CEO of Halliburton, he used an off-shore subsidiary to profit from doing business with Iraq during our embargo ...

These people are completely immune from shame.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | November 5, 2007 9:53 AM

The posts are funny/appalling and all, but I gotta say the entire exercise exemplifies the blogosphere's (L and R) worst up-its-own-arse tendencies.

Posted by arse | November 5, 2007 11:24 AM

Wingnuttery never sleeps. NRO had a gem today. See if you can figure out the point that Mark Hemingway is grasping at here.

Posted by SDM | November 5, 2007 3:01 PM