BREAKING NEWS: Two people who serve the same masters had a nice lunch.

>> Tuesday, February 02, 2010

Glenn Reynolds tosses a 70 m.p.h. heater down the heart of the plate:

EVERYONE COMES TO KNOXVILLE SOONER OR LATER: Had a nice lunch with Jonah Goldberg, who’s speaking here at the University tonight. If you’re in Knoxville, you should check him out. Interestingly, it was the first time we’ve actually met.
What, exactly, is interesting about the fact that this lunch happened? Is it that it's the first time these two water-carriers for conservative excess ever carried water in the same room at the same time? What's interesting about two people who live thousands of miles apart never having dined together? As a rule, nothing that can be true of any one person and any of the millions of people who live nowhere near him or her qualifies as interesting. You want interesting?

I once punched Spencer Ackerman in the gut as hard as I could. Such acts of gratuitous blogger-on-blogger violence are inherently interesting. But lunch?

Does Reynolds assume that his readers think all like-minded internet ideologues regularly assemble around some second-rate Algonquin Round Table, so that each might praise the other for having reached the same tendentious conclusion? (The pair do possess two of Dorothy Parker's three requirements in a man: "He must be handsome, ruthless and stupid.") Don't let the uniformity of their independently conceived opinions fool you: they receive the same talking points and are intellectually lazy in the same way. They don't need to collaborate to draw identically idiotic conclusions.

Perhaps the fact that they dined together is supposed to be interesting, what with the Singularity being so near and all that most people assume Reynolds no longer needs to feed his meat in order to "Huh," "Indeed" and "UPDATE." (If they had any sense, his readers would assume he's long since transferred responsibility for posting on Instapundit to a tourettic algorithm that trawls the internet for perfunctory contrarianism, second-rate science fiction novels and pictures of cars. Do you know how easy it is to post like Glenn Reynolds? I do. I made a whole day of it. It was not a good day.) Maybe the niceness of the lunch is what made it interesting? Lunch with Reynolds or Goldberg would not be "nice" if I had to attend it—my Southern sense of politeness would render me mute—but those two likely yukked it up about who'd be first against the wall when they're made king.

I'm at a loss. I have no idea what could possibly have been interesting about the fact that these sad little men shared a table and a meal.

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