The Gifts of Reason

Well, let me pause to praise lightly the Reason magazine readers. While many took issue with a post here, they were largely civil and, let's call it, reasonable.

That's not exactly how it was on their own blog. That section where it appeared is well named Hit & Run. Some were less kind that one might suppose and quite a few had not bothered to read what they criticized, here or there.

[Over the years, I have turned to moderating comments and rejecting the threatening and obscene. None of those from the Reason crew required moderation. As so many of them note, they are largely pro-marriage equality, and most of the nasty comments I have gotten have been from anti-gay readers who came looking for trouble.]

Backfiring

Overall, this post's follow-up was been an amusing experience. I do regret, however, that it was the rock accidentally kicked that caused the minor landslide.

I thought I had written one of my rare personal and family posts. I was attempting to poke fun at myself. I thought I had been pretty clever in manipulating my mother into visiting and then in giving her one of my favorite lefty publications, when she would never have brought on into her house on her own. Then when a friend turned the tables without knowing what I had done, I thought it was funny and I was the goat.

You can read the comments on my post and the Reason blog to see that some sloppiness on my part did not suit many, many readers. Even those who conflated comments from others with my original post had one main point -- Reason is a libertarian pub, not a neocon or conservative one.

Many did not read far enough or closely enough to see that I was reading Reason. They told me I shouldn't be so narrow and should read it. I can identify; I've been known to skim long posts. Even when others here and on Hit & Run corrected such comments, the skimming continued and muddled comments followed. A few here and there also got emotional or smug claiming I or some other commenter was emotional or smug. That too is understandable and human, even if not in the spirit of the magazine.

Losing Count

What was most remarkable to me was the traffic. I noticed spikes with the influx of comments. My stat counter showed a huge bump in hits, far outweighing the number of comments. Moreover, they were worldwide. The industrialized, computerized centers in both hemispheres were coming in by the hundreds, then thousands. Nearly all showed links from Reason, with a few emailed ones. I didn't notice an appreciable number of hits from Africa, but the rest of the world had representatives. I had never given it much thought, but there's a magazine and website with impressive coverage.

I do read Reason as it arrives. I hope some of my visitors read and enjoyed my post otherwise. It actually was supposed to be a personal one and was an apparently failed attempt at self-depreciating humor. I have no doubt the Hit & Run citation gave me much higher readership for that post than all but a few on same-sex marriage over the past three years.

There is another irony here that I might as well reveal. Quite a few libertarians I know say they are Objectivists. Before she had her personality change and became so conservative that we couldn't talk politics, my mother was a reader and follower of Rand and considered herself an Objectivist. She never called herself a libertarian, but I suspect that were she still living she'd be quite happy with a subscription to Reason.

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Tags: Reason magazine, Objectivist, libertarian, mother