This is the true face of Anti-Althousia.

Here?  This place, Comments Home?  No, not hardly.

Here.  The execrable site Lawyers Guns and Money, a motley collective of "antizionist" (perfumed antisemitic) socialist academics with sloppy beer guts and ironic Expos hats.  One of the whitest, most male-dominated third-tier blogs in existence, all of the contributors are white men, who spend their time railing against the white male hegemony, to an almost-entirely white male audience of a few dozen commenters.  The commenters compete to see who can say "THIS." first in every thread.  It's a sad echo-chamber of lickspittles eager to polish the knob of the author of the post -- sort of the antithesis of TOP.

Actually, they don't spend all of their time on the hegemony:  They're also obsessed with Althouse.  They loathe her over there.

More after the jump.



The innocuous Althouse post that they pounce upon concerns the very controversial issue of...the high-speed train accident.  Althouse could write that water is wet, and these idiots would fling shit all over the internet falling all over each other trying to disprove it.

Althouse says of the accident: 

I’m blogging this because it’s not an atypical incident and because too many people in America have unrealistic, idealized notions of the goodness of trains and their capacity to whisk everyone around everywhere at high speed.

 And so the author of the post calls Althouse innumerate and a lunatic; because...more people die in automobile accidents per year, in Japan, (??), than die in train accidents.

Not accidents per mile traveled; no, she's innumerate because of the comparison of the absolute number of deaths of the two.

Someone actually brought this up in the comments:

2011 Figures:
5.7 Fatalities per 100 million passenger train-miles
1.1 Fatalities per 100 Million Vehicle Miles Traveled

 And after 10 or 15 comments debating the subtleties of division, addition, and subtraction, the heretic is smacked down with this gem:

All in all, it would appear that our rail system is, for passengers, notably safer than car travel. Rail is killing more people per passenger-mile than are cars, but (1) they’re not on the trains; (2) passenger-miles make little sense when discussing American train volume; and (3) the preponderance of the train victims probably result from bad infrastructure and maintenance.

So their answer is:  Sure, technically, our statement that trains are safer than cars isn't supported by your dark art, arithmetic -- rail kills more people per mile than cars.  And sure, that's not even high-speed rail, which is probably quite a bit more dangerous than conventional.  But those victims weren't actually on the train, so...they don't count.

Set aside for a moment the fact that Althouse never compared trains to cars, never stated that one was more dangerous than the other; these idiots lost an argument to their own strawman.

Jesus, these people are stupid.  And vicious.  From the post itself:  “I occasionally wonder how much They pay Althouse to play a craven jackass online, then I realize They probably just ply her with flowers and an Internet Husband…”

A sampling from the comments:  “This person is really a professor of law at Wisconsin?”  (And you, a law professor!) “high on box wine”;  “…butt-chugging cheap box wine…”;and so on.  One commenter invites her to commit suicide on train tracks.

And then further down, a comment that's really quite instructive:

“Looks like she picked the right month to turn off comments. Oh wait, that would have been any month ever.”

 These are the Althouse readers who wanted her to do away with comments.