The Most Disturbing Thing (Perhaps) About Ann Althouse . . .

and I used to describe it as her pathological lack of self awareness. But on and after deeper thought, I must now conclude it's her lack of general awareness. Generally. Let me try to explain with out getting too long, here.

Following her latest bloggingheads.tv performance, she took asymmetrical offense to her opposite's blogging about the experience, calling it,"Weird." Granted, Althouse employed one of my least favorite sleazy lawyer tricks, what I call a buzz saw citation, and to a great extent misrepresented, blatantly, some of the things the other, Ms. Rebecca Watson, said in her own blog post post. Go here if you need to see for yourself.

The most telling thing about Althouse's blind spot occurs when she looks at one of the discrete (and it is a mild) complaints Watson makes about the experience, basically complaining about Althouse's (my words) sometimes manic conversational style. It's like dealing with some child on a sugar buzz, or some adult who had too many double espressos. Again, my words. What Watson said was reportedly this (and I did read the full post on her own blog. I am quoting from Althouse's post, here):

"She kept saying things that required me to unpack a lot of stuff before moving on."

Mild, like I said. No where near how I would and did say it. And while I am at it, ya know how Sarah Palin does that neurologically disturbed and distressing to experience, word salad shit? Althouse does not do word salad. But she does this thing where instead of coming at you with one coherent question, or point, she can blitz a person with a bunch of nonsense just muddying and mucking things up. It's not the clearest of thinking, communicating styles/tactics. Never mind the straw man and red herrings that seem to be legion with her.

Anyway here's the pay off. After saying that, Althouse says:

"Wow! That sounds like good conversation to me. I would love it if someone would talk to me in a way that invited me to go places where I hadn't planned."

STOP THE PRESSES! Ann Althouse likes her own odd, strange, sometimes hard to follow style of communication. Doesn't seem to get it that others might not like that, and would prefer a more "Strunk and White" style.

And before she gets to the end of her post, she's basically gone all passive aggressive troll on Watson. And the follow up post highlights the trolling. But back to that statement. There's this net/blogger convention where people do a shorter version of what some other writer says. My not so much shorter on Althouse's unaware statement would be:

"Wow! Someone thinks different than me. Heathen/heretic/monster."

Ya. Above I described it as non awareness. Althouse actually is aware there are people with different thoughts than her. She just has trouble processing that reality. At first I took that quote for being pathologically not self aware, but that's only part of the story. She has a shallow, bare minimum awareness that people are different than her. And it seems to bother her. A lot. So much so, that by giving the signal to her commentariat that she felt offended by Ms. Watson, she (knowingly) unleashed the hate mob to spew all sorts of disproportionate poison on the poor girl. I guess it's good to be the Queen Bee? (Gag me.)

Oh. And the follow up. To explain, one of the incidents covered in the bloggingheads episode was Watson's telling of a story about being hit on (mildly) in an elevator at this conference she attended. By the end of the original post, Althouse is sympathizing with the pick up artist.

Now during the "follow up," as posted today, Althouse posts some vid of some other guy in some elevator. More passive aggressive snark aimed at Watson. Petty vicious trolling, there. Not very mature, that. After giving a passive "By My Leave," license to her minions to savage the poor girl (one of the topics of that bloggingheads session, disturbingly ironically was sexism,) she could not leave it at that one shot for that one incident. Sorta sickening, I think.

My god (figure of speech.) What must it be like to work with her?