Representative Sampling

On your Backtalk page, you state that "We get a lot of letters, and publish a representative sampling of them in this column." The Backtalk column for today (11/27) contained 6 letters that supported points of view that appeared on the website; all 6 were either fairly articulate or extremely articulate. And then there was a letter printed in support of the war that looked like it was written by a 3rd grader, a string of misspellings and grammatical errors.

Glancing through your Backtalk archives, I find virtually no letters in support of the war. There are some refutations, but they typically refer to specific points rather than your general premise. It's not hard to discern the message you're sending with your 11/27 Backtalk: "only an idiot supports the war."

Do you expect your readers to believe that you've only gotten one letter in weeks supporting military retaliation for the acts of September 11th, and that one letter was inarticulate? My advice to you would be to live up to your word and publish a representative sampling of letters. Why let pettiness get in the way of the credibility of an otherwise excellent website?

~ CP

Justin Raimondo replies:

You're right about the "representative sampling" bit: if  "Backtalk" published a truly representative sampling of the mail we get, about 60 percent of it would consist of the following:

"You two-bit traitors ought to get on a plane to Afghanistan! You are giving aid and comfort to our terrorist enemies, and therefore I have reported your site to the FBI! Be expecting a visit from them real soon! F*ck you!"

"Backtalk" was conceived in those halycon days before the present war fever set in, and we must admit that our promise of a numerically representative sampling has come to naught. However, we don't believe our readers want to read 60% gibberish: this would not only be tiresome, but it wouldn't really make any kind of point. Sure, it would underscore the failure of so many of our fellow citizens to spell even the most elementary words correctly, and certainly it would dramatize the abject failure of the public school system to inculcate anything other than mindless conformity (let alone the ability to make a coherent argument). The problem is that it would be really really boring, and so we have chanced on another formula, one less democratic and more meritocratic – as befits our admittedly libertarian bias. We publish the best of the letters we receive: the most well-reasoned, and the most interesting.

I certainly don't agree that "only an idiot supports the war," so maybe I'm not getting my own message. Intelligence and a moral sense are not necessarily connected: that is, the latter is not always derived from the former. I'm sure, for example, that Max Boot is a friggin' genius, or thinks he is: unfortunately, he is also a moral monster. I'll acknowledge, of course, that you don't have to be a moral monster to endorse retaliation against the perpetrators of the 9/11 atrocity: I advocated just that in my 9/21 column [see "Kill 'Em – and get out!" ]. That is a far cry, however, from supporting this war – which may well extend into Iraq, and other parts of the Middle East, and which our leaders have promised is going to be practically endless.

We get some articulate pro-war letters, and I'm all for publishing them: but of course, this just makes more work for me (who often has to answer them!) and I am naturally biased against that, given my three-columns-per-week schedule. But you do make a very good point. Hey, all you gung-ho, pro-war, let's-bomb-everybody types – I know you're not that inarticulate! Get to work and write us!

Webmaster Eric Garris replies:

I would not usually have asked for that inarticulate letter to be pubished, but it really was representative of the letters we received that day. Many of our articles appeared as links from mainstream sites, and we got an unusual number of first-time visitors. I am quite amazed at how the most adamant letters are often some of the most stupid-sounding ones.