Is Dave Weigel’s comments section like sex?

"The Red Queen hypothesis for sex is simple: Sex is needed to fight disease,"
according to PBS's "The Advantage of Sex," we captioned this image of
"Alice and the Red Queen" by Sir John Tenniel (1930s) in our October 2005
post "Is democracy like sex," the provocative title of a 1995 Glenn Harlan Reynolds scholarly legal essay.

By Sissy Willis of sisu

We are not responsible for our commenters' opinions, but they may open windows for debate," we twittered Dave Weigel this morning. The Slate/Washington Post [He's BACK!] political reporter was not too happy about our previous post headlining one of his readers' distasteful and profoundly uninformed
opinions about black Republicans who don't buy the politically correct "victim mentality/government savior narrative" [Michelle Malkin's words in a broader tea party context]. Our twitter response to Weigel re his reader's comments:

More information, not less. Exposing toxic, Pauline-Kael-bubble notions to the disinfectant light of day.

Now comes a fresh new voice in our own comments, LNSmithee of L.N. Smithee's Reactor blog. We may not be responsible for our commenters' opinions, but we'd be happy to take credit for providing the soapbox:

As
one of those rare "African Americans [who DO] know who these Black
Conservatives are and what they represent," I say without hesitation
that I would rather be represented by them than the idiots at the NAACP
who needed to find something to whine about so badly, they claimed a
greeting card was racist for making reference to "black holes"!

Oh. About that blogpost title. As suggested in the caption above, it's a play on Glenn Reynolds's 1995 scholarly essay "Is democracy like sex?" An excerpt from our own blogpost on the subject five years back gives the gist:

Reynolds's metaphor [actually, an analogy, come to think of it] comes from Darwinian biologists' attempts to account
for sexual reproduction vs. the much easier (at first glance) asexual
reproduction alternative:

"To explore this idea, I have
chosen as an analogy or metaphor another widely criticized and
misunderstood institution — sex. In short, some discoveries resulting
from the application of complexity theory to the question of
evolutionary fitness among biological systems have important
implications for our discussion of the fitness of the body politic. Both
kinds of systems face a similar problem — maintaining a balance between
adaptability and stability on the one hand, while resisting parasitism
on the other. In essence, democracy can be viewed as serving the same
function in political systems that sex serves for biological systems —
enhancing resistance to parasites."

The argument resonates in the Darwinian struggle out here in
cyberspace and on the ground for survival of the "fittest" narrative.
We'll leave it to our readers to ferret out the parasites. BradnMS in the comments gets it just about right, and Juliette Akinyi, AKA Baldilocks, has some important things to say about "the narrative" in her "The Herding" series. Part Two now up. Here's a taste:

If the Left has been
successful at keeping racial grievance in the forefront of the black
American agenda — in indoctrinating black Americans to believe that
retaining racial anger at whites is inherent in being black and
essential for black survival — it has also been successful in later years of producing a certain
mindset in white Americans. Actually this seems to be two mindsets, but
it is really a singular one — a two-headed beast. The first is
guilt-fear and the second is unproductive anger.

Update: This just in on Twitter as we're about to go to print: Dave Weigel's Slate blog launches today. A taste of "This lame duck will destroy us all":

A
general slack in the trust people have in government is at play here —
it's not hard to convince people that Congress is being gamed.

Indeed. Sounds downright Darwinian. Related: "Bloggers are 'cracking, popping, drilling and peeling their victims open.'"

Crossposted at sisu and Liberty Pundits.