This is completely off topic as far as the 49ers are concerned, but as far as blogging goes, it's right on point. One of my fellow SB Nation bloggers passed along an interesting little article from CrashBurnAlley.com, a Philadelphia Phillies blog. Apparently the writer at CrashBurnAlley.com wrote to Bill Conlin in regards to voting for Jimmy Rollins for MVP. This Phillies blogger (again PHILLIES BLOGGER) was trying to explain why a guy like David Wright (among others) deserved the MVP award over Jimmy Rollins. The two emailed back and forth that say Bill Conlin go absolutely crazy in his condemnation of bloggers. Here's a link to the blog post, which details the background of the initial email and the subsequent email exchange. I HIGHLY recommend reading the entire post to get a better idea of everything. However, specifically, I wanted to bring to your attention one of Bill Conlin's responses:
Now I can see newspaper writers getting annoyed with bloggers infringing on their turf. When something new comes along traditionalists feel threatened. And if you want to wage war with bloggers so be it. HOWEVER, invoking a man who instituted mass murder in the name of ethnic cleansing goes beyond just being a bad idea. That's reprehensible and just hideous.
I first learned of this from the SB Nation Phillies Blogger and he made some interesting comments in regards to the pamphleteers comment.
From The Good Phight, our Phillies blogger:
This was, in part, how we got the American Revolution.
Perhaps it's to Conlin's credit (intellectually if not morally) that there is a strong similarity between the pamphleteers of the 18th century and the bloggers of the 21st. Just as the Thomas Paines of that time helped spread radical new ideas that ultimately undermined old, corrupt power structures, bloggers too refuse to passively accept the "wisdom" of pundits in every field of human activity--including sports. All of the sudden, we can talk back.
He sees us, all of us, as a threat to his enormous self-regard as an "expert." The discourse no longer goes just one way. As was never the case until the mid-1990s, when Conlin writes crap, we can call him on it, whether through direct e-mail--my god, how he must loathe logging on and having to endure the uninformed opinions of the hoi polloi--or by writing about it our own damn selves on blogs.
That he invokes Hitler is sufficiently offensive on its face that I feel no additional need to comment on it.
I'll throw up contact information in the comments if you feel like firing off an email to Mr. Conlin's bosses at the Philadelphia Daily News, as well as the opinion section. I think this is clearly something that is so far overboard that people need to learn about this.