In quarter-hearted fashion (the entire piece reads like a sigh, frankly, a fact that I dig), Variety‘s Cynthia Littleton takes a stab at the recent flare-up in film blog pissing matches, and concludes it’s cyclical, and wearying. Without waging into the breach myself — because, truly, I care not — I will say that the incidents cited in this piece, and others like them, are exactly why I find so many film blogs kind of tiresome, and it reminds me of two other things:

1) The old saw about the politics of academia — that the squabbles are so nasty because the stakes are so low.

2) My firm belief that “Toldja!” is the scrappy, upwardly-mobile middle class intelligentsia’s equivalent of the rotted celebrity bitch line “Do you know who I am?,” and its unironic deployment, especially in print, is a sign of mental inferiority, tackiness and/or low self-esteem.