Leo Laporte loses it with Mike Arrington on the Gillmor Gang

The interruption was a bit rude. Arrington is a lawyer, and that's just what legal folks do. Laporte felt it was a bit disrespectful, and though the level of reaction was not warranted, a reaction was understandable. Laporte has been around forever, and I think he's earned a pretty good reputation amongst nerds. Also, have you seen crunchgear? These people do not know their tech -- that much is clear. They are in the business of selling tech, not creating it. That being said, they're important.<p>I'm a recovering lawyer myself and I left because working with lawyers was worse than anything I had experienced before (which was working mainly with startups and non-profits in NY).<p>Its fascinating to me. There are a lot of bitter nerds out there who passionately hate T/C, like fanatically so. It seems the slashdot/reddit crowd has repeatedly criticized those guys for being marketers rather than geeks, and they are right in that basic premise but I think the level of animosity is unwarranted. Even if these guys aren't pedigreed nerds, they are fascinated by and love technology and they are an important part of the industry.<p>Its one of the reasons I like HN -- it has a much more nuanced view of the important role folks like Arrington and the VC community play in the bigger world outside of nerdland.

Arrington is a complete hole and Leo does actually care about technology. I was kind of puzzled why Leo started with the Gilmore Gang anyway. The show is 98% attitudes and is generally idea-free. It was good to see Leo blow up over Arrington's trolling.

Leo Laporte comments on TC article:<p>"Thanks for the post, Mike. Apology accepted. Now that I know what was going on in your mind, I apologize to you.<p>There seems to be something about the Gillmor Gang that just engenders over the top passion. I’m embarrassed by my overreaction. Peace."

Leo was justified to call Arrington out. What a douchebag thing to imply honestly.

<i>sigh</i> TechCrunch is a whole bunch of trolls, but there aren't enough startup news sites. I read TechCrunch in my pile of feeds, but with a large grain of salt. Is there a site which covers basically the same news, without the silly Twitter love fest, and with less asshole-ish editors?<p>I'd really love to see real journalists who believe in "be good" doing a solid site. If that were to happen, people could send their exclusives and firsts there to slowly put TechCrunch out of business.

It seemed like a slight overreaction here, but I have a feeling this was built-up rage over something else.

Ha ha, I just noticed the Wikipedia page for Arrington:<p><pre><code> J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Orange, California)[1] is a troll, entrepreneur and was the maintainer[2] of TechCrunch, a blog covering the Silicon Valley technology start-up communities and the wider technology field in USA and elsewhere. </code></pre> Wonder how long that'll stay up..

The only thing this video did for me was remind me of TechTV. Never seen this side of him but I really do miss TechTV.

If we're going to keep this on the frontpage, then Valleywag gets to come back. Same kind of thing.

Thank god! I've been watching Leo Laporte on Twit Live for over a year, but I recently stopped watching as much because every time I tuned in, I had to watch the Gillmore Gang, and that guy always was such a douchebag and I could not stand to here him belittle everyone and speak as if he was some god and everyone else was just little peons. He was annoying, and made me even stop watching Leo Laporte. Good riddance.

I usually listen to TWIT as a podcast, but this makes me want to tune into the live feed to see if there is a follow up.

This isn't important.

755 comments and counting on Leo's ff:<p><a href="http://friendfeed.com/twit-conversations/1d37431c/live-now-gillmor-gang-with-steve-mike-arrington" rel="nofollow">http://friendfeed.com/twit-conversations/1d37431c/live-now-g...</a><p>and it looks like Arrington's apology has been accepted:<p>"Thanks for the post, Mike. Apology accepted. Now that I know what was going on in your mind, I apologize to you. There seems to be something about the Gillmor Gang that just engenders over the top passion. I’m embarrassed by my overreaction. Peace."

hrm, seems to me it could be a well played PR stunt. A Biggie vs. 2Pac or Microsoft vs. Google type competition. Probably not but there is probability that it is. If not they could use that for what it is worth.