That is a very long article...

The point seems to be that while there's been a lot of criticism of snark (too much negativity), smarm (too much positivity) is also bad.

It seems to me that the way he describes them, snark and smarm are pretty similar: snark is being smug (acting unnecessarily superior) about someone else doing something wrong in judgment (like being ignorant or making a bad decision), while smarm is being smug about someone else doing something morally wrong.

I would probably mostly agree with the idea that smarm is bad, although I'm not sure I would have spent 30 pages on it.

He defends snark as criticism of smarm, but I think it's important to note that while criticism or negativity itself isn't necessarily wrong, it's the smugness that makes it bad. I'd probably describe smugness as criticism mainly for looking good to your ingroup, and for making your target feel bad.

For instance, I can imagine a good teacher criticizing me, but I can't imagine a good teacher being smug about it. Being smug seems correlated with impure motives, which decreases the accuracy and diminishes the trustworthiness of the criticism, to me.

The article is less about opting for snark over smarm, than it is about reading too much onto the method of delivery ie: "I can't imagine a good teacher being smug about it", being politicized in a particular way.

It kinda runs counter to the position you're advancing, but I thought you'd find it interesting anyway.

Fair enough. I started skimming around halfway through so I missed that.

I'd agree that there are limits to what you can read into the method of delivery, but:

I think anger and indignance are valid attitudes to have, and that seems largely what he's defending. They're not like smugness in that I can still imagine someone sincerely caring about the truth having them.

I'd also point out that I react with discomfort when I see smugness from my side, and annoyance when I see smugness from the other side, and these are physiological reactions that can't exactly be controlled.

I guess I didn't see much actual content in the Bond article (ironically, most of _that_ article was criticizing method of delivery), so the method of delivery was all I had to comment on.