Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Also an asshole, Ross Douthat

Man, these faux-McArdles may be crappy, but they're boring. They can write, making it far more difficult to insult them.

Thankfully, the entire "voices" section of The Atlantic is awash in mediocrity. While I got ya on the line, just wanna point out how awesomely clever calling the magazine's blog section "voices" is cause the completely totally unique thing about blogs is their voice. I mean, sure, the op-ed page kind of just barely audibly hums, but it wasn't until the harsh light and poor grammar of the PC came to be that journalists finally got a "voice"

Anyway, Ross-D has a take on some article that I'll be damned if I'm gonna read: Apparently it talks about some teacher at some school getting belittled because they're a lefty:


whereas the lefty teacher in question was more than happy to describe, doubtless with perfect evenhandedness, how Robbins liked to "storm" into her office and "rail" against her politics - and how his claim that she called him a "Nazi" in class made her sob into her pillow at night.

...

But having found myself in minor ideological scrapes with my own high school teachers from time to time, I left the piece harboring a lot more sympathy for young Robbins - and a lot more curiosity about his account of things - than the story seemed designed to make me feel.
Wow, the blogger feels empathy for the insulting windbag that storms into his teachers office to pick political fights. Whodda thunk? The internet is awesome! Kudos for the subtle implication that the teacher is lying about being called a NAZI (BTW, acronyms get all capital letters). I'm like that too. I read an article about an abusive student and think "man, that teacher was so asking for it. Teenagers are never senselessly mean and don't ever overreact to authority figures."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well, Fallows has a pretty good record of turning out interesting, informative, solid pieces. But the rest of them are just an embarrassment. I just can't fathom why Atlantic management thinks that the world needs another Slate. And I'd be surprised if Slate even makes money, so at least in that sense you can't accuse the Atlantic of selling out.
-- sglover