This makes me laugh and cry at the same time
So here I am, browsing through the Linkage Archives - great webpage, but prepare to get sucked into a black hole of articles - and I find this and this. It's a positively ancient argument from 1998 in two parts. The first is something which appears to be an academic article, spends a lot of time bullshitting and faffing around with long words, and has an interesting if flawed (for which read loopy) premise which touches on feudal Europe, libertarianism and left-libertarianism, Thomas Jefferson's slave-owning habits and the EU. All this in an essay about what appears to be attitudes to the internet...
...The article doesn't seem to be particularly rooted in reality. Fine. Too illogical for me to bother blogging about normally. However, I was quite taken aback by the tone of the rebuttal, which is the second part. Not because I'm not used to it - I don't actively seek out flames, although I'm quite aware of them - but because you'd expect that kind of sentiment from a 14-year-old talking about Justin Bieber or Rebecca Black, not from a man then in his late forties who was, at the time, the editor and publisher of Wired magazine. The general tone of the rebuttal - if you can call it that, since it's more like a glorified flame - seems to be "Well, you're wrong and stupid and vague, and you're European so of course you must be smug and retarded because us Americans are obviously so AWESOME hurr durr, stupid stupid anal retentive [blogger's note: don't use that term if you aren't prepared to take the Freudian baggage that comes with it], you're a Marxist/Fabian and therefore like totally wrong, let's throw in a reference to the 19th century to sound smart and oh look here's a shitty analogy which falls flat on its face, oh yeah and Europe doesn't have democracy". (I was going to try and make out a coherent viewpoint, but I ended up with this mini-summary instead...please accept it as a token of my utter incredulity at how damn immature people can be, myself included.)
This "rebuttal" makes me want to smack my head on the desk. HARD. Firstly (if you bother to read it), it has few coherent points and relies mostly on insulting Europe and leftist movements while implying that they're both undemocratic and un-meritocratic. In short, it's everything the writers of the first part hated and then it comes back for more, because the writers assumed that libertarians - what they called the Californian New Right - had brains. (I'm willing to bet that most of them do and they're just hiding.) Secondly, it has wider implications for society generally.
If people thought of as being respected and intelligent behave this way, what does it mean for the rest of us? Is intelligent debate dead? Keep in mind this came before social networking became popular and before the media started to worry about cyberdisinhibition. If that was the accepted standard and we are assumed to be slipping from that...will it be possible to hold an intelligent conversation anymore?
Is that even possible now?
...The article doesn't seem to be particularly rooted in reality. Fine. Too illogical for me to bother blogging about normally. However, I was quite taken aback by the tone of the rebuttal, which is the second part. Not because I'm not used to it - I don't actively seek out flames, although I'm quite aware of them - but because you'd expect that kind of sentiment from a 14-year-old talking about Justin Bieber or Rebecca Black, not from a man then in his late forties who was, at the time, the editor and publisher of Wired magazine. The general tone of the rebuttal - if you can call it that, since it's more like a glorified flame - seems to be "Well, you're wrong and stupid and vague, and you're European so of course you must be smug and retarded because us Americans are obviously so AWESOME hurr durr, stupid stupid anal retentive [blogger's note: don't use that term if you aren't prepared to take the Freudian baggage that comes with it], you're a Marxist/Fabian and therefore like totally wrong, let's throw in a reference to the 19th century to sound smart and oh look here's a shitty analogy which falls flat on its face, oh yeah and Europe doesn't have democracy". (I was going to try and make out a coherent viewpoint, but I ended up with this mini-summary instead...please accept it as a token of my utter incredulity at how damn immature people can be, myself included.)
This "rebuttal" makes me want to smack my head on the desk. HARD. Firstly (if you bother to read it), it has few coherent points and relies mostly on insulting Europe and leftist movements while implying that they're both undemocratic and un-meritocratic. In short, it's everything the writers of the first part hated and then it comes back for more, because the writers assumed that libertarians - what they called the Californian New Right - had brains. (I'm willing to bet that most of them do and they're just hiding.) Secondly, it has wider implications for society generally.
If people thought of as being respected and intelligent behave this way, what does it mean for the rest of us? Is intelligent debate dead? Keep in mind this came before social networking became popular and before the media started to worry about cyberdisinhibition. If that was the accepted standard and we are assumed to be slipping from that...will it be possible to hold an intelligent conversation anymore?
Is that even possible now?
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