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Seldom has a point been so pointedly made by pointy heads.
Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say
Jonathan Chait / New York Magazine— How the language police are perverting liberalism. — Around 2 a.m. on December 12, four students approached the apartment of Omar Mahmood, a Muslim student at the University of Michigan, who had recently published a column in a school newspaper about his perspective as a minority on campus….
Jonathan Chait writes a fairly good piece on the resurgence of Political Keerecktness on the campuses of America today and talks about the fundamental philosophical split between the classical liberal “Enlightenment” Era view of freedom of expression and the modern more nuanced multiculturalist/deconstructionist/postmodernist IDEA that stands in contrast to the more established and Founding Father™ Approved IDEA.
I was happy to see his discussion of the two very different Operating Systems, and his even-handedness. And the picture he paints of the current convulsions of what to censor, by whom and when? I have my own conclusions, but then, why do you think they call them “think” pieces?
Well and good. Except …
This is above the intellectual pay grade of the blogosphere.
Another American blogger
And, astonishingly, and in an entirely bipartisan display of junior high school/middle school tweener contempt, Jonathan Chait — the person and NOT Jonathan Chait’s article in question — becomes the foci of a feces flinging fest that would be the admiration of any ape house in any zoo in the so-called civilized world. A bravura performance of snark Particularly the first four responses by “liberals.” (Righties in boldface, Lefties not, and SANE neither.):
Steven Hayward / Power Line: A Foolish Consistency Is the Hobgoblin of Chait’red Minds
Amanda Marcotte / Talking Points Memo: P.C. Policeman Jonathan Chait Can Dish It Out, But He Can’t Take It
Joan Walsh / Salon: When “political correctness” hurts: Understanding the micro-aggressions that trigger Jonathan Chait
Angus Johnston / studentactivism.net: Jonathan Chait Demands to be Liked
Jia Tolentino / Jezebel: A Note to Chait: Dissent Isn’t Suffocation, Internet Isn’t Real Life
Michael Walsh / The PJ Tatler: Laughing at the Death of Little Nell, PC Division
TBogg / Raw Story: Helicopter Liberals: Or why Jonathan Chait is history’s greatest monster
Robby Soave / Hit & Run: Students Newspapers Desecrating Free Speech: A Transformation, or Return to Form?
Andrew Sullivan / The Dish: The Left’s Intensifying War On Liberalism
Noah Rothman / Hot Air: Does any feminist care that Susan Rice is this White House’s scapegoat?
Scott Lemieux / Lawyers, Guns & Money: Jon Chait’s Political Correctness
JVW / Patterico’s Pontifications: Jonathan Chait on Political Correctness, Then and Now
Sean Davis / The Federalist: Language Policing Doesn’t Pervert Liberalism, It Is Liberalism
Dan Savage / The Stranger, Seattle’s Only Newspaper: This Morning’s Best Long Read: Jonathan Chait On the Return of Political Correctness …
more at Mediagazer »
RELATED:
Alex Pareene / Gawker: Punch-Drunk Jonathan Chait Takes On the Entire Internet — So, here is sad white man Jonathan Chait’s essay about the difficulty of being a white man in the second age of “political correctness.” In a neat bit of editorial trolling, New York teased the column with following question …
Discussion:
Kevin Williamson / National Review: Liberals Seek PC Exemption
Our national dialogue of alternate realities has found a point of commonality at last: a confection of milky mindless hatred wrapped around a chewy nougat filling of purest Himalayan snark. Hate speech with a spell-checker, in other words.
Mindless hatred of discussion of mindless hatred, in fact, since that is much of the subject of the piece that has limned Jonathan Chait the greatest intellectual villain and poopyhead of the twenty-first century. Evidently.
Is this the intellectual life of a great nation? Or a prelude to something that Goya would paint?
Had this article been published in 1995, there would have been a range of responses, but not such a derange of replies.
Courage.
A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog, His Vorpal Sword (no spaces) dot com.