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What's Wrong with Public Intellectuals?

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Re: What's Wrong with Public Intellectuals?

#21

There's been a style change. People used to be impressed by high-sounding prose. Writing the way he favors impressed. But things changed, and now people suspect that it's a smokescreen to hide BS behind. The present style is for clarity rather than impressiveness. Interestingly, the article itself displays the problem. It tries to hard to have the impressive style. That style gets in the way of actually saying someth…

I was just thinking to myself the other day that the danger of actually taking the time to write something thoughtful and cogent the days is that once you have convinced the intelligent, open-minded readers, that leaves everyone else to write comments. Which means when people come to look at the article in the future, and skip to the comments to get a sense of what kind of reaction people had, they get precisely the wrong impression.

This is an interesting article. It's not a "think piece" about writing "these days". It's a serious attempt to understand just what "public intellectuals" were in the first place, what conditions made them possible, and what part of that, if any, can be revived, or is worth reviving.

He might be completely wrong. But he deserves a little better than TL;DR because he dared to write above the eighth grade level.

Re: What's Wrong with Public Intellectuals?

#22

You get what people pay for. I was watching Fox News at the gym today, side by side with CNN. On CNN the news was about terrorist attacks, wars, and a blizzard in the Northeast. It might be the daily bummer, but it least it was News. On Fox News they are indignant because some people didn't like a movie that was released a month ago. This segways through something I can't get through the closed captions and then they…

> On CNN the news was about terrorist attacks, wars, and a blizzard in the Northeast Whenever I go to the US, I get to watch CNN at the airport (this time a couple of days ago, waiting in the immigration line). It strikes me that I always see images about war. The US are in a state of perpetual (defensive) war just as described by Orwell.

Well we are not directly involved in all the wars. For instance I want to be bullish on Nigeria but Boko Haram is a real problem. Also the Ukraine is out of our hands, no way we could fight the Russians on their own turf. Certainly nobody in Europe has the balls to do anything about it since Russia might quit sending them methane.

Even when you look at the terrorism issue I think Europe is much more vulnerable than the US. The US is by no means perfect but Muslims come here and get jobs and own businesses and they don't drink and their kids don't fk up cars at the mall. If you want to wear a Burka or some other kind of headscarf we don't give you trouble, we have the first Amendment because we know how much trouble an "established religion" caused in England.

In France and other euro countries they warehouse Muslims in Big Block apartments out of some Le Corbusier nightmare on the edge of town (where euro people don't want to live) and they live off welfare and it takes hours and hours to get anywhere on public transit. Muslims there have grievances that go far beyond the indignities of being dissed in comic strips. On the other hand I am personally pissed at the Boston Bombers because we gave them a safe place to live where nobody wants to kill you because you are a Chechen. (We do have idiots in the US who attach Sikhs because they hate Muslims or attack Iranians because they hate Iraqis, but this is really a lunatic fringe.)

When CNN is not talking about war it is talking about some plane that disappeared or how the daughter of somebody famous was drowned in a bathtub or how the Republicans and Democrats can't agree on the budget (i.e. fund Homeland Security so we can avoid the kind of attacks that hit the Euro zone, fund NASA so we can get astronauts home from the ISS...)

Re: What's Wrong with Public Intellectuals?

#23

There's been a style change. People used to be impressed by high-sounding prose. Writing the way he favors impressed. But things changed, and now people suspect that it's a smokescreen to hide BS behind. The present style is for clarity rather than impressiveness. Interestingly, the article itself displays the problem. It tries to hard to have the impressive style. That style gets in the way of actually saying someth…

Reminds me of the Catholic switch from Latin to local language, and from facing the altar to facing the assembly.
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