They want me to pay for this?
So the NY Times wants to charge for access to their op-ed, but not their news. Fine with me, their op-ed page is full of crap and I only read it expecting to find a bunch of the proverbial fish-wrapping.
John Tierney writes the most muddled and silly op-ed article the New York Times has published in a while...and this paper has Maureen Dowd.
So, he sets off to write a column about how the new Star Wars movie has an important bi-partisan lesson for us all. That lesson: conservative policies are better. Also, he reduces Adam Smith to a couple of sound bites that endorse completely free markets with no social conditions or regulation at all, but conservative hacks have been doing this for 200 years. Also, he implies that charity and patriotism are opposing political values. Oh, oh, and he says that the Chancellor Palpitine character is on to something when he recognizes the emptiness of altruism, and then Tierney turns around and says that the same character was a bad guy largely through his exhortations to altruism. And, he makes a mash of some sort of anthropological point about the transition from hunter-gatherers to modern society and how this means that our old instincts to be good are out-dated...it's really silly and I wnat a moritorium on people using evolutionary justifications for their contemporary foibles.
Look, Tierney, you don't want to have to be nice to people outside your family. I get it. That's what this is all about, I know. Teasing out all the conflicts in your little column would take to much time, so let's jsut be blunt. You are made uncomfortable by the conflict between an instinct to be nice and charitable, and your conscious abhorrence of anything that smacks of panty-waisted pinko-ism. Why don't you come out and say it? Why go around dirtying up the reputations of perfectly good people like Smith and Tocqueville with your confused mis-reading? It's alright--there, there--it was a good try, including Star Wars as if you've seen the movie instead of just read the write up in National Review.
But you threw in your hat when you went with that Matt Ridley explanation of the evolution of altruism in human nature. You know why...because Ridley is not a social scientist and does not understand basic things about social science...like how we don't organize theses around ideas like "the noble savage", and it isn't polite to insist that private property rights are the sine qua non of successful civilization since modern property rights as we understand them have only existed for a couple of centuries. And he shouldn't have told you that altruism simply isn't practical because that ignores the web of practical altruism (like SS, and government grants for research) that holds our society together well outside the bonds of kin. Bad scholarship makes for bad op-ed. Ask your colleague Davy down in D.C.
(also, way off-topic, but if David Brooks can write for a New York newspaper while living in D.C., then why can't he move to one of his beloved red-states? And not NoVa, I mean for real, like Amarillo, Texas or Boise, Idaho.)
John Tierney writes the most muddled and silly op-ed article the New York Times has published in a while...and this paper has Maureen Dowd.
So, he sets off to write a column about how the new Star Wars movie has an important bi-partisan lesson for us all. That lesson: conservative policies are better. Also, he reduces Adam Smith to a couple of sound bites that endorse completely free markets with no social conditions or regulation at all, but conservative hacks have been doing this for 200 years. Also, he implies that charity and patriotism are opposing political values. Oh, oh, and he says that the Chancellor Palpitine character is on to something when he recognizes the emptiness of altruism, and then Tierney turns around and says that the same character was a bad guy largely through his exhortations to altruism. And, he makes a mash of some sort of anthropological point about the transition from hunter-gatherers to modern society and how this means that our old instincts to be good are out-dated...it's really silly and I wnat a moritorium on people using evolutionary justifications for their contemporary foibles.
Look, Tierney, you don't want to have to be nice to people outside your family. I get it. That's what this is all about, I know. Teasing out all the conflicts in your little column would take to much time, so let's jsut be blunt. You are made uncomfortable by the conflict between an instinct to be nice and charitable, and your conscious abhorrence of anything that smacks of panty-waisted pinko-ism. Why don't you come out and say it? Why go around dirtying up the reputations of perfectly good people like Smith and Tocqueville with your confused mis-reading? It's alright--there, there--it was a good try, including Star Wars as if you've seen the movie instead of just read the write up in National Review.
But you threw in your hat when you went with that Matt Ridley explanation of the evolution of altruism in human nature. You know why...because Ridley is not a social scientist and does not understand basic things about social science...like how we don't organize theses around ideas like "the noble savage", and it isn't polite to insist that private property rights are the sine qua non of successful civilization since modern property rights as we understand them have only existed for a couple of centuries. And he shouldn't have told you that altruism simply isn't practical because that ignores the web of practical altruism (like SS, and government grants for research) that holds our society together well outside the bonds of kin. Bad scholarship makes for bad op-ed. Ask your colleague Davy down in D.C.
(also, way off-topic, but if David Brooks can write for a New York newspaper while living in D.C., then why can't he move to one of his beloved red-states? And not NoVa, I mean for real, like Amarillo, Texas or Boise, Idaho.)
posted by justin | 11:09 AM
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