Unmournable Frenchies (reaction to Charlie Hebdo)

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I read the Cole article when it was published. This article flat-out lies about what Cole means by 'unmournable'. And about the tone and content of the Cole article in general, really.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I also note that Dolan has the ever-tiresome Anglo cultural cringe of treating 'French “liberté” with sex, language, obscenity, and secularism' as THE COOLEST THING EVER!, and wastes no time in sh**tting all over people like Will Rogers, who is just as legitimate a representative of the English idiomatic tradition as somebody like Françoise Sagan is of the French one. I'm not surprised.

I like the fact that he carve the sugar way away, which make things look reasonable and focus on the what the person say without the sugar coating.

He's not doing that. He's lying.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I also note that Dolan has the ever-tiresome Anglo cultural cringe of treating 'French “liberté” with sex, language, obscenity, and secularism' as THE COOLEST THING EVER!, and wastes no time in sh**tting all over people like Will Rogers, who is just as legitimate a representative of the English idiomatic tradition as somebody like Françoise Sagan is of the French one. I'm not surprised.

I like the fact that he carve the sugar way away, which make things look reasonable and focus on the what the person say without the sugar coating.

He's not doing that. He's lying.

Maybe, but not in his comments about Cole's article. He's describing precisely what Cole is really saying, you may only see the sugar coating, but it doesn't change the words behind, and they're ugly.

I think you're doing what we call, in the lit-crit biz, 'reading into' the Cole article.

I also note that Dolan has the ever-tiresome Anglo cultural cringe of treating 'French “liberté” with sex, language, obscenity, and secularism' as THE COOLEST THING EVER!, and wastes no time in sh**tting all over people like Will Rogers, who is just as legitimate a representative of the English idiomatic tradition as somebody like Françoise Sagan is of the French one. I'm not surprised.

I like the fact that he carve the sugar way away, which make things look reasonable and focus on the what the person say without the sugar coating.

He's not doing that. He's lying.

He's not attacking Will Rogers. When Will Rogers was alive, that was how some people talked. He's attacking people who still talk like Will Rogers, like Jim Hightower and any Democrat who says "folks"

That was actually my favorite part of this article, it was dead on.

Replace 'Will Rogers' with 'Jim Hightower' and I still stand by what I said. He's shilling his own idiomatic preferences and treating deviation from them, or criticism of them, as worthy of contempt (or worthy of assertions like Anglophone culture being more similar to Sunni Arab culture than it is to Francophone culture? What the [Inks]?! That's absolutely insane!).

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

This inveighing against nebulous groups of academics is yet another set of tropes that it's not exactly behovely for people ostensibly concerned with liberal values to be using.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

This inveighing against nebulous groups of academics is yet another set of tropes that it's not exactly behovely for people ostensibly concerned with liberal values to be using.

Why, illiberal values don't become less illiberal because the man spewing them have a master degree instead of a shovel.

Provide some sort of argument for the notion that social science faculties are suddenly and uniquely swarming with people espousing 'illiberal values'--illiberal as opposed to just an version of liberal values that isn't identical to yours (bonus points if you account for the possibility that a your preferred version of liberalism may have been a way of understanding the world that people working in social science disciplines decided to reject after genuine consideration rather than just because they're some sort of funhouse-mirror version of Wahhabi clerics or something)--and then maybe we can have this conversation. Until then, WillipsBrighton is just engaging in anti-intellectual hand-wringing about 'the ivory tower'.