Aug 12th, 2008 at 11:18 am
A Teachable Moment
When you work for a non-profit, your different activities are supposed to support different specific kinds of missions set out by your tax status. We do some “political advocacy” here, for example, but I’m also supposed to do “education.” So if you’re interested in learning about the difference between someone who knows what he’s talking about, and someone who’s good at being pretentious and cultivating a wealthy patron, read John Judis here and here and then read Leon Wieseltier here.
29 Responses to “A Teachable Moment”
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August 12th, 2008 at 11:33 am
I think you’re dramatically underestimating Wieseltier’s pretentiousness. He’s not cultivating anyone in that post but himself. That’s just who he is and how he writes.
August 12th, 2008 at 11:37 am
If Putin paid proper obeisance to the master race and declared Israel to be “The Land Of Milk and Honey” – little Leon W. would be dancing the hora in tribute to the Russian maneuvers in Georgia. His concern for the Georgians and Georgian independence is as heartfelt and meaningful as his devotion to the walking dead at Walter Reed. They are goyim, filthy goyim – a means to an end.
August 12th, 2008 at 11:37 am
It is beyond droll to watch the likes of Weiseltier deploy the high-minded rhetoric of international legalism in the case of Georgia, homeland of Josef Stalin, dominion of the Romanovs, and far from an historically independent neighbor of Russia.
Leon, where ya been for the last 8 years, dude?
This (and inter alia, John McCain’s peurile vaporizing, not to mention that lunatic essay on Newsweek.com) marks our final descent into late-imperial senescence, with the sort of symptomatic haranguing about us and the barbarians that hard-line British Empire types used to enjoy at length in the Tory papers.
August 12th, 2008 at 11:38 am
Oh, Trevor, your soul’s ugliness is showing–better hie off now, fella….
August 12th, 2008 at 11:41 am
Trevor: quite piggish. congratulations.
August 12th, 2008 at 11:51 am
Christ with a laser pointer, those people are annoying.
The comments are even more annoying. Strip away the extra syllables and their oddly British airs, and you’ve got:
Let’s not go to TNR. It’s such a silly place.
.
August 12th, 2008 at 11:59 am
On the contrary, GMT, I dearly loved and desperately missed Peretz blogging during the Atlantic sojourn. I’m very glad that Matt’s asteroid-like pathway among the DC planets has now reached an aphelion with respect to the New Republic.
August 12th, 2008 at 11:59 am
You would think one visit to Walter Reed would shame these hasbara vuntzes into crawling back into the woodwork. Leon “Pope Of The Jews” Wieseltier is their Morlock God. At the next ghoulish blow of the shofar – we Eloi are all to amble silently into the belly of the beasts.
August 12th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
As I don’t have a decoder ring, I can’t make out what Trevor is trying to say…but I think he should be sent away for good, as best I can tell.
August 12th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Marshall, although I admit not to being one of Peretz’s regular readers, I was referring to the comments section.
One of the things I loathe about the blogsphere is the way its text-based nature allows idiots to clothe dumbed-down American politics in borrowed synonyms for the sake of appearing to be an “intellectual,” and therefore “serious.”
Fuck that. Professional intellectuals (and here I’m talking about academics, not the thinktanks’ stables) are a salty bunch. The ones I know don’t dress their ideas up and don’t respect those who do. If you can’t explain it in plain English, you don’t understand it. If your model is simple and elegant, it probably has little to do with the facts on the ground.
So much of the discussion I’ve seen online has suffered from a severe shortage of detail, of ground-level local knowledge. Just a bunch of jejune smoke wrestling, vain attempts to reduce a murky situation to abstracts suitable for endless wordplay, and the repackaging of old grudges in new bloody shirts.
Feh.
.
August 12th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
Is it possible that Trevor is a bot? I submit the following glossolalia:
Wherefore I am the Doge of the Mormons, replete with the severed appendices of my Tin Man victims. Many a Trevor knew what it was like to roast in the belly of the sloar that Infinite Zervon Time, I can impart to you.
.
August 12th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
GMT, I’m a big fan of academic research, and I agree with your comment on online discourse…
…but “if you can’t explain it in plain english, you don’t understand it” has about as much to do with modern academe as a four-element cosmology.
Often the jargon is necessary. Sometimes the jargon is witty. Occasionally the jargon is profound. But you know as well as I do that there is always jargon.
August 12th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
(All that said, what the hell is Wieseltier babbling about? He seems to be trying to assert that Putin invaded Georgia because both Putin and the political culture he inhabits are intrinsically evil enemies of the United States, just as the Soviets were (contra the beliefs of those poor deluded lefties), and to ascribe them any reaction at all to American foreign policy is to be complicit in that evil.
But then he goes on about how “It was a proper description of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait that made an effective response possible”, an assertion that can only be the product of the best kind of recreational pharmaceuticals, and he’s completely lost me again.
My sympathies to Judis for having to deal with him.
August 12th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
(Apologies for the errant parenthesis. The ability to edit posts would be a nice addition, Matt.)
August 12th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
Demonsthenes: that’s why I picked history over philosophy, sociology, or law.
You can find jargon if you’re looking for it, but usually it’s only the special use of an otherwise common word (e.g., the verb “inform”). Some special studies seem especially keen on theory, but those are specializations. Some of that seems to have passed out of fashion (e.g., I haven’t seen an article use the term “embricate” since the mid-90’s).
The most obscure terms I use are Latin agricultural vocabulary and legal terminology, but those were contemporaries’ terms.
Not the same thing.
.
August 12th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
My God, the nastiness and snark was so thick in the Wiseltier post that I couldn’t bring myself to finish it. Life is too short.
August 12th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
Why does anybody read Wieseltier or for that matter Trevor’s anti-Semitic ramblings? Wieseltier’s self-regard is just odd, especially calling himself the type of liberal conservatives love to hate.
August 12th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Wouldn’t it make more sense to direct readers to read the Wieseltier between the two Judis pieces?
That said, it was funny to see Wieseltier make the leap from Judis saying that the explanation is not simply X to attributing to Judis the view that X must have nothing to do with it. And it was very polite of Judis to apologize for writing in such a way that such a basic logical fallacy could be applied to his writing. It is not actually possible to right such that basic logical fallacies cannot be applied ot ones writing.
August 12th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
i wouldn’t know, but it is said that wieseltier is a very good editor of book reviews. i wish he would limit himself to that task.
his prose is offensive and stupid and pretentious all mixed into one package: like bobbo, i couldn’t get through the first paragraph.
as for nastiness, bobbo, that’s what wieseltier lives for: he’s proud of his nastiness.
August 12th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Hate to say it but I agree with Wieseltier and the “Bush effect” on liberals.
However if I was Judis I would point out something new I learned, that Georgians and Russians frickin hate each other and have for years, their hatred for each other is as bad as the Isreali and Palestinian’s dysfunctional relationship.
I am beginning to think Mr. Saakhashvili baited the Russians into baiting him to attack. Since the Russians have stopped, he might have accomplished his goals, unless the Georgians depose him b/c of the death and destruction.
(and if I were Judis I’d point out how Israelis’ enemies often bait them into overreaction. Wieseltier should appreciate that.)
Thing is Saskhashvili can be voted out of office, unlike, say, the dictator Saddam Hussein during his reign. This distinction seems lost on some people for some reason.
August 12th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
That’s some high-quality wanking from Wieseltier.
August 12th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
Judis is great, and Wieseltier absurd – but I hope that this post isn’t an accurate representation of the restraints on your blog writing.
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