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Breaking down the Tunnels' favorite conservative myth

TheTwinAndreBen said:
It says works mentioned, not read. And none of those are taught as great works of English Lit.

So he's not well read, and you simply just aren't good at reading.
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He writes on American history and politics, not Jane Austen criticism or whatever KAs beat off to. The canon referenced is entirely appropriate for his work.
 
TheTwinAndreBen said:
Again, haven't read the article, not going to, don't have an opinion on it. But in response to Coates, the guy is the biggest pseudo-intellectual fraud of all time.

He admittedly has little to no education regarding English Literature, or really the history of the written word for that matter, and is not a good writer. Regardless of what I think of his socio-economic-political stances, which often border on the ridiculous.


I'll let him admit his ignorance himself, in this piece from 2012, where he writes from his position of 'Senior Editor' of The Atlantic. After he makes a terrible grammatical error in the second paragraph, he then admits he's never read Hemingway, or Plato, or Nietzsche, and basically dismisses them as not mattering as much as great minds like Rakim.

http://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2012/12/my-heroes-your-stamps/266672/

So my point stands that he is not well educated or even well read, and appears to be proud of such deficiencies, even though both attributes would probably help him as he offers his hottakes on the macro issues of modern society, especially as he purports to explain the roots and reasoning for our cultural history.

This also more or less sums up my feelings on Coates:

https://storify.com/GadsdenJazz/wherein-will-antonin-eats-t

That's it, carry on.
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I'll bet that TNC has read a lot of stuff that you, Gadsden, a majority of academia, and I haven't read either. Does that make everyone not well educated or even well read?

In general, I think that you would be shocked at the proportion of the population, even in academia, that has neither read Plato or Nietzsche nor could even articulate the general thrust of their work.

#anecdotes: I read a bit of both in an intro philosophy class when I was 18 years old and I don't anticipate reading any more until I have time to joy-read again. Based on my cohort and people in my program, I can safely say that I have probably read as much or more of those two scholars than my peers. And in my program, and based on my experiences with colleagues in similarly ranked programs in my discipline and in others, there are loads of PhDs who drag their heels when it comes to reading even the most essential disciplinary or general theory and openly joke about not reading non-empirical work.

High theory and philosophy, especially antiquated high theory and philosophy, (unfortunately, I'll add) doesn't exactly have a place in the contemporary social sciences. Perhaps Ph can weigh in on this, too, but that's my hot take.

Do we need Neitszche and Plato to "explain the roots and reasoning for our cultural history?" Whose cultural history is "ours" anyway?

You're entitled to your opinion, but TNC is a pretty great example of a public intellectual who does the work, digs deep, and substantiates his analysis with data from a variety of sources: academic, policy, and popular. To call him uneducated and unread - in general, but especially relative to the mainstream media/blogosphere - is kind of silly.

(And I think Hemingway is garbage. Perhaps that's best for the unpopular opinion thread, but so be it.)
 
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TheTwinAndreBen said:
It says works mentioned, not read. And none of those are taught as great works of English Lit.

So he's not well read, and you simply just aren't good at reading.
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What, pray tell, are the great works of English lit?
 
Junebug said:
ITT we learn that the USA is not the land of opportunity, hard work doesn't get results, and you can't escape your caste. If I thought the way y'all did, I'd hate this country too.
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Pretending that people are better off than they are does not help those people, it just helps you ignore them. Your expectations are not the charity you make them out to be.
 
Junebug said:
Yes, you dipshit. The people who created us did, so you have to also. To call Plato and Nietzsche antiquated is just ignorant.

If you drag your feet on required reading like this, I question your devotion to your profession, unless your course of study is in the hard sciences or gym.
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Super excited to hear how Nietzsche created the Lincoln presidency.

ETA: actually, I'm not. Gotta get back to US Grant's memoirs. Hope they're TAB-approved. Probably aren't, though.
 
Irony of purported graduates of a highly ranked liberal arts school championing the approach of someone refusing well rounded knowledge in favor of dropping out of a marginal school and then intensely studying only one subject.

Everyone doesn't have to read everything, but you have to draw the line somewhere. If you purport be an intellectual, a college professor or even an 'editor' of a popular website, then you should at have a working knowledge of writers that have been the defining voices of the last few generations of the America you claim to understand.

This active ignorance, combined with no college education, and the nonsensical garbage he spouts, lead me and many other educated individuals to conclude that he is a full-of-shit hack moron.
 
Junebug said:
ITT we learn that the USA is not the land of opportunity, hard work doesn't get results, and you can't escape your caste. If I thought the way y'all did, I'd hate this country too.
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But have you tried the veal? It's tremendous tonight.
 
Junebug said:
Yes, you dipshit. The people who created us did, so you have to also. To call Plato and Nietzsche antiquated is just ignorant.

If you drag your feet on required reading like this, I question your devotion to your profession, unless your course of study is in the hard sciences or gym.
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Read any top flight academic journal and let me know how often you see scholars debating the merits of Plato and Nietzsche. They are influential, but for the life of me I don't know how essential they are to "explaining the roots and reasoning for our cultural history."

In other news, our founding fathers (or whoever the people who created us) must have been really innovative to have read someone (FN) who wasn't born until 70 years or so after our great nation was founded. (Or, to crib Tuffalo's example: Lincoln). There are many contributing and even influential members of society that aren't products of elite liberal arts educations (or canonical, core curriculum in a Columbia University-sense). This country isn't merely "created" by elites. Who else "created us?"

Thanks for questioning my devotion to my profession. I've read a lot of theory and philosophy in my short time on this earth and my work is actually pretty theoretical relative to my field. I was merely generalizing based on my experiences with peers, professors, and the state of the field more generally. Unless you're in Anthropology or Philosophy, you won't see a mainstream dedication to classical or contemporary theory.

ETA: And, yes. Works written over 100 years ago are antiquated. That's why philosophers make their living interpreting, building on, and critiquing classic works that are remarkably useful and pertinent, but require translation into our unique temporal and social context. Orthodox interpretations of antiquated texts can have pretty miserable effects in the real world (but we've already gone over that in a half a dozen threads already)!
 
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TheTwinAndreBen said:
Everyone doesn't have to read everything, but you have to draw the line somewhere. If you purport be an intellectual, a college professor or even an 'editor' of a popular website, then you should at have a working knowledge of writers that have been the defining voices of the last few generations of the America you claim to understand.
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This is the issue, though. He has a working knowledge of a lot of the defining voices of the last few generations of the America he claims to understand. There is an awful lot out there besides Plato, Nietzsche, and Hemingway and TNC talks about it pretty regularly on his blog and in his published work.
 
ONW said:
Can you explain this quote/reference/joke?
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25a66mg.jpg
 
Junebug said:
Considering Lincoln was assassinated in 1865 and Nietzsche's first book was published in 1872, you picked a bad example.

For the record, Plato wrote a little earlier.
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In his defense, normally the Board left tries to ignore when people from Illinois are killed by gunfire.
 
TAB almost certainly as uneducated about black history as TNC is about English lit. That's why neither one should comment on shit they don't know about.
 
TheTwinAndreBen said:
Irony of purported graduates of a highly ranked liberal arts school championing the approach of someone refusing well rounded knowledge in favor of dropping out of a marginal school and then intensely studying only one subject.

Everyone doesn't have to read everything, but you have to draw the line somewhere. If you purport be an intellectual, a college professor or even an 'editor' of a popular website, then you should at have a working knowledge of writers that have been the defining voices of the last few generations of the America you claim to understand.

This active ignorance, combined with no college education, and the nonsensical garbage he spouts, lead me and many other educated individuals to conclude that he is a full-of-shit hack moron.
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Chapter break!

Dude's (re-)learning French in his late 30s and doing repeated immersion trips and programs, and writing about his failures with grasping the language in a forum bigger than anything any poster here will ever have. Obviously his profession affords him opportunities that others don't get, but I think that's an impressive practice of lifelong learning. I understand that you have no interest in the man or his writing, but I think that should lead you write less about how committed to ignorance you think he is. Maybe to the extent that you don't even do it at all.
 
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Coates sucks so bad that the losers at MIT saw fit to have him educate their undergraduate donks in essay writing. Thankfully we have some (at least three!) terrible peckerwood lawyers here to set us all straight.
 
Bill Gates drops out of college and everyone is like oh damn that too was too smart for school, he didn't need it anyways!
 
jhmd2000 said:
Gladly. Everyone thinks that. That's also the wrong analysis.

The right analysis is the kid with the uphill battle who makes those for choices versus the same kid when he doesn't.
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Those three things aren't "choices" unless you have privilege.

ThinkingWithMyDeac said:
Is it that they were enslaved? I don't think that having ancestors that were slaves 150 years ago matters as much as the environment that slavery created in this country in the past and present. Is someone that is a more recent immigrant from Africa at an advantage over someone that was a descendant of a slave? I would think the answer is no.
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Yes, it is an advantage to be in America because you came on your own vs. being here because your ancestors survived 250 years of slavery.
 
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