STUPID PEOPLE? ON THE INTERNET? WELL FUCK ME, STOP THE PRESSES!

Yeah, yeah, I know...

But still, that ALWAYS eats at me!

Terrible argument with just poor, POOR word usage...
Shameless exploitation of a tragedy for attention (yeah, I know, never seen thatm but STILL!)
And then just the personal fact that it really does bother me when I see someone like this or Glenn Beck the other night write a TERRIBLE essay, one I know I and half my English major friends could do better than drunk than these jokers can do sober...

And yet they have the writing sjobs and my fiends and I, try as we might, just can't land one...so yeah, on a personal level, it's just frustrating knowing you could do better.

But on the topic itself...I mean...

WHEN has Hitchens called for that? For an apocalypse? For hoping for an End of Days? Hell, he made it a point of his in his debate with Tony Blair that this is a trait he hates utterly about evangelicals and HIMSELF finds repugnant and dangerous...

Hedges accuses him of jumping on the "Chosen People" bandwagon as well, and that's certainly not Hitchens (who I mention again and again here not out of any special focus or care for the man here so mjuch as the fact I've read and seen Hitchens and not Harris, I don't want to say Harris hasn't done these things and find out he has, so I can just speak to Hitchen's account here.)

And finally--

It's a pretty poor irony when you spend your entire paper decrying fundamentalism when your psoition is, pretty much, a fundamentalist position AGAINST this supposed secular fundamentalism.

The ONLY single, solitary point I thought was made logically and fairly was that the Christian Right and the New Atheists seem to feed off of one another to an extent in that one group inevitably provokes the other...

But that point's been made countless times before, and with far more precision and carried to a far more plausible and better-established end than Hedges' article.



So yeah.

Stupidity on the Wb is nothing new...but it's jsut as irritating--and maybe even moreso--as an old, established part of the Internet and journalism as a whole.

MORON ON THE INTERNET: DETAILS AT 11

Obi, I couldn't agree more Chris Hedges writing style leaves a lot to be desired. He clearly has no idea how to capitalize random words in his sentences. There were no exclamation points to let us know how passionately he feels about the subject. He didn't quote Shakespeare or make comparisons between his own ideas and Plato -- so how is the reader supposed to tell that he his educated? And there we no long-winded but fascinating parenthetical asides. I can't believe he graduated high school, let alone won a Pulitzer prize!!!!!!
Aside from that I didn't have any opinions on his article. I'll read it properly later.

typo.. And there *were no long-winded but fascinating parenthetical asides

:-P

Et Tu, spyman? A fellow Mets fan? :p

(Seriously, though, I don't see the problem in citing sources and ideas from others...if it's a good idea, why not use it? So what if Shakespeare's name gets dropped in there, or Plato's, or Nietzsche's, or Hume's, or Mill's, or Homer's, or Twain's, or Aristotle's?

Or Shakesplatonietzschumillhomertwainastotle?

;) )

But really, what's wrong with using other names and sources in an article or essay?

I mean, you have to do that as a real journalist or critic, right?

Granted a real journalist isin't going to cite dead white guys who are centuries old every time, but that's because they have actual sources they've been able to speak to in person or other such resources...I don't have the concrete, so I ahve to rely on the theoretical.

Plus--I don't use exclamation points...I use CAPS a lot, but only because there's no way to italicize (and yes, I probably do italicize/caps too often, but that's jsut for the Web, as emphasis and intented feelings can be lost over the Web, I don't use them in real essays...)



Well, nevertheless:

The next thread I post in I won't quote a single dead white guy! I'll take up the challenge! :p

I was just kidding around as I am sure you know. And judicious use of caps can be effective. Dave Barry does this really well.

"I have a dream"

- Obi in his next thread