Wednesday, July 10, 2002

Ok, stripped from all the verbiage, what I've been abled to discern from Jonah Goldberg's latest piece on Stanley's Fish's defense of PoMo is that he believes:

a) Ideas are dangerous

b) Post-Modernism is a dangerous idea that has spread everywhere

and...

c) Stanley Fish should be blamed not for what he says or believes, but what other people think- that the simplistic misconceptions about Post-Modernism that people may hold are not their own fault, but the fault of those who actually try to explain what PoMo really is.

Whatever the hell happened to the "individual responsibility" meme in conservatism? It seems that conservatives start embracing otherwise-repugnant "root cause" arguments the minute they get within fifty feet of a University. Professors wish they had that kind of power. Even if this wasn't absurd (Fish should be held responsible for trying to correct other people's misconceptions and for those misconceptions in the first place) it's incredibly off-message.

Edit: Ugh. "Goldman" instead of "Goldberg". Noted and corrected. Oddly enough, I have to give the credit to Glenn Reynolds for that, and I didn't picture him to be a regular reader. What's next, Glenn hanging out at Maxspeak and Eschaton?

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