Friday, June 20, 2014

Lepore and the smarmmasters at slate!

I've been loving Jill Lepore's  takedown of the new business snakeoil, disruptive innovation and the responses to it. I especially love how Slate's Will Oremus replied. This is a man who has inherited the humorous stylings of Mickey Kaus and the ignorance of subject matter of Will Saletan. Those are big shoes to fill - in fact, I think size 24s - the bozo class. Of course, he trips all over himself trying to find an angle. His angle is, wait for it, that this being the internet, he, Oremus, is able to paraphrase Lepore's article, which is apparently behind a pay wall, and thus you, the reader, get it for free. Sakes alive! Lepore has been disrupted. Why is it like this is 1996 - or maybe 1936, since Readers Digest did the same thing. 
But the freebie you get from Oremus is worth what you pay for it. He evidently never met an argument with more than one variable in it that he could understand, and he severely misunderstands, and thus misparaphrases, Lepore's article. In the toady style that Slate has perfected, he didn't seem to high himself to one book or article to write his refutation - why should he? I mean, when you are a genius, anything you draw out of your ass must be high class. This was always Will Saletan's motto - used especially when he embraced white supremecy as science in an infamous series in 2007 - so Oremus is following in the footsteps of the masters.  Oremus might be interested in the fact that I can go to the library here in Santa Monica and read the whole issue for free - I mean, isn't that a portent of the singularity! 
Frankly, save for their book and movie reviews, Slate has been a must-laugh-at ever since they put a stick in Bush and saw he was done in 2000. For years, their schtick has  been to find clever ways to wrap rightwing conventional wisdom in neo-liberal wrapping and claim that the resulting product is some brand new thing nobody had ever thought of before, rather than yesterday's dog poop.  It is like the monster child of the New Republic and the Third Way. 
So I was happy to see them smarm attack Lepore's article. It shows that she must have tapped a vein. 

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