Why David Palumbo-Liu is Wrong about THE LETTER
I once had some respect for David Palumbo-Liu. Sure, we mixed it up at Facebook, but I never doubted his intelligence or his good intentions. Now I have to question both because he’s written a response to THE LETTER that is stupid and malicious. It’s pasted below. DP-L makes three moves. Each carries equally ugly doses of malice and stupidity which are in turn amplified by his own pedantry. First he says the signatories are “celebrities thoughtlessly piling on to sign a ridiculous, ill-conceived, attention-getting ‘Open Letter.’” Thoughtless, ridiculous, ill-conceived, attention-getting. Oh, and, like dumb jocks in pads and helmets, they’re “piling on.” They’re not people on the other side of an intellectual divide, they’re brutes. I went through the signatories, and didn’t recognize half the names. These are celebrities? More to the point, they’re quite diverse by any measure, race and gender to be sure but also by their political positions. Second, DP-L claims that the letter has no cause–there are no “real events” here, he announces, no “solid facts” that would allow for genuinely open debate on the cultural crisis the signatories cite as their motive in writing. He says this immediately after quoting an entire paragraph of worrisome incidents that any reader of Harper’s–any sentient being who doesn’t rely on FOX News–would recognize, and might well have endured. Third, most maliciously and most stupidly, DP-L turns...
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