5 Comments
Bwog is a bully-free zone.
Columbia history Ph.D. student Megan Doherty strikes back at Glenn Beck. (HuffPo)
Taiwanese CGI animates those creepy bed bugs that have been taking over our lives! (Gothamist)
Riding the subway can often be a trial. Subway door-standers don’t make things any better. (City Room)
Maryland company rents drug-sniffing dogs to paranoid parents. (Gawker)
This year’s election ads target New York. (NYT)
Photo from flickr/Eddie~S
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5 Comments
@Anonymous <3 glenn beck
@ivory tower historians I find it interesting how historians can look back at history, discover trends, and make a whole period of time coherent, but when they look at their own times they resort to gross oversimplifications, think themselves so knowledgeable of history that they can easily extrapolate it into the future.
How is it that such a *learned* historian like Megan Doherty cannot fathom the allure of Glenn Beck? Sure, his views are exaggerated, bombastic, and incoherent at times, but there has to be some truth to what he is saying. The American people are not idiots and if they are listening to Beck in such large numbers then it can’t be simply because he is entertaining.
Dismissing him as a huckster is a disgusting cop-out for a supposed historian, and I would hope that in her PhD dissertation she pays more attention to complexity and nuance than the partisan drivel she wrote for the Huffpo.
@hmm I agree with you that people tend to grossly overgeneralize and improperly extrapolate, and identify “trends” that really aren’t as consequential as they intermittently appear. The erupting panic about bullying, for instance– the increasingly common and totally unsubstantiated belief that it is a fast-growing pandemic and that it is anything but a normal part of the behavior of children that has been with us since time immemorial– is a perfect example. You’re correct, I believe, that people often engage in fallacious reasoning when they deal with the present. Too bad then that you resort to a blatantly fallacious line of thought at the end, then, when you conclude that Glenn Beck’s popularity means that there must be some merit to his message. I’m not saying that there isn’t– although I personally do NOT believe there really is– but assumptions and insinuations about the intelligence of the American public aside, what is the track record of that kind of thinking? The public really likes the WWE. Does that mean that the WWE represents a valuable ideal, that it can’t “simply” be entertaining to them?
@Les door-standers refuse Door-standing is a time-honored tradition. You can have my spot against the door when you take it from my SUBWAY-DOOR-CLEAVED INNARDS!
@blah, blah, Megan I got so bored with her article, it sounds like she is mad that he has a show on cable