Thursday August 26, 2010

THE SQUARES DON'T GET ME. Ann Althouse thinks I missed her point:

Did Edroso even understand my point? I deliberately write in an elliptical style sometimes. You have to think a minute to get it, and I don't think Edroso did. The writing may look simple, but there is a challenge in that simplicity that you'd better be sure you see and meet before you decide you've done the easy reading and are now in a fine position to call me stupid.

731 words, folks. Seven hundred and thirty-one words. Not counting the title.

She eventually gets to her secondary target, and makes this generous admission:

I don't think [Savan] wanted to deal in higher level philosophy about individual freedom and autonomy (which is the subject that I went on to talk about, quoting James Madison).

Considering Savan was talking about some nut talking about Obama's Muslim seed, yeah, maybe she wasn't heading for the rarified air of higher level philosophy.

So, Roy, imagine that an editor at The Nation had responded to Savan's draft with these direct questions:

You can go look. Her prescriptions sound very little like what any editor would write in the margin of any copy, and rather like what someone might write across a blue book if he or she really had it in for the student who submitted it.

I'm starting to think they gave Althouse tenure just to shut her up.