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I skimmed your article and I'm now convinced that Albert Burneko is a mean person. That was about 3479 words of ad hominem. I have to respect such persistence.

• vonnik 11y ago
  I don't think it's entirely ad-hominem. This is actually a fairly accurate description of his output: "...He has been a reliable producer of out-of-touch, tissue-thin pronouncements on the perils of our secularized, technologized 21st century lives, virtually all of which rightly can be interpreted as passive-aggressive nostalgia for what Family Circus comics told him “outdoors” might have been like when he was a kid. You could just about set your calendar by it: In a month of Brooks, you’d get the call to begin or continue a war with Iraq or Iran, the grasping attempt to paint some cretinous Senator or presidential hopeful as the intellectual heir to Edmund Burke, and then, at last, the decline-and-fall column. You’d see a headline like “The Slow Virtues” or “The Hollow Century” or “Why the Teens Are Despicable,” and you’d know ol’ Dave’s coffee shop was out of plain croissants a week ago and the barista had a nose-ring and he’d decided he’d witnessed the death of the Western moral tradition."
  • saeranv 11y ago
    He also describes himself as a third wave feminist, and was an early advocate of the conservative argument for gay marriage.
  • kbenson 11y ago
    There are few things as satisfying to read as a witty denouncement. Sometimes the accuracy (which I have no knowledge of) can rightly take a backseat to the theater, as long as you remember to not take it too seriously.
    • sanderjd 11y ago
      This is a sentiment that makes no sense to me. Instead of remembering to not take it too seriously and enjoying the theater (regardless of accuracy), why not remember that the target of such articles is a real person and not an abstract object to be harmlessly ridiculed. Why celebrate meanness?
      • kbenson 11y ago
        Is the target a person? I'm pretty sure it was a person't public product. In this case, their public words, opinions and critiques. If your job is to produce works for public consumption and you can't stand a critique of your work, you should find another career. To clarify my earlier point, there are few things as satisfying to read as a witty evisceration of an argument or stance. For a public persona, I don't see much problem with applying it to their wider body of work as long as you think the criticism applies well overall. My earlier statement was fairly ambiguous in this respect.
        • vlehto 11y ago
          This case was based on: "We should pity David Brooks, because he is not getting laid. And he is slowly losing his sanity." The author is free to write that. But I'm not going to spread the link.
          • kbenson 11y ago
            Ah, well I was commenting on the portion shown above. Taken in your expanded context, it's not something I would endorse. That said, I still stand by my (revised) point, regardless of whether it was brought about by a poor example, which is that a witty evisceration of an argument or point of view can be very satisfying.
        • sanderjd 11y ago
          The thread starter's point (which I tend to agree with) was specifically that this particular article was ad-hominem and mean.