9.06.2004
It's the nuance, stupid!
Tim Blair gives some thought in answer to the demeaning way in which liberals claim intellectual superiority over right thinkers. Liberals are 'nuanced'; they see subtle points and variations that their 'black and white' counterparts fail to pick up on. Why aren't there any conservatives in the arts? Huh? Perhaps so much of the 'arts' is all about failure -- from an overly generous smattering of 'nuance'... Conservatives, on the other hand, argues Blair, have great memories, and are adept at seeking solutions to seeming intractible political problems..."Mr Gorbachev, tear down that wall!"
Anyway, with all their 'nuanced' harangues, liberals of the season are anything but. Tim Blair is kind enough to include this subtle language from New Yorker writer Hendrik Hertzberg ahead of last week’s Republican convention:
Here’s an example of the multi-hued leftist view, as expressed by the New Yorker’s The Republicans are here. We—we New Yorkers—hope they enjoy the amenities of our city. We hope they are treated politely by all of our fellow canyon dwellers, including those among us who are alarmed by the performance of the incumbent Administration during the past three and a half years—alarmed by its mania for shovelling cash to the very rich at the expense of families of middling means, its servility to polluters and fossil-fuel extractors, its reckless embrace of fiscal insolvency, its hostility to science, its political alliances with fanatic religious fundamentalisms of every stripe except Islamic (and of that stripe, too, when the subject is family planning or capital punishment), its partisan exploitation of our city’s suffering after the attacks of September 11, 2001, its transubstantiation of the worldwide solidarity that followed those attacks into worldwide anti-Americanism, and its diversion of American blood, treasure, and expertise away from the pursuit of Al Qaeda to a bloody occupation of Iraq that appears to have done nothing to weaken Islamist terrorism and may have done more than a little to strengthen it.
Do you detect an abundance of nuance in Hertzberg's rumination? It's called talking out both sides of one's mouth. Blunt as a rock, flavored with fancy words.
Anyway, with all their 'nuanced' harangues, liberals of the season are anything but. Tim Blair is kind enough to include this subtle language from New Yorker writer Hendrik Hertzberg ahead of last week’s Republican convention:
Here’s an example of the multi-hued leftist view, as expressed by the New Yorker’s The Republicans are here. We—we New Yorkers—hope they enjoy the amenities of our city. We hope they are treated politely by all of our fellow canyon dwellers, including those among us who are alarmed by the performance of the incumbent Administration during the past three and a half years—alarmed by its mania for shovelling cash to the very rich at the expense of families of middling means, its servility to polluters and fossil-fuel extractors, its reckless embrace of fiscal insolvency, its hostility to science, its political alliances with fanatic religious fundamentalisms of every stripe except Islamic (and of that stripe, too, when the subject is family planning or capital punishment), its partisan exploitation of our city’s suffering after the attacks of September 11, 2001, its transubstantiation of the worldwide solidarity that followed those attacks into worldwide anti-Americanism, and its diversion of American blood, treasure, and expertise away from the pursuit of Al Qaeda to a bloody occupation of Iraq that appears to have done nothing to weaken Islamist terrorism and may have done more than a little to strengthen it.
Do you detect an abundance of nuance in Hertzberg's rumination? It's called talking out both sides of one's mouth. Blunt as a rock, flavored with fancy words.
// posted by HunterByrd @ 3:16 PM 
