The New York Times tried to suck up to the eminent and intelligent Alice Dreger the wrong way. Boy! Is she pissed! And she only gets pissed when getting pissed helps fix a significant problem: that the New York Times today is a central part of a "postapocalyptic, postmodern media landscape where thoughtfulness and nonpartisan inquiry go to die": Alice Dreger: Why I Escaped the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’: "I asked what this group supposedly had in common...

...the answer..."they’ve climbed the ladder of fame by pissing people off, saying stuff you’re not supposed to say." They regularly made progressives angry with "politically incorrect" statements about gender, race, genetics, and so on. This troubled me... that one might think of pissing people off as an inherent good, a worthy end.... Pissing people off is something to be done accidentally, as a side effect, while you’re trying to fix a significant problem. Yet the operating assumption... seems to be that angering progressives represents a mark of honor in itself.... The Times article confirmed my initial fears—and made me glad that I asked to be left out (which I was). The article begins by breathlessly reporting that the IDW is rife with "beauty" and "danger."... Meh.... If these people are having conversations that are so rare "in the culture," how is it that they have millions of followers.... The whole thing—especially the excitement over these people having found a "profitable market"—made me identify anew with that person standing in the ESPN-televised crowd at some SEC football game holding the sign that said, "You people are blocking the library." I don’t see it as a sign of intellectual progress when a bunch of smart people find a way to make money off of niche political audiences by spewing opinions without doing much new research.... Twenty years since my first scholarship-based op-ed ran in The New York Times, here’s what I see: a postapocalyptic, postmodern media landscape where thoughtfulness and nonpartisan inquiry go to die...

#shouldread

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