Outlook Hell
OUTLOOK HELL....Ezra Klein writes about Charlotte Allen's already infamous op-ed in Sunday's Washington Post:
I don't want to engage with the article because, sometimes in Washington, editors take controversy as a sign of success. "The response is heated, but that just shows we hit a nerve, forced people to discuss an important issue. Namely, whether women are idiots." So instead, I'll say this: They should be ashamed of publishing an article of such poor quality.I'm always a little unsure of what to do in cases like this. There's a class of people (patron saint: Ann Coulter) whose sole objective is to provoke a response. Link to me! Talk about me! Help me promote my new book! So no matter how deserving of ridicule they are, it turns out that ridicule actually helps them. This presents us with a quandary: ignore such pieces, thus allowing idiocy to sit unchallenged? Or fight back, thus providing the authors with exactly what they wanted?
I dunno. Take it on a case-by-case basis, I guess. Or do what I'm doing now and and respond to someone else's post instead of to the original piece itself. But I'll second Ezra's further comment: Charlotte Allen may be a nitwit, but the world is full of nitwits. The real fault here is with the Post's Outlook editor, John Pomfret, who apparently thought it was cute to run a plainly moronic article solely because it would get some attention when lots of people attacked it for being moronic. He needs to find a new job if that's what he thinks his current job is all about.