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Bill E Pilgrim

Published Letters: 504
Editor's Choice: 4

Saturday, November 21, 2009 04:07 AM

Your liberal media at work, including right here.

The Washington Post long ago became largely a platform for Neoconservatives and other extreme right wing pundits like George Will and Charles Krauthammer. Among many others. I'd say the opinion writers there are about 85% extreme right wing.

This is "balanced" by a couple of moderately liberal writers (I'm certain that they think Michael Kinsley is some sort of raving extreme leftist, amusingly enough) and then people like David Broder who the WAPO I'm sure considers a of middle-of-the-road centrist.

Yes, the David Broder who just wrote the equivalent of "Just attack! Figure out why later!" or "Kill em all, let God sort em out!" as an opinion piece about foreign policy. They consider that the voice to balance out all of the hawkish ones like Krauthammer.

But hey, I wouldn't get too high and mighty about it here at Salon, where you've got Camille Paglia praising Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh every month.

It's curious that you can find articles here in Salon going absolutely medieval on a right wing pandering column like that by Broder, and rightly so, but you never see articles here ridiculing and expressing outrage over the extreme-right-wing-talking-points-laden articles that Paglia writes, right here.

Gosh I wonder why?

Wednesday, November 11, 2009 05:42 AM
Original article: Pelosi's victory for women

-- Susan Wood

For what it's worth, I got right away that the Donovan attribution was a satire of Paglia and didn't mean that you, the satirist, actually thought that the singer and song went together.

This is another casualty of having Paglia published in Salon at all, the irony-deficiency seems just another aspect of the lack of perceptiveness in general of the Drudge hoards she now attracts.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009 05:11 AM
Original article: Pelosi's victory for women

@dclach

Wow. For someone who misunderstood so completely what I wrote you've got a lot of nerve being that arrogant accusing others of misunderstanding things.

The section about Larry the Cable Guy was sarcasm. It was aimed at Paglia's claim that Dawkins' accent was "affected", that having a certain kind of English upper class accent must be put-on, since real English speakers simply don't sound that way.

Whatever one may think of certain kinds of UK accents, people really do speak that way, Dawkins spoke exactly in the manner he does during his entire life, we can assume. Not including Paglia of course, who accuses him of "affecting" the accent. And you do realize that to him, she would be the one with the "accent", right? This really seemed a new low even for her, the stock caricature of low-brow moron thinking anyone who doesn't speak like her is "putting it on".

Regarding your other accusation, you've actually misrepresented what Paglia wrote. She wrote that hearing Dawkin's voice was "a revelation" because she'd never heard him speak before. This means presumably that prior to hearing him she had the same opinion of his science as she gives here, that it was "spot on", but the "revelation" was that he had this "affected", "gossipy" sounding voice that she didn't like. The way we can assume that she didn't like it is that she called it "affected" and "gossipy" once hearing it.

Regarding your use of "mates" and all of the rest, I really have no idea what you're talking about but no, I don't live in the UK if that helps at all, Dawkins isn't an acquaintance, and I'm American.

This is the really depressing thing about Paglia being such a big draw here at Salon, her fans are about as capable of reading comprehension and rational discussion as she is.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009 09:05 PM
Original article: Pelosi's victory for women

Wait, did Paglia actually elevate Joseph Cambell over Claude Lévi-Strauss?

And write that she liked Richard Dawkins until she decided that his English "accent" was "affected"?

Yes, Dawkins put on that whole "English" and "Oxford" thing just a few years ago for a book tour. Because everyone knows that real English sounds like Larry the Cable Guy, which is what Dawkins actually sounds like when he's among friends, that UK English thing is obviously a pose.

Reading Camille Paglia is really like watching the worst imaginable stereotype of a redneck throwing beer cans at the TV, watching the suds trail down the screen, and then scraping them off and publishing them. Except it's far less honest.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009 08:46 PM

Unsolicited advice

You went from "passionate liberal" to rabid right wing conservative and now back to liberal... all since 2001?

I don't mean to be rude, but you may want to check out if there's a manic-depressive diagnosis for political views, my god. There might be some value in asking yourself what you actually believe, rather than joining any more groups and taking on their worldview, I mean at that rate Scientology can't be far off and believe me, you don't want to be here in a few years writing about how ashamed you are of having been one of them.

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