Tuesday, December 02, 2008

That's how they get you

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There are a lot of pundits I generally agree with, but they all have some fatal flaw -- like Professor Krugman's pro-NAFTA Clintonism and Joshua Micah Marshall's failure to appreciate just how unstable our political and economic systems are -- that reassure me that I have some need for independent thought.

This guy, Glenn Greenwald, though, is pretty tight. I'm really tempted to outsource all of my opinion-forming to him. Remember Anna Karenina?
Stepan Arkadyevitch took in and read a liberal paper, not an extreme one, but one advocating the views held by the majority. And in spite of the fact that science, art, and plitics [sic.] had no special interest for him, he firmly held those views on all these subjects which were held by the majority and by his paper, and he only changed them when the majority changed them--or, more strictly speaking, he did not change them, but they imperceptibly changed of themselves within him.
I've always felt like this was my eventual fate, to be a superfluous man. And Glenn Greenwald's getting me closer.

Update:Just as we enter the last month, I think Nephos and I have developed the word of the year: Arkadyevitchizing from Arkadyevitchize, to replace one's opinion-forming capacity with preformed editorial content, used of media. It's developed in the comments of this post, but I moved it into the body so that it would be searchable, as it's now in this blog's header.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Seems to beg a new word for this phenomenon. Is "Arkadyevitchism" sufficiently catchy?

Rionn Fears Malechem said...

Fears and Frets: Arkadyevitchizing America since 2006

Anonymous said...

Whatever you say, Malechem, I forcefully espouse.

Anonymous said...

Awesome!