Culture: Update to Charlotte Allen’s “lots of women are dumb but I’m not” Article
Regarding this blog post, the Politico reports:
“If it insulted people, that was not the intent,” Outlook editor John Pomfret told me this morning, calling the piece “tongue-in-cheek.”
Ms Allen’s article is imbued with sarcasm. That’s obvious. I initially thought that it was too over the top to be serious. I mean, how could someone with such a prominent vocabulary commit such a glaring relativist fallacy. You can get away with hating people for being wrong. It’s harder to get away with arguing that the people you hate are wrong because you hate them and you are right.
However, after reviewing her previous attempts, I determined that her aforementioned argument is, indelibly, her style. As proof I direct you to this WaPo opinion-editorial. Ms Allen asserts:
In fact, when I contemplate the concept of “dying well,” I can’t avoid the uneasy feeling that it actually means “dying when we, the intellectual elite, think it is appropriate for you to die.”
And then, without the slightest regard for the irony, Ms Allen asserts:
Furthermore, according to a 1990s study by the National Institutes of Health, even when patients have living wills, if those wills contain directives with which doctors and hospitals disagree (such as, I myself suspect, prolonging the patient’s life instead of terminating it), many doctors simply ignore the patient’s desires.
Hilariously, she’s completely ignorant of the fact that those “intellectual elites,” for whom her disdain is made palpable, proliferate every “National Institute.” I feel sorry for Ms Allen. Not only did those nurses bother her but, also, one of her doctors is obviously going to end her life against her wishes.
So, it’s obvious that Ms Allen is sardonic and bothered and the WaPo got caught with its pants down. Her article is, hopefully, a eulogy–albeit a premature eulogy–to the sort of narcissistic and self-contained journalistic structure in which people like Ms Allen thrive.
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