Sunday, January 20, 2008

Kammeraderie

I'm sure we've all picked up on the fact that Oliver Kamm rather fancies himself as a writer of prose. (For some reason he thinks that good style consists of littering your blog posts with words like "nugatory" and piling up adjectives and adverbs where none are needed. Maybe he models himself on Annie Proulx.) His latest post quite defeats me. Kamm refers to

"The stridently unlettered paleo-libertarian polemicist Justin Raimondo"

I can see that Mr Raimondo might be strident, and I'll take Kamm's word for it that he is unlettered. I just don't see how anyone could be stridently unlettered.

5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

The Chambers dictionary gives "urgent, commanding attention" as one of the meanings of "strident". So Kamm is saying that Raimondo's illiteracy is so bad it calls attention to itself. But really it's just an insult: "fatheaded" would have done just as well.

1/20/2008 07:12:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Kamm is a pompous windbag rarely able to offer up anything other than ad homs and straw men. Personally I started ignoring him a long time ago.

1/20/2008 09:23:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I don't believe that electorates in the US or the UK are "increasingly isolationist". They are against losing, not against intervention

Where to start?

1/21/2008 08:32:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Where to start?" Well, we could start with looking at the meaning of the words "isolationist" and "interventionist" and also wondering whether they are in fact opposites of each other. Ollie is trying to say that there are only two alternatives: completely ignore the rest of the world or invade it. This ignires a rather significant "missing middle"

Guano

1/21/2008 09:20:00 AM  
Blogger Martin Wisse said...

He's certainly pro(u)lix.

1/21/2008 01:07:00 PM  

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