What's in a name? Pseudo neo-intelligentsia babbling
Letters and columns sometimes degenerate into juvenile name-calling. Here are a few guidelines that may redress the balance:
1. The validity of someone's argument has no connection to what they drink. Just because you don't like chardonnay, latte or cappuccino doesn't mean that the people who do are stupid. Likewise, beer doesn't make you smart. It just makes you think you are.
2. People's intelligence has no connection to the suburb in which they live, nor to their political persuasion.
3. The majority's not always silent.
4. I don't know what the "chattering classes" are, but they're probably journalists.
5. Putting "neo" in front of a word doesn't make you sound any more intelligent. In fact, it makes you sound like a pseudo-intellectual punching above your weight.
6. Putting "pseudo" in front of a word normally has the same effect as putting "neo" in front of a word.
7. Anyone using the word "intelligentsia" should be beaten with a thesaurus. Calling someone an apologist isn't much better. Sorry, but it's the truth.
8. The phrase "politically correct" is an oxymoron. Politicians are seldom correct, but usually manage to be two-thirds of oxymoronic.
Remember, just because someone is a chardonnay-swilling, latte-sipping, neo-conservative from the eastern suburbs, it doesn't mean that he or she is not also shallow, closed-minded and wrong.
But being a beer-drinking, left-wing, pseudo-scientific university student from Newtown doesn't make you right either.
James Mason, Redfern, September 2.
Tom Stuart wrote:
I’ve become somewhat battered by castigates of the chattering class. While, if I am a part of the chattering class, I would be at the bottom end, I confess (if such a membership is a sin) I to belong to it. I have come to this conclusion because I seem to be interested in, and hold opinions, that often fit into the categories of the accusers.
As I often am, I am about to be presumptuous. My hunch is that if I belong to this chattering class then a lot of the people on this list could also be described as fitting the same category.
Though I actually don’t think my membership is such a sin I am anxious that somehow my perspectives are somewhat blinkered and at present I am feeling dearly inclined to ratchet the blinkers back. I would like to find a place (oh dear … I mean a website, ezine or something similar … is the place I am seeking my answers already denying me of them?… okay, a pub!) where I might discover what really matters to the ordinary Australian.
And, by the way, when I look at Jesus and who it was that surrounded Jesus, and to whom he offered his message, who are they in Australian society? (There is a question in there of a particular … is it the blue collar worker that apparently the Prime Minister is pandering too and whose values I detest? Maybe I can find the same anxieties in them but come up with different responses … hmmm)/
After the furore over refuges, war, a lying *&^% of a prime minister, homosexuality, I just need to calibrate my compass.
Tom
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