By her own logic, Christine Rosen has almost nothing to say . . .

Christine Rosen, it seems, does not like Glenn Reynolds.
She also doesn’t like cell phones, but she does like the Leon Kass Commission on Bioethics.
I say these things by way of background, because I’m looking for a way to escape having to write a long essay defending Glenn Reynolds. Not that I have to do that, but in a previous long essay I did say this:

…if Glenn is attacked unjustly and I hear about it, I will speak up…

Kinda puts me on the hook, long essay or not.
But fortunately Dave Price made it easy for me to escape the long essay by catching Ms. Rosen in a self-refuting error! She claimed that Glenn Reynolds provided no explanation for a statement he made but she completely ignored a little thing called a “link” which in fact was the very explanation she accused Glenn of not providing.
Well fair is fair, and I demand the right to uphold and apply to people who set standards (which Ms. Rosen clearly does) the very same standards they have set. And, according to Christine Rosen, it’s perfectly acceptable to ignore what can be gleaned from clicking a link by not clicking that link, then later claiming nothing was there.
This means that in fairness and in logic, at minimum I would be free to not click on her link, and then treat it as amounting to nothing, right?
Right!
However, when I went to the NRO Online, I was shocked — shocked, I say — to discover that I was asked to do more than click a link.
MUCH MORE!
In order to read Ms. Rosen’s piece, it was demanded of me that I create a thing called an ACCOUNT! In order to do this I would have had to fill out monstrously intrusive form — a sort of personal questionaire asking for my full name, my email address, my home address, my zip code, a pass word (twice!), and under the euphemism of “preferences” even answer questions about whether I want things sent to me that I can state unequivocally that I absolutely do not want!
And this woman is against cell phones? And technology?
Hmmmpph!
Again, fair is fair. Christine Rosen doesn’t click links; I don’t have to fill out her forms.
And because I don’t have to, that means I cannot read her hatchet job. Like, no way! So I’m off the hook, and according to her own rules I can conclude she’s guilty of “vacuity” because her essay is so devoid of content. All I can read are four complete sentences, plus a fragment of a fifth, mainly belittling and understating Glenn’s background. (He’s “just” a law professor at UTenn, and he’s written about the Second Amendment, etc…)
As far as I’m concerned, these four and a half belittling sentences amount to little more than “terse, almost meaningless commentary.” It’s also obvious that by hiding behind the intrusive questionaire, she’s loaded to the gills with lots of self contradictory “outre.” Under Ms. Rosen’s rule of logic, I think I’ve been more than fair.
(A self-axing hatchet job, I’d say.)


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2 responses to “By her own logic, Christine Rosen has almost nothing to say . . .”

  1. metapundit Avatar

    By way of clarification: the essay is at tnr.com – The New Republic’s website.
    It’s true that the title of their site is the NewRepublic Online, but I usually see people refer to them as TNR. NRO, I usually think, refers to National Review Online (nationalreview.com). In either case “NRO Online” is kind of like an “ATM Machine” or a “PIN Number”….

  2. Mark Olson Avatar

    BTW, if you use firefox, you need to also get the “bugmenot” extension as a way of bypassing all free registration forms.