Flighty writing

Sometimes writing can get what I call "flighty"--the writer throws caution to the wind and sort of lets loose with as much figurative language as he/she needs to naively say a thing, even while knowing that what is said might not stand up to analytical cross-examination later (what this means to me--"not standing up to analytical cross-examination"--is basically that it would receive a bad grade if submitted as a Philosophy paper). Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. A couple of excerpts on Sullivan today I think are good examples. The first, about Facebook:

Rob Horning bashes Facebook:

In exchange for making our social lives more convenient, Facebook seizes the right to transform our sociality into commercially useful information, turn our relationships into market research and use that data to anticipate and shape our future selves with the ads it calculates that we should be presented with. It manages our friendships and then processes the data interrelationships to guide the process of how we subsequently develop our identities through its site.

Since it is mediating our friendships, and in effect making the effort for us, it is also directing what the fruits of that effort will be, supplying the framework through which friendships develop and making itself the very medium of friendship. At that point Facebook succeeds into making friendship a consumption product, and itself as the service provider. The other friends we have through it, on the other side the screen, are the product it marshalls for us. And our consumption of Facebook, rather than the actual experience of friendship with all the effort that would otherwise require, now shapes our personalities—in accordance with the commercial goals it has set our for ourselves. In that way, it isolates us more by promising to mediating our connections with the rest of the world. It deprives us of the optin [sic] to make more effort, and make our social efforts more meaningful. Is this too pessimistic?

My reaction to this was: what the hell is this guy talking about? I honestly have no clue. Now, compare that to the second example of flighty writing:

Mark Danner opines:

...scandal represents that media-age dream, the perpetual story. Scandal can be rehashed, debated, photographed, from initial leak, to perp walk, to hearing, to trial, to appeal. Scandal offers an endless stream of what the business is after all supposed to be about: news. As in: what is new. Scandal brings the heart-pumping, breath-gulping surge of stop-the-presses excitement, letting us know that into our fallen world the Gods of Great Events have finally come down from on high to intervene. Scandal represents movement, the audible cracking of the ice. And yet it is all an illusion, for beneath the rapidly moving train of gaudily hyped "breaking news," beneath all the grave and breathless stand-ups before the inevitable pillars of public buildings, beneath the swirling, gyrating phantasmagoria of scandal lies a kind of dystopian stasis. Everything changes and nothing does.

My reaction to this was: well, that's very interesting! I especially like the idea of "the Gods of Great Events" coming down from on high to intervene in human affairs. I think that's right.

No more *gate, please

I was perusing an article by Charles Krauthammer about how the press is going easy on Obama, and ran into an offhand reference to "snipergate"--i.e., the recent mini-scandal of Hillary exaggerating her story about ducking sniper fire at an airport in Bosnia.

Since Watergate--and especially with the Clintons throughout the 90s--we have been subjected to the newly-invented suffix -gate, used at first to denote an impeachment-worthy scandal but now used as tongue-in-cheek shorthand for any scandal whatsoever.

This has to stop. It's just not very clever, or pithy, or anything--it's just obnoxious, unoriginal, and hackish.

PS: Charles Krauthammer looks like a Koopa.