Dumb and Dumberer-er
But for your sake, I hope you have not seen it. It is the kind of thing that, while you are reading it, actually makes you dumber. My own IQ, for example, has now fallen 20 points just from providing the link.
"In a nutshell," Ventura writes,"deconstruction is a method for discrediting historical theorists such as Aristotle and Plato for the sole purpose of promoting Derrida’s own beliefs." She also mentions that the footnotes of commie pinko professors lack references to such important"theorists" as"Thomas Jefferson and Mark Twain."
What do we learn from this? Well, now that I'm feeling a lot dumber, it's pretty obvious: For one thing, Laura Ventura has access to secret (yet doubtless fascinating) texts by Plato and Aristotle, in which they reveal themselves as “historical theorists.”
Nobody else has ever referred to Plato or Aristotle as that -– what, with neither of them offering any substantial body of philosophical reflection on history, and all.
I think it’s cruel of her not to reveal what their theories were. But maybe Accuracy in Academia is banking on a big publicity blitz, like National Geographic did with"The Gospel of Judas"?
Let’s not even get into Jefferson and Twain as"theorists." I bet Twain’s stuff is all in dialect.
Scott Eric Kaufman did some initial head-scratching about Ventura’s complaints, over at The Valve. But it’s Timothy Burke who had taken the next logical step of recasting the syllabus so that contemporary students can escape the liberal brainwash.
Thank you, Laura Ventura! Keep up the good work.
(Ordinary I would think that people who have clearly never read a word of Derrida should avoid making firm statements about the implications of his thought. But you don't win friends and influence people in the Culture Wars by having any idea what the hell you are talking about, right?)