[FRIAM] reading through the text

[∄ uǝlƃ]

Linguistics, Style and Writing in the 21st Century - with Steven Pinker
https://youtu.be/OV5J6BfToSw?t=1054

>From the presentation:
"- Avoid clichés like the plague: We needed to think outside the box in our search for the holy grail, but found that it was neither a magic bullet nor a slam dunk, so we rolled with the punches and let the chips fall where they may while seeing the glass as half-full - it's a no-brainer!"

Pinker may be an alt-right enabler with his stance on political correctness, but he gives a great presentation. (My dead father is yelling "Cut your damned hair!" from his grave.) And although I COMPLETELY disagree with everything he's saying in this section of the talk, he does a masterful job of pointing out the problem: the dichotomy between reading the text as it is vs. reading through the text. Lately, we've had this problem on FriAM a lot. How far do you go when trying to follow the tendrils of left-over meaning purportedly entailed by every term in an expression? We postmodernists [♬] are lazy and only go as far as we must in order to confirm our bias and begin slathering the expression in our own home-brewed juices. The unificationists, by contrast, must explore and tease out ever conflict no matter how deep, small, or old, until the entire *database* is normalized, hermetically sanitized for the naive consumption of the vulnerable.


[♬] No, I'm not actually a postmodernist ... I only play that role when surrounded by anti-post-modern-ists.

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☣ uǝlƃ