This is rather funny. Someone at Vice pretended to post a piece of Lena Dunham’s new book, and Instapundit (but really, he’s a libertarian) and the twitchy wingnuts went postal:
Then a miracle happened: It got retweeted by Instapundit, a conservative blogger who is read by a lot of relatively respectable people. That led to syndicated radio host and frequent FOX News contributor Tammy Bruce picking it up. She has since deleted the post, but she sent my joke along and added one word: “OMG.” All of a sudden, my joke was hopping around the right-wing Twittersphere, only nobody knew I was joking. As far as my new audience was concerned, that Veblen quote was the work of 28-year-old comedy auteur Lena Dunham, a known liberal.
These FOX News viewers were instantly angry with the Not That Kind of Girl author—not that it takes that much to get conservatives pissed off at Dunahm. She needed an editor; she had the audacity to use the word “exigencies”; she just wrote the world’s worst term paper. It was time for her to go down. This was the last straw. Comments generally fell into four categories, all of them convinced of the quote’s veracity. (Note: I reorganized these tweets to aid smoother categorization. They don’t represent the actual timeline.)
Wow, Lena Dunham's book is actually great. I totally understand why she got 3.7 million dollars to write it. pic.twitter.com/AgneAN1pIw
— Kaleb Horton (@kalebhorton) October 3, 2014
They’ll fall for anything that can get them worked up into a lather.
kc
Some lefties fell for that as well.
jl
“leisure class’, was in the first phrase of the extract to set up the joke. How much do you need to signal a ‘Veblen’?
I meayann, thayat ther feller is a fancy-payants perfesser!
Edit: heh indeedy…
Mike J
@kc: Rather shocked LGM didn’t have a post on it.
Shakezula
Lathered wingnuts: Do. Not. Want.
dmsilev
“There’s such a thing as “Twitter law,” people said, and my bullshit had violated it.”
Hah.
Omnes Omnibus
@jl: Will Veblening become the new rickrolling?
Hawes
Veblen, hunh. I would’ve gone Wollstonecraft or maybe Woolf.
Still, well played.
Suffern ACE
Wow. That’s actually a pretty famous quote.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suffern ACE: I had “very strong suspicions” by word three.
Mike J
@Omnes Omnibus: The like is true as regards further coalitions, further consolidations of industrial processes which have not been effected, but which are known to be feasible and desirable so far as regards the mechanical circumstances of the case.
p.a.
Would have loved to see a Snowflake Snookie comment, but she would have quit reading halfway through the paragraph.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mike J: You aren’t sure, but it would cool if it did?
jl
The reactionary pundit class is in great measure sheltered from the stress of those intellectual exigencies that prevail in any modern, highly organized industrial community, or any normal human community at all, or pretty much any person at random who has to actually do something, Including hunter-gatherers, commuters, and people who need to find their way to the grocery store and back home as part of the normal activities of daily living.
This commonplace has long been a staple of popular opinion, but remains largely unspoken among the Very Serious Persons class.
Culture of Truth
Dreams of My Lather
mdblanche
@p.a.: I see what you did there.
jonas
Lemme get this straight. Someone just cribbed a passage of Veblen’s work and said it was Dunham’s and the Wingnut Wurlizer went into overdrive on it? This has to be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of…
Snarki, child of Loki
Surely there’s been a reaction to having the joke revealed, one of the wonderful right-wing: “that just goes to further prove my point” gaseous emissions that Jonah Goldberg is so justifiably famous for.
Howard Beale IV
@efgoldman: Any offsite backup?
sinnedbackwards
Back in my preliterate undergraduate days, I penned a “Veblen” joke to the blackboard of an economics class.
Sfortunately, I attributed to “Thorndyke Veblen”, which *ahem* didn’t work.
I survive under the illusion that I am now wiser.
But I can still trick a RWNJ when I sit next to them on the airplane.
Lol
@efgoldman:
Well you can’t trust the cloud because NSA and Obama and like such as.
Gin & Tonic
@Howard Beale IV: Not to be overly cynical, but in my experience that’s the sort of thing people start thinking about the day after everything gets stolen.
sherparick
@jl: Apparently Glenn Reynolds never read either Veblen or Robert Heilbronner’s “The Worldly Philosphers.” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worldly_Philosophers
More proof of this identity equation: Glenn Reynolds = Ignorant Twit
sm*t cl*de
Needs more “nugatory” and “otiose”.
MikeBoyScout
Nobody. Could. Have.Predicted the Twitters could be unfactual.
What next? Could there be something with reduced truthiness on our inntrotubes?
jibeaux
I don’t really think of myself as a cynical, world-weary person. I don’t instantly distrust people or wonder if they’re lying to me. But the right wing machine has got to be the most gullible single class of people in existence. Tell them Obama’s trip to Country X cost 11 trillion taxpayer dollars, and watch it spread. Are there really NO red flags that someone is fucking with you here?
PurpleGirl
@p.a.: La Palin would have quit reading by the second sentence. None of it would have meant anything to her; reading comprehension is not her strong point.
Mike in NC
Instapundit is a shitstain.
aimai
@Shakezula: Rode hard and put away wet.
Lol
@jibeaux:
Remember that guy who did the “it’s in the stimulus” twitter account. Initially started off with factual items and then started tweeting increasingly crazy items. The right wing didn’t realize what was going on until hen started tweeting about how the stimulus settled Laura Bush’s $10 million gambling debt.
Eric U.
I just bought that book, it’s 3 bucks.
Howard Beale IV
@Gin & Tonic: Got a car?
hells littlest angel
@PurpleGirl: And she would have complained that it was “word salad.”
The Main Gauche of Mild Reason
Dunham may be horrendously pretentious, but even she’s not THAT bad a writer.
Buggy Ding Dong
@jonas: You mean in the last 45 minutes. I would wager 9/10 of those gnashing their teeth never even read “her” quote.
Roger Moore
@p.a.:
Not that being unable to read the thing would stop her from commenting.
Anoniminous
Good to see Veblen getting some media exposure. Maybe some people will be intrigued enough to actually read the thing.
Frankensteinbeck
I hope this is useful publicity for Lena Dunham, because I’d hate to see anyone’s book shot out from under them by a well-meaning prank. Except possibly Bill O’Reilly.
As for the quote, that’s really traditional conservatism, isn’t it? We’re not dealing with a traditional conservative wing today. The GOP’s policies are not meant to slow down progress, but to enact dramatic social change to punish minorities.
Tyro
I have been reading Veblen lately, and to be fair, he really DID need an editor.
Cervantes
@sherparick:
Nor is ignorance the only quality Reynolds put on display here.
If the episode reminds (more) people not to take him seriously, that would be a good thing.
Matt
@jibeaux:
You’re dealing with a population that has needed to disbelieve every single social and economic statistic for the last thirty+ years in order to not falsify their belief in Saint Raygun and the Immaculate Tax Cuts. No, there are no red flags left.
Someguy
They’re just upset because she outed the College Republicans as racists. Er, rapists. Sorry. I get the two confused because the perpetrators look so much alike.
Villago Delenda Est
Wingtards just reinforce every stereotype about the residents of Rock Ridge that were ever introduced in Blazing Saddles.
slag
Great. Are we, as a nation, now moving on to Dunham Derangement Syndrome? Because that’s not progress.