For years now, I’ve had a running argument with my sister about Slate. She likes the stuff about advertisements and manners (Dear Ad Watch Guy and Dear Prudence, or whatever the hell they call those features) and feels that redeems Hitch, Kaus, and the occasional foray into white supremacism. But my gripe with Slate isn’t the excessive drinking, the bestiality, or sheet-wearing that some of the contributors engage in, it’s the facile contrarianism that permeates the place; I can’t find it on the google, but I’m pretty sure they had an article titled “Why genocide is good for property values” a few years back.
I was pleased to see today that Wonkette agrees — their take-down of Eliot Spitzer’s robot column today is right on the money:
Eliot Spitzer has written another one of those columns for the online Slate magazine, and he’s already mastering the “Slate Style,” which is to take a widely accepted belief (e.g., “Dogs make good pets”) and write a cool 600 words arguing why its opposite is SECRETLY truer (”Why all dogs should die”). In this column he tackles Obama’s big infrastructure plan, saying that instead of funding immediate road repairs and stuff for short-term stimulus’ sake, we should invest in transforming the foundation of America’s infrastructure. It is a stupid article because, um, Obama’s plans do include all of that, which is kind of the point. This leads us to Spitzer’s ace-in-the-hole, which is of course the massive federal funding of Robot Construction.
I can’t be the first one to wonder if Spitzer is just hoping this kind of robot will save him 2000 dollars an hour.