Aporia

When I was an undergraduate I took a course in literary theory. One argument concerned aporia, which meant the point at which an author or text, depending on how you looked at it, contradicted itself. So here are two aporia, at least as I see it, that expose the underlying cupidity and stupidity of a texts author.

The first is John Derbyshire all around NRO idiot. He denies that the current conservative jihad against education is hypocritical because:

I personally would be delighted for my kids to learn some useful trade like plumbing. I personally would be delighted for my kids to learn some useful trade like plumbing.

He also

take[s] exception, though, to the several commenters jeering at us NRO elite types as being desperate to get high-elite credentials for our own kids even as we scoff at the real value of those credentials

Yet when his daughter, whose work ethic is beyond compare, doesn't want to go to college he

 talked her into it, though, and this fall she’ll attend a local state college. She has no idea of any particular direction she wants to go in, but we’re hoping something will occur in the first year or two. With a work ethic like hers, she’ll excel at whatever she ends up doing. We’d just prefer it was something a bit higher up the occupational-status ladder than putting chocolate chips into cookies.

So two aporia in one essay. He argues that he wishes one of his kids had some working-class skills and when one of them shows the signs, not wanting to go to college and the ability to succeed in any field, he refuses to let her pursue the dream of becoming a plumber. Plus also he rejects the notion that he rejects working class occupations even as he reject working class occupations for his darling daughter. What's even odder is that he is going to send her to the gulag of public education supported, as it is, by the theft of producers honest wealth by the parasites. Idiot, in the ancient Greek sense of imbecile.

Over to the Crooked Timber there is an essay on rape culture, which I understand to mean the way in which rapists are excused from being rapists by pointing to the improbability of this male raping that female. One of the dissidents asks how can oral sex be violently coerced and another commentator explains, quite reasonably, by threats of violence and death, the skeptic replies:

C’mon, LB,we are generalizing away from the specific case again.
DSK was not going to murder the maid in his hotel room.

Yes that's right, no well connected, powerful man has ever killed a women over sex and its denial and, what is more, all hotel maids know that someone well connect and powerful isn't going to kill them.

It's not the stupidity so much as it is the idiocy that gets my goat.