It's hard to take The New Yorker seriously in any capacity. I find it's just long, pointless essays that don't communicate any new information or original thought, but are designed to make someone who already has the same opinion as the author feel good about themselves. Opinions which are never explicitly made clear.
It's class entertainment sold as news. It make a certain societal class feel higher class than they actually are.
This is rather unkind, but I think you are aware of this.
Opinion pieces, by definition, will be full of the author’s bias based on their experience up until the point when the article was written. We all go through the journey of life at our pace and guided by our own direction (but even that is debatable), and as such, dismissing some work with an ad hominim towards the author instead of the content of the piece is uncharitable.
What work is being presented here, it's just an opinion piece. Analyzing an opinion piece through the lens of previously expressed opinion pieces is anything but an ad hominem attack. It's the only possible way to understand an opinion piece.
> Analyzing an opinion piece through the lens of previously expressed opinion pieces is anything but an ad hominem attack.
The problem is that original poster did not provide any actual analysis or reason to support their assertion as this is not a famous or well-known enough person (at least within HN) to know automatically what their other opinions are on other matters. For this reason, I stand by my statement that this is just an attack on the author and not the ideas the author is communicating.
> It's the only possible way to understand an opinion piece.
No, the only way possible to understand an opinion piece is to read the text while keeping in mind what organization decided to publish it.
Let’s be honest here: this statement is just a ex post facto justification for the ad hominem. Perhaps a you’ve heard it’s cousin, the classic “no offense but, <something offensive>,” or even, “I’m not racist, but <something racist>.”
This is not true of anything. There are always multiple perspectives and ways of understanding things. We short-change ourselves and others when we think otherwise.
