
Liberalism is loneliness - eevilspock
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/liberalism-is-loneliness/2018/04/06/02a01aec-39ce-11e8-8fd2-49fe3c675a89_story.html
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wilsonnb2
This opinion piece (like the vast majority of opinion pieces) is not worth the
time to read.

The author doesn't even have a position. They're just summarizing a book that
someone else wrote. It's not even a book review. There's very little
supporting evidence given, and even worse there is no discussion of why the
book's ideas might be wrong.

The click-bait title did draw me in to read it though, so I guess whoever
wrote it did their job.

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JadeNB
> They're just summarizing a book that someone else wrote …. There's very
> little supporting evidence given, and even worse there is no discussion of
> why the book's ideas might be wrong.

The piece (titled "Liberalism is loneliness") seems to _agree_ with the thesis
of the book (titled "Why liberalism failed"). The place for supporting
evidence is thus surely in the book itself, rather than the article, no?

(I can't tell if it agrees with the _ideas_ of the book, because, as you say,
they aren't clearly indicated—but I don't see any reason to think that it
_doesn 't_ agree with them. In fact, it's hard for me to see how the piece
could be _both_ a mere summary of a book _and_ in disagreement with that book.
Or are you saying that it should have offered a balancing perspective by
discussing possible issues anyway?—that is a reasonable, but, I think, not
obligatory, approach.)

Anyway, I didn't find the piece life changing, but it was an effective way to
get me interested in the book referenced (perhaps just because I am currently
listening to an audiobook of Nicholas Shorto's "Amsterdam: A history of the
world's most liberal city", which similarly explores the subtle shades of
meaning in the words 'liberal' and 'liberalism' and their derivatives); so
maybe it's not all bad!

