> Why celebrate meanness?

Because meanness stands at the basis of our Western civilization, of which this website is more or less a part of. Think of Cicero's "Catiline Orations", which was an ad-hominem attack through and through, Aristophanes's plays, Lucian of Samosata's works, almost everything written by Swift, Shakespeare's Marcus Antonius's speech, which is another much celebrated ad-hominem, and the list goes on and on. Adversity helps us move forward.

Is the target a person? I'm pretty sure it was a person't public product. In this case, their public words, opinions and critiques. If your job is to produce works for public consumption and you can't stand a critique of your work, you should find another career.

To clarify my earlier point, there are few things as satisfying to read as a witty evisceration of an argument or stance. For a public persona, I don't see much problem with applying it to their wider body of work as long as you think the criticism applies well overall. My earlier statement was fairly ambiguous in this respect.

This case was based on: "We should pity David Brooks, because he is not getting laid. And he is slowly losing his sanity."

The author is free to write that. But I'm not going to spread the link.

Ah, well I was commenting on the portion shown above. Taken in your expanded context, it's not something I would endorse. That said, I still stand by my (revised) point, regardless of whether it was brought about by a poor example, which is that a witty evisceration of an argument or point of view can be very satisfying.

The thread starter's point (which I tend to agree with) was specifically that this particular article was ad-hominem and mean.

But my comment wasn't meant to be a continuation of that discussion, but a digression. A poor choice for one though, as is obvious now.

Ah, I see. Fair enough! I agree that witty arguments are enjoyable to read, I just don't like take-downs so much.

Shall we create a safespace for beigeist conservative think pieces?