All of those people are academics par execellance. I'm not talking about business-ified institutional academica. I'm talking about spending a long time on a topic, researching it and thinking deeply, clearly on it before you offer your opinion as though it were valuable.
pg spent weeks on each of his early essays. He spent a solid month writing What You Can't Say. He spent at least a couple days writing this one. They aren't opinion pieces.
Stephenie Meyer spent years writing the Twilight books. Time spent on a work is in no way indicative on the quality of that work.
Reaction from literary critics? Reaction from the target audience? Financial success?
It seems to me that by two of those standards Stephenie Meyer knocked the ball out of the park. It is not clear to me why we should care about the other standard of quality.
Personally, I agree with some of his essays, but on some others he's way off the mark. For instance, his writings on anything Hollywood or copyright-related betray a fundamental misunderstanding of what artists sell. Yet those essays were extremely popular simply because they confirmed people's biases (hence "pop philosophy"). However, if you check the so-called "blogosphere", you can find many others who have posted well-reasoned criticisms of those (and other) essays.
Yeah, I think this is a fairly good characterization of pg's audience.
>>Not about the subjects they research. That is the purpose of research.
They are cluless _especially_ about the subjects they research.
Most philosophy, political economy etc academics are beyond mediocre -- not only in advancing their field, but even in understanding the greats who contributed to it and rightfully presenting their knowledge.
Most real development comes from outsiders to this system -- people incombatible with academic life, even if they happen to work as professors (like Adorno or Wittgenstein did for example). And that was true already in the '40s and '50s, were academic discourse and research freedom in those fields was extremelly better compared to (market driven, low quality, paper churn) today's reality.
>The audience I would be targeting in a critique of the man (via a critique of his under-informed rants) are those who equate money with success and "money-making" with intelligence.
Oh, those poor fools. Because there are other, proven, definitions of success that everybody should ascribe to, right?
>I value my time too much to spend the amount required undoing that confusion
Yep, I expected this part.
The purpose of research is to farm grant money and citations. Any actual learning that happens during the process is beside the point.
Not about the subjects they research. That is the purpose of research.
> are full of scorn for academia in general
All of those people are academics par execellance. I'm not talking about business-ified institutional academica. I'm talking about spending a long time on a topic, researching it and thinking deeply, clearly on it before you offer your opinion as though it were valuable.
> do a SPECIFIC critique of what he wrote somewhere
I have on one of his essays, but I took it seriously to write that critique.
The audience I would be targeting in a critique of the man (via a critique of his under-informed rants) are those who equate money with success and "money-making" with intelligence. I value my time too much to spend the amount required undoing that confusion.