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headgasketidiot t1_jbccme3 wrote

Reply to comment by Intelligent-Hunt7557 in Rep. Scott Beck: Is this education alliance good for Vermont students? - VTDigger by halfbakedblake

My comment isn't just about "more than a typo." It's about an elected representative who cannot write an essay. That isn't a descent into pedantry. It's a serious criticism of someone who is supposed to write laws for a living. The only pedantry here is invoking a silly adage to point out that I typed "sledge hammer" instead of "sledgehammer," as if somehow a random comment on reddit should be judged on the same standards as the communications of an elected official, or as if that somehow makes my point unclear or deficient. The dude wrote like 800 words of borderline nonsense; that should concern his constituents. No one but you will ever care that I put a space in the word sledgehammer in a reddit comment.

And yeah, obviously I don't know for sure. This isn't a paper I'm submitting to peer review on the psychology of Rep. Scott Beck. It's a reddit comment about Beck's incoherent opinion piece. I know that an elected official made an incoherent argument against something that might negatively affect his own employment. From there, I infer that he doesn't actually have a good argument. That's a perfectly reasonable jump.

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Intelligent-Hunt7557 t1_jbd5ikh wrote

We’re talking past each other a bit- I’m saying the pleasant pedantry is ours over whether Hartman’s Law applies here. There’s no point in being pedantic (except humorously) about it or Poe’s Law, Godwin’s Law, or any of the other “Laws” which are really observations at best. It’s indeed a bad opinion piece if we’re arguing about the possible qualified intros and not the content. And it was always clear that your complaint was not limited to a typo, but like you I couldn’t resist the zinger.

Getting back to the author’s credentials/ possible motivations Beck is listed on the SJA website as a Social Studies teacher and local business owner so as an alum I’d prefer to think that his incoherency owes to

  1. not being an alum, unlike a great percent of the faculty
  2. not being in the English Department
  3. possibly since he got his M. Ed. from The Citadel?! TIL

All I meant was we could leave the Academy out of this. That he has no discernable point is clear but the Academy is not responsible for that.

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