How Tierney does it

I was too angry in my Tierney post to spend adequate time on the underpinnings of his edifices, but it would probably be a service to my readers (the erudite and interesting bunch of pathbreaking people and divines!) to explain a little more about how I imagine Tierney's type columns get written.

First you go and look hard in the fringes of academia for researchers who agree on your special type of lunacy or you sift and sift a more mainstream piece of research to see if it can be twisted to back your opinion by focusing on a tiny bit of it or by pretending that, say, a five percent difference between men and women can be made into a BIG MARSVENUSGIVEEQUITYUP finding.

Then you write your article AS IF you were just innocently walking by a certain study and it reared up on its hindlegs and grabbed you and forced, FORCED you to look into the abyss and see that, indeed, the opinions of one John Tierney or one David Brooks just unfortunately happen to be the law of the universe. So stuff that down your throats, you mean and irrelevant feminists!

Finally you pack it all into a wider network of wondering about how all this really fits into our history so well and how sad it is but oh, also so courageous, to point out the truth to all and sundry.

Then you get your paycheck and go out to celebrate, while real writers like one Echidne of the snakes sit here impotently typing away.