{"id":4915,"date":"2013-11-11T04:55:12","date_gmt":"2013-11-11T09:55:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/?p=4915"},"modified":"2013-11-11T04:55:12","modified_gmt":"2013-11-11T09:55:12","slug":"norm-geras-is-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/2013\/11\/11\/norm-geras-is-dead\/","title":{"rendered":"Norm Geras is dead"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\nSo it turns out <a href=\"http:\/\/flyingrodent.blogspot.co.uk\/2013\/11\/a-requiem-for-blog.html\">Norm Geras has died<\/a>. To be honest this wouldn&#8217;t matter to me one way or another, if not for the fact that his death has caused otherwise sensible people to behave as if a great intellectual has passed away (reaching dizzying heights <a href=\"http:\/\/normfest.org\">here<\/a>). It&#8217;s a repeat of what happened when Hitchens died, with even less justification.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nEven the backhanded compliment flyingrodent gave that he &#8220;can&#8217;t imagine blogs without the Professor &#8212; Normblog really should be seen as the archetype of the form&#8221; is giving him too much credit. What Norm Geras did is no different from what the rightwing and &#8220;decent left&#8221; US warbloggers did and do: smear, lie, distort to manufacture outrage. The only thing Geras added was to play up his seventies marxist credentials to imagine how Marx and Engels would&#8217;ve totes supported the War on Iraq. Oh, and of course a certain sort of (imagined) upperclass English loquaciousness (<a href=\"http:\/\/normblog.typepad.com\/normblog\/2004\/02\/the_quality_of_.html\">e.g.<\/a>).\n<\/p>\n<p>\nIn short, <a href=\"\/wissewords2\/2010\/08\/15\/norm-geras-is-still-a-dick\/\">my opinion of Geras<\/a> remains unchanged after his death, a bullshitter who used his writing talents to help make the world slightly worse, though only a minor offender compared to people like Hitchens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So it turns out Norm Geras has died. To be honest this wouldn&#8217;t matter to me one way or another, if not for the fact that his death has caused otherwise sensible people to behave as if a great intellectual has passed away (reaching dizzying heights here). It&#8217;s a repeat of what happened when Hitchens [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-decent-left","category-war-on-iraq"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4915"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4915\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4917,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4915\/revisions\/4917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}