Did you mean “drivel” rather than dribble?
What’s “pseudo intellectual” about my references to philosophers? I have a Ph.D. in philosophy. Is that not enough for you, for the author of “7 Things You Should Never Put in Your Vagina”?
You allege that I attack Zulie Rane, the popular writer, but do you understand the difference between attacking a person and attacking an argument? Are you sure you could show that I attacked her personally rather than her explanation of what holds writers back, namely their supposed fear that their writing isn’t good enough to be sold? Or were you so caught up in your personal attack on me, which taints the bulk of your comment, that the allegation flowed by a kind of warped transference? (“If I, Ms. Beccia, am so quick to engage in ad hominem, so must be everyone else,” would be your presumption.)
No, the point of my article isn’t that there’s no value in anything that becomes popular. It’s that there’s a kind of value, namely the most intellectual and philosophical (truth-telling) kind that tends to be unpopular. So Rane’s explanation wouldn’t apply to those kinds of writers.
Does Zulie Rane’s writing strike you as particularly high-brow and intellectual? I think not.
There are surely some listicles and highly emotional or amusing stories that are worth reading. Indeed, I also try to appeal to the emotions; note, for example, how my article’s bluntness seems to have triggered you. But there’s a difference between using rhetoric to complement intellectual substance and using the former as a stand-in for the latter.
Yet what Rane assumed is that there’s no deeper conflict between salesmanship and artistry. She just didn’t address that obvious rejoinder at all, as far as I could tell, and that's the whitewash. As I showed, that deeper conflict goes all the way back to sophistry vs platonic philosophy.
Nietzsche wrote aphorisms, not listicles. Oh, another difference is that Nietzsche savaged Christendom, liberalism, and secular humanism (the cultures of his time and place), whereas most of the listicles that become popular regurgitate pop cultural mores in all their naïve vanity.
