Chelsea Clinton Got Into A Twitter Fight Over Hannah Arendt

Think about how much worse life would be without the internet. We wouldn’t have video chats on Skype. We wouldn’t have baby pandas sneezing on YouTube. And we wouldn’t have Chelsea Clinton getting into an argument over philosophy and Nazism on Twitter.

It started when the former First Daughter tweeted a Washington Post article on Friday about an arson attack at a Phoenix LGBT center, along with the message “The banality of evil” — a phrase coined by 20th-century Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt in her classic book “Eichmann in Jerusalem.”

Brooklyn College political science professor Corey Robin thought that Clinton had misunderstood the phrase. “This is what happens when you know something as a cliche or slogan rather than as an idea,” he tweeted at her. “Totally the opposite of what Arendt meant. Sidwell Friends, Stanford, Oxford, Columbia: all that money for fancy schools, and nowhere did you learn the meaning of this phrase?”

But, to Robin’s surprise, Clinton responded, asking whether Robin had actually read the Post article and noted that she was “thankful to have read Arendt at Sidwell & Stanford.”

But if you read his blog account, it is dripping with self-aggrandizement as he describes blow-by-blow how he destroyed her argument and how flabbergasted he was that "Chelsea read my tweet". The twitter exchange should have stood on its own. His recounting of the exchange on his blog reminded me of the commercial in which a fisherman describes his battle to land a huge ferocious fish, which turns out to be about the size of a sardine.

This is like an iceberg, 90% of which is below the waterline.

In the exchanges of 140 character tweets between Robin and Clinton, there's no real argument.

It's not clear what it's about.

They're just trading insults.

After Corey Robin explained his view at excruciating length, I could see that he was probably right about the use of the phrase, but just from the tweets alone, it was impossible to tell what the whole disagreement was actually about.

My takeaways:

1) Twitter is useless for serious discussion.

2) Corey Robin is obsessive, forever splitting picayune hairs, arrogant when he thinks he's right, and unwilling to admit that he may be wrong (all of which those who read his books may already have figured out).

3) There are people on the left who really hate Chelsea Clinton and her parents and wish Chelsea would just go away.

Strangely, that was my first thought about Chels missive.

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