Pat Condell of YouTube.com fame
Let me start by apologizing for the lateness of this post. Night shifts is all I can say.
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Who is Pat Condell? Does he have anything worthwhile to say? Should you listen to him?
His profile lists his occupations; his videos iterate his beliefs and views. I wrote him a message through the youtube messaging system. I didn’t get a response.
I’ve got some criticisms of Pat Condell’s and his work. Let me just say first, that for the most part I like what he’s got to say. He speaks fairly well and is clear with his message. However, my criticisms concern his simplicity. Pat Condell’s work is simple. It’s been a long time belief of mine that criticism is easy, anyone can do it. Granted some criticisms are better than others, Pat Condell’s, in his videos, are in the middle somewhere.
Constructive and criticism are the buzzwords here. I often liken characters such as Pat Condell to wrecking balls. Imagine that ideas are buildings occupying a beautiful piece of land in a prime location. The Pat Condell’s of the world come along and decide they don’t like the building and so they smash it down, leaving an enormous pile of rubble. The problem is that now instead of a building that some liked and some didn’t you’re left with a giant mess with which no one is really happy. Critics, if they don’t provide constructive solutions, are entirely useless in my opinion.
I break with Condell on his “constructive” ideas. I don’t consider them constructive at all. When he bothers to offer ideas at all, they are so completely laughable that it detracts from his criticisms which are sometimes quite good. If you want to extend the metaphor actually, it reminds me of of a construction worker trying to do gymnastics.
I think Pat Condell is another social critic in a long line of them. But unlike Copernicus, Luther, and the ’60s hippies, he doesn’t offer a replacement theory, a launchpad for forward progress. I mean even the hippies, after attempting to tear down the world social order tried to push a message of peace and free love. Pat Condell doesn’t offer us anything.
This is the long version of the email I sent him.