vegetables wrote:
3 Points: John Gray, the author of the philosophy book Straw Dogs. Praised as a masterpiece of modern philosophy, it's an embarassing mess of a book that reads like it was written by what people who hate Atheists think an Atheist is like. Again, it's the sort of thing that wouldn't stand up on a reasonably intelligent forum or even blog; because depressingly forum posters have higher standards for this sort of thing than the broadsheet press appear to.
Is that the same John Gray who did those shitty Mars/Venus books and the laughable "what you feel you can heal" one? Because if so, I agree, he's a rotten little shit peddling pseudo scientific nonsense and questionable-at-best psychological generalisation to the gullible. I'd happily take a pickaxe to the authors of most self-help books, in fact. If I had no conscience I could make a fortune off bullshitting on that circuit, too.
I also second Gillian McKeith, although she seems to be on the way out now, thankfully.
Also, the small panel of people peddling those 'tragic childhood' biopics. Maybe it's just because I worked in a library, but I really am convinced that all those Dave Pelzer-alikes (and the man himself, who erased my sympathy by milking his story and putting out about six identical books instead of, y'know, writing a biography) are just the same room full of people making up a load of utter bullshit about child abuse, then tacking a generic title and sad child cover onto it with the same font and same background, and selling it as a testament to the human spirit, when it is in fact merely selling schadenfreude and the morbid fascination with human cruelty that dogs its readers. They inspire you, do they? Sure they do. Definitely not just your loving the dark side of human behaviour and being too ashamed to admit it, or anything.
So yeah, them.
Top place though goes to Ed Balls. One day, somebody who actually has a fucking clue what he's talking about will be made Minister for Education (my vote, as ever, will go to Philip Pullman). Until that day we will have greasy wankers like him whose sole positive contribution to education is making a lot of teenagers snigger whenever he introduces himself.