Santorum's funeral for his baby would indeed be off-limits for mockery if he didn't bring it up in political speeches, as I've said before. You don't get to use something for electoral gain and simultaneously claim that it's immune to criticism.
In short, if you use your dead infant as a political football, you don't get to complain when the other side intercepts.
Was he strangely using it in some kind of aggressive way? Because the only way I can think to use it would be to emphasize his conservative credentials. Which is bad form, but how does ridiculing him refute that in any way?
I'm as much of a you and your dead fucking baby story eyeroller as anybody when it comes to Rick Santorum, but this is probably an instructive case. Where the effective line can be drawn is in pointing out to any who will listen that Rick Santorum may have politicized the personal tragedy for his own gain. And just leave it at that. Done.
But it's such a difficult line to toe as to not even be worth the risk, because dead baby. It's a great example of the kind of situation where even being technically right about something still necessitates restraint, and a certain handling that you might not often see in an idealist eager to go for the jugular and destroy these people at any cost.
Mitt Romney's Mormon faith would be another good example of an off-limits topic (and I'm sure many people disagree with me on that, too.) I think we as progressives can do a lot better than dead baby and religion mockery, especially when that kind of thing is antithetical to what we're supposed to be all about. And especially when such tactics are wholly unnecessary in a world where these men will be defeated on their merits in November anyway.
We must do better.
1) Not worth risking it.
2) Explain to me how these merit lacking individuals, will still manage to carry 45+% of the popular vote, even in defeat. And will win a large number(maybe a plurality) of states.
Rational, fact backed discourse is a great way to find solutions between 2 rational informed parties. Unfortunetly, we don't have that situation.
Think about how stupid the average person is, then realize half of them are stupider than that.
If you sway 99 intelligent well educated rational voters with your argument, but the other guy gets 1 rational voter who disagree with you and the 100 reactionary imbeciles, You Lose.
I have no crystal ball, I only have access to the same polling data as anybody else.
But you're right, even with a win would come this sort of second-guessing, like what were the rest of these people thinking. We've possibly come to some consensus that this isn't the richest one percent accounting for 45% of the vote. It's a story of many other people who vote for reasons that cannot be effectively debated. Reasons like a commitment to an ideal, to a religious belief, or maybe even just a "good feeling" about one guy and an uneasy distrust of another. These are just as valid reasons to those people as any other.
This isn't actually confusing to us, as another poster posited, but it is a little frustrating. Were we to live in a world where 45% of eligible voters were ripe for conversion to our own ideas, our own worldview.. But that's not the reality of the situation.
This is why candidates always chase those infamous "undecided voters." These are people who perhaps can be educated, can be brought around. And the trick is always to do that without being an abrasive dick about things they might not be the most knowledgeable about or have the same level of concern for. That's why we can't advocate for an abrasive dick position towards those who will never change their minds about something either, because the cost is always too high in terms of those who might otherwise have done so.
Except undecided voters don't really respond to rhetoric anyway. They respond to personal well being (which kind of makes them rational, if uninformed). Political rhetoric is largely about enthusiasm.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Santorum's funeral for his baby would indeed be off-limits for mockery if he didn't bring it up in political speeches, as I've said before. You don't get to use something for electoral gain and simultaneously claim that it's immune to criticism.
In short, if you use your dead infant as a political football, you don't get to complain when the other side intercepts.
Was he strangely using it in some kind of aggressive way? Because the only way I can think to use it would be to emphasize his conservative credentials. Which is bad form, but how does ridiculing him refute that in any way?
I'm as much of a you and your dead fucking baby story eyeroller as anybody when it comes to Rick Santorum, but this is probably an instructive case. Where the effective line can be drawn is in pointing out to any who will listen that Rick Santorum may have politicized the personal tragedy for his own gain. And just leave it at that. Done.
But it's such a difficult line to toe as to not even be worth the risk, because dead baby. It's a great example of the kind of situation where even being technically right about something still necessitates restraint, and a certain handling that you might not often see in an idealist eager to go for the jugular and destroy these people at any cost.
Mitt Romney's Mormon faith would be another good example of an off-limits topic (and I'm sure many people disagree with me on that, too.) I think we as progressives can do a lot better than dead baby and religion mockery, especially when that kind of thing is antithetical to what we're supposed to be all about. And especially when such tactics are wholly unnecessary in a world where these men will be defeated on their merits in November anyway.
We must do better.
The Mormon Church is one of the largest anti-gay lobbying organizations in the world. Why the fuck is his membership in said organization and their beliefs off-limits?
If he were a member of the KKK, would that be off-limits, too?
Except undecided voters don't really respond to rhetoric anyway. They respond to personal well being (which kind of makes them rational, if uninformed). Political rhetoric is largely about enthusiasm.
So, can you conceive of a way of going so far as to humiliate and marginalize people who held a certain opinion and would never change it that would not cause irreparable damage to popularity among those who held the same opinion but might have been ripe for change?
Again, we're not even talking about attacking the ideas themselves here, because that would have been too rational and make too much sense, and as we established earlier, would actually give credence to those opinions. We're talking about a way of calling these people pieces of shit but somehow excluding those who might have been on board had we not--"Oh, um, but not you!"
Maybe if it was like Order of The KKK For Jesus. That would be off-limits. Because of a nebulously defined policing of rhetoric that has hindered liberal discourse for the past 30 years and is super popular in liberal circles and also really regressive and also kind of lame and out of touch.
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Sir Landsharkresting shark faceRegistered Userregular
I give a shit if a candidate is anti-gay. I don't give a shit if he's Mormon. Freedom of Religion and all that.
Please consider the environment before printing this post.
Except undecided voters don't really respond to rhetoric anyway. They respond to personal well being (which kind of makes them rational, if uninformed). Political rhetoric is largely about enthusiasm.
So, can you conceive of a way of going so far as to humiliate and marginalize people who held a certain opinion and would never change it that would not cause irreparable damage to popularity among those who held the same opinion but might have been ripe for change?
Again, we're not even talking about attacking the ideas themselves here, because that would have been too rational and make too much sense, and as we established earlier, would actually give credence to those opinions. We're talking about a way of calling these people pieces of shit but somehow excluding those who might have been on board had we not--"Oh, um, but not you!"
Any ideas?
And this is exactly why I posted my anecdote earlier.
Calling someone a piece of shit for his beliefs, makes everyone who shares those beliefs think you're talking about them too. EVEN IF THEY'D OTHERWISE BE WILLING TO LISTEN TO YOUR POINT.
Except undecided voters don't really respond to rhetoric anyway. They respond to personal well being (which kind of makes them rational, if uninformed). Political rhetoric is largely about enthusiasm.
So, can you conceive of a way of going so far as to humiliate and marginalize people who held a certain opinion and would never change it that would not cause irreparable damage to popularity among those who held the same opinion but might have been ripe for change?
Again, we're not even talking about attacking the ideas themselves here, because that would have been too rational and make too much sense, and as we established earlier, would actually give credence to those opinions. We're talking about a way of calling these people pieces of shit but somehow excluding those who might have been on board had we not--"Oh, um, but not you!"
Any ideas?
And this is exactly why I posted my anecdote earlier.
Calling someone a piece of shit for his beliefs, makes everyone who shares those beliefs think you're talking about them too. EVEN IF THEY'D OTHERWISE BE WILLING TO LISTEN TO YOUR POINT.
These are terrible a prior arguments that are so linear in nature that I don't even know how to address them. Are you guys really pretending that the only resultant from ridicule is a massive social butthurting?
Your response was way too long. The man in the video was simple and concise, you just come off as blathering, essentially. It doesn't seem unlikely that a trained or skilled social manipulator would be able to respond with a simple retort that painted you as reactionary and long winded.
Which is a complaint about length, not about the civility or lack thereof in his argument.
Length and content; his response was too long and the language used only provided ammo for the opponent to insinuate that he's huffing and puffing. It's not solely that the long response drones on but that the attempts at subversion didn't really perform the ridicule he intended. This is the dilemma in responding with ridicule, too obvious and your opponent can just pass you off as a persecutor or as an angry buffoon, too complex and it will simply pass over everyone's head. Ridicule works best for people like Jon Stewart or other satirists, because they are adept at witty retort. There are certainly those in politics who are better at it than others, but it's still seemingly rare. Al Franken may be one of the few who can effectively implement ridicule in politics, and he's of similar ilk to Stewart.
No, it's not. This is a problem with any response that isn't well done.
None of your complaints are specific to ridicule or scorn or the like.
You are also only considering a very narrow type of incivility in discourse (ie - satire and joking), which is probably why you think only certain people do it well.
So you've contested what I've said, but haven't provided any reasoning. Okay? Ridicule is difficult to employ effectively as a tactic because it often requires rhetorical skill in combating the opponents ability to turn it against you. It's not something to just bandy about in discourse haphazardly. I say it is likely to work best in the hands of a satirist because they have a higher degree of ability in articulating their use of ridicule. Ridicule for its own sake can often just become empty posturing, which can easily be taken advantage of by the opponent.
So you deny there are people in power who are arguing entirely in bad faith and will use the ability to speak at every turn only to manipulate the audience against you no matter what you say/do?
Every person in power is manipulative of the audience. So I don't think it's really a case of good faith/bad faith. It's essentially a game of language, whomever can most effectively utilize various strategies will come out on top. Wielding any specific form or tactic as a blunt instrument won't really be effective in the long run(at least in terms of those who carry views other than yours). I think you had the right idea earlier, just that how you employed it didn't work out(at least in comparison to what was used in that clip). So, the should or should not of ridicule, etc is somewhat irrelevant really. The most effective path is desirable, and I don't believe indulging in simplistic ridicule will really follow that as such. Unless you can do it well don't bother, as it seems to be more likely to remain ineffective.
Except undecided voters don't really respond to rhetoric anyway. They respond to personal well being (which kind of makes them rational, if uninformed). Political rhetoric is largely about enthusiasm.
So, can you conceive of a way of going so far as to humiliate and marginalize people who held a certain opinion and would never change it that would not cause irreparable damage to popularity among those who held the same opinion but might have been ripe for change?
Again, we're not even talking about attacking the ideas themselves here, because that would have been too rational and make too much sense, and as we established earlier, would actually give credence to those opinions. We're talking about a way of calling these people pieces of shit but somehow excluding those who might have been on board had we not--"Oh, um, but not you!"
Any ideas?
We're talking about entirely different ideas. You're interested in winning the argument. I'm interested in winning the election. As the Democratic Party has proved for the last forty years, you can easily be winning the argument and lose the election. In terms of actual policy positions, the Democrats have the more popular stance on most issues except gun control. And yet, they have a hard time winning the Presidency.
Alternate view:
Essentially, let's say there are five groups of people in politics.
There's the GOP base (~27%), Republican leaners (~18%), true independents (10%) Democratic leaners (~20%), and the Democratic base (~25%)
The true independents largely vote their personal circumstances, punishing the incumbents when the economy is bad, rewarding them when it's good. With certain exceptions like 2000 which remains a fucking bizarre election that I tend to believe the national media's hatred of Al Gore swung (which they did by mocking him relentlessly about shit they made up out of whole cloth or took wildly out of context... hmm).
Republican leaners will almost always vote Republican, unless something truly heinous happens. And I mean REALLY heinous. Same with Democratic leaners. Similarly, the bases will ALWAYS vote for their parties, essentially regardless of the candidates. The issue is getting those people to turn out.
At which point you can appeal to their better natures (can work! See 2008) or you can scare the shit out of them (can work! 2002, 2004, 2006, 2010). Ideally you formulate some way to simultaneously increase your turnout and depress the other side's turnout. For example, if you use arcane Senate rules to make the other party's large majority look like feckless cowards while telling your people that it's the most abusive powerful majority in history that is taking away their freedom and probably leaving them to die alone at the hands of a government bureaucrat (you know, hypothetically), you will probably do quite well!
Basically, winning the argument is meaningless if you can't actually get your ideas in place as far as policy goes. And frankly, mockery and incivility work. That's sad, but it's true.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Except undecided voters don't really respond to rhetoric anyway. They respond to personal well being (which kind of makes them rational, if uninformed). Political rhetoric is largely about enthusiasm.
That and also defining what an election will be about. That is where you can find an intersect between undecided voter persuasiveness and campaign rhetoric. If 70% of them think that you're weak on foreign policy, you're probably not going to find a lot of wiggle room at changing minds there, but you might be able to persuade them that the election is less about foreign policy and more about some other issue on which you're viewed more favorably.
I kind of feel like there ought to be two separate discussions about political discourse: what's effective and ethical for policy discussions, and what's effective and ethical for electoral discussions.
Except undecided voters don't really respond to rhetoric anyway. They respond to personal well being (which kind of makes them rational, if uninformed). Political rhetoric is largely about enthusiasm.
That and also defining what an election will be about. That is where you can find an intersect between undecided voter persuasiveness and campaign rhetoric. If 70% of them think that you're weak on foreign policy, you're probably not going to find a lot of wiggle room at changing minds there, but you might be able to persuade them that the election is less about foreign policy and more about some other issue on which you're viewed more favorably.
I kind of feel like there ought to be two separate discussions about political discourse: what's effective and ethical for policy discussions, and what's effective and ethical for electoral discussions.
That's a fair point, though I tend to think they just vote their pocketbooks regardless of the narrative.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Hell, we're having a debate right now in which some people are saying "We made it socially unacceptable to be racist, and that has made the world a better place, and we want to do that with homophobia, hatred of women, and the poor too."
We didn't make it socially unacceptable to be racist via mockery and humiliation. I didn't go from being a stupid 12yr old kid making fag jokes to a champion for gay rights because somebody shamed me into silence. I mean, I'm stunned to hear people think shame and guilt are effective tools for teaching anything. If this was a parenting thread, most of you guys would be freaking out. "Well, my teenager came home and started going on about "those gays" so I mocked him, laughed at his stupid ideas, and shamed him until he shut up and went to his room crying - so add another gay marriage supporter to the list, folks! You're welcome!"
Also, the poor? How does that work? The other classes, we shame them into silence. Do you plan to shame poor people into silence about their economic status? That makes no sense at all - you're just tossing in "some third thing" to make the sentence more rhetorically snappy.
Except undecided voters don't really respond to rhetoric anyway. They respond to personal well being (which kind of makes them rational, if uninformed). Political rhetoric is largely about enthusiasm.
That and also defining what an election will be about. That is where you can find an intersect between undecided voter persuasiveness and campaign rhetoric. If 70% of them think that you're weak on foreign policy, you're probably not going to find a lot of wiggle room at changing minds there, but you might be able to persuade them that the election is less about foreign policy and more about some other issue on which you're viewed more favorably.
I kind of feel like there ought to be two separate discussions about political discourse: what's effective and ethical for policy discussions, and what's effective and ethical for electoral discussions.
That's a fair point, though I tend to think they just vote their pocketbooks regardless of the narrative.
That can be a pretty strong influence, but true independents are usually motivated by other things, as well. 2006 was unquestionably about Iraq for independent voters, for instance.
Also, the poor? How does that work? The other classes, we shame them into silence. Do you plan to shame poor people into silence about their economic status? That makes no sense at all - you're just tossing in "some third thing" to make the sentence more rhetorically snappy.
Shaming people about their hatred of the poor. It wasn't that difficult of a sentence to understand.
Hell, we're having a debate right now in which some people are saying "We made it socially unacceptable to be racist, and that has made the world a better place, and we want to do that with homophobia, hatred of women, and the poor too."
We didn't make it socially unacceptable to be racist via mockery and humiliation. I didn't go from being a stupid 12yr old kid making fag jokes to a champion for gay rights because somebody shamed me into silence. I mean, I'm stunned to hear people think shame and guilt are effective tools for teaching anything. If this was a parenting thread, most of you guys would be freaking out. "Well, my teenager came home and started going on about "those gays" so I mocked him, laughed at his stupid ideas, and shamed him until he shut up and went to his room crying - so add another gay marriage supporter to the list, folks! You're welcome!"
Also, the poor? How does that work? The other classes, we shame them into silence. Do you plan to shame poor people into silence about their economic status? That makes no sense at all - you're just tossing in "some third thing" to make the sentence more rhetorically snappy.
I give a shit if a candidate is anti-gay. I don't give a shit if he's Mormon. Freedom of Religion and all that.
No. This is some stupid shit. Freedom of belief is not a shield of criticism for holding those beliefs. This is where I think a big part of the lefts tactical disadvantage stems from.
Just because your belief some illiterate farmer in upstate New York found golden tablets inscribed by Indians talking about Jesus, is a religious one, doesn't mean you can't be judged for holding it. Cause its fucking ridiculous.
And in the US so many of our ext(R)a-stupid, beliefs stem from the various southern fundamentalist theologies, that rendering them immune because they are religious view-points is ridiculous.
When you combined the two, you have a situation where one side labels everything the disagree with as Immoral/Communist/Socialist/Fascist, and the other side hides a large set of its beliefs under the aegis of religion.
The GOP has one thing right. It is a culture war. Unless you think you can effectively lure these people to break with their beliefs when they vote, you need to attack the underlying beliefs so fewer people will share them in the future. Its a big part of how we countered racism. You make holding the base position, not just the actions that stem from it, so draconian that to profess it is political suicide.
An issue by issue fight is trying to kill the hydra by lobbing off its heads. Go for the heart. The real issue isn't being anti-science homophobes; those are symptoms. The disease is believing a bunch of stone-age scriblings are literally and inerrant true.
Except undecided voters don't really respond to rhetoric anyway. They respond to personal well being (which kind of makes them rational, if uninformed). Political rhetoric is largely about enthusiasm.
That and also defining what an election will be about. That is where you can find an intersect between undecided voter persuasiveness and campaign rhetoric. If 70% of them think that you're weak on foreign policy, you're probably not going to find a lot of wiggle room at changing minds there, but you might be able to persuade them that the election is less about foreign policy and more about some other issue on which you're viewed more favorably.
I kind of feel like there ought to be two separate discussions about political discourse: what's effective and ethical for policy discussions, and what's effective and ethical for electoral discussions.
That's a fair point, though I tend to think they just vote their pocketbooks regardless of the narrative.
That can be a pretty strong influence, but true independents are usually motivated by other things, as well. 2006 was unquestionably about Iraq for independent voters, for instance.
Yeah, I keep forgetting that "also military casualties" corollary that's fairly recently been shown to be a better predictor.
Basically incumbent share of the vote = .45 + Ax +By where x is GDP growth in the previous year and y is military casualties. A and B are some coefficients (B is a small negative number)
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
If I agreed with your approach, I'd mock you something something English language. Wouldn't that be useful to the discussion?
Now that statement didn't make a whole lot of sense.
It is revealing that you read my sentence, which could technically be taken either way, but reasonably could only mean the one thing, and heard "Jeep says we should shame the poor."
Except undecided voters don't really respond to rhetoric anyway. They respond to personal well being (which kind of makes them rational, if uninformed). Political rhetoric is largely about enthusiasm.
That and also defining what an election will be about. That is where you can find an intersect between undecided voter persuasiveness and campaign rhetoric. If 70% of them think that you're weak on foreign policy, you're probably not going to find a lot of wiggle room at changing minds there, but you might be able to persuade them that the election is less about foreign policy and more about some other issue on which you're viewed more favorably.
I kind of feel like there ought to be two separate discussions about political discourse: what's effective and ethical for policy discussions, and what's effective and ethical for electoral discussions.
That's a fair point, though I tend to think they just vote their pocketbooks regardless of the narrative.
That can be a pretty strong influence, but true independents are usually motivated by other things, as well. 2006 was unquestionably about Iraq for independent voters, for instance.
Yeah, I keep forgetting that "also military casualties" corollary that's fairly recently been shown to be a better predictor.
Basically incumbent share of the vote = .45 + Ax +By where x is GDP growth in the previous year and y is military casualties. A and B are some coefficients (B is a small negative number)
That's a bit closer. There's other stuff that ends up factoring in, too; Katrina came to be shorthand for the Bush administration's failed leadership style, and if you could work it into some press comments alongside your other points, it was going to help you make the case with independents that the election was a referendum on the Bush administration.
But you're absolutely right that it doesn't happen in a vacuum. If independent voters generally think the nation's sinking into the sea, you can't use rhetoric to persuade them that your candidate is strong on lifejackets and hope to ride it out.
Except undecided voters don't really respond to rhetoric anyway. They respond to personal well being (which kind of makes them rational, if uninformed). Political rhetoric is largely about enthusiasm.
So, can you conceive of a way of going so far as to humiliate and marginalize people who held a certain opinion and would never change it that would not cause irreparable damage to popularity among those who held the same opinion but might have been ripe for change?
Again, we're not even talking about attacking the ideas themselves here, because that would have been too rational and make too much sense, and as we established earlier, would actually give credence to those opinions. We're talking about a way of calling these people pieces of shit but somehow excluding those who might have been on board had we not--"Oh, um, but not you!"
Any ideas?
We're talking about entirely different ideas. You're interested in winning the argument. I'm interested in winning the election. As the Democratic Party has proved for the last forty years, you can easily be winning the argument and lose the election. In terms of actual policy positions, the Democrats have the more popular stance on most issues except gun control. And yet, they have a hard time winning the Presidency.
One of the major reasons why is their poor communication skills, and part of that is related to ridicule, although tangentially.
If you lay out your argument, and half of voters don't support it even though you're right, you're doing something wrong, and it's not that you aren't being snarky enough.
Common ground is where Republicans do great and pick up a ton of votes, while Democrats stand around looking awkward, and talking about how moronic people are. Which really does come through in some ways.
Except undecided voters don't really respond to rhetoric anyway. They respond to personal well being (which kind of makes them rational, if uninformed). Political rhetoric is largely about enthusiasm.
So, can you conceive of a way of going so far as to humiliate and marginalize people who held a certain opinion and would never change it that would not cause irreparable damage to popularity among those who held the same opinion but might have been ripe for change?
Again, we're not even talking about attacking the ideas themselves here, because that would have been too rational and make too much sense, and as we established earlier, would actually give credence to those opinions. We're talking about a way of calling these people pieces of shit but somehow excluding those who might have been on board had we not--"Oh, um, but not you!"
Any ideas?
We're talking about entirely different ideas. You're interested in winning the argument. I'm interested in winning the election. As the Democratic Party has proved for the last forty years, you can easily be winning the argument and lose the election. In terms of actual policy positions, the Democrats have the more popular stance on most issues except gun control. And yet, they have a hard time winning the Presidency.
One of the major reasons why is their poor communication skills, and part of that is related to ridicule, although tangentially.
If you lay out your argument, and half of voters don't support it even though you're right, you're doing something wrong, and it's not that you aren't being snarky enough.
And that illuminates what Bum's talking about when he says that they're two different (and not even really related) things. Winning an election frequently depends on telling people what they already know or believe to be true so that more than 50% of the electorate will agree with you. Changing someone's opinion on a policy issue always starts with telling someone something that he believes to be wrong.
If I agreed with your approach, I'd mock you something something English language. Wouldn't that be useful to the discussion?
Now that statement didn't make a whole lot of sense.
It is revealing that you read my sentence, which could technically be taken either way, but reasonably could only mean the one thing, and heard "Jeep says we should shame the poor."
It's not revealing - that's just a rhetorical device to set up the ridicule. What's really revealing is that you think hating poor people is an actual thing we need to fight against, instead of comical hyperbole used to, gasp, shame and ridicule Republicans for having different economic philosophies.
Homophobia - a thing we should fight
misogyny - a thing we should fight
hating poor people - a thing the left made up to ridicule ideas they don't like. There's maybe two dozen people in this nation that hate the poor, and they don't care what you say about them.
This system, reframing every opposing principle in ridiculous terms and repeating the reframed catchphrase until it penetrates, is something the left deploys across the board.
Example? Bootstraps! It's not possible to have any kind of a discussion about the value of work or self-reliance, any kind of a discussion at all, no matter how reasonable or caveat-encrusted, without somebody trying to shut the whole thing down by saying this. Sometimes it doesn't seem possible to have any discussion at all without somebody trying to blow it up through mockery, condescending sarcasm, and aborted-fetus-poster style shaming.
In the wider political arena, it's unavoidable. Around here, though... it really ought to be.
-I'll touch on the whole Santorum's dead baby thing.
I personally wouldn't attack him how he chose to grieve but I'm not sure it's rarely fair to call foul when people describe it as a bit creepy when you have your kids (how old were they? It looks like some of them might have been a bit too young to have the concept of dead family thrown in their face unnecessarily) hold the dead baby. Now I think Santorum is vile for politicizing this whole thing and I don't feel much sympathy when it backfires on him. He chose to make a private issue political and he needs to deal with it, it's not like people went and dug this up, he made it an issue on his on volition.
-I'm also seeing a bit too much of the political correctness bullshit. I don't care for political correctness because it too often is twisted into a tool that shuts down discourse. My whole issue is that people get wrapped up in the "you can't say that because I find it hurts my feelings, even though it's not actually offensive." Then we end up in a situation where what needs to be said can't be said and the discussion gets convoluted with attempts to side step hurting someone's feeling. I subscribe the the political tack route, you can ridicule the other side if what they have to say isn't worth consider, even if it's worth considering, it's alright if the truth does hurt their feelings.
I think by far one of the best example of political correctness failing is when it comes to doctors dealing with over weight kids. Telling a parent you kid is obese is starting to become taboo because it hurts someone's feeling even though that is a tactful way to say that "Hey, you kid is over-weight and needs to start shedding some pounds." Instead saying obese is slowly being redefined as being as bad as saying "Hey your kid is a fat ass!" Which isn't tactful and is intended to be offensive.
The GOP has gotten to a point where much of what they espouse can't be handled without ridiculing them. Hell, they've moved some of the goal posts for some of the issues to a position where one has no choice but to ridicule them. Take the ultrasound thing in VA, sure you could have a rational, civil discussion on abortion but when you have a bill the sets out to demean women for seeking an abortion by raping them, there just isn't way to not ridicule that. OWS is provides another good example, they start peacefully protesting and the GOP immediately starts calling them a mob, lazy, entitled and accuses them of starting class warfare. The irony with the OWS part, the GOP and their backers were already resorting to class warfare but apparently it doesn't count when it's only the rich actively screwing over the non-rich, once the 99% calls bullshit then it's all of a sudden class warfare.
The GOP reminds of me of the playground bully who has rich parents. The bully goes around and pick on everyone else and they're suppose to deal but once someone calls him a meanie pants. He runs to his mommy and daddy and cries like a little bitch about how someone was being mean for calling him out and that it isn't fair.
If I agreed with your approach, I'd mock you something something English language. Wouldn't that be useful to the discussion?
Now that statement didn't make a whole lot of sense.
It is revealing that you read my sentence, which could technically be taken either way, but reasonably could only mean the one thing, and heard "Jeep says we should shame the poor."
It's not revealing - that's just a rhetorical device to set up the ridicule. What's really revealing is that you think hating poor people is an actual thing we need to fight against, instead of comical hyperbole used to, gasp, shame and ridicule Republicans for having different economic philosophies.
Homophobia - a thing we should fight
misogyny - a thing we should fight
hating poor people - a thing the left made up to ridicule ideas they don't like. There's maybe two dozen people in this nation that hate the poor, and they don't care what you say about them.
This system, reframing every opposing principle in ridiculous terms and repeating the reframed catchphrase until it penetrates, is something the left deploys across the board.
Example? Bootstraps! It's not possible to have any kind of a discussion about the value of work or self-reliance, any kind of a discussion at all, no matter how reasonable or caveat-encrusted, without somebody trying to shut the whole thing down by saying this. Sometimes it doesn't seem possible to have any discussion at all without somebody trying to blow it up through mockery, condescending sarcasm, and aborted-fetus-poster style shaming.
In the wider political arena, it's unavoidable. Around here, though... it really ought to be.
Hatred of, or more properly, contempt for the poor, is a very real thing in the Republican party. Particularly the less religious neo-con and pseudo-libertarian wings of the party. Paul Ryan being only one of the more vocal cheerleaders of this worrying trend. Ayn Rand unequivocally hated the poor. Her modern disciples have inherited that from her philosophy.
I give a shit if a candidate is anti-gay. I don't give a shit if he's Mormon. Freedom of Religion and all that.
No. This is some stupid shit. Freedom of belief is not a shield of criticism for holding those beliefs. This is where I think a big part of the lefts tactical disadvantage stems from.
Just because your belief some illiterate farmer in upstate New York found golden tablets inscribed by Indians talking about Jesus, is a religious one, doesn't mean you can't be judged for holding it. Cause its fucking ridiculous.
And in the US so many of our ext(R)a-stupid, beliefs stem from the various southern fundamentalist theologies, that rendering them immune because they are religious view-points is ridiculous.
When you combined the two, you have a situation where one side labels everything the disagree with as Immoral/Communist/Socialist/Fascist, and the other side hides a large set of its beliefs under the aegis of religion.
The GOP has one thing right. It is a culture war. Unless you think you can effectively lure these people to break with their beliefs when they vote, you need to attack the underlying beliefs so fewer people will share them in the future. Its a big part of how we countered racism. You make holding the base position, not just the actions that stem from it, so draconian that to profess it is political suicide.
An issue by issue fight is trying to kill the hydra by lobbing off its heads. Go for the heart. The real issue isn't being anti-science homophobes; those are symptoms. The disease is believing a bunch of stone-age scriblings are literally and inerrant true.
This reads awfully like the war on religion I thought the GOP was making up. I'm not Mormon but there are several Mormon posters on these boards that probably don't appreciate any of this.
You can criticize whatever the hell you want, but I find it far more useful to focus on things that are relevant to policy rather than trying to dig down to some perceived root cause. You may think most people are bigots because they're religious, but maybe they just want to be bigots and they're using religion as an excuse. Unless you can prove that, for example, every Mormon is anti-gay, I think it's far more useful (and far less alienating) to attack the bigotry, not the religion.
Please consider the environment before printing this post.
Many atheists believe that religion is at the root of every social ill. It's not news. More troubling is idea that religious people should be free to continue to preach the notion that lack of religion is the root of all social ills, but that liberal atheists should shut up.
Atheism is not a religion per se, but if you believe in freedom of religion at all, then you must believe that those same ideals protect atheist thought.
How about vilifying the poor then? An example would be Florida's governor just assuming that people on welfare and government assistance, use drugs way way more than everyone else, and then his mandatory for profit drug testing just happened to prove the exact opposite, by a huge margin.
How about vilifying the poor then? An example would be Florida's governor just assuming that people on welfare and government assistance, use drugs way way more than everyone else, and then his mandatory for profit drug testing just happened to prove the exact opposite, by a huge margin.
Endorsed by Mitt Romney!
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Dude, some Republican politician used the "bootstraps" metaphor, like, LAST WEEK. The fact that the left makes it a sarcastic joke doesn't change the fact that "your team" (if we're going with "you are all alike") keeps using it with all seriousness.
Your big problem with the "uncivil discourse" around here seems to be you just don't want to admit certain things exist at all, and when other people mention it that's "unfair."
Except undecided voters don't really respond to rhetoric anyway. They respond to personal well being (which kind of makes them rational, if uninformed). Political rhetoric is largely about enthusiasm.
So, can you conceive of a way of going so far as to humiliate and marginalize people who held a certain opinion and would never change it that would not cause irreparable damage to popularity among those who held the same opinion but might have been ripe for change?
Again, we're not even talking about attacking the ideas themselves here, because that would have been too rational and make too much sense, and as we established earlier, would actually give credence to those opinions. We're talking about a way of calling these people pieces of shit but somehow excluding those who might have been on board had we not--"Oh, um, but not you!"
Any ideas?
And this is exactly why I posted my anecdote earlier.
Calling someone a piece of shit for his beliefs, makes everyone who shares those beliefs think you're talking about them too. EVEN IF THEY'D OTHERWISE BE WILLING TO LISTEN TO YOUR POINT.
These are terrible a prior arguments that are so linear in nature that I don't even know how to address them. Are you guys really pretending that the only resultant from ridicule is a massive social butthurting?
Pretending? The entire argument FOR ridicule in this thread is that it makes people feel so butthurt that they hide their position out of shame!
Shame might work fine in the cases where a small minority believes something (Conspiracy Theories, overt racism, etc), but it does not work when the there's still a sizable minority that believes it. Shaming people is drawing a clear line in the sand, where one side is "Us" and the other side is "Others".
Isn't fear of "Others" the entire reason just about everyone here hates the policies of the Tea Party?
How about vilifying the poor then? An example would be Florida's governor just assuming that people on welfare and government assistance, use drugs way way more than everyone else, and then his mandatory for profit drug testing just happened to prove the exact opposite, by a huge margin.
Endorsed by Mitt Romney!
Really? That's surprising to me. I mean I guess that people who have jobs (however crappy) are more able to AFFORD drugs, but I figured the poverty-to-drugs ratio went all the way down.
Every person in power is manipulative of the audience. So I don't think it's really a case of good faith/bad faith. It's essentially a game of language, whomever can most effectively utilize various strategies will come out on top. Wielding any specific form or tactic as a blunt instrument won't really be effective in the long run(at least in terms of those who carry views other than yours). I think you had the right idea earlier, just that how you employed it didn't work out(at least in comparison to what was used in that clip). So, the should or should not of ridicule, etc is somewhat irrelevant really. The most effective path is desirable, and I don't believe indulging in simplistic ridicule will really follow that as such. Unless you can do it well don't bother, as it seems to be more likely to remain ineffective.
That response was more my attempt to probe what exactly MentalExercise is scolding everyone for. Which seems to be based on a misunderstanding of people's many different intentions when entering into a discussion. His posts implied that every discussion could be handled with the utmost civility, care and rational argumentation and I was trying to ask him if he even believed it was possible for one party in a conversation to be operating entirely from malice and using the discussion as a medium to inflict profound harm upon his opponent or his opponent's ideas through whatever means were necessary.
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
And this is exactly why I posted my anecdote earlier.
Calling someone a piece of shit for his beliefs, makes everyone who shares those beliefs think you're talking about them too. EVEN IF THEY'D OTHERWISE BE WILLING TO LISTEN TO YOUR POINT.
These are terrible a prior arguments that are so linear in nature that I don't even know how to address them. Are you guys really pretending that the only resultant from ridicule is a massive social butthurting?
Pretending? The entire argument FOR ridicule in this thread is that it makes people feel so butthurt that they hide their position out of shame!
Shame might work fine in the cases where a small minority believes something (Conspiracy Theories, overt racism, etc), but it does not work when the there's still a sizable minority that believes it. Shaming people is drawing a clear line in the sand, where one side is "Us" and the other side is "Others".
Isn't fear of "Others" the entire reason just about everyone here hates the policies of the Tea Party?
Hating someone because of their beliefs isn't being prejudiced; it's just plain judging. You know something about the way the person thinks and what they advocate, and you have evaluated them based upon said actions. There is a clear line in the sand, and they are "Others." I don't want to be associated in any way with people who believe the horrific, appalling, retarded things that Rick Santorum does, and I think they should be made to feel awful, because they're terrible people. I don't care if you're Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jewish, or Atheist: if you think homosexuality is comparable to child rape, your beliefs are fucking awful, even if you're shrouding them in the garb of godliness, and I'm not going to let you say "oh, can't judge me for that, Jesus says so!"
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Sir Landsharkresting shark faceRegistered Userregular
Many atheists believe that religion is at the root of every social ill. It's not news. More troubling is idea that religious people should be free to continue to preach the notion that lack of religion is the root of all social ills, but that liberal atheists should shut up.
Atheism is not a religion per se, but if you believe in freedom of religion at all, then you must believe that those same ideals protect atheist thought.
I don't see how this contradicts with anything I said unless you are trying to assert that all religious people are propogating social illness and therefore should be ridiculed/attacked for their beliefs.
Please consider the environment before printing this post.
Many atheists believe that religion is at the root of every social ill. It's not news. More troubling is idea that religious people should be free to continue to preach the notion that lack of religion is the root of all social ills, but that liberal atheists should shut up.
Atheism is not a religion per se, but if you believe in freedom of religion at all, then you must believe that those same ideals protect atheist thought.
I don't see how this contradicts with anything I said unless you are trying to assert that all religious people are propogating social illness and therefore should be ridiculed/attacked for their beliefs.
It directly contradicts with what you said. Because you seem to support the right of the religious to attack atheists, but not the reverse.
If you don't believe that freedom of religion gives the religious carte blanche to vilify atheists (and they do, oh yes they certainly do) then it's fair to say that atheists cannot (or should not) attack religion in much the same way.
If you're agreeing that they all have that right (or should have that right, because obviously they all currently do enjoy these rights) but merely saying that atheists shouldn't say those mean things about religion, then we're right back to one side should be nice even though the other side will absolutely not under any circumstances return the favor.
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I have no crystal ball, I only have access to the same polling data as anybody else.
But you're right, even with a win would come this sort of second-guessing, like what were the rest of these people thinking. We've possibly come to some consensus that this isn't the richest one percent accounting for 45% of the vote. It's a story of many other people who vote for reasons that cannot be effectively debated. Reasons like a commitment to an ideal, to a religious belief, or maybe even just a "good feeling" about one guy and an uneasy distrust of another. These are just as valid reasons to those people as any other.
This isn't actually confusing to us, as another poster posited, but it is a little frustrating. Were we to live in a world where 45% of eligible voters were ripe for conversion to our own ideas, our own worldview.. But that's not the reality of the situation.
This is why candidates always chase those infamous "undecided voters." These are people who perhaps can be educated, can be brought around. And the trick is always to do that without being an abrasive dick about things they might not be the most knowledgeable about or have the same level of concern for. That's why we can't advocate for an abrasive dick position towards those who will never change their minds about something either, because the cost is always too high in terms of those who might otherwise have done so.
If he were a member of the KKK, would that be off-limits, too?
So, can you conceive of a way of going so far as to humiliate and marginalize people who held a certain opinion and would never change it that would not cause irreparable damage to popularity among those who held the same opinion but might have been ripe for change?
Again, we're not even talking about attacking the ideas themselves here, because that would have been too rational and make too much sense, and as we established earlier, would actually give credence to those opinions. We're talking about a way of calling these people pieces of shit but somehow excluding those who might have been on board had we not--"Oh, um, but not you!"
Any ideas?
And this is exactly why I posted my anecdote earlier.
Calling someone a piece of shit for his beliefs, makes everyone who shares those beliefs think you're talking about them too. EVEN IF THEY'D OTHERWISE BE WILLING TO LISTEN TO YOUR POINT.
Every person in power is manipulative of the audience. So I don't think it's really a case of good faith/bad faith. It's essentially a game of language, whomever can most effectively utilize various strategies will come out on top. Wielding any specific form or tactic as a blunt instrument won't really be effective in the long run(at least in terms of those who carry views other than yours). I think you had the right idea earlier, just that how you employed it didn't work out(at least in comparison to what was used in that clip). So, the should or should not of ridicule, etc is somewhat irrelevant really. The most effective path is desirable, and I don't believe indulging in simplistic ridicule will really follow that as such. Unless you can do it well don't bother, as it seems to be more likely to remain ineffective.
We're talking about entirely different ideas. You're interested in winning the argument. I'm interested in winning the election. As the Democratic Party has proved for the last forty years, you can easily be winning the argument and lose the election. In terms of actual policy positions, the Democrats have the more popular stance on most issues except gun control. And yet, they have a hard time winning the Presidency.
Alternate view:
Essentially, let's say there are five groups of people in politics.
There's the GOP base (~27%), Republican leaners (~18%), true independents (10%) Democratic leaners (~20%), and the Democratic base (~25%)
The true independents largely vote their personal circumstances, punishing the incumbents when the economy is bad, rewarding them when it's good. With certain exceptions like 2000 which remains a fucking bizarre election that I tend to believe the national media's hatred of Al Gore swung (which they did by mocking him relentlessly about shit they made up out of whole cloth or took wildly out of context... hmm).
Republican leaners will almost always vote Republican, unless something truly heinous happens. And I mean REALLY heinous. Same with Democratic leaners. Similarly, the bases will ALWAYS vote for their parties, essentially regardless of the candidates. The issue is getting those people to turn out.
At which point you can appeal to their better natures (can work! See 2008) or you can scare the shit out of them (can work! 2002, 2004, 2006, 2010). Ideally you formulate some way to simultaneously increase your turnout and depress the other side's turnout. For example, if you use arcane Senate rules to make the other party's large majority look like feckless cowards while telling your people that it's the most abusive powerful majority in history that is taking away their freedom and probably leaving them to die alone at the hands of a government bureaucrat (you know, hypothetically), you will probably do quite well!
Basically, winning the argument is meaningless if you can't actually get your ideas in place as far as policy goes. And frankly, mockery and incivility work. That's sad, but it's true.
That and also defining what an election will be about. That is where you can find an intersect between undecided voter persuasiveness and campaign rhetoric. If 70% of them think that you're weak on foreign policy, you're probably not going to find a lot of wiggle room at changing minds there, but you might be able to persuade them that the election is less about foreign policy and more about some other issue on which you're viewed more favorably.
I kind of feel like there ought to be two separate discussions about political discourse: what's effective and ethical for policy discussions, and what's effective and ethical for electoral discussions.
That's a fair point, though I tend to think they just vote their pocketbooks regardless of the narrative.
We didn't make it socially unacceptable to be racist via mockery and humiliation. I didn't go from being a stupid 12yr old kid making fag jokes to a champion for gay rights because somebody shamed me into silence. I mean, I'm stunned to hear people think shame and guilt are effective tools for teaching anything. If this was a parenting thread, most of you guys would be freaking out. "Well, my teenager came home and started going on about "those gays" so I mocked him, laughed at his stupid ideas, and shamed him until he shut up and went to his room crying - so add another gay marriage supporter to the list, folks! You're welcome!"
Also, the poor? How does that work? The other classes, we shame them into silence. Do you plan to shame poor people into silence about their economic status? That makes no sense at all - you're just tossing in "some third thing" to make the sentence more rhetorically snappy.
That can be a pretty strong influence, but true independents are usually motivated by other things, as well. 2006 was unquestionably about Iraq for independent voters, for instance.
Shaming people about their hatred of the poor. It wasn't that difficult of a sentence to understand.
Also, pretty coherent.
Fault lies with you there, spool.
No. This is some stupid shit. Freedom of belief is not a shield of criticism for holding those beliefs. This is where I think a big part of the lefts tactical disadvantage stems from.
Just because your belief some illiterate farmer in upstate New York found golden tablets inscribed by Indians talking about Jesus, is a religious one, doesn't mean you can't be judged for holding it. Cause its fucking ridiculous.
And in the US so many of our ext(R)a-stupid, beliefs stem from the various southern fundamentalist theologies, that rendering them immune because they are religious view-points is ridiculous.
When you combined the two, you have a situation where one side labels everything the disagree with as Immoral/Communist/Socialist/Fascist, and the other side hides a large set of its beliefs under the aegis of religion.
The GOP has one thing right. It is a culture war. Unless you think you can effectively lure these people to break with their beliefs when they vote, you need to attack the underlying beliefs so fewer people will share them in the future. Its a big part of how we countered racism. You make holding the base position, not just the actions that stem from it, so draconian that to profess it is political suicide.
An issue by issue fight is trying to kill the hydra by lobbing off its heads. Go for the heart. The real issue isn't being anti-science homophobes; those are symptoms. The disease is believing a bunch of stone-age scriblings are literally and inerrant true.
Yeah, I keep forgetting that "also military casualties" corollary that's fairly recently been shown to be a better predictor.
Basically incumbent share of the vote = .45 + Ax +By where x is GDP growth in the previous year and y is military casualties. A and B are some coefficients (B is a small negative number)
He just really, really loves bootstraps.
Won't someone stop all this incivility towards Republicans?
If I agreed with your approach, I'd mock you something something English language. Wouldn't that be useful to the discussion?
Now that statement didn't make a whole lot of sense.
It is revealing that you read my sentence, which could technically be taken either way, but reasonably could only mean the one thing, and heard "Jeep says we should shame the poor."
That's a bit closer. There's other stuff that ends up factoring in, too; Katrina came to be shorthand for the Bush administration's failed leadership style, and if you could work it into some press comments alongside your other points, it was going to help you make the case with independents that the election was a referendum on the Bush administration.
But you're absolutely right that it doesn't happen in a vacuum. If independent voters generally think the nation's sinking into the sea, you can't use rhetoric to persuade them that your candidate is strong on lifejackets and hope to ride it out.
One of the major reasons why is their poor communication skills, and part of that is related to ridicule, although tangentially.
If you lay out your argument, and half of voters don't support it even though you're right, you're doing something wrong, and it's not that you aren't being snarky enough.
Common ground is where Republicans do great and pick up a ton of votes, while Democrats stand around looking awkward, and talking about how moronic people are. Which really does come through in some ways.
--LeVar Burton
And that illuminates what Bum's talking about when he says that they're two different (and not even really related) things. Winning an election frequently depends on telling people what they already know or believe to be true so that more than 50% of the electorate will agree with you. Changing someone's opinion on a policy issue always starts with telling someone something that he believes to be wrong.
It's not revealing - that's just a rhetorical device to set up the ridicule. What's really revealing is that you think hating poor people is an actual thing we need to fight against, instead of comical hyperbole used to, gasp, shame and ridicule Republicans for having different economic philosophies.
Homophobia - a thing we should fight
misogyny - a thing we should fight
hating poor people - a thing the left made up to ridicule ideas they don't like. There's maybe two dozen people in this nation that hate the poor, and they don't care what you say about them.
This system, reframing every opposing principle in ridiculous terms and repeating the reframed catchphrase until it penetrates, is something the left deploys across the board.
Example? Bootstraps! It's not possible to have any kind of a discussion about the value of work or self-reliance, any kind of a discussion at all, no matter how reasonable or caveat-encrusted, without somebody trying to shut the whole thing down by saying this. Sometimes it doesn't seem possible to have any discussion at all without somebody trying to blow it up through mockery, condescending sarcasm, and aborted-fetus-poster style shaming.
In the wider political arena, it's unavoidable. Around here, though... it really ought to be.
I personally wouldn't attack him how he chose to grieve but I'm not sure it's rarely fair to call foul when people describe it as a bit creepy when you have your kids (how old were they? It looks like some of them might have been a bit too young to have the concept of dead family thrown in their face unnecessarily) hold the dead baby. Now I think Santorum is vile for politicizing this whole thing and I don't feel much sympathy when it backfires on him. He chose to make a private issue political and he needs to deal with it, it's not like people went and dug this up, he made it an issue on his on volition.
-I'm also seeing a bit too much of the political correctness bullshit. I don't care for political correctness because it too often is twisted into a tool that shuts down discourse. My whole issue is that people get wrapped up in the "you can't say that because I find it hurts my feelings, even though it's not actually offensive." Then we end up in a situation where what needs to be said can't be said and the discussion gets convoluted with attempts to side step hurting someone's feeling. I subscribe the the political tack route, you can ridicule the other side if what they have to say isn't worth consider, even if it's worth considering, it's alright if the truth does hurt their feelings.
I think by far one of the best example of political correctness failing is when it comes to doctors dealing with over weight kids. Telling a parent you kid is obese is starting to become taboo because it hurts someone's feeling even though that is a tactful way to say that "Hey, you kid is over-weight and needs to start shedding some pounds." Instead saying obese is slowly being redefined as being as bad as saying "Hey your kid is a fat ass!" Which isn't tactful and is intended to be offensive.
The GOP has gotten to a point where much of what they espouse can't be handled without ridiculing them. Hell, they've moved some of the goal posts for some of the issues to a position where one has no choice but to ridicule them. Take the ultrasound thing in VA, sure you could have a rational, civil discussion on abortion but when you have a bill the sets out to demean women for seeking an abortion by raping them, there just isn't way to not ridicule that. OWS is provides another good example, they start peacefully protesting and the GOP immediately starts calling them a mob, lazy, entitled and accuses them of starting class warfare. The irony with the OWS part, the GOP and their backers were already resorting to class warfare but apparently it doesn't count when it's only the rich actively screwing over the non-rich, once the 99% calls bullshit then it's all of a sudden class warfare.
The GOP reminds of me of the playground bully who has rich parents. The bully goes around and pick on everyone else and they're suppose to deal but once someone calls him a meanie pants. He runs to his mommy and daddy and cries like a little bitch about how someone was being mean for calling him out and that it isn't fair.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
Hatred of, or more properly, contempt for the poor, is a very real thing in the Republican party. Particularly the less religious neo-con and pseudo-libertarian wings of the party. Paul Ryan being only one of the more vocal cheerleaders of this worrying trend. Ayn Rand unequivocally hated the poor. Her modern disciples have inherited that from her philosophy.
This reads awfully like the war on religion I thought the GOP was making up. I'm not Mormon but there are several Mormon posters on these boards that probably don't appreciate any of this.
You can criticize whatever the hell you want, but I find it far more useful to focus on things that are relevant to policy rather than trying to dig down to some perceived root cause. You may think most people are bigots because they're religious, but maybe they just want to be bigots and they're using religion as an excuse. Unless you can prove that, for example, every Mormon is anti-gay, I think it's far more useful (and far less alienating) to attack the bigotry, not the religion.
Atheism is not a religion per se, but if you believe in freedom of religion at all, then you must believe that those same ideals protect atheist thought.
Endorsed by Mitt Romney!
Your big problem with the "uncivil discourse" around here seems to be you just don't want to admit certain things exist at all, and when other people mention it that's "unfair."
Pretending? The entire argument FOR ridicule in this thread is that it makes people feel so butthurt that they hide their position out of shame!
Shame might work fine in the cases where a small minority believes something (Conspiracy Theories, overt racism, etc), but it does not work when the there's still a sizable minority that believes it. Shaming people is drawing a clear line in the sand, where one side is "Us" and the other side is "Others".
Isn't fear of "Others" the entire reason just about everyone here hates the policies of the Tea Party?
Really? That's surprising to me. I mean I guess that people who have jobs (however crappy) are more able to AFFORD drugs, but I figured the poverty-to-drugs ratio went all the way down.
That response was more my attempt to probe what exactly MentalExercise is scolding everyone for. Which seems to be based on a misunderstanding of people's many different intentions when entering into a discussion. His posts implied that every discussion could be handled with the utmost civility, care and rational argumentation and I was trying to ask him if he even believed it was possible for one party in a conversation to be operating entirely from malice and using the discussion as a medium to inflict profound harm upon his opponent or his opponent's ideas through whatever means were necessary.
I don't see how this contradicts with anything I said unless you are trying to assert that all religious people are propogating social illness and therefore should be ridiculed/attacked for their beliefs.
It directly contradicts with what you said. Because you seem to support the right of the religious to attack atheists, but not the reverse.
If you don't believe that freedom of religion gives the religious carte blanche to vilify atheists (and they do, oh yes they certainly do) then it's fair to say that atheists cannot (or should not) attack religion in much the same way.
If you're agreeing that they all have that right (or should have that right, because obviously they all currently do enjoy these rights) but merely saying that atheists shouldn't say those mean things about religion, then we're right back to one side should be nice even though the other side will absolutely not under any circumstances return the favor.