Though his distractors say...
Lovely word, that, and a very accurate description of most of Moore's critics.
Avram, perhaps Elric should have said "is projected to be reported on the national news as having little or no impact". Unlike, say, having a haircut on an unused runway, which can disrupt right-wing radio shows for weeks.
The time has come, Patrick said, to speak of many things.
James, to Griff's credit, he did say "I did not trust Nixon, Reagan, Bush 1 or 2, but i did have a level of trust in Carter as well as Clinton." He appears to be against Clark more than he's for Bush. (And he praises Carter, who was in the military.)
William, maybe so people wouldn't ask him questions and expect him to notice?
She [Theresa Lepore] probably thanks God everynight that she was not a Republican.
Lepore, of course, was a Republican. She then became an independent sometime in the '80's, and only became a Democrat in 1996, when she decided to run for the job of election supervisor in a heavily Democratic county. After the 2000 election she re-registered as a Democrat. The notion that she somehow "paid heavily" for designing a ballot that increased by sixfold the number of invalid overvotes is partisan spin, as is the notion that she had any perceptible loyalty to the Democratic party which might have made suspicions of bad faith on her part implausible.
Dennis Slater wrote:
>If you lived in the western US and turned off your
>TV at that point the chances of you going out to
>vote were zero. If Gore won FL the election was
>over.
I do not think that word "zero" means what you think it means. I do not think that the election could have reasonably been considered over if Gore won Florida. I do not know of any evidence that election predictions purporting to decide a race discourage turnout among the 'losing' candidate's party over the winner's, although IIRC there have been studies showing that it depresses voter turnout among both parties about equally. I am not aware that there were any states in 2000 which had only one contested election.
Is there any circumstance, I wonder, in which you would consider the ratio of fallacies to sentences in your posts to be unacceptably high?
Ouija boards and monkeys at typewriters have a chance of getting us closer to the truth. I'm glad to hear Oliver Willis supports their use.
I'm not convinced that what Media Whores Online is doing is worsening public discourse, though. I don't expect them to communicate effectively with anyone but left-wing zealots, but having an inherently narrow audience is not a bad thing. What would be bad would be if their rhetoric inspired their readers to go out and use similar overheated rhetoric, but I haven't seen evidence that that's happening. What defenders like Avedon Carol have been saying is that their overheated rhetoric inspires readers to take action--to write letters--in a way that tamer and more civilized sites don't. I suspect that the letters MWO inspires are generally more civilized than the site itself (and I'd be very interested in evidence either supporting or refuting this view).
To me, the defining characteristic of pollution is that I can't ignore it. Toxic radioactive waste in my groundwater forces itself upon my attention in a way that toxic radioactive waste in a salt mine in Nevada doesn't, even though the two are chemically identical. I can't ignore Rush Limbaugh just by not listening to him, because his followers repeat invective and lies, but I can do a pretty good job of ignoring MWO by not listening to them. That seems like a sound basis for asserting that one of them is pollution and the other one isn't.
This controversy strikes me as being similar to Bob Somerby's attacks this week on Josh Marshall, for not saying often enough that the press was bashing Gore. I agree that when people on our side do something we disagree with, we should condemn it, but at the same time we shouldn't suggest that it's equivalent to what the other guys are doing if the other guys are much, much worse. It's a shame the original Spinsanity piece went so far over the top in making a false equivalence.
Hmm. I don't see any intent to deceive in the use of words like "fascist" and "traitor" as epithets, but you're right that the distortion of their meaning does cause MWO to present untruths as truths, and so calling them dishonest is a fair cop.
I still think there's a qualitative difference between the level of dishonesty on their site and the dishonesty of a Limbaugh or a Coulter, but I'd have to think more carefully before I chose words to describe it.
I hadn't really grasped that you were arguing that MWO-style rhetoric is a weakness--by which I think you mean that it's ineffective and even counterproductive--rather than a bad thing regardless of its effectiveness. I have no trouble agreeing that it's bad, but I have less confidence with either the claim that it's effective or the claim that it isn't. How can you tell?
I'm not a fan of MWO's rhetorical style, and I'm not a regular reader of the site. But I agree with zizka that MWO doesn't use "the worst tactics of its opponents". It isn't the namecalling on the right that's polluted this nation's political discourse. It's the use of deliberate lies, and carelessness with the truth, and the former is a cause of the latter. My greatest frustration is with people who repeat Republican talking points without caring whether they're true or not. You can rebut them endlessly without making an impression because they don't _care_ about objective truth--all they care about is whether their rhetoric is effective. That in my mind is what "pollut[ion] of the public discourse" means. The effect of bouncing lies through an echo chamber is to enable a breed of pseudopundits, for whom dialogue is irrelevant, to drown out dialogue. Not only is it impossible to have an honest discussion with these people, but their volume makes it difficult for more serious people to make themselves heard.
Namecalling, while childish, doesn't have the same impact. Flagrantly biased rhetoric doesn't have the same impact. These tactics may be annoying, but they don't leak into the mainstream of public discourse as readily, and so I don't take the metaphor of "pollution" as seriously. I think it's important to make a distinction between rhetorical tactics that are distasteful in themselves and rhetorical tactics that tend to contaminate the broader discourse in distasteful ways. Namecalling is the sort of tactic that doesn't spread. Only people who call names will call names. But lying isn't--people who wouldn't tell a lie will repeat a lie.
MWO is generally recognized as honest and acknowledges the need to support its charges with sources and links. That puts it miles above its worst opponents, and Patrick's and Spinsanity's failure to acknowledge this more prominently strikes me as a serious defect in their argument.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 4 |
| 2003 | 7 |
| 2002 | 3 |
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