Scott, I think you're setting up another misleading dichotomy here.
I wasn't setting up any sort of dichotomy at all, Henry. My post was just a "heck yeah" to Lucy's last point and a corollary to Patrick's observation that there's a big, vigorous audience of American liberals who read liberal blogs for what he termed the "red meat" of loud, proud, unapologetic liberal discourse.
My point was that there are reasons for this that go well beyond the pleasant feeling of reading opinions that are congruent with our own. It ties in to what Patrick just said-- we're not really up against the people who are inclined to civility and compromise, here. We're up against a network of intolerant, privilege-hoarding wannabe fascist wingnuts who've made a standard practice of shaming their opponents into muzzling themselves with pleas to codes of behavior that the wingnuts themselves do not follow. Because of this, some of us cherish progressive blogs that refuse to preface every opinion and analysis with a hand-wringing apology to the forces of darkness for daring to disagree with them. No more, no less.
I don't know that anyone's been arguing for the position that "liberals must always take pains to avoid the uneeemly appearance of excessive passion or disagreement." Certainly I haven't. Nor has Kevin.
I didn't say that either of you had, did I? To misquote Frank Herbert, I displayed a general garment; there's no need for you to worry that it was cut to your fit, or to Kevin's. Take it easy, man. I sense that you mean very well, but I think you're backing dumptrucks full of dirt up to several conversational molehills here.
It is a bad thing to expect us to always be nice and understanding when the other side will never ever be nice and understanding.
And that's just it, Lucy... many of us are extremely sensitive to the whole "liberals must always take pains to avoid the uneeemly appearance of excessive passion or disagreement" argument, because it's one of the pillars of wingnut attempts to control the discourse.
You can see it on a recurring basis everywhere from Instadipshit to Little Green Footballs; from Powerline to whichever crew of reanimated cadavers is guesting at NRO in any given week. The faux more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger posts about how they'd just love to talk to "reasonable" and "respectful" liberals, but gosh darn if there just aren't any to be found!
As far as they're concerned, disagreement itself is disrespect; failure to take their wildly shifting talking points at absolute face value is degeneracy. They don't actually give a rat's ass about genuinely "reasonable" dialogue; they just want to use our own vestigial sense of fair play to convince us that it's very rude to yelp while they're trying to knock us down in the dirt and pee on our faces.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 3 |
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