Letters to the Editor
William Timberman
Published Letters: 3298 Editor's Choice: 7
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On calling for better trolls
[Read the article: The right-wing brain in action]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]In making political arguments, people tend to overlook the collective nature of cultural forces, and of their consequent intricacies.
To an educated layman reading the Book of Mormon, its literary antecedents -- or lack of them -- and the relative cultural isolation of its author are clear. It's obvious, for example, that Joseph Smith didn't actually know Hebrew or Aramaic. To draw from that the conclusion that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is an unsophisticated cultural organization, or to characterize its members as a bunch of hick cultists -- as I've heard people do -- would be to make a grave error.
Likewise, it may be amusing to a modern cosmopolitan to watch from a distance the seemingly absurd contortions of the Roman Catholic canonization process currently underway -- the somewhat desperate search for documented miracles, etc. -- but again, such a characterization overlooks the enormously sophisticated political and cultural influences at work in it, and the transmutation of a relatively primitive historical imperative with origins over a thousand years old into something easily as complex and relevant in the broad sense as any American election.
(A note to believers: no disrespect is meant to your faith, or to the institutions which are its stewards. Quite the contrary; my respect for both is considerable.)
In the ebb and flow of history, though, it's also possible for perfectly respectable cultural forms to become debased. The RWAs being discussed here, high, double-high and otherwise, are in some respects the vulgar offspring of once viable forms of social organization. We shouldn't forget that authoritarian societies built Chartres cathedral, for example, and the great temple at Karnak, and produced most of the great works of literature, philosophy and science which still inform us.
The problem with folks like Michael Ledeen and Glenn Reynolds isn't that they're authoritarians per se, it's that they're stark raving mad, and the most tedious, and frankly disgusting part of arguing against their lunacy is their pretense to being the inheritors and custodians of cultural traditions which their madness prevents them from understanding. From the philosopher king to Moloch is a journey in the wrong direction, against the flow of history, and I hate the idea that anyone need to point it out, least of all me. Oh, cursed spite... just about sums up my reaction.
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Shooter invictus
[Read the article: The right-wing brain in action]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If the enemy doesn't respond to it, what good is it? -- shooter242
Do you beat your dog, shooter? Have you made virtually everyone your enemy? Do you have any friends?
Let me put it to you this way. While you're making enemies, we'll make friends. Fifty years from now, the loser buys the drinks.
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Sigh....
[Read the article: The right-wing brain in action]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]haven't heard any sort of strategy from your side other than blaming conservatives for all ills in the world. -- shooter242
Earwax, that's it. Except that he reads all of Paul Rosenberg's posts and learns nothing -- the only member of a supposedly sentient species who could make that claim. Selective neuro-optical pathways? A billiard ball in place of a cerebral cortex? Until the vivisection is complete, we can only speculate.
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Post Scriptum
[Read the article: The right-wing brain in action]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Shooter, whatever makes you think you're a conservative? Perhaps if you set fire to all the libraries in the world, and executed all the people who've read the books contained in them, you might safely make that claim. As it is, you'd be more credible if you claimed to be Clarabelle.
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Reason not the need
[Read the article: The right-wing brain in action]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]do the readers of this blog really have to fill up 50 pages to respond to such mentally ill paranoia? -- El Cid
It's a division of labor thing. Sometimes I feel like a nut, sometimes I don't. Is there really any harm in poking a hole here in there in what might otherwise be taken by the uninitiated as the seamless fabric of authoritarian bliss?
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On the barbarism of the Middle East
[Read the article: The right-wing brain in action]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]As an American, I consider it shameful that Paul even has to bother to set you folks straight, but I'm certainly glad that he's both willing and superbly able to do so. Would that we had many others like him, with both the knowledge and the patience to correct the knee-jerk assumptions about the other which are so common right across the spectrum of political opinion in this country.
Civilization, and our understanding of what is and isn't civilized, is a long journey. Paul is quite right to point out that much of what constitutes our civilization today is owed to the very people we are now so busy murdering when we aren't equally busy demonizing them. Shooter probably hasn't the slightest idea what the concept of zero has done for us, for example, and I suspect that he isn't alone in his ignorance.
Apart from that, the charges leveled against Middle Eastern tribal cultures -- from the Burka to the blood-feud -- were part of our own culture not so long ago, and there are some, notably Christian fundamentalists, who still lament their passing. Never mind the only good Indian is a dead Indian, Mr. Brown, have you never heard of the Hatfields and McCoys, or of Ian Paisley?
Yes, the liberal vision condemns such practices, and understands that tribalism has seen its best days, as has nationalism, yet that which comes after us will be a collective enterprise, no less than that which came before us. The devotees of fear, ignorance, disgust and destruction among us are a burden on that vision, and on that enterprise, regardless of their cultural antecedents.