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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Michael Harold
Published Letters: 498 Editor's Choice: 3
William Timberman
Is the fact that Fred Thompson actually smokes his cigars a help or a hindrance when it comes to portraying the essential qualities of manliness?
Even Freud said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." On the other hand, sometimes it's not. I'm guessing (if we count the cigar) that Thompson is somewhere between a 0 and a 1 on the Kinsey scale. "Not that there's anything wrong with that."
Following Scientician
How bad can a guy who likes busty blondes be?
http://tinyurl.com/29pkll
Shooter242, RealName, kdwmson, tiberius, et al
The most popular career of a Greek of ability at the time was politics; hence the sophists largely concentrated on teaching rhetoric. The aims of the young politicians whom they trained were to persuade the multitude of whatever they wished them to believed. The search for truth was not top priority. Consequently the sophists undertook to provide a stock of arguments on any subject, or to prove any position. They boasted of their ability to make the worse appear the better reason, to prove that black is white. Some, like Gorgias, asserted that it was not necessary to have any knowledge of a subject to give satisfactory replies as regards it. Thus, Gorgias ostentatiously answered any question on any subject instantly and without consideration. To attain these ends mere quibbling, and the scoring of verbal points were employed. In this way, the sophists tried to entangle, entrap, and confuse their opponents, and even, if this were not possible, to beat them down by mere violence and noise. They sought also to dazzle by means of strange or flowery metaphors, by unusual figures of speech, by epigrams and paradoxes, and in general by being clever and smart, rather than earnest and truthful. Hence our word "sophistry": the use of fallacious arguments knowing them to be such. Early on Sophists were seen to be of merit as people of superior skill or wisdom, as we find in Pindar and Herodotus. We learn from Plato, though, that even in the 5th century there was a prejudice against the name "sophist". By Aristotle's time, the name bore a contemptuous meaning, as he defines "sophist" as one who reasons falsely for the sake of gain.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/s/sophists.htm
That's you guys.
I agree with you that everything they do is in bad faith. They have no interest in dialogue or in the rational exchange of ideas. They're here to get attention, to distract and disrupt and to poison any attempt to gain and share any understanding of social and political problems.
I tend to ignore them, but they're like flies or mosquitoes. After a while I sometimes get distracted and take a swat at one of them, which is a complete waste of time.
If we try to include them in the discussion, they either don't want or don't know how to participate. If we ignore them, they don't go away. As long as they can insert one or two bad puns or other form of totally lame trope, they seem to be happy with their lot in life.
Given the general mediocrity of their comments, I don't think they do that much damage.
In the event I haven't said enough bad things about them, let me add, they don't seem to be able to pay attention to a discussion for more than a few posts, which I suppose is indicative of something, although I'm not sure what.
"I wasn't hardly doing any psychological theorizing or analysis in this post"
I see it all the time in comments (except for bebop-o. poet that he is, his stuff is always perfect.) Five seconds after you post you see the double articles "the the", the adjective you forgot to remove when you changed a dependent clause, all sorts of things. It's a blogger's five second rule. You never see the typo until five seconds after you've posted. Some typos are so common they become a symbol of cool. Teh for example.
If we could get Salon to give us one last chance to edit after we post, that would be nice. I don't think it would reduce the typos, but it would be nice.
Glenn must really be getting famous. I've never seen so many trolls in one spot on this blog before. If this were a communications network their rampant one-lamers would constitute a denial of service attack.
So do any number of categories of sociopaths and psychopaths, both in and of service to governments and terrorist groups.
It's not about who does it. It's about the fact that we did it and the whole world knows it. Now that we've broken every rule regarding the acceptable behavior of civilized nations, even and especially including nations at war, nothing is off the table.
I would never in a million years send a soldier into an environment where both sides did not understand that people who torture people will be held accountable in the same ways that the defendants at Nuremberg were held accountable.
But now we can't. We have created a world in which people can be waterboarded, attacked by dogs, and even burned with blowtorches and both sides will point a finger and say, "But he did it, too!"
Now that is a symptom of a supposedly civilized nation's sociopathology if there ever was one.
When I first heard about America's criminal behavior at Abu Ghraib and later at Guantanamo, I was enraged. Then I calmed down. Then my inner sense of self-preservation went into freak-out mode, not only because of what the U.S. government was doing to "enemy combatants," but also because of something my father told me when I was a child that I remember to this day:
The meanest thing you ever see your best friend do to somebody else, he may do to you someday.
Someday may be fast approaching.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
