Rhetoric

Names

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Like other commenters, I was struck by this observation of Lex’s while he related his tale of his initial Occupy Chicago encounter:

My hatred of the Boomers, who have brainwashed and wasted these kids
is boundless. There is nothing wrong with them. They have just never
been taught anything but bullshit. They have been betrayed by their
parents and their teachers. It is very depressing. The country has
been shamefully dumbed down.

Three weeks ago, Thomas S. Monson, the president of my church, observed:

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“Watchful Waiting” vs. “Precautionary Principle”

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Watchful Waiting = Do nothing, even though it may be a good idea to do something, because it’s difficult to justify doing something when institutional third-party payers who evaluate everything in terms of population average costs and benefits rather than your cost and your benefit are making the decisions.

Precautionary Principle = Take extreme measures, even though it may be a good idea to do nothing, because it’s difficult to justify doing nothing when activists who evaluate everything in terms of hypothetical worst cases rather than probability weighted costs and benefits are making the decisions.

The question that always matters most is “Who decides?”. Answer it and you can usually predict what the answers to the other questions will be.

Herman Cain, Race and Anti-Republican Demagoguery

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WRT this post by Glenn Reynolds, it’s always been a mistake to assume that a black Republican candidate would be immune to racial demagoguery. If Cain does well as a candidate Democrats will attack him. They will make race-based and other attacks and they will continue to use the attacks that work. It doesn’t matter that Cain as a black person is most unlikely to be an anti-black racist. What matters is whether any particular kind of demagogic attack on him is politically effective. Conservatives and libertarians have no excuse for uncertainty on this point since Democrats relentlessly attacked their last presidential candidate, a RINO squish and former media favorite, as a right-wing extremist once he became a contender. If Cain becomes the Republican nominee Democrats will attack him as a racist even as they attack Obama’s opponents as racists. There will be no irony in these attacks because they will not be about accuracy or logical consistency but about political effectiveness.

Republican voters should not assume that a candidate’s background will insulate him from personal attacks by political opponents. Democratic pols and their media allies will subject any Republican contender to vile personal attacks and campaigns of character assassination. The best course of action for Republicans and the country is to run highly-qualified candidates who can perform well on their own merits without any consideration to identity politics.

Does “Extremism” Mean What You Think it Means?

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[youtube D58LpHBnvsI Princess Pride “Inconceivable” Montage]

From the Princess Bride:
Vizzini has just cut the rope The Dread Pirate Roberts is climbing up
Vizzini: He didn’t fall? Inconceivable!
Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Of course, Montoya is correct. Vizzini isn’t actually using the word inconceivable correctly. Inconceivable means “not capable of being imagined” but Vizzini uses the word to mean, “I didn’t plan on that happening when I set up this little political kidnapping.”

Right now, the word “extremist” is much bandied about in Washington these days but clearly it doesn’t mean what people seem to think it means. People claim that this or that group of “extremists”  in Congress have hijacked the federal government, and hyperventilate about it endlessly.

By defining as “extremist” people who are in fact not at all “extreme” people end up in a delusional world of political  plans that fail as “inconceivably” as Vizzini’s did, and if they don’t start thinking clearly, their political fortunes could end up sharing Vizzini’s fate.

The word “extreme” means, “furthest  from the  center  or a given point” and that concept is extended metaphorically to people to give us “extremist”, meaning someone who holds political views far from the center of the political spectrum. So what constitutes “far from center” in the context of America’s political system?

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Carl Prine: recommended reading

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[ cross-posted from Zenpundit — war, reading lists ]

Not exactly delighted by the reading list recently provided by the inbound Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Carl Prine at Line of Departure will be offering a “weekly discussion about how one might know one’s self” – Sun Tzu suggests that such knowledge is of value to the professional soldier — via texts other than the “middlebrow books of a recent vintage, pulp paperbacks” of the Army’s recommended readings.

Today he opened with an essay on the First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon, and quoted the final paragraph from Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man:

And here I was, with my knobkerrie in my hand, staring across at the enemy I’d never seen. Somewhere out of sight beyond the splintered tree-tops of Hidden Wood a bird had begun to sing. Without knowing why, I remembered that it was Easter Sunday. Standing in that dismal ditch, I could find no consolation in the thought that Christ was risen. I sploshed back to the dug-out to call the others up for “stand-to.”

I could only respond with a passage that I first encountered, likewise, on a blog – Pat Lang‘s Sic Semper Tyrannis – from Sassoon’s friend and fellow poet of the Great War, Wilfred Owen:

For 14 hours yesterday, I was at work-teaching Christ to lift his cross by the numbers, and how to adjust his crown; and not to imagine he thirst until after the last halt. I attended his Supper to see that there were no complaints; and inspected his feet that they should be worthy of the nails. I see to it that he is dumb, and stands mute before his accusers. With a piece of silver I buy him every day, and with maps I make him familiar with the topography of Golgotha.

And I think to myself how much more power there is in either one of those paragraphs, than in that quip about “no atheists in foxholes”.

* * *

It’s not a matter of one of those “God or no God” debates in which some clergyman might triumph over some atheist, or vice versa, on TV or at the town or village hall. It’s a matter of cultural riches, of having a reference base of image and story that’s strong enough to express the horrors of Passchendaele or the Marne in a way that speaks to the hearts of those who were not there — and of those who will find themselves there, all too really, in other times and other lands.

It’s about narrative deep enough to go with you to Golgotha and back. It’s about the words, and about the furnace.

Prine himself puts it like this:

I care only of your soul and how it might be fired in the smithy of this blog and then hammered by your experiences in the coming years.

Our culture is the smithy.