Rhetoric

My Response

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I’m going to start pasting the following in threads whenever I encounter the casual and ritualized accusations of racism from leftists.

No matter what
 
You do or say
 
They’ll call you racist
 
Anyway

Abuse of a word or concept robs it of its power. Once the accusation of racism was devastating, now it’s just annoying and merely signifies that a leftist disagrees with you. It only has real impact when made by a non-leftist.

Instead of making the equally ritualized and pointless “No, I’m not a racist” retort, I will use my new phrase to point out the robotic nature of the accusation. Everyone else should consider doing it as well. Maybe we can train them to stop abusing the word or at least force them to come up with something new.

So, Fox reports – but Not Nearly as Well as Iowahawk.

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Iowahawk allusion (if you don’t want to entangle yourself in the rest).

Today Fox News discussed “Your Life, Your Choices” , an “end of life” booklet developed by the VA and recommended for use in counseling. The segment appears to have been prompted by Jim Towey’s piece in WSJ, “The Death Book for Veterans.” To counter Towey, the VA’s spokesperson was Tammi Duckworth, VA Assistant Secretary. The exchange was lively, if frustrating.

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Quote of the Day

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But beyond humor that misses, with some audiences or with all, what characterizes snark? Two things, I think. One is that it is an appeal to emotion – it is a statement with a particular affect, and the affect is an appeal to an attitude in which both writer and reader participate, but they participate in an exclusionary way. This is what makes it a branch of irony. Instead of arguing to everyone on the basis of shared reason so that, at least in principle, everyone could be included in the shared sentiment, snark depends upon exclusion. It is a refusal to offer a public argument, with the possibility of reasoned inclusion, and instead depends upon prior shared views that merely exclude because snark does not make an attempt to persuade. It is ‘affectively exclusionary’ in the language of moral psychology.
 
[…]
 
Two, because snark depends upon a prior shared commitment, it is a form of question-begging argument. Not precisely a form of argument, because it is about affect, not reason. So, more precisely, snark is the affective cognate of a question-begging argument, in which the sentiment of the conclusion assumes the sentiment of the premise. It assumes that one already shares the attitudes necessary to … share the attitudes.

–Kenneth Anderson

There are More Ways to Go Wrong Than to Go Right.

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Megan McArdle makes a very good general point in her post on the illusion that socialism will reduce health-care costs:

We have been trying to control health care costs since the 1970s made it clear that Medicare was going to get really, really expensive.  And any idea that you care to name, from comparative effectiveness research to healthcare IT to preventive medicine . . . these have all been on the table for more than thirty years, under one name or another.  They haven’t happened.
 
The answer that those promising magical cost reductions need to ask is “Why haven’t they happened?” and “What has changed to make them feasible now?”  But when I ask this question, I get angry demands that I put forward my plan for cost control, rather than merely critiquing everyone else’s.  This seems rather like demanding that I put forward my design for a perpetual motion machine before I am allowed to point out problems in the US energy market.

I was reminded of this style of argumentation by Harry Angstrom’s comments in my previous post, where he makes this exact argument. In thinking about it, I realized that a lot of debates with leftists often come down to this type of, “I have an idea and you don’t, therefore I must have the best plan,” argument. 

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Nietzsche’s Lessons for the Internet

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From Something Positive

If you you don’t know what a LOLCAT is here are some examples. 

I can emphasize with the character’s shock. I recently spent several hours over the course of two days trying to explain to someone on the Mythbusters forum why their little gadget didn’t work as they thought it did. I gave up when they declared it a version of a perpetual motion machine. I have no idea why I spent so much time. At first I was intrigued by the physics, but after I figured it out I kept banging my head against a wall trying to explain to the guy basic scientific method and the concept of conservation of energy.