From: Bill Stoddard (stoddard@raleigh.ibm.com)
Date: Wed Jan 31 2001 - 06:09:13 PST
"Hi my name is Johnny Knoxville and I am about to FoRK a controversial post...
:-)"
From the article cited...
"It is important to be clear about some things. Not all conservatives
participate in this cult or speak its jargon, and not all speakers of
the jargon engage in personal abuse."
Substitute 'conservatives' with 'liberals' in the above sentence and it is
just as accurate.
I made the same observation about 'emotional abuse' used as a political weapon
a number of years ago. It is a tactic long used by gun control advocates "to
advance their extremist views :-)". Gun owners have been called 'baby
murderers', pricks like Spike Lee advocate murdering Charlton Heston (who was
very active in the Civil Rights Movement, BTW) and I could go on and on.
Demonizing of the absolutely worst kind, supported by much of the media and
encouraged by the democratic party. Seeing this abuse by so called liberals
was my first real life experience with "things political".
Agre is obviously arguing from the liberal stance, not a 'disinterested' third
party. He is just a guilty of the BS flinging as he claims his enemies are and
if he opened his eyes, he would see this sort of shit has been happening from
the dawn of history. It is the human condition. If he is really concerned
about this, he will address it in a politically neutral way. If he chooses not
to address it in a politically neutral way, his message is marginalized.
Bill
> From Phil Agre's Red Rocks Eaters list:
>
> http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/2000/RRE.the.new.jargon.html
>
> "I am talking here about people who are emotionally abusive, and
> who have obviously invested effort in learning a whole technology of
> emotional abuse that they are deploying in a systematic way for (what
> they regard as) political purposes. I am talking about people who
> express themselves in snide, sarcastic, scornful tones, who express
> themselves in innuendoes, who invest incredible effort in provoking
> an intemperate response so that they can portray themselves as victims,
> and who engage in complicatedly indirect forms of rhetoric that deniably
> presuppose things that are false."
>
>
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