Barkley Rosser wrote: >Tom, > This interesting post simply does not address the question. On strictly grammatical grounds, I'd have to agree. Brad's question was about a "strange and pathetic attempt to deny the agency of those who are undertaking the ethnic cleansing". It was a leading question and couldn't be answered without either accepting or challenging its fused premises that: 1. Paul Phillips' message was "strange and pathetic"; 2. that Paul attempted to "deny the agency" of the Yugoslav government in the events in Kosovo and 3. that what is occuring in Kosovo is unambiguously "ethnic cleansing" as opposed to, say, a military-strategic response to the bombing campaign. Given its highly rhetorical charge, one might suspect that Brad's question was rhetorical. That is, he wasn't really so much asking a question as using the question form to make a series of claims that were themselves questionable. Perhaps the only appropriate way to address such a rhetorical question is with another rhetorical question: why this strange and pathetic attempt to deny the agency of those who issued the ultimatum and recklessly escalated the hostilities? When confronted with the false dilemma of either pedantically challenging the premises of a leading question or joining in a communicatively sterile rhetorical tennis match, one can always take a third -- unoffered -- route: to digress interestingly. regards, Tom Walker http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/covenant.htm
