On Apr 20, 2005, at 7:08 PM, Gautam Mukunda wrote:
--- Dan Minette <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote (quoting Warren, whose post I still haven't got):
Well, you need to take me out of your trash filter, man.
(Yes, that was meant to be wry.)
"That's just the empty cant of ideologically andmorally bereft leftist extremists"
To be fair, I should not have said this. I was tired and frustrated when I wrote it. It's just that I've heard this said, over and over and over again, and I, and many other people, have rebutted it over and over and over again, and none of the people saying this have ever even bothered to respond to the points made, over and over and over again, that this is a ridiculous thing to say.
This I understand. There are plenty of times when I've thought, oh no, not *that* tired old hobbyhorse again. There are also times when I've made an end run around all the arguments leading up to whatever a given conclusion might be and simply jumped right to the end. (That usually comes back to bite me.) There've been some times when I've just not responded to the stuff that makes my eyes roll; I can't recall offhand if that's worked in the long run or not, but it sure can make for some short replies sometimes.
I don't know what the literary equivalent to this would be - someone telling you, over and over again, that a mixed metaphor is gramatically correct even when you send him hour grammar textbooks saying otherwise?
More on the order, perhaps, of cliches -- they're just appalling, don't add any value to a narrative, and almost always can be replaced with something much more creative, colorful and effective with just a little thought. They feel like placeholders when I come across them -- almost like the author needed to put *something* there, and always meant to go back and fix it, but somehow just never did. (Though there are some authors that just use them and don't care; I tend not to read their works, as it's no good at all for my blood pressure.)
Won't disagree that the war for oil argument really isn't; there's a lot wrong with the assertion, but possibly your correspondent at the time (Doug?) was also tired. The corollary could be the war to get the WMDs away from Saddam story, which was still being promoted even when it was looking increasingly unlikely (post invasion) that Iraq had had any in its possession for years.
IIRC recent polls indicate that a significant minority of Americans still believe that Iraq *did* have unconventional weapons, and that they were seized by US forces. I don't think anyone's seriously promoting the WMD idea any more, but for a while there it was as tiresome to me as the war-for-oil mantra seems to be for you.
And yeah, as you observed, people do things for more than one reason; many people -- possibly all people -- can actually carry multiple and mutually-contradictory views, and yet behave in a way that is consistent to many nines. Nations, being bodies of people, logically must be capable of similar behavior -- but maybe that's best taken up on the other thread.
ANYway, thanks for the comments; they're appreciated.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
_______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
