[Platt] In pursuing that moral goal, personal attacks should be shunned. [Arlo] The underlying question is, when social level rhetoric is used to assault intellectual patterns, is it immoral to finally combine intellectual response with a counter social-level attack? Or, in short, when one is assaulted with social-level anti-intellectualism is a solely intellectual response adequate? My answer, is no. Or to say it proverbially, one must fight fire with fire.
The more aggressive social-level anti-intellectualism becomes, as in the case of repeated distortions and misdirection of intellectual responses and the repetition of socal-level assaults, one has to couple the intellectual-level replies with a social-level condemnation of the assault and rhetorical devices being used. And those who continually rely on social-level anti-intellectual rhetorical trickery, deception and distortion should not be surprised when an intellectual response is finally coupled with a condemnation of those tactics as "moronic". The Buddha may take the high road and meet such ongoing, despicable assaults with non-response, but for mere humans one finally has call a spade a spade. This may indeed be lowering oneself to the level of those who wield such tactics in the first place, but in the face of such anti-intellectualism there is little other recourse, I'm afraid. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
