Matt, John, Steve and anyone interested:
John said to dmb:
You display your intelligence, coolness and so forth by producing something new
on the scene, in the academic world. But here in the heartland, we just want
to raise our babies and find some hope for our lives and those of our children.
So hooking into hallmark platitudes might not be cool in the circles you move
in, but here in the real world, it's what we need.
dmb says:
Steve recently asked me why the conversation always seems to "devolve" into a
debate about the conversation itself. Well, this response of yours is a fairly
typical example of the reasons why. There has been a shift or transformation
from one context to another so that the meaning of my comments has been wildly
distorted. I was talking to Steve about Pirsig's "failure" to talk about love
in his attempt to be taken seriously by academic philosophers and you've
responded as if I said people in the heartland shouldn't talk about love. And
of course, it would be completely ridiculous to suggest that one ought not talk
about love at a wedding ceremony.
See, by taking my comments out of the context in which they were made, which
was about Pirsig's MOQ, and putting them into the context of heartland dads who
love their babies, the meaning is rather dramatically altered and the meaning
of my comments is thereby construed as something very different from what was
actually being said. This sort of distortion is not only intellectually bogus
because the context changes the meaning, it also relies almost entirely on
cheap sentimentality and it fabricates a rather silly straw man, as if anyone
would be opposed to hope or babies.
Criticizing moves like this is NOT the cause of conversational devolution.
Moves like that have already spoiled the conversation and complaining about it
could, if taken seriously, put the conversation back on track.
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