Jim Graham wrote: > Sour grapes: > > Reading Michael Atherton's response to my posting on that > Nokomis article regarding NRP was like drinking a bad year > Cabernet. Do I detect a little sour grapes here? Sour grapes > from someone who was not able to control the voting of his fellow > neighborhood residents? Talk about hyperbole and misleading to > motivate people through irrationality and FEAR. Michael's > post sure seems to show how to do it.
Being one who often finds themselves fighting for minority causes I've come to recognize the standard techniques that opponents often use to invalidate your position without actually addressing your arguments. There are a number of these techniques, I will identify just a few of them. Years ago you could accuse someone of having an "agenda". I suspect that this was a negative counter because anyone who has to take the time to think out their motivation and rational must not be acting intuitively. This approach falls back on the religious assumption that faith and trust in God is more reliable than thought and rationality. Later, when it was no longer sufficient to claim the existence of an agenda, it was necessary to accuse someone of having a "hidden" agenda, far more evil than an agenda alone. You must have thought this all out, but you are keeping your strategy secret. This works well because you can never prove to everyone's satisfaction that you have truly reveled your agenda. If worst comes to worst they can called in a psychologist who can testify that you are not even aware of your own agenda. It is indeed secret even to yourself. It's hard to deny expert testimony (the Soviets often used this technique). There's also the "axe to grind" technique. If you have an axe to grind then your cause cannot possibly be worthy. This is the antithesis of an "agenda" because rather than being based on rationality your cause is invalidated because you are acting emotionally. These people need to cover all the bases. The techniques are often used in combination. So they can start out by claiming that you have an agenda, but if you clearly identify your rational, they can then accuse you of having an axe to grind. And then of course there's always, "sour grapes." No matter how valid your arguments or righteous your grievances, they can always be invalidated because you happen to be on the losing side. This is a variant of the Fundamental Attribution Error in which you attribute the circumstances of someone's failure to some unrelated personal attribute such as race. These techniques fall under the more general class of ad hominem attacks. They are not hard to identify, just look to see if people provide counter arguments, rather than to simply claim that you have an agenda (secret or not), an axe to grind, or attribute your position to sour grapes. Michael Atherton Prospect Park TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. 2. If you don't like what's being discussed here, don't complain - change the subject (Mpls-specific, of course.) ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
