Rakesh (under the nom de plume Lakshmi Rhone) writes: > I think that I am encouraged by this manifesto against civility to say that > it is idiotic. The problem is not that the Tea Party is uncivil; it is that > it paranoid. The Fox/Hannity/Limbaugh/Palin discourse makes symptoms worse > in paranoid schizophrenics.
This seems quite unfair to paranoid schizophrenics and others with mental illnesses. Now, some of these folks do have paranoid fears (i.e., illogical and untrue ones) but real paranoids can't function well at all in society as we know it. Also, one can be temporarily paranoid, as from smoking too much pot or from having actual enemies who use tactics that encourage paranoid delusions (as seems to have happened to Julian Assange at one point). And clinging to illogical and untrue delusions is hardly unique to the right wingers. > Is the argument against civility imply that we cannot be pissed off by _the > right-wing paranoia machine_ [my emphasis]. This is much more accurate and fair: the right-wing machine _uses_ paranoid rhetoric in a demagogic and opportunist way, trying to appeal to everyone's worst fears (to unite their movement and recruit new members), just as gun-dealers likely appealed to paranoia fears about Obama "taking away our guns" to pump up sales. Part of the appeal of this kind of rhetoric to these toads is that it's impossible to prove an (empirical) negative: we can't _prove_ that Obama doesn't have secret nefarious plots (since they're secret), just as Iraq couldn't _prove_ that it didn't have Weapons of Mass Destruction after 2003 (since they might have been hidden somewhere under a mountain and then FedExed to Nepal when the US invaded). It's also the fallacious "slippery slope" argument: a small policy change going against what right-wingers like (restrictions on junk food consumption, for example) is extrapolated into a snow-balling process of "authoritarian" take-over, ignoring counteracting forces (along with any benefits arising from the policy). (Sorry to be unfair to amphibians.) -- Jim Devine / "The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking." - John Kenneth Galbraith _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
