> those illnesses miscalled "psychoses," cannot form the substance
> of any conversation among decent people. Your question refers to
> style, my post referred to substance. There is no possible style which
> could make Ken's propositions civil.
I don't quite understand, off hand, why clinical terms are inappropriate for
social theoretical discourse.
I'm with Ken here. People also use legal terms like "guilty" or "criminal" in a loose and popular sense rather than in a strict and technical sense, and they use old outmoded technical terms like "melanchonic" or "choleric," etc.
If I say that David Irving, the holocaust denying historian of Nazi Germany, is a psycho or a psychopath, anyone who gets upset on behalf of the mentally ill is missing the point. I am not insulting the mentally ill, least of all by using a term which I am now told doesn't actually apply to any mentally ill persons any more.
Granted, it's not a scientific term, but that doesn't mean using it puts one beyond the pale of civilized discussion. What about that "beyond the pale"--as a Jew, should I be offended that the main surving reference to that episode of Russian anti-semitism is to mean, in English, "unacceptable"? Come on, guys and gals, let's not overdose on PC here.
--jks