Nancy Bauer/Dennis Perrin wrote:
>
>
> ALL attacks? Don't know if that's dogmatic thinking, or simply absolutist.
> In any event, I too am thankful you are not as others. Imagine the landslide
> of verbiage if you were.
If you were to check through my posts you would find that (with the exception of comments on those who throw accusations of dogmatism) I have never used that charge. It seems to me, to expand on the last post, that such charges are usually in bad faith because what the accuser *means* is, "You are wrong." Freshmen comp students get around the obligation to defend their propositions by sneaking in an "I think" before the proposition. More sophisticated writers avoid the necessity to back up their propositions by substituting statements about the opponent's *style* rather than committing themselves to actually arguing against the content.
Consider a recent response by Doug to neil:
**** neil wrote:
>But the workers struggles and movements should defend their own class
>terrain and not get sucked into
>taking sides in interimperialist battles. Internationalism of toilers
>against capital should be the watchword--
>not outmoded bourgeois nationalist programmes..
Wow. Parroting formulas like this must be a lot easier than thinking. What do you do with all the time it saves?
Doug
*******
Now neil comes about as close as it is possible to *always* being wrong. And except when I run into his posts quoted by Doug I haven't read one of them in about 4 years. But Doug's reply is nearly as silly as the neil's post. I wonder what Doug does with all the time he saves by seldom responding to content rather than style. It's so much easier to just characterize the writer rather than what the writer says.
Now as far as I am concerned, neil's political positions aren't worth responding to. But if one feels one *must* respond to them, why not do the honest thing and argue against them, said arguement including one's defense of a counter-position.
And that is where my intervention in this thread started. Someone or other had arrogantly characterized their opponents as "prudes," etcetera. It was so much easier than simply arguing against them. Antiporn crusaders are *wrong* -- but very probably many of them have every bit as good a sense of humor as Doug has. They just disagree wtih Doug on what is humorous and what isn't.
Calling people prudes has really the same structure as red-baiting. In traditional rhetoric it is called poisoning the wells of discourse.
Carrol