>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.
Remember Doug likes Wallace Stevens*? Being a lover of modernism, he thinks that style = content = author (if the author is not dead, that is). The equation, of course, cannot & shouldn't be applied to all, but in the case of Neil (the dogmatist properly so called, since he applies correct principles inappropriately), the equation works, for the content of a dogmatist is his or her style: an ungainly substitution of an endless recitation of correct principles for a difficult task of analyzing the phenomena in question.
Yoshie
* She was the single artificer of the world In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea, Whatever self it had, became the self That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we, As we beheld her striding there alone, Knew that there never was a world for her Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
("The Idea of Order at Key West," at <http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/Poetry/Stevens/The_Idea_of_Order_at_Key_West.html>)