> >After a while, doesn't that kind of "discourse" get a little choppy?
>
> Ace Cockburn seems to have the same problem: it's a style issue,
apparently.
>
> I had a stylistic suggestion already, when i wrote that you might have
> foregrounded the issue of sexism as a problem elsewhere, as i suggested
> with an example of how you could have framed the discussion: "again, to
> speak to those topics doesn't require relativism. example, "i'm not saying
> that rape (or whatever you are speaking of) doesn't occur in our own
> country or elsewhere, ...."
It seems like you believe every statement about the Third World makes an implicit comparison with the First World.
If I declared that the Vietnam War was an act of barbarism (which I believe it was), I wouldn't feel obliged to hurriedly remind my listeners that the Cambodian genocide was an act of barbarism too. It ought to go without saying.
As for your suggestion, it seems eminently reasonable to me, Kelley. In isolation, I have nothing against it. But I still object. It's more than a style issue. When all these rhetorical rules are rigorously enforced, the result is political language that sounds doctrinaire and stale. To me, it's not just an aesthetic offense. It transforms the political culture into something cultish and stale. Political arguments stop sounding like the creative product of individual human minds and start to sound like party manifestos drafted by platform committees. The best writers - Edward Said, for example - don't observe these rules. They respect the intelligence of their audiences more than that.
To me, it's these rhetorical differences that divide different segments of the left more than people realize.
Seth