> This rhetorical tactic of shifting the focus of a
> conversation away from the country/ideologue being
> criticized is used far too often, especially by those
> apologists for "real socialism", to divert any
> criticism of those countries (past and present).
If "shifting the focus of a conversation away from" a country is a "rhetorical tactic", then what do you call shifting the focus of a conversation to the criticism of a country? This is an even older tactic. If the focus of the news is on how "our boys" are doing over in Iraq, whether we "support the troops" or not, the errors of the Hussein regime, the mistakes Castro has made in Cuba, the war, along with issues like affirmative action, crime, avant garde New York City artists who sculpt the Virgin Mary out of doo-doo and so on and so forth, you've already won. You can even bring on a pipsqueak like Michael Kinsley and have them give you the other side of why artists should be publically funded to drop crucifixes in urine or sculpt Mary out of doo-doo, why we should give more lenient criminal sentences to criminals, why an African-American child with worse grades should be accepted instead of your child to a good college, and so on and so forth. The point is you always lose, it's more important to focus people's attention on a topic than what is said about it.
Our blacks IQ's really lower than whites as the Bell Curve says? Now if an average working class person hears a debate about this, what are the odds that they'll come out of it with a more progressive outlook, and what is the chance that they'll get a bit of a sneaking suspicion that for cultural or perhaps biological reasons, blacks are dumber than whites (which is probably not the case, from my point of view)? Then imagine a debate on the crappy economy, Enron, how the way Bush is dealing with it is tax cuts for the wealthy, how polls show for the first time in I believe decades, a majority (over 50%) of Americans want to belong to a union, how we're still paying off the S&L defaults, how the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage is below what it was thirty years ago and so on and so forth. Probably a much different outcome, even if you did match up someone like Krugman with someone from the heritage foundation. What people are focused on is more important than what it says. If headlines talk about the bad economy, people think more progressively, if they talk about war and 9/11, they think in a more reactionary manner - whether or not the paper they are reading is more liberal or more conservative. Context beats content.
Lance