[lbo-talk] master baiting and Ada Juke, imbecile and ho'

snitsnat snitilicious at tampabay.rr.com
Tue Apr 26 13:32:42 PDT 2005


baiting is a form of logical fallacy called poisoning the wells of discourse. You paint your interlocutor as something you assume most people would rather not be labeled: "like the Nazis" or Puritanical or (man-hating) feminst, or Socialist/Commie, or Pwog, or Petty bourgeois, or or or. It famously happened to you over at Femecon where your existence as a man who probably didn't scrub his own toilet and had investments on Wall St. was what was being baited. You had to defend yourself against ludicrous charges before you got anyone to address your argument in the first place. It became all about you and your person as to whether you had a right to make the claims you made in the first place. Never was about your claim.

Which is why it's wrong. The baiter never addresses the argument, she simply calls her interlocter something "poisonous" -- something that any 'right thinking' person shouldn't want to be.

If you truly are a Puritan, it's no big deal to you. Yepper, that's nice, that I am. Tully can respond this way when charged with something we here might think somewhat deplorable (Liberal). She can smile and say, "That's nice." Call Wojtec a misantrhope or 'America Hater', he smiles and says, "Yes, isn't it nice?"

But, get on the Fox News channel and have O'Reilly call you or Sawicky or Delong that. Where are you? You're in an untenable position where the truth is long and complicated but to accept or ignore the charge is to allow a lie to circulate. Thus, you force the person to defend his or her person and how you are labeled before ever getting a chance to make an argument or refute O'Reilly's. Show's over and x number of USers think you're anti-American.

Now, you really should go read that Vermont archive. What a great bunch of material they have on line there, to wit:

Education deprives people of the desire to work because it makes them desire more than what they might otherwise obtain with a blue-collar job. check. And you wonder why anti-intellectualism is a prominent feature of u.s. life. There was a concerted effort to keep people from an education -- because they might desire white-collar jobs!

"Again, the system of public education, especially as it is carried out in the high schools, divorces the young people from a desire to work, and is liable to leave them stranded with high standards of life and little earning power. This condition drives them to the cities after white-collar jobs, compels them to delay marriage, and, finally, causes race suicide."

http://chipmunk.uvm.edu:6336/dynaweb/eugenics/orrlcmc070713/

(and, seriously, don't skip their account of what went wrong with the Roman Empipre and how the Anglo Sax empire isfollowing the same path! It's a laff-riot!_

Remember that the mental equilibrium of many persons is endangered by the high pressure of our twentieth century civilization--be thoughtful of them. Try to get a little recreation every day, and a vacation oftener than once a year. Try to keep your weight up to that regarded as "standard" for your height. Cultivate a cheerful, generous, and charitable disposition. There are many forms of insanity; a large percentage is preventable, and a considerable proportion curable. Observe the few well established and simple rules of health concerning food, sleep, exercise, bathing, and recreation. Avoid alcohol, drugs, immoral living, venereal diseases, great mental or physical stress, and excesses of all kinds. Be temperate in all things.--N. Y. Medical Journal.

http://chipmunk.uvm.edu:6336/dynaweb/eugenics/ojmhvmm071513/ (Rules for mental hygience -- cause mental depravity is contagious is you share a drinking cup! And, woah!, all this worry about drugs. In 1913!)

The comparatively new science of eugenics, based upon the Mendelian laws of heredity, has taught us and more and more is teaching us that capabilities and capacities depend more upon our parents and grandparents than upon environmental conditions. There seems to be no mistake about this: the germ plasm contains the determiners which go to make up the individual. This has been demonstrated by thousands of experiments in the breeding of the lower animals. It is being shown to be true in the study of the family histories of the inmates of our insane hospitals and penal institutions. The twelve hundred defective descendants of one Ada Juke, imbecile and prostitute, is a case in point. Davenport gives this pedigree of a "family of drunkards," which shows the hereditary character and effects of alcoholism and imbecility. An alcoholic, a basket-maker, married a feebleminded woman.

From these two individuals in four generations sprang nearly forty alcoholic, immoral, imbecilic and epileptic offspring.

CONCLUSIONS.

1. The majority of chronic alcoholics are mental defectives. (Incorrigible). 2. A certain number of alcoholics become so through the influence of an unfavorable environment. (Recoverable type). 3. Alcoholism in the parents may cause in the descendants such diseased conditions as insanity, epilepsy, imbecility and other neuroses. 4. Alcoholics of a certain type should be recognized as diseased individuals and, as such, should be segregated and prevented from having children.

http://chipmunk.uvm.edu:6336/dynaweb/eugenics/ojwwvmm081513/



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list