I'm with Carrol on this one. Call them what they are without resorting to perjoratives, or being nice. Using cute or otherwise slang just feeds into their martyr/victim role;'Look, they even call us nasty names'.
PC
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CB: What do you say they actually are ?
They definitely are not victims of oppression in the way "darkies" are. To put "fundie" in the same category as "darky" or "towelhead" implies that "fundies" are the victims of world historic oppression - a seriously false proposition.
As Kelley says, no matter what we say, even if we are silent, they will lie and say we are vicimizing them. They are doing that now, and there is very little mass media report of left descriptions of fundamentalists.
Whose the audience of our statements ? The "victim" role the fundies cop to is extremely phony. Anybody in our target audience who buys that phony b.s. is not going to be persuadable through polite language that the fundies are bad. Our audience is people who can be persuaded that fundamentalists are wolves in sheep's clothing. Our goal is to demonstrate that fundies are oppressors. If we can't get a lot of people angry at the fundies, we won't get anything done.
Fight righteous anger with righteous anger. Agitate !
"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning." - Frederick Douglass, Christian agitator against other Christians.
Not attacking the fundies is not working. Try something different. Howard Dean may be a liberal and a Democrat, but he's trying what needs to be tried right now. Some of the liberal talk-radio hosts are trying the same tactic now.
Ironically, it is the Clintonians who are counselling against use of sharp language in criticizing the rightwing.
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Jeffrey Fisher:
no, they're not, but (a) that's not an argument against carrol's point, and
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CB: How is it not an argument against Carrol's point ?
Our target audience is not the fanatics, but others who we want to make angry with the fanatics. Disciplining ourselves to use polite language in referring to the fanatics is not going to be more persuasive to the non-fanatics. We want to get the non-fanatics to call the fanatics names like "fanatic".
Lets not misuse the term "strawperson" shall we ? Strawperson argument means arguing with a point that the speaker didn't make. I am arguing with the point Carrol made, so it's not a strawperson argument.
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(b) it's not the fanatics we're trying to turn off the road to fascism, at least in the first instance. so let's let go of that little straw person, shall we?
J
Carrol: Precisely. My argument that we speak to those who already agree with us is an obvious and long-established point which many posters on this list seem either to have great difficulty in grasping or else simply choose to distort it for fun.
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CB: What is your argument that we not use the term "fundie" in speaking to people who already agree with us ? Seems the opposite is true. We should agitate those who "already agree with us" but don't all the way agree with us to the point of being angry with the fundies.
Whispered agitation must use words of sharp content because we can't shout.
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Imagine yourself in the center of a circle with a 200 yard radius. Your voice can't rise above a whisper. You want to reach out as far as possible.
But who do you talk to _first_? Obviously, those standing next to you. And you need to convince them to talk to those near them.
The point about a fundamentalist who is ALSO a "fascist roader" is not that she is a fundamentalist but that she is a "fascist roader." We son't talk to her. We talk to the fundamentalist standing next to her who happens _not_ to be a "fascist roader" but someone who opposes the war.
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CB: I'd say the first group we talk to are not fundamentalists of any sort, but religious people who are not fundamentalists. We want to alienate more the non-fundies from the fundies.
How do we speak about the fundamentalist fascist roader to the fundamentalist non-fascist roader ? By politely calling the former a "fascist roader" ?
How many fundamentalists against the war are there ? Not many.
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Attacking "fundamentalists" (or referring to them sneeringly as "fundies") cuts us off from that fundamentalist who happens to agree with us on the main point now.
Carrol
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CB: I don't agree that any fundies are our main target audience now. There is a huge group of non-fundamentalist ,religious people. That's our target audience.