They are created by an interaction between the individual and others. The typer of interaction pretty much influences, if not determines, the thoughts and actions.
It therefore makes perfect sense to ask for civility in verbal interaction, for otherwise this interaction will escalate to aggression. I personally practice that by avoiding interactions that are uncivil, competitive and having an aggressive potential, and I think everyone else is perfectly capable of doing the same, unless one desires to get into a pissing contest.
But I do not think it is unreasonable to ask the media - which use publicly owned airspace for free - to use it in a way that is, well, civil.
Freedom to speak does not mean the freedom to be heard. Palin Beck & Co may be free to say whatever they want, no mater how civil or uncivil, but using some technological contraption (cf. media) to force others to hear it is an invasion of privacy, no much different form breaking into someone's house.
I am all for the freedom of speech - but I am also against the privilege of forcing others to hear that speech. Airlines cannot prohibit possession of "dangerous substances" but they are perfectly within their rights to prohibit using their aircraft to transport them. The same should pertain to airwaves.
Wojtek
On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 9:54 AM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>wrote:
> <
> http://wcg-journal.blogspot.com/2011/01/wrong-kind-of-climate-control-risks-of.html
> >:
>
> "...it is a useless, if pretty, piety to urge everyone to be 'civil' in
> their discourse. The reason for the inflamed nature of present political
> debate in the United States is that the country is in decline and economic
> inequality and insecurity have destroyed our social and cultural fabric..."
>
>
>
> On 1/13/11 7:49 AM, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>> On Jan 13, 2011, at 8:03 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>>
>> Come on, Doug. Loughner is indisputably crazy, but that hasn't stopped
>>> many from saying, "See? this is what happens when you let those tea-party
>>> ideas get about."
>>>
>> Actually, the liberals, bien-pensant or not, have been complaining about
>> violent language and imagery used by name-brand Republican politicans and
>> right-wing media stars. And the language is really violent. Yes, Loughner is
>> crazy, but madness operates in a social context and frequently expresses
>> itself through political symbols emanating from the discursive fever swamp.
>>
>> The bien-pensant Obamist liberals have a problem with the tea party. They
>>> were delighted to have it emerge so that they could run against it in order
>>> to gather the political class (the 20% of the population with a degree from
>>> a good college) with the threat of raving yahoos form the other 80%. But
>>> then they discovered that, small and even cynical as the tea-party
>>> organizations are, they've attracted the sympathy of the majority of the
>>> population.
>>>
>> No, they haven't really. They've attracted the sympathy of right-wing
>> Republicans. It wouldn't surprise me if these shootings damage the TP brand
>> and support ebbs.
>>
>> Now as the Great Recession makes things increasingly bad, the repressed
>>> economic desires - the "American dream" - return as a symptom and takes
>>> outre forms in the tea party. Nativism and monetary crankiness becomes the
>>> socialism of fools as antisemitism once was.*
>>>
>> Except that there's nothing socialist about it - it's all that old petty
>> bourgeois right-wing self-reliant crap.
>>
>> And you know perfectly well that McCarthyism was only synecdochically
>>> related to a dipso Republican senator. It's the general name for the
>>> post-WWII ideological rectification campaign - beginning in a Democratic
>>> administration (with Truman's loyalty program) - to forestall the demand for
>>> social democratic reforms of the sort appearing in Europe.
>>>
>> Sure. Also state power. Keith Olbermann doesn't have that.
>>
>> Doug
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