[CrackMonkey] Lindsey Graham

[Mike Goldman]

Bob Bernstein wrote:

> > Anyhow, it seems to me that your claim is unsupportable.
>
> I'm not making a claim. There's nothing to support. I know that doesn't fit
> in with the reigning language game around here, where the debating club
> paradigm holds sway. The whole dreary business of making claims and bringing
> forth 'evidence' left me cold a long time ago.

You're not making a claim?  I like how you conveniently elide the portion of your
message to which I was replying, in which you say:

"I have talked about the polis. I have claimed membership in it gives us our
lives."

Okay, you withdraw the claim now.  Fine.  It was stupid to begin with.

> What startles the shit out of me - still - is that the olde academic
> claptrap of argument, claim, evidence, inference, etc is taken - especially
> in otherwise hip internet circles - to be the only reasonable use of
> language imaginable. All else, one is led to believe, is useless empty
> 'posturing' devoid of "content."

Bullshit.  Aren't you replying to a message which included some totally illogical
(yet, I think entertaining) verse?  Language can be used for many things,
reasoning is just one of them.  Perhaps your messages have content as "art," but
if you expect to PERSUADE people by them, they ought to stand up to argument.  Or
be backed by force, I suppose.  Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just
happy to be here?

> Other modes of expression are repressed with an imperialistic Procrustean
> axe wielded with breathtaking enthusiasm.

Help! Help! I'm being repressed!

Now you see the violence inherent in the system!

> Look. I offer a set of verbal responses. You are free either to exercise the
> willing suspension of disbelief and muck around in the images I use, or to
> move on. If my sensibilities are dissonant to your cognitive ear, so be it;
> no harm done. But don't give me that crap about 'unsupportable claims.'

Hey, same deal goes both ways.  I'm enjoying the dialogue immensely.  You can keep
making a fool of yourself if you like, or not.  Perhaps I will do the same.

> > If voting is a NEGATIVE activity, then you WANT less of it.
>
> Voting is a mostly harmless ritual, and we need to keep what few rituals we
> have. We need ritual, but the new ones coming into usage suck. Let's hang
> onto the few old ones we still have.

Yes, this is EXACTLY like that cannibalism debate from "At the Drop of a Hat"!   I
really MUST find that now.  Oh, this is just precious.

> > This is mystical nonsense, man.
>
> Translation: I don't know what you're talking about, man.

Right.

>> There are social forms which are non-politic, anyhow.

> I couldn't agree more.

[snip]

> We are always in some social form or other.

Right.

> The ritual of voting is for me mostly a matter of civility, of manners.

The RITUAL of voting may be social, but the ACT of voting is political.

> It's of a piece with the sense in us that causes us to simmer down and sit (or
> stand) fairly still for awhile when we get onto a bus or subway.

Horsefeathers.  And if you believed that voting was just a pleasant social event,
like a picnic or a barbecue or whatever, then why would you object if some people
didn't want to attend?  You're so conflicted it's just pathetic.

> My feeling about this soup of ritual, symbol and mannered behaviour that we
> swim around in every day is that it is a fairly delicate creature, and very
> hard to cultivate once it goes to seed. To see what life is like when it has
> gone to seed one need only glance around the world.

Spoken like a true Southern Gentleman...defending their peculiar institution.

(See how subtly the reductio ad hitlerum can be introduced, even indirectly?  This
is ever so much fun!)