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Does it help your argument to be petty?
David Sirota is a prominent spokesperson for liberalism who often buries his insightful commentary under adolescent name calling.
“Ok, I promised myself I wouldn’t get too into following Sen. Joe Lieberman (CfL-CT), but this is really just too disgusting. On 11/12/06, Tim Russert (aka. Pumpkinhead) asked Lieberman (aka. Rubberface) about Iraq: “Should we send more troops?â€?”
Certainly folks all along the political spectrum say nasty things about their opponents. Often it is because their audience already agrees with them. But if it is important to us to try and persuade others then personal slights are just not helpful and trivializes our message.
Ridiculing hypocrisy is fine with me. Ridiculing someone for something that is not under their control is mean and petty.
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8 Responses to “Does it help your argument to be petty?”
Actually, I would argue that ridicule AT ALL (even attached to an allegation of hypocrisy) does nothing to move a debate forward or to advance policy options. All ridicule does is preach to the already-converted while hardening the resistance and frustration of those who disagree.
Depends on the setting of the ridicule. In a debate it’s pointless. On a blog it’s expected, and only the quality and cogency of the ridicule matter. Bad ideas, people, and actions DESERVE ridicule; which is far more civilized than a bullet.
There’s a line somewhere in there. On the whole I agree with Tutakai, that riducle (of individuals particularly) is bad. One doesn’t want a blog to be completely boring, of course, but I’m just never going to waste my time reading someone like Sirota, who can’t speak on any topic without injecting such foolishness.
On my own blog, my co-bloggers and I were recently challenged by a reader regarding our fairly consistent practice to refer to the New York Times as the New York Tehran Times. We’ve done many substantive posts on why we believe that the Times has shredded what respect it had left and has acted consistently out of political malice rather than in support of any legitimate public right to know. Our reader suggested we were discouraging moderate readers by making such constant references to the Tehran Times without providing a link to a page showing why we were doing so.
But it seems to me that there is a point somewhere between staid blandness and constant name-calling. One, calling an organization a name seems more fair game to me than an individual. Two, personal traits (hair, weight, height, facial characteristics) is just really silly and should be always off-limits. Three, it’s one thing to make the occasional joke, another to be unable to write cogently without resort to such silliness. Four, we must remember that other people may not think the idea, person or action is “bad”, and deserving of ridicule. Resorting to ridicule, while more civilized than a bullet, is still likely to antagonize those people, who might be more receptive to being persuaded if you didn’t start off by calling their argument or belief ridiculous.
This sounds like a really important issue.
Almost 3000 Americans have been killed in Iraq.
We should focus on petty name calling.
Some 25,000 Americans have been seriously wounded in Iraq.
It’s really important that politicians and commentators be as civil as possible.
We have spend half a trillion dollar in Iraq.
Being polite is of overriding importance.
Andrew, you mystify me.
You are certainly right that the loss of blood and treasure in Iraq is of paramount importance for our society.
And you are a frequent commenter on a blog that is about improving the environment for the exchange of ideas. It is about learning how to listen, learn and persuade. These are the skills the world needs more of to reduce conflict, death and destruction.
I think of lots of things to call Sirota every time I read him. “Prominent spokesperson for liberalism” is definitely not one of them.
LMAO. It may be petty as he**, but its also funny. Tim Russert’s head does look like a pumpkin! He would have made a great Charlie Brown.
We should all remember what our mum’s used to say = “if you can’t say anything ‘nice’ then don’t say anything at all.’ Since they all have mum’s perhaps we should appeal to them, the mothers, to keep their ‘children’ in check.
Cheers