December 17, 2003
The latté is the politics
One of the frustrations of being a "warblogger" is that the anti-war types will snipe and sneer endlessly, but won't debate. At least not using dead-white-men-of-ancient-Greece-patriarchical-homophobic tools like, you know, "logic," or "facts." At least I've never had a real debate—perhaps i'm too minor a weblogger. (Though I've noticed that if I make some trifling mistake in an otherwise impeccably [I think] logical argument, the epee is often embedded in my gizzard with blinding speed, with the rest of the stuff still ignored.)
A subset of this frustration is when you ask some leftizoid: "OK, you don't like the President's plans. At least they are bold attempts to take on big problems. What's your big vision?" What's your plan? "...And answer came there none."
I think this article, The Bike-Path Left suggests a reason why...
....He's [Dean] full of anger.Posted by John Weidner at December 17, 2003 01:55 PM | TrackBackBut only for peripheral issues. Ask him serious questions about the president's key responsibilities--national security and foreign policy--and the passion drains away as it did with Chris Matthews. David Brooks, visiting Burlington in 1997 in search of what eventually became his thesis "Bobos in Paradise," concluded that the quintessential latté burg was "relatively apolitical." He's a smart guy but he was wrong. All the stuff he took as evidence of the lack of politics--pedestrianization, independent bookstores--is the politics. Because all the big ideas failed, culminating in 1989 in Eastern Europe with the comprehensive failure of the biggest idea of all, the left retreated to all the small ideas: in a phrase, bike paths. That's what Bill Clinton meant when he said the era of big government was over; instead, he'd be ushering in the era of lots and lots of itsy bits of small government that, when you tote 'em up, works out even more expensive than the era of big government. That's what Howard Dean represents--the passion of the Bike-Path Left....
....For hard-core Democrats, the whole war thing is an unwelcome intrusion on what large numbers of people had assumed to be a permanent post-Martian politics. When you're at a Dean get-together, you realize they're not angry about the war, so much as having to talk about the war....
That's what I get from all the sniping too. The only "idea" that the lefties (or whatever they are) can seem to come up with is that we shouldn't be thinking about the terrorism-Middle-East problem; that we shouldn't do anything about it at all. Often these same people were, pre-9/11, excoriating Bush for being "isolationist."
Posted by: Andrea Harris at December 18, 2003 04:09 PM...For hard-core Democrats, the whole war thing is an unwelcome intrusion on what large numbers of people had assumed to be a permanent post-Martian politics. When you're at a Dean get-together, you realize they're not angry about the war, so much as having to talk about the war....
I'm suddenly reminded of Fawlty Towers... "No matter what you do, don't mention the war..."
I've been doing some debating on usenet. My experiences are rather similar. As a result I'm trying to put together a FAQ on the subject of the war at my 'blog. I'll have time to work on it again this weekend.
One argument I ran into this week was "The US invaded Iraq because they were going to switch to Euros instead of Dollars for denominating sales." I'll probably need a definitive answer for that.
Of course, you could point out that that would be stupid, counterproductive, etc., and they would only say "and that proves that he's the dumbest imperialist that ever lived!"
Well, maybe that's another answer.
I've debated with lefies of varying intelligence on a few boards and I definitely notice some of the things you mention. Specifically the idea that when you make a long and nuanced argument, they'll latch on to one offhand statment you made somewhere along the line and tear into it - ignoring all of the other points you've made.
Case in point, the other day a liberal friend posted something about how Republicans are fiscally irresponsible, and as evidence he noted who was president during the last 8 recessions (7 out of 8 were republican). He also had some info on inflation. He ended the post with "You can't argue with the facts..."
My essential response was that the economy was a whole lot more complicated than who is president at the time, and that his entire argument was fallacious - Correlation does not imply causation. His data only showed a correlation. I had some other information (including who controlled the senate at the time), but I mentioned that even that doesn't paint a clear picture. In the course of this, I mentioned that there have been some extraordinary events that happened during Bush's administration (an inherited bubble burst, 9/11, corporate scandals, etc...) made his handling of the economy look worse than it is.
His response to all of this was to take my "extraordinary events" line and say how convenient it was that Bush had such excuses. That's it.
*sigh*
Posted by: Mark at December 19, 2003 08:18 AM
