also:

Laws against stealing are on the books because deep down, there is this fear that it would be a relief to be unburdened of our property. Before you knew it, we’d all be tripping over ourselves in our haste to give away all our money and property to the indigent; and before you could say “Dennis Moore” we’d all be living in a communistic anarchy. Talk amongst yourselves.

I’m just putting it out there.

Ummm, how can it be lost on you that I haven’t argued this?

What I’m saying is that if you want all that awful incivility to go away, you are going about it the wrong way. This is not necessarily an endorsement of the so-called “incivility” itself (which, for me, runs the gamut from genuinely enlightened and useful rhetorical horseplay to stupid and off-target kneejerking, and all points between).

How they got it is NOT an element of the argument I’m making.

It kind of is, Brett, because it’s the answer to the question you purport to be asking. Why might someone want to make who wins arguments a matter of power? (The word you’re looking for is “polemic.”) Provided the persons you’re talking about are in fact doing so, the answer is obviously because it has been shown to work as a means of getting power (and of undermining the power of others). Trying to tell them that the tactic will doom them to not getting power is, therefore, silly. It will not persuade anyone.

A better case for civility can be made along the lines that if all parts of the American political spectrum morph into imitations of movementarianism’s more-or-less total lack of rhetorical restraint, your country is basically screwed. This, of course, would require you to abandon a condescending lecutring-to-”the Left” attitude, but you’re not trying to cop such an attitude anyway, right? So no worries.

1. Republicans have most of the power, regardless of how they got it. How they got it is NOT an element of the argument I’m making.

2. You think you have reason on your side. Whether you’re right about this is NOT an element of the argument I’m making.

Why would you want to make who wins arguments a matter of power, rather than reason? Because that IS what you’re doing, when you reject civil argument as a response to civil argument. Because, in the end, power IS the only alternative to reason.

Mmm-hmm. And now you’ve come to realize that you haven’t left the liberals—they’ve left you! And the time has come for you to bid your farewell—more in sorrow than in anger, of course—to your erstwhile comrades, and to ally yourself with the only truly honest and decent intellectuals left: viz., the ones who come up with things like “a libertarian case for torture.”

You think intense hatred of a guy who makes excuses for torture and admires the barbarities of Iran’s justice system is weird?

I myself don’t subscribe to the dislike mostly because I don’t think the guy is worth it, but is it really so hard to understand it, and that it might just bleed over into other contexts (even when what he’s saying is just wrong instead of actively vicious)?

A comment which is itself, of course, quite literally nothing but the adoption of a detached rhetorical posture.

It’s the intense hatred of EV which is so weird.

•••

I have never taken the right-wing claims about “intolerant PC liberals” as accurate—being a liberal myself—and have always mocked those claims.

I was wrong.

Sorry not to have been clear about this. I think it was “some ‘ideas,’ like this one, merit ridicule.”

Whoa! Yeah! Do you have an actual argument as to why I shouldn’t? One that doesn’t involve complaining how much more terrible Michael Moore is than Fox News, the Swift Boaters, the right-wing blogosphere and the bulk of the sitting Administration?

Why the heck are you trying to establish that shouting people down instead of using rational arguments is appropriate?

Why the heck are you trying to pretend I did any such thing? All I said to you is that bringing up electoral politics is a stupid way to make the point. In point of fact, one could argue that some people’s willingness to turn away from “civility”—most of the Democratic establishment excepted, of course—correlates strongly with the collapse in Bush’s approval ratings, providing at least circumstantial evidence that incivility is not all that much of a political liability. (That’s if the political success of the Right’s abandonment of civility hadn’t already taught us that lesson.)

You can make the case for civil discourse, but you can’t do it by pretending that the Republicans won their political victories by honest argument and that the Dems will be Inevitably Crushed if they don’t do the same. That will not do. That is not honest. It’s looking to me like Barry is right.

I think maybe you’re not so sure your arguments are really better.

Really? What do you think “my” arguments are? I think maybe you’re not so sure you even know.

adm: So if I’m raped and I have an orgasm, I’m upset because I had the orgasm?

Dealing with the shame, confusion and damaging psychological stress resulting from involuntary physiological responses during rape is a standard part of clinical treatment of survivors, as noted by this WHO guide to clinical management—though in North America the problem is most often foregrounded in reference to male survivors.

Of course it’s right to object to EV’s attempt to overemphasize the issue as a basis of law—which even he eventually recognized—and I really don’t blame those who suspect his good faith given his past record of bizarre and even vicious pronouncements. But it’s genuinely troubling that EV is becoming an excuse for some people to downplay this problem as somehow obviously freakish and self-evidently not worth talking about. I think Thomas subsequently proved himself off-target in trying to identify Belle as a source of this sentiment per se, but I don’t think he’s wrong to identify this kind of sentiment as a trap, and one that is objectionable.

(“…if you really think this is an appropriate response to a woman who just said in a very public forum that she has been the victim of rape and sexual assault…”)

How does having been raped give you any veto/proscription over public comment? This is a key question because it goes to social attitudes toward rape, which are of course at the heart of your posts.

So is there a legitimate “rape card” which a woman (or man, for that matter) can use to shape public discussion, as you have tried to do here with Thomas? Kind of a warning shot across the bows of all male non-rape victims not to make certain kinds of remarks?