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April 10, 2004

Comments

Moe, I don't get this. In the course of the article the writer decides that she can still see the therapist in question. And it's her therapist, for G*d's sake - if you found out your confessor or spiritual advisor or Litte League coach or whatever was a big fan of Noam Chomsky, wouldn't you have to mull over your relationship? I sure would.

My therapist at one time was, in fact, Noam Chomsky, until his was license was revoked. Were I to find out my little league coach was Grover Norquist, hide the bats and cover the kids' eyes.

I agree with everything the lady said about Limbaugh, joke or not.

I do like Moe Lane and admire his civility, which makes me a moderate. Once I'm in power, I'm going to be civil, too.

"And it's her therapist, for G*d's sake - if you found out your confessor or spiritual advisor or Litte League coach or whatever was a big fan of Noam Chomsky, wouldn't you have to mull over your relationship?"

Shoot, rilkefan, I deal every day with people who unaccountably like other people whom I can't stand. It may be worth fussing over, but it's rarely worth tearing yourself up inside over.

(pause)

'Course, I may just be rationalizing this 'cuz I'm miffed that this woman gets paid cash money to talk about her hangups and I have to subsist on pure egoboo, which if true is kinda lame of me, but that's a whole different issue.

"I deal every day with people who unaccountably like other people whom I can't stand..."

You're a credit to the race, Moe - the above is a reason why this blog works - but for the rest of humanity, in particular the ones who feel the need to pay enormous sums to have a therapist listen to them...

"You're a credit to the race, Moe"

You don't see the posts I delete unsent. :)

Moe, that you are capable of deleting posts unsent is proof you're a credit to the race. My hat's off to you.

Just a thought...if she thought her therapist was brilliant, couldn't discovering the therapist liked Limbaugh induce her to take a moment to reconsider her own visceral hatred of the guy?

if she thought her therapist was brilliant, couldn't discovering the therapist liked Limbaugh induce her to take a moment to reconsider her own visceral hatred of the guy?

Sure. Just like finding out the parish priest you respect is a pedophile should make you rethink your aversion to raping kids.

So listening to Limbaugh equals pedophilia. Got it.

Does this mean that the lefties have changed their tune on whether its wrong to hate Tim Robbins movies now, or whatever? Just checking to see which story everyone is sticking with this week.

Limbaugh resembles pedophilia only in the sense that both make my skin crawl.

I'll add that Limbaugh and his ilk have done squirrelly, damaging things to the national discourse and political rhetoric. From which we'll never recover. So we're condemned to repeat it. That's my excuse.

Happy Easter.

Phil, why don't you look up "analogy" in the dictionary, okay?

Jesurgislac, the day that you have accumulated even one one-millionth of the balls you need to condescend to me like that, the sun will have long burned out and left the Earth cold and waste.

I find analogies between listening to self-important radio talk show hosts and having sex with minor children to be so rank as to be out of the bounds of what a sensible person would even consider saying. Perhaps you are neither sensible, nor a person. I am willing to believe both.

In fact, it occurs to me that providing an explicit comparison between listening to a certain talk show and raping children is exactly the kind of poisonous horseshit that Limbaugh and others of his kind unleashed on the discourse in the first place, so obviously neither Mithras nor you mind it too much if you consider it reasonable and logical.

Phil, plainly you don't have any idea what "analogy" means, so I repeat my recommendation that you go look it up in the dictionary.

And you plainly think it's good common sense to draw analogies between things that are so unlike that one would have to be a) retarded, b) evil, c) deliberately trying to poison the well or d) some combination of a, b & c. Asshole.

Sorry, von, Moe, Edward et al. -- while I don't take Rush Limbaugh seriously, I take child raping very seriously, and for Mithras to construct such a monumentally vile and inappropriate analogy, and for Jesurgislac to defend it as if it were nothing . . . I guess maybe forcible sex with children is one of my buttons. Apparently it isn't one of theirs. Please delete or modify my comments as necessary.

This will stop now, because otherwise I will have to start dinging valued commenters for Posting Rules violations. I have no desire to do this, but I will.

Thank you in advance.

I further suggest that apologies for losses of temper and/or what I am sure was an unintentionally provocative analogy be offered all around; at least an assurance that no personal ill-will was intended.

I second Moe: We got valuable, thoughtful commentators here who have, IMHO, crossed the line. (Sorry for not getting to it sooner -- I was consumed with the latest LGF controversy. A bad aspect of my own character, I fear.)

But, you know, I've always wanted to do this:

Ad hom: "the day that you have accumulated even one one-millionth of the balls you need to condescend to me like that, the sun will have long burned out and left the Earth cold and waste."

Not ad hom: "And you plainly think it's good common sense to draw analogies between things that are so unlike that one would have to be a) retarded, b) evil, c) deliberately trying to poison the well or d) some combination of a, b & c. Asshole."

This, by the way, is not to take sides. Only that, judging by a recent rash of posts on The Panda's Thumb (a worthwhile blog, btw), the distinction between insulting and ad hom appears not to be well known.

Thank you for this opportunity to provide my teaching lesson for the day. (Not intended for Phil, Jes, or anyone else -- from whom I tend to learn, rather than arrogate to myself the right to teach.)

An analogy, properly used, is an illustration: it's not an example.

If I write: "ducklings are to ducks as kittens are to cats", I am not saying that Aves/Anseriformes are the same thing as Carnivora/Felidae.

If I write "The government of Ronald Reagan is to the government of George W. Bush as Windows 3.1 is to Windows XP" I am not saying that either Reagan or Bush are computer operating systems.

An analogy is properly answered not by attacking the comparator but by showing that the comparison is wrong.

But I concede Moe's point that there are certain subjects which invariably raise the temperature of debate when alluded to, such as Nazis or child molestation, and which therefore ought to be avoided unless absolutely necessary.


The analogy is invalid because learning that someone who you respect likes a particular ideologue that you don't, and then considering whether perhaps there's some entertainment, social or political value in listening to that ideologue, does not require you to violate, violently, the rights of another person, or even to consider whether it's a good idea.

Ducklings are to ducks as kittens are to cats because, in each case, the former is the immature form of the latter. Discovering that a respected person likes a talk show and reconsidering your opinion on whether that show has any value is not like discovering that a respected person rapes children and reconsidering whether child rape is a good idea, because the latter is in no way a logical sequela of the former.

I apologize for violating the posting rules.

Phil, in your post of 05.44 today, you took apart the analogy Mithras offered and show why it doesn't work: I agree with you, I don't think it does.

In your posts yesterday at 1:40 PM, 06:49 PM, and 08:29 PM, you didn't do that - instead you accused Mithras of doing something he hadn't done. I agree that I was being condescending in my comment at 08:07 PM, and I apologise for that, but you were (it seemed to me) either aggressively misreading what Mithras had said or unaware of the use of analogy. I chose to condescend rather than to accuse, I guess, though I didn't think about it in those terms at that time (to be honest, I just thought "What on earth? Of course Mithras isn't saying what you said he said. Don't you understand when someone is making an analogy?")

It's one of the things about posting comments on blogs, though: spur-of-the-moment rhetoric often doesn't stand up to rigorous analysis, as you just demonstrated. I'm as guilty of using bad analogies (or rather, analogies that look good on the spur of the moment but that fall down when you kick them, like cheap flatpack furniture) as anyone else. And of kicking apart other people's bad analogies. But an analogy isn't a metaphor or a simile: it should be attacked on its own terms, not for something it's not.

Sorry. I don't mean to stir this up further. Just thinking aloud.

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