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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: FaultLine who wrote (116467)	10/9/2003 5:00:11 PM
From: epicure	Respond to of 281500

I am so glad you found it worth reading. :-)

To: FaultLine who wrote (116467)	10/9/2003 8:23:54 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Nice post. X deserves a pat on the back.

To: FaultLine who wrote (116467)	10/10/2003 8:33:52 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

I would like to cast one vote against zombie-like lack of affect. There are, indeed, people who are so unable to read between the lines that humor is wasted on them. This is why God created Ignore and moderated threads.;^)

To: FaultLine who wrote (116467)	10/13/2003 4:12:07 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Ok, I was initially taken aback by the first bolded point: Avoid sarcasm and irony. Oh dear, that leaves me in a pickle. But the full post is a little more ambiguous on that element, tossing me this bone: To drive this change, you have to be willing to be a lone individual dedicated to responding to vindictiveness with reason. But reason need not be dull -- sophisticated wit and irony are of longer lasting entertainment value than monkeys throwing shit at each other, as humorous as that is, for a few minutes. The line between "sarcasm and irony" and "sophisticated wit and irony" is one I admit to having some difficulty with. But then, going up a level at egodeath.com to the egodeath home page, we come across this as the lead-off: Ego Death and Self-Control Cybernetics A rational, systematic model of religious experiencing based on loose cognitive association, experiencing of no-free-will, and timeless block-universe determinism. Um. Even if I pretended to understand that, I couldn't touch it without stumbling all over the sarcasm/irony/sophisticated wit line. Anyway, exploring the sarcasm/irony problem further in egodeath.com , I find that elsewhere in the body, what's proscribed is actually "vindictive sarcasm", which I can somewhat live with. Something that comes up somewhat more frequently in the full text is another element not mentioned in X's excerpt: I'm interested in the psychology of flame-postings. It seems to be driven by hunger for self-righteousness points. . . . But when anyone climes their soapbox or mount to deliver a sermon of hatred, whatever the cause, they could take a look and themselves and deliberately consider whether they are just escalating a righteousness war, just for the feeling of being pure and sinless, for being on the side of righteous judgement. . . . Flaming seems to be the dominant mode of "discussion" in the drugs newsgroups and many others all across the net. If anything, I want to free people to think twice, and consider alternatives to mounting the soapbox of righteous, violent hatred, whatever the cause. . . . We're all free to curse and swear and condemn each other -- but once the motive of the thrill of self-righteousness is recognized, more moods of posting become available, other than verbal war to the death, screaming at each other like the apes in 2001. The feeling of righteousness is greatly overrated and cannot satisfy for long enough. Most people don't want to research and think. It's so much easier to simply take a side on some battle or other, and be filled with the glorious feeling of righteousness. To totally garble Goldwater, is sarcasm in the face of self-righteousness a virtue or a vice? Anyway, for a little semi-political context, the paragraph preceding the above sentence was this: Because the anti-prohibitionissts, the anti-Inquisitionists, the advocates of legalizing, or "decriminalizing", drugs are consistently winning in the reasoned* debates (as opposed to their inability to stop unreasoning anti-drug attitudes), even the DEA is on the defensive on that front -- just take a look at their web site. The "war" on drugs is harder to promote, on a battleground of reason. It is in the DEA's interest to promote that old flame-like metaphor of "war", rather than "debate". As soon as the "war" metaphor is let go of and replaced by the "debate" metaphor, everyone has to do the real work of research and thinking. Um. I'm afraid I can't help myself stumbling over the dreaded sarcasm / irony line to note that where the neocon true believers line up on that one is hardly a secret. Not to be confused with the Ashcroft / holy roller side of the W constellation. Oh well. So much "moral clarity", so little time.