{"id":67,"date":"2003-11-11T13:37:50","date_gmt":"2003-11-11T13:37:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/?p=67"},"modified":"2003-11-11T13:37:50","modified_gmt":"2003-11-11T13:37:50","slug":"so-am-i-mean-or-only-stupid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/?p=67","title":{"rendered":"So am I mean, or only stupid?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday at the cafe at Schuler, a copy of the book entitled Dude, where’s my country<\/i> (or something like that, I feel silly just typing that title) by Michael Moore was sitting next to my table. I picked it up and flipped through it, not expecting to find any “facts” or “insights” necessarily, but I was hoping for a few laughs. Unfortunately, I was disappointed (in the latter expectation at least).
\nI enjoyed Roger & Me<\/i>, as well as TV Nation<\/i> the couple of times I watched it. I understand there’s some widely divergent opinions regarding Mr. Moore, but I figured that as long as you take his work as the expression of a particular viewpoint, not an attempt to present an unbiased expression of all viewpoints, it was okay.
\nHowever, towards the end of Dude<\/i>, Moore violates my personal cardinal rule for political discourse. As a result I would like to propose a new rule, modeled upon “Godwin’s Law”<\/a>, which regards gratuitous comparisons of one’s opponent to Hitler\/the Nazis. (Thanks to Andy<\/a> for the link to the official definition). My rule, which I would like to call the Moore-Coulter Rule, runs as follows:
\n“Any argument based upon the attribution of the arguer’s opponent’s political opinions to his or her ignorance, fear, or malevolence, should be disregarded.”
\nTowards the end of his book, I think in a chapter about how to talk to your conservative brother-in-law, Moore explains that the reason conservatives are conservative is because they fear<\/i> [black people, gay people, Moore himself, whatever] because they are ignorant<\/i>–they don’t know any [see list above]; and therefore they wish to oppress them in order to protect their own personal worldviews and lifeways. (That’s what I gathered from my quick skim, anyway.)
\nI wouldn’t dream of touching the logic of this argument with a ten-foot pole. What aggravated me was that Moore, a man a good deal older than me and presumably more politically savvy, is using the same dopey arguments that I did when I was 16 (the only possible reasons anyone could disagree with me is that they must be either mean or stupid or both). Like the Nazi comparison, the mean\/stupid gambit is a blatant ad hominem<\/i> attack, and works by instantly conjuring up emotional animus against the opponent by means of an unprovable generalization; in place of an actual reasoned argument against the opponent’s position.
\nI’m so tired of this kind of stuff. I first noticed it when I used to read the editorial page in the University of Nebraska’s student paper. I guess it’s understandable in 20-year-olds, but, to borrow Moore’s argument, by the time you’re forty-ish one would hope you’d actually met some [conservatives, liberals, republicans, democrats, whatever] and realized that they’re a pretty equally mixed bag as regards intelligence and philanthropy.
\nIn any case, I believe that this rule would improve the quality of public discourse, and reduce the amount of time I have to waste reading about how Republicans hate everyone whereas Democrats only hate America.
\nBy the way, the “Coulter” in the rule’s title refers of course to Ann Coulter. I haven’t read any of her work, but their titles speak for themselves as far as this rule’s applicability in her case. As a final note, I would also like to propose that the credibility of anyone who chooses to appear on the cover of his or her own book should automatically be reduced by 50%; but maybe another time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday at the cafe at Schuler, a copy of the book entitled Dude, where’s my country (or something like that, I feel silly just typing that title) by Michael Moore was sitting next to my table. I picked it up and flipped through it, not expecting to find any “facts” or “insights” necessarily, but I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=67"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=67"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=67"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=67"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}