| | John,
I do not wish to get into a long-distance pissing contest with a person for whom I no longer hold any value. However, since the focus of the present site is activism, there are a couple of things that should be mentioned - strictly in the sense of learning from observing - nothing more. As I said, I ain't in a pissing mood.
The first thing I want to say is that I completely reject the rude approach as the norm for rational discussions. Call it "passionate," KASS, "righteous anger" or whatever euphemism for temper tantrum that can be dreamed up, the only good I have seen come of this has been that some inconvenient people leave at times. Nothing else really changes for the better. (And, unfortunately, I have been guilty of embracing this manner on occasion.)
On the negative side of rudeness and yelling, there is the possibility of using it for crowd control. I have witnessed the group of the moment become manipulated and swayed because of an angry fit that was thrown by one person or the other (usually peppered with sayings from Ayn Rand). What is interesting is that after the dust settles, all the people who become "suddenly convinced" (with many joining in to throw stones at the hapless villain of the moment) normally and gradually go back to their previous way of thinking. NO ACTUAL CONVINCING GETS DONE BY THROWING TEMPER TANTRUMS.
So on that point, the point of activism, rudeness is highly ineffective.
(I am not talking about the standard Randroid moral condemnation, which is more sneering than yelling and, also, is not effective, but in a different way. I am using rudeness here to mean outright insulting a person with foul language.)
It is true that the audience tends to swell some when voices get loud, but that kind of audience rarely stays around for the ideas later. These people are there to see a fight, not think.
Now let'e look at the activism angle. There was a discussion recently on RoR about the Free Radical, which is an Objectivist magazine that has been in existence for 10 years. The person you mentioned has been the editor since the beginning. One side of the discussion called it an activism success because it has survived during all this period and the other side said it was not a success because of the fact that number of subscribers and circulation could not be evaluated, so its actual impact could not properly be estimated, leading to the speculation that the impact was small.
Well, it is true that the subscriber base has not been released, but there is one thing that can be evaluated - the contributors. If you go to the Free Radical site, take a look at the articles and authors in the back issues. Don't take my word for it - the facts are there, not in what I am saying here. (I am merely pointing in a direction and mentioning what to look for.) One thing that stood out to me when I did this was the high number of people who wrote articles for that magazine who are now enemies of the editor. The rude approach had been used with practically all of them. So is this really calling a spade a spade? Is this rational passion? Are all these people really irrational evil fucks? Think about it.
If an inordinately high number of authors were "rational heroes" or NEM'S or whatever, when they were contributing their content to that magazine (for free, I might add), but practically all of them became "scumbags," "limpdicks," "wankers" etc. after awhile (calling a spade a spade, of course), it seems reasonable to ask why. So let's do it. Why?
There are only 4 choices from what I see:
1. All these people actually were rational when they wrote for the magazine and later turned into irrational evil fucks;
2. The editor was fooled by all these irrational evil fucks for awhile, but then he saw the light after they had written for the magazine;
3. The editor took what he could get because he does not/cannot pay his authors, but after he got their articles, he saw no reason to be nice anymore to irrational evil fucks; or
4. The rude approach did not convince the authors of any of the editor's other ideas and they don't like to be called irrational evil fucks, so they moved on.
The facts are observable. You can come to your own conclusions.
Now look at the present thread. Did you learn anything or change your thinking any because of the name calling? Did anybody you know of change their thinking?
In my judgment, rudeness is not good for activism. It is only good for getting rid of people - at least making them go away. (And some come back swinging.)
Also, rude does not equate with "passionate" or all the other jingoism. That idea is pure crap. Is there any person more rationally passionate in his beliefs than a Jehovah's Witness, for example? I have seen them up close and I know how rationally passionate they are, despite the irrational Biblical premise. (They make strong and elaborate use of reason once the unsound premise is accepted.) A JV member is purposely not rude and that organization grows by leaps and bounds in soft polite voices.
Rude is rude. Period. Sometimes it's fun, but ultimately it serves very little purpose.
If growth of reason - the growth of Objectivism - is what is being sought, then rudeness is definitely something that should only be used in small doses at specific times. Also, I highly suggest the study of what is working elsewhere for growth, but that is for another discussion.
Michael
|
|
