| | Thanks guys.
Ted:
Giving people the benefit of the doubt might be a problem for me. Mostly, with things like this, I just laugh and am not disturbed. It's a no harm done scenario. To put it as succinctly as possible, Rand's ideas are too well formed to be laughed away. The same clip, in the same style, with Marxism or po-mo as its subject would have exposed the subject.
And this is where I make a distinction and when I take offence to something it is because of it. There is a difference between mocking, intellectual combat, and cutting down. Mocking is not an intellectual exercise and implies a lack of valid counterpoints. This is where I place the Colbert clip.
Intellectual combat is where serious debate is joined. Again, no problem.
But it is cutting down, which lies in the middle of the last two, where I take offence. It's the idea that an entire intellectual edifice can be brought down by simply flinging a plate of spaghetti at it. This is the style adopted by Naomi Klein and Micheal Moore. They practice this fraudulent intellectual combat and attempt to pass it off as valid... even though they know better. They think they have intellectual A-bombs, when all they have are transparent, half-formed ideas. When this technique is employed, I take offence.
Let me add that yes, there is a realm of things that you don't mock (just war, rape, achievement, etc.). Colbert did not penetrate into this realm. He mocked something which is already seen as a straw man in dishonest intellectual circles. That is why I laughed at his method; and that is why I laughed along with the crowd at his subject, although for different reasons.
Tyson
(Edited by Tyson Russell on 7/13, 8:19am)
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Welly, welly, welly, welly, well. Given Jeff's incredibly harsh denunciations, I find myself tempted to see what all the ruckus is about. Perhaps this proves the "no bad publicity" thesis.