Postmodern discourse

Following are ten of its hallmarks, as Roberts describes on his blog:

• “persons and positions are ordinarily closely related,” with little insistence on keeping personal identity separate from the questions or issues under discussion;

• “sensitivity, inclusivity, and inoffensiveness are key values”;

• priority on “cooperation, collaboration, quietness, sedentariness, empathy, equality, non-competitiveness, conformity, a communal focus”;

• “seems lacking in rationality and ideological challenge,” in the eyes of proponents of modern discourse;

• tends to perceive the satire and criticism of modern discourse as “vicious and personal attack, driven by a hateful animus”;

• is oriented to ” the standard measures of grades, tests, and a closely defined curriculum”;

• lacking “means by which to negotiate or accommodate such intractable differences within its mode of conversation,” it will “typically resort to the most fiercely antagonistic, demonizing, and personal attacks upon the opposition”;

• “will typically try, not to answer opponents with better arguments, but to silence them completely as ‘hateful’, ‘intolerant’, ‘bigoted’, ‘misogynistic’, ‘homophobic’, etc.”;

• has a more feminine flavor, as opposed to the more masculine flavor of modern discourse;

• results in “stale monologues” and contexts that “seldom produce strong thought, but rather tend to become echo chambers.”

Pound - On Package Words

Partisan Review: Where do ignorance and innocence end and the chicanery begin? 

Pound:There is natural ignorance and there is artificial ignorance. I should say at the present moment the artificial ignorance is about eighty-five per cent. 

The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these package words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight, if there is going to be any intellect left.

What the Left means when it cries "Racism"

From Spenser Ackerman (J-list 2008):

It's not necessary to jump to Wright-qua-Wright's defense. What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger's [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.

And I think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they've put upon us. Instead, take one of them--Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares--and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.