Finding the Devil's Mark
8 October 2008Years ago, I was dealing with a verbal thug in an Internet politics forum, and I called him a thug
. At which point one of his allies jumped-in and claimed that my calling him this was an act of anti-Semitism, insofar as thug
was used by Palestinian militants as as a codeword for Israelis, and I knew
the fellow to be an Israeli.
One immediate problem was that I didn't know or believe that the fellow was an Israeli (I'd formed no opinion about his nationality); and, indeed, it developed that I couldn't have known such a thing, because the fellow simply wasn't an Israeli.
I'd also never heard or read of the word thug
being used by Palestinian militants for any purpose (albeït that it wouldn't surprise me if they'd exhausted the lexicon of insults when it came to Israel). I'd called the fellow a thug
for the simple reason that he was a goddamn'd thug.
The deeper problem was simply the accusation that someone was using codewords
, where there isn't any need to produce a codebook, or demonstrate that a pattern has been meaningfully fit. It's a perfectly craven line of attack.
I mention this now in response to this story:
Black Congressmen Declare Racism In Palin’s Rhetoricby Jason Horowitz in the New York Observer
They are trying to throw out these codes,said Representative Gregory Meeks, a Democrat from New York.He’sMr. Meeks said, referring to a comment Sarah Palin made at a campaign rally on Oct. 6 in Florida.not one of us?That’s racial. That’s fear. They know they can’t win on the issues, so the last resort they have is race and fear.
Tags: eristicism, polemic, sophistry
Does "eristicism" have anything to do with the mythological goddess of discord?
If so, is there an opposite to the goddess of discord? (the harpy of accord?)
Speaking of anti-eristicismic tendencies, I've got a remunerative 12-hour herculean true task of manhood for the intrepid who would call themselves economists -- which can locally reverse entropy in short-term wampum flow for the worthy. Indian beads on the barrel head, baby.
I'll call at 7pm PST today (nominal time, non-adjusted for daylight savings).
--BTM
Yes, there is some etymological relationship between the name of Ερις and . The opposing goddess would probably be Αρμονια, but the god opposed to eristicism would perhaps be Απολλων.
I may not be a fit conversationalist by 19:00PST; I've been up quite a while.