May 1, 2010

• Descriptive Term Manipulation

  In my last entry I talked about the concept of Judicial Activism and how I believe it is not a useful term to describe any particular phenomenon. I still believe that though some through their comments and through a link to a video provided some interesting alternative interpretations of the term that are more coherent than the one we hear about most often today.

  But my final point in that entry was that the term “activist” in the idea of judicial activism is a part of a wider long ranging effort to commandeer the language of the Left and turn it into something it is not. It’s a twisted association game deliberately engaged in as a method of social manipulation. No sooner had that point been made then someone in the comments engaged in exactly that same language shifting behavior repeatedly in an attempt to attack the people she disagreed with.

  I would not ordinarily care. I get comments like this all the time whenever I write about politics. But in this case it serves as such a perfect example of the point I was trying to make that I felt it would be instructive to look at those comments directly.

  “Liberal judges love nothing more than to legislate from the bench.”
  
  “Creep is not the word that liberals use.  Liberals believe in full blown bias. “
  
  “Liberals love taxes because they make government more powerful.”
  
  “There is no denying that life begins at conception, that is unless you are a leftist or a lawyer.”
  
  “What the God-hating left has done is hijack and destroy American culture and language and replace it with the culture and language of death.”
  
  “What do we believe, leftist gobble-d-gook or our own lying eyes?  You folks demand scientific proof at every turn and when it’s provided about something you not into you deny it.”
  
  “liberal justices base their decisions on subjective factors such as personal point of view”
  
  “Liberals manufacture meaning at a whim and thus destroy the original meaning”
  

  
  
  Notice the strategy here?  Liberals think. Liberals believe. Liberals are. Liberals do. 

  Gee, I’m on the Left. I consider myself a liberal. I never REALIZED I thought such things! Oh thank you so very much for enlightening me!

  Of course, this is ALL putting words in the mouths of some amorphic undefined group of BAD people that she suggests you should have nothing but the utmost disdain for.

  Notice how it’s always absolutes. It’s never “most liberals” or “some liberals”  or even “extremist liberals”. It’s ALL liberals or it’s ALL liberal Judges.  It’s also NEVER specifics unless pressed. She doesn’t specify specific Liberals and she doesn’t provide specific quotes. The closest she comes is snide insinuations without citation about Justices Stevens and Sotomayor and an extended rant  about Roe v. Wade. Even if you buy those accusations, surely that’s a far cry from showing that ALL Leftists, ALL Liberals, or even ALL Liberal Judges are anti-religious monsters out to destroy our very way of life that she paints them as.

  Notice also the association game being played here. We started off talking about Judicial Activists. But it soon went something like this: 

  Judicial Activists == Liberal Judges == Liberals ==  Biased/Prejudiced Liberals == Tax-Loving Liberals == Leftists == Lawyers == The God-Hating America-Destroying LEFT

  No doubt had the discussion gone on longer she would have started talking about the Baby-Murdering Left or come up with some even more insulting characterization.

  In the commentator’s mind no one on the left should EVER be a Judge because they are all biased, lying, dishonest, power-hungry bastards who are making up gooble-d-gook and engaging in sophistry deliberately in order to DESTROY the country, the culture, the language, and the constitution.  They HATE God. They HATE the founding fathers. They LOVE taxes. They’re as BAD as LAWYERS. No doubt she thinks the same of all liberals no matter where they come from or what their career is. They just can’t be trusted.

  I didn’t include all of her quotes. She also spoke of how liberals are trying to turn the constitution into “Gumby” and were engaged in “pretzel-making” in their interpretation of the law. In the discussion of abortion that came about due to her repeated citing of Roe v Wade as her core example, she went on to strongly imply that supporting Roe v Wade makes liberals murderers or at least complicit in murder. She also called Liberal judges Judicial Disasters.

  Contrast this to what she has to say about Conservatives:

  “Conservatives do not believe in personal bias as a means to judge the law.”
  
  “conservative justices seek the intent of the Founders.  That is most important.”
  
  “Conservatives [are] better justices because they are more interested in what the Founders thought then what they, the justices personally think, feel or experience.“

  Do you get the it? She might as well have removed every one of her comments and left only one.  It could have said something like this:

  LIBERALS ARE  EVIL!!! CONSERVATIVES ARE GOOD!!!

  It is an inherently black and white world she lives in. People aren’t complex. Laws aren’t complex. There aren’t large varieties of people with varying justifications for their beliefs. No. It’s just you’re either on the dangerous, evil, deluded, racist LIBERAL side, or you’re on the good, right, faithful, and Just CONSERVATIVE side.  The moral justifications for Left-leaning ideas never enter into the equation. They aren’t given serious contemplation. They’re all TRICKS. It’s the LEFT trying to use sophistry to DECEIVE US!   But not to worry, she’s got the religious conviction to ignore all facts and evidence, all logical arguments or alternative perspectives and stick faithfully to her firm unyielding beliefs NO MATTER WHAT!

  This is, of course, EXACTLY what I was talking about in that last entry.

  I don’t really mean to pick on one person too much. There’s no shame really in getting over involved in an argument and using charged language. People do it all the time. It may not be pleasant and it can certainly be rude but it doesn’t necessarily invalidate the debate. I believe that several of the commentators on the last blog engaged her constructively and good points were made.

  If this were the only time I’d seen this type of argument I would have chalked it up to just someone trying to win an argument using techniques that I personally find disgusting.

  But this isn’t the first time.  Indeed, you can turn on your radio any time of the day and hear a conservative talk radio host saying EXACTLY these things in almost EXACTLY these words. You can often hear it on prime time news programs on Fox News and you can even find it on popular right wing blogs across the internet.

  My wish would be that this is just a decidedly odd way of thinking. But its prevalence leads me to believe that it is more than that. Indeed, I’ve come to believe that this is a deliberate strategic argument methodology.  I think it is a style of argument that is being encouraged by certain institutions and repeated again and again shamelessly because of its surprising effectiveness.

  It’s like subliminal messaging. It’s a kind of propaganda.  It’s like if someone went around the world telling everyone you were a child molester and got all their friends and relatives to go around and say it too. And they in turn got their friends and family to do the same. And all of them said it with conviction and certainty as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. They acted as if anyone who disagrees with them is just stupid and ignorant. Under such an onslaught, even without a shred of evidence outside of hearsay, eventually many people will start to suspect you. People will start to doubt you. People will start to wonder if maybe those people have a reason for being so suspicious of you and they’ll start to doubt their own judgments of your character. People will start to even feel ashamed to be associated with you. At the very least they might err on the side of caution and choose to avoid you.

  Of course people respond to these kinds of manipulations. People don’t WANT conflict. They don’t like having to defend themselves from cruel and dishonest accusations. They want to get along with people. It’s much much easier to simply say “I’m not a Liberal” than to try to defend yourself against cruel and baseless accusations loudly being shouted out against Liberals from all the rooftops. But of course if everyone runs away from the term Liberal than all that is left is the imposed interpretation. “Liberal” becomes synonymous in the culture for exactly the characteristics the word-destroyers associated it with.

  That’s what these news outlets are doing. They are shoving down people’s throats an idea of what Liberalism means without ever asking or even interacting with a single person who actually calls him or herself a Liberal. They are making stuff up. They are re-writing history. And they are using on the flimsiest evidence in many cases to do it. Glenn Beck recently went so far as to insinuate that Liberals are in fact NAZIS, deliberately associating them with one of the most monstrous genocidal campaign in human history. 

  Note how they are perfectly willing to define themselves and say what it means to be Conservative or Christian. But they NEVER give Liberals the same courtesy. It’s always pushed upon Liberals. You ARE this. You ARE that. Even though, of course, in a vast majority of cases most liberals AREN’T any of those things. Throughout history most liberals in the United States have in fact been Christians for example or at least not atheists. Certainly you would be hard pressed to find a liberal here that believes in anything remotely resembling genocide. But that doesn’t matter, a nuanced understanding of the terms, is exactly what the people engaging in this strategy DON’T want.

  The idea is to make it common knowledge that being an activist or a liberal or a leftist is a shameful thing that you shouldn’t dare call yourself. Not if you want to be one of US, the good people of this world. And the rest just don’t matter.

  I think we need to turn this rhetoric around. It’s the people that do this kind of thing who are the shameful ones. They’re the ones being dishonest, cruel, and manipulative. They’re the ones so bound up in their own bias that they are blind to facts, blind to reason, and blind to anything but their overwhelming religious conviction. And no, not in God. It’s to their new God, the almighty CONSERVATISM that can never and will never in their minds admit of any exception to its edicts. 

  Now don’t get me wrong. Not all people who self describe themselves as conservatives are like this. Not all of them are deserving of our scorn. There have been many conservatives throughout history that are deserving of enormous respect. No. I’m not talking about engaging in the same strategy in reverse.

  I’m talking about shunning the specific people who engage in this disgusting practice of manipulating descriptive terms no matter where they are coming from on the political spectrum. The people who do this are running rip shod over the Truth. They are running it into the ground and spitting on its rotting corpse. They are trying to destroy reason itself and turn us into a society of irrational unthinking slaves to their empty fact-less philosophy.

  And they must be stopped.

  • 7:20 pm
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