The lawyer is actually an authority on the subject, being as the subject there is, um... LAW. I would like to see some evidence, but I could generally take the lawyer at his/her word. Pomeroo goes to blogs. Whoop-de doo.
Practice builds competence in many fields.
We can then take that information, find the source, look at it ourselves and make our own evaluation.
Does Pomeroo do that? Nope. He just loudly proclaims that, "It's true!
" because he saw it some blog or some protest.
You are asking him to reproduce for your convenience four to five years of debate? Who are you kidding? You are not the professor, he is not your student.
Experience does matter, and one need not have a degree to be an authority on something. Our software development lead has no degree, but he has considerable years of experience: he's an expert.
A guy gets into 20 street fights, and tells you about them, and about street fighting. You then demand "evidence."
Right.
Pomeroo has not convinced me that Moveon.org has had a fixed position for five years. I honestly don't care. Part of that is due to my indifference to its contributors, and my disdain for much of the political bile that arrived, on schedule each day or week, from the left as soon as Al Gore gave his concession speech. I will neither attack nor defend moveon, given that they have not moved on, or so it seems to me. Their efforts speak for themselves.
What is disappointing is the display of
groupthink in this discussion.
He does not present the blogs, nor any pictures or video of these protests he's been fighting, "the good fight," at.
That's a worthwhile complaint, perhaps, as examples are handy, though a common complaint against them is "but that's just anecdotal." Why is it that a summary isn't good enough for you? What makes you so special?
Which shows me, the neutral observer, that you are no longer coming to the court with clean hands.
I fail to see how five years' experience in battling with rhetoric (a pursuit of dubious value) does not form a base of knowledge of one's ideological opponents. Caveat: any time one uses labels like "leftists" "conservatives" "Germans" as a generality one risks making errors via generalization, or at least having a position that is only as strong as a generality holds together. That does not preclude analysis or synthesis.
The left of center rhetorical themes of complaining about fascism, and other authoritarian characterizations of the Bush administration's actions, are not a myth: I read a great deal, in the press, in magazines, in contemporary books, and in some foreign press sources. I too have synthesized a picture of the
general form of the complaint, of some of the argument.
A meme frequently used by the more strident critics, as opposed to some of the more thoughtful and eloquent critics, is that of a new fascism growing in Washington. The leap from "Fascist" to "Nazi" to "Hitler" isn't very far, though I personally find the Godwin tendency tiresome. I see it with striking regularity among
neoconservative commentators. (Note, not loony lefties here, but
erzatz conservatives.) I was tired of Godwin applied to Saddam before the war started, as I had always understood Arab Ba'athists to be more Stalinist than Nazi/Fascist as a movement. Assad and Saddam both seeme to me more similar to Stalin than Hitler.
I have in my readings seen more commentary comparing Saddam, Ahmadinejad, and Chavez as fascists directly to Hitler sorts than Bush, but part of that comparative balance is due to
how quickly I tire of the extreme sector of leftist rhetoric: people like skeptibimbo on this board, who view the political world through a soda straw. Molly Ivins, for all her wit and skill in wordsmithing, seemed unable to write about Bush without succumbing to emotional
ad homs. I stopped reading her columns after the broken record skipped for about the 20th time. Having enjoyed her essays for years, the rut she dell into was a disappointment.
If pomeroo has been arguing with people at the far left end of the spectrum, it is no surprise that he's synthesized a picture of standard talking points. Why is that? Groupthink is rampant in current political discourse, on both sides of the fence.
The more thoughtful critiques (Daniel Ellsberg or Chris Hedges for example, or from another direction, criticisms of the BushCo by William Lind or Paul Craig Roberts) tend not to reach into the same style of hyperbole or exaggeration, though Roberts is given to histrionics. The latter group argue about Empire, not Hitler.
I find it fascinating that liberals, libertarians, and paleoconservatives are finding a rich common cause
in what they are against, though not so much what they are for. This is the inverse of Bush's aims of bipartisan cooperation that served him well enough in Texas, and that he has failed to achieve as a President.
But I digress.
The trouble is, Sturgeon's Law applies to much of what is presented as argument, in the press as well as on the internet. That weakness is on all sides of the discussion. It is no surprise to me that pomeroo has formed the synthesis he has, and it suggests that he has been focusing on the large portion of the Sturgeon's Law data set regarding rhetoric from "the left side of the fence."
DR
