The Glade 4.0

GOP folks and Tea Partiers are increasingly peeved that their movement is being depicted in the media as filled with angry crazies on the verge of violence. As someone who's studied protest, and demonstrated a couple of times myself, I think part of the problem is quality control.

I date back to the Million Man March, when there was great concern that the hordes of black men descending on Washington might break out into a riot....I was a student at Howard at the time, and like all the other prospective Marchers, I read the papers and was well-versed in notion of not embarrassing your people in front of white folks. The last thing any of us wanted to do was to march down to the Mall and have the next day's headline read, "Niggers Can't Even March Without Fighting." ...We thought the media was looking for trouble, but we also thought it was within our power not to give it to them.

I think we got some of that sense from the Civil Rights movement's choreography. These guys were the masters of protest as propaganda. The Montgomery bus boycott was a strategy and Rosa Parks was not some witless old lady, but a civil rights worker who'd been trained to accord herself a certain way. When Martin Luther King would be arrested he dressed a certain way, he seemed to try to convey to the cameras a kind of solemn restraint. The marches themselves were choreographed, and the strategy of nonviolence was drilled into anyone who'd protest.

I hear GOP folks and Tea Partiers bemoaning the fact that media and Democrats are using the extremes of their movement for ratings and to score points. This is like Drew Brees complaining that Dwight Freeney keeps trying to sack him. If that were Martin Luther King's response to media coverage, the South might still be segregated. I exaggerate, but my point is that the whining reflects a basic misunderstanding of the rules of protest. When you lead a protest you lead it, you own it, and your opponents, and the media, will hold you responsible for whatever happens in the course of that protest. This isn't left-wing bias, it's the nature of the threat.

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice and compromise in the pursuit of justice no virtue.

Interesting how any extremism can be easily rationalized.

No, it is not a false dilemma unless you can prove that a moral statement cannot be deifnitively made, and must do so according to the morality of the person you are engaged in discussion.

I tend not to believe in viewing the world as shades of gray. The use in blurring morality is that it is the easiest possible excuse for not investigating moral issues. By proclaiming that everything is of a mixed morality one has excused oneself of the responsibility of trying to find morality, or even of having to ascribe to one.

These are not about the rules of logic as a moral system cannot be proven. They must be internally consistent. In order to make a logical argument within the system you must confirm to the rules of the system itself (otherwise you are making an argument based on another morality and with no intersection you are incapable of making ANY argument). Thus you must use the morality of the system to disprove it or you are simply ignored.

You know me Arathain, I've always been swayed by such powerful argument as "that's dumb".

I've already shown how gray is the easy course in life and black and white is hard - at least it is hard when you actually care about finding out where the black and white are.

It's easy to have some information on a topic and see it as gray, its harder to investigate and see the pixels of black and white that actually cause it to appear to be gray from far away.