CASE STUDY IN BULLSHIT RIGHT-WING "ARGUMENTATION"

From an American Prospect blog, courtesy of Eschaton:

Defining Lynching Down

My apologies for being in Shirley Sherrod overdrive recently, but this piece from Jeffrey Lord nearly made my eyes pop out of my head. After reviewing the Screws case, Lord concludes that Sherrod lied about Sheriff Claude Screws lynching Bobby Hall because he and his colleagues simply beat him to death rather than using a rope:

It's also possible that she knew the truth and chose to embellish it, changing a brutal and fatal beating to a lynching. Anyone who has lived in the American South (as my family once did) and is familiar with American history knows well the dread behind stories of lynch mobs and the Klan. What difference is there between a savage murder by fist and blackjack -- and by dangling rope? Obviously, in the practical sense, none. But in the heyday -- a very long time -- of the Klan, there were frequent (and failed) attempts to pass federal anti-lynching laws. None to pass federal "anti-black jack" or "anti-fisticuffs" laws.

A lynching is an extrajudicial mob killing. No one who worked to document the practice of lynching in the South limited the definition of the term to solely include those lynchings that occurred using a rope.

More here.

Years ago when I was a high school debater, we employed a tactic known as a "spread." The "spread" is, in essence, an attempt to make so many arguments in your allotted speaking time that the other side can't possibly respond to all of them during their allotted speaking time. It doesn't matter if the arguments are any good, or how easy it is to refute them; all that matters is that you make a billion arguments: if your opponents don't respond to each and every one of them, you probably win the entire debate as a result--not responding to an argument is basically the same thing as conceding the point, whether it's a good point or not.

A few years after I had graduated, I started judging some high school debate rounds here and there. At the beginning of each debate, I would straight up tell the students I was judging, as an attempt to address the unfairness and anti-intellectual spirit of the "spread," that if an argument was totally stupid in the real world, I would accept as reasonable a two word response: "That's stupid." This got some good results. There were fewer arguments made, but, generally, they were good arguments. Debate, when I was judging, was less like a twisted chess match, and more of an exercise in thought and intellectual discourse.

Unfortunately, there are no judges when it comes to public political discourse. I mean, the mainstream news media is ostensibly the judge, but they abdicated that role many years ago. These days, it's the wild west. You can say whatever the fuck you want, and the media just amplifies it without any sort of common sense intervention or analysis. And the right wing takes full advantage of the situation. I mean, sometimes the left does, too. But generally the left is handicapped by the belief that people will respond well to a good argument, and usually enters a debate with that attitude. Most of the time, when met with total, jaw-dropping, right-wing bullshit, the left just stammers. They thought it was a knife fight, but the right brought shit loads of pies for face splatting.

This lynch-means-rope "argument" would be right at home in a high school debate "spread." It's totally stupid. It has no real-world correlation. It appears to be aimed at doing nothing more than forcing people to waste their time responding to it, which ultimately distracts from actual issues, thereby confusing what the overall debate is actually about. Indeed, lots of conservative "arguments" about race are along these lines. That is, there's not much thought behind them; they seem to exist just to fuck up the conversation. And that's bad. It means, for the time being, we're doomed to be mired in rhetorical games as far as discussing race goes.

But what's truly disturbing is that I'm not sure whether the people making these "arguments" actually believe them or not. Back in high school, we knew we were full of shit--we were just employing cheap strategy. But here in real life, it's very startling to contemplate the notion that educated, seemingly intelligent people would loudly proclaim utter gibberish because that's what's in their heads.

This isn't at all what I imagined adult life would be like.

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