Re: Congratulations to Lewis

On Fri, 7 Nov 2008 16:01 +0000 (GMT Standard Time),
Jon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Jon O'Brien) wrote:

I'm not much concerned with nationalism myself. It was blamed for
pretty much everything when I was a child in the fifties, but now
the archives are all open, the historians look back over a longer
perspective, and it seems that nationalism itself was rarely ever a
primary cause of our problems.

So nationalism had no part to play in, for example, the events that
accompanied the break-up of the former Yugoslavia?

The place has a long and difficult history, which I've never really
understood, so I don't know the context. And recent events are too
recent for many historians to analyse objectively. So I don't really
know the answer, but what I have generally found is that when the real
driving forces behind events are properly understood they are not
often what they appear to have been to observers at the time.

Some of us call people who behave in this high-handed way communists
and homosexuals, which seems obvious enough to me...

I'm not part of whatever group you're referring to when you say 'some of
us', so it isn't at all obvious to me. Call me strange but I prefer to
retain use of those words for when I'm referring to communists and
homosexuals. Not being Humpty Dumpty, I find it aids communication to use
words to mean what everyone else uses them to mean, rather than make up
meanings that are completely unrelated to the ones recorded in
dictionaries.

You are literal minded.

...but clearly you need to check out somebody like Jeremy Clarkson in
order to understand that terms of derision are not always to be taken
literally.

I was under the impression that Clarkson was a motoring journalist, not
an arbiter of the English language.

I don't particularly recommend Clarkson, much of his stuff is really
quite tedious. But he does reflect a type of anti-PC humour which you
don't seem to be aware of..

You have asked several questions which have no sensible answers.

Which questions are these and why do you feel that they have no sensible
answers?

You cannot get away with talking about defamation...

Defamation: injuring a person's reputation by false and malicious
statements. (Just in case you use the word to mean something different)

Your accuse me of asking questions "...with a view to intimidating,
ridiculing, and, ultimately, humiliating..." my opponent? You don't know
me and you can't read my mind yet you're happy to state categorically
that I have malign intentions.

...you have even described some of the questions as unanswerable
yourself.

Again, I'd ask you to point out which questions they are. I can neither
recall nor find anywhere that I describe any of my questions as
unanswerable.

I put it to you that your plan is to make somebody look foolish should
they fall into the trap of trying to answer these questions. And the
danger in this kind of trickery...

Opinions were expressed which I suspect have no rational reasoning behind
them. I had no 'plan' and there was no 'trickery'. I /did/ hope that the
person expressing these opinions, and perhaps those reading his post and
agreeing with him, might be prompted to examine the reason that he holds
those opinions. It seems that Dasco isn't interested in following upon
his statements, though, so either he's thought about it and finds there's
nothing behind them or he doesn't hold the opinions strongly enough to
want to discuss them.

Let us start at the beginning. Archaic people have been found living
in isolation and having little or no sense of tribal identity. It
seems that this sense of identity arises, or becomes stronger, when
different tribes compete for resources. Then we find that warriors of
the Zogozogo tribe will defend their ancestral territory against all
comers. I suggest that here we find the origins of national pride, and
that its all perfectly logical.

By the turn of the last century people had forgoten all this, national
pride was just something that they took for granted. And then I think
it was in WW1 that people, possibly from a "humanist" tradition, stood
up and said that all this running about in the mud and getting killed
by machine guns was just plain idiotic.

I think you start from this latter position with your suspicion that
there is no rational reasoning behind ideas such as national pride.
But you are wrong, there is perfectly good rational reasoning, its
just that most ordinary people still take such things for granted. So
they find your questions to be unanswerable, and they can see that you
have set a trap for them, whereby anything they say will look stupid.

The rest of what I have to say is set out in previous posts, and I
won't repeat it here.

ColinM
.

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