Don't even start...

[falcongrrl]

"Why do you continue to support a Nazi policy?"

"When you ask me that question, I am going to refer to my ethnic heritage, and answer a question with a question..."

"Don't even start with the Jews."

***

The querent made a simple statement about Adolf Hitler, and there Barney Frank goes bringing Jews into it.

They're like that, always talking about their Jewishness, dragging it into every conversation, no matter how irrelevant.

Context here.

Comments

[rowyn]

Bwahahahaha!

The dining room table comment was probably uncalled for. Also, a conversation with a dining room table on the topic would be much more pleasant. }:)

[ladyperegrine.livejournal.com]

*laugh* I actually thought that too, on both counts.

[circuit-four.livejournal.com]

I... dunno. My third grade homeroom teacher said much, much nastier things to us when we were acting like idiots. Believe me, nobody wants civility to return to American politics more than you and me. But nobody wanted order to return to our classroom more than poor prematurely gray Mrs. Allison. :) And sometimes cutting someone down in front of their friends for being rude and ignorant is in the greatest service of civility. I think Barney Frank would have an obligation to be polite and unsarcastic... the moment that woman apologized and asked a relevant, mature question. I hope he would. But we're never going to know, and the hectoring continues. I think liberals are just so astonished to see one of ours reacting with a spine for once, we can't help but applaud.

[rowyn]

I am certainly not going to fault Rep. Frank for the quip, which was made on the spur of the moment and in response to a question that was provacative, insulting, and ridiculous. It's very hard not to ridicule someone who is setting themselves up for ridicule.

But I do think that the cause of discourse is generally better served by ignoring the people who make insulting and erroneous assertions than by retaliating with ad hominem attacks of your own. It's a waste of your time and just feeds the cycle of viciousness.

Still, to reiterate: I am not faulting Rep. Frank on this. Verbal restraint might be my ideal, but witty repartee is a good alternative. Think of it as a 7 or 8 on a scale of 1-10, instead of a 10. :)

[circuit-four.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, hon, I still disagree with you. I'll use the classroom example again: when a substantial minority is shouting, throwing paper airplanes, and generally behaving like a bunch of asses, ignoring them is not going to make them settle down. The ruckus is self-sustaining. It's sort of hard to ignore the insulting and erroneous when they make up a significant political bloc. And it's a lovely thought, that you could quiet a roomful of rowdy juveniles (even adult-aged ones) with polite and reasoned discourse. But you gotta make it clear that you are not going to tolerate that behavior first. Once you've got a mob on your hands, any speech soft and gentle enough to be shouted down might as well be no speech at all.

[ladyperegrine.livejournal.com]

The problem is that in theory, at least, the over-18 citizen crowd are Frank's bosses, not subordinates (the way students are to a teacher).

I think the really disheartening thing is how, well, stupid, we the people seem to be. But this woman and those like her are products of the educational system. Kids at least have the excuse of their brains not being fully developed, of needing an education for their own good, regardless of how they feel about it. But the voting public are supposed to dictate policy, not the other way around. The fact that we (collective American we) don't appear capable of rational decision-making? It's a problem. I don't know what happens from here...

[circuit-four.livejournal.com]

He's trying to administer a meeting. Teachers are public servants, too. It was incredibly disrespectful of her -- and negligent of her duties as a participant in a democracy -- to address him like that. For that matter, judges are servants of the public, too -- and yet, for the good of society, we allow them to punish people for acts of contempt like that. The purpose isn't to subjugate or assert authority over the person being chastized. It's to remind them that what they're doing is serious and the person up there trying to serve the public deserves to be taken seriously. If she's going to dictate policy, she can do it in a civl manner, and until she does, she's broken a very important social contract and doesn't deserve to be addressed like a responsible citizen. Sorry, I don't think I'm gonna budge on this one. :/

[glashund.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, I'm in total agreement on this 'un.

[ladyperegrine.livejournal.com]

See response, then.

[glashund.livejournal.com]

I just don't see Frank's roles as representative and meeting administrator, and their corresponding responsibilities, as one and the same. Yes, the latter is situational, technically unofficial, and in service of the former, but it's also crucial in its own right; as much as traditional media and cranks love a good anarchic shouting match, it's a waste of pretty much everyone else's time.

[ladyperegrine.livejournal.com]

I think that's a good point, and I also think that, "Talking to you is like talking to a dining room table," while true, is, well first insulting to the furniture, and second maybe not completely in the service of calming things down and getting back to business. But it was funny.

[glashund.livejournal.com]

Reckon we'll probably have to file that under "reasonable people disagreeing". I get your point, but I just feel like, wrt: the whole townhall teabagger/crank scene, the time for playing nice...which I would agree is pretty much always preferable, when viable...lies crumpled in a bloody heap several miles back up the road.

That respectful dialogue should be proven unworkable is absolutely a shame, but IMHO, it has proven unworkable under the circumstances.

[ladyperegrine.livejournal.com]

Right. I'm just stuck at the first point. I feel like once respectful dialogue is impossible (and I'll concede that crazy and stupid have made it that way) then our democracy just isn't working, and that saddens and depresses me.

[glashund.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm certainly with you there. :,

[shaterri.livejournal.com]

I think part of the problem is that we're seeing a Prisoner's Dilemma at work. The root of it is that in respectful and reasoned discourse, generally (albeit not always) the best ideas win, and at some level both sides win -- but when it comes down to reasoned discourse vs. a shouting match, the shouting match almost always wins. And I abhor this myself, but I don't know how to fix it, and I don't know if it can be fixed per se. Usually the only way out of these things is for things to degrade to the point where people get tired of the lose-lose strategy, but I'm not seeing any signs that we're anywhere near that point yet. :/

[ladyperegrine.livejournal.com]

when it comes down to reasoned discourse vs. a shouting match, the shouting match almost always wins

I think it depends upon what you mean by win. I think it can shut things down if allowed to continue, sure, but I don't know that it really ever wins.

What it does is create drama,and drama makes people tune in. I think what we have to do is exactly what you said - get tired of the drama, and want to work to make things better instead of getting sucked into the lose-lose strategy, but we're not there.

What Frank said maybe made us laugh, made us cheer, but it didn't really do anything to fix stuff. Maybe the middle-of-the-road folks need him to point out the absurdity...but...really? Really? I mean, if moderate people don't get the whole Godwin's law thing on their own, I just don't know what hope there is, honestly.

[toob.livejournal.com]

The Internet trolls have spread to real life!

I wonder what would have happened if he'd challenged her to name which specific points of the health plan she thought were fascist, and which tenets of fascism they related to?

[ladyperegrine.livejournal.com]

I wonder that too, though I suspect we wouldn't get to see it.

[jenny_evergreen]

Tell me about it. I've started to stop paying attention to the health care thing because it is literally causing me to start to lose my faith in humanity. *wry*

[ladyperegrine.livejournal.com]

So on the same page.

Though visit is coming up soon! :-)

[jenny_evergreen]

Yay, visit! :)

[ladyperegrine.livejournal.com]

I can't believe that it seems like I'm defending her, but I still think that your analogy is faulty. What we pay politicians for is representation, which is something completely different from paying someone to educate youth or to administer punishments for laws broken. It's apples and oranges.

I don't even think that Frank is really wrong - I'm in agreement over rowyn that perhaps it wasn't the absolute 100% best way to handle it, but I don't really think he was out of line either.

My point is that at some point our American democratic experiment has failed, and this makes me sad. I think you're missing my point.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

My point is that at some point our American democratic experiment has failed, and this makes me sad.

It's very easy to get depressed about what passes for public political discourse now, and I think it's always good to strive to lift it -- you can't have a rational conversation with a pitchfork-carrying mob. But I think sometimes we tend to forget (I certainly do) that, well, pitchfork-carrying mobs have been with us at least as long as pitchforks have been with us. "Know-Nothings" has been in American politics since the 1850s, first as a short-lived political party founded on anti-immigration right-wing populism, then for over a century as a slur. And historically, the idea that the press has an obligation to be objective is actually pretty new -- go back 70 years and press magnates were much more like Rupert Murdoch; go back 200 years, and what you had was pretty much the ancestors of partisan political blogs, but arguably even less objective: newspapers had been invented, but reporters hadn't.

I'm not pleased with a lot of discourse in this country and some of it genuinely worries me, and I think there's a specific strain of demonizing "The Other" in this generation of politics which only goes back as far as Lee Atwater. And I think unchecked, it has the potential to lead to very dark places. Yet there are versions of Atwater back through our political history, and we've been in some awfully dark places before: just since World War II we've seen a president assassinated, a politically-driven purge of opponents on a far more massive scale than anything Karl Rove dreamed up, and soldiers firing on our own citizens to break up political protest. And if you go back past that, you'll find events that challenged the way we thought of American democracy pretty regularly. All the machinations around the Great Depression, the Haymarket Riot. And of course, we actually had a full-fledged civil war.

We do pay politicians to represent us, but we also theoretically pay them to use their brains. In any political district, there are going to be people who have wildly differing views and a representative can back at most one of them on any given subject. Do we pay politicians to be respectful to us even when we're not being respectful to them? In a sense, maybe, but there's a line at which point you have to be willing to say, as Washington's Rep. Rick Larsen did a few days ago, "I've got facts on my side and you've got Glenn Beck on yours." I want more politicians to speak truth to power -- and I can't help but suspect that goes hand in hand with a willingness to speak truth to stupid.

[ladyperegrine.livejournal.com]

But "What planet are you on?" is something funny, and it's certainly the truth of the emotion in the moment, but I don't know that it really counts as capital-T Truth to stupid...at least, not to me. (Maybe because I've wondered that, more than once, about myself. *grin*)

These people holding up placards of Obama decorated to look like Hitler...they may or may not be mentally ill (good luck for them getting treatment given the current healthcare system if so, heh)...but either way, they're most certainly absolutely terrified. It's impossible to talk to them, granted, but insulting them also feels a little bit like shooting fish in a barrel.

And, honestly, I felt that way under Bush Jr. I felt like we were one small step away from a dictatorship. So while I think the posterwielding folks are completely wrong in this instance, I can empathize with that sense of fear. I can empathize while at the same time I worry about the stupidity/racism/batshit crazy that seems to be accompanying their fear.

I really and truly don't have any problem with Frank. I just don't think he's Jesus Christ either. I think that making fun of that woman is just too easy.

I like the reassurance of the history. At the same time, I guess I want to believe that our public educational system is making the political climate better, is creating a more educated populace, and my fear is that things are actually worse and that the things I want to believe about my country are false. The fact that my kids are coming up through the public school system makes it even more of an issue. What will they learn and not learn?

But when things get bad, I turn on the tap, or the lights, or go to the grocery store. We have a hell of an infrastructure, and I guess even if our political system has denigrated into fearmongering and marketing and ratings, there's still that to feel good about.

[rowyn]

That's okay. I think this is one of those areas where diversity is good, where it's better that we don't all agree. Because different methods get different results on different people, and having different ones available is a plus. Sorry, I'm not sure that it explains it very well; brain kinda failing.

*hug*

Also, Peregrine said most everything I thought on the matter, only better, so *hug* to her too. <3

[ladyperegrine.livejournal.com]

I guess based upon the fact that one of my friends is a lava lamp, talking to a dining room table doesn't seem that far outside the realm of possibility to me. O:-)

[cargoweasel.livejournal.com]

I adore Barney Frank.

[monkeyman.livejournal.com]

Oh, I love Barney Frank. Always have.