This is a self defeating assumption.

Why? Because from that comes the rationale of “Why Bother?”

Then it just becomes a race to grab power and dominate the other, since, after all, we have the exclusive notion on what is right and the other won’t listen and abide.

Aside from the corruptive power of DC, this is a top reason why conservatism gets nowhere – we won’t bother to take our case and message beyond the echo chamber.

” … if the person is not willing to be respectful, or keeps setting up strawman after strawman in order to almost continually take up everyone’s time and effort (and then keeps moving the goalposts, or not responding to the substance but just setting up a new strawman argument), then that person is sometimes banned. It’s a judgment call.”

This is an extremely interesting remark for what it says about the nature of that type of commenter.

These cannot be accidental characteristics, but are rather deliberate – or at least preferred – methods for engaging those with whom they disagree.

It’s a kind of deliberate emotional provocation or incitement using language. I guess you could call it “rhetoric” if you wanted to dignify these verbal behaviors with that title.

Related to this, I’ll note that one of the more fervently desired visitors on a blog I once frequented, was the so-called “rational liberal”. In that case, he was imagined as a liberal who would 1, stick to the initial point until the issue was resolved, 2, avoid ad hominem attacks either open or sly in the meanwhile, and 3, who would be prepared to try and justify his moral pronouncements – since it always came down to that eventually – with arguments and demonstrations that the proffered imperatives were in fact logically necessary conclusions from some more basic and agreed upon axiom or assumption.

Naturally, the entity sought was never found. And the reason it soon became abundantly obvious, was because it was a chimera; i.e., an imaginary creature cobbled together out of essentially antithetical or incompatible parts.

Because – and here’s why – the modern liberal’s moral sensibility and value system is not based on inferences drawn from what is presumed to be an objective and categorically describable human nature in the first place. That is in great measure what makes him the kind of person we refer to as a “liberal”

We conservatives, or libertarians, or non-relativists have been expecting, or hoping for, or asking for, a modern liberal to argue the political compulsion case he advocates on presumably objective grounds, or from a logical framework, which he as a relativist, nominalist, and instrumentalist when it comes to the faculty of reason, rejects right out of the box.

Thus, it is absolutely to be expected that we cannot talk to each other: since one party expects to be framing the argument on the basis of supposedly objective moral criteria, and the other on the subjective tastes and dreams which he feels entitled to try and purchase with the social capital he imagines himself as entitled to draw from others.

That is why, once the superficial matter of how much this or that really costs the treasury is disposed of, there is no further place to go insofar as judging whether “it” is even worth it, or legitimate, at any price.

It is the psychological stance of rejecting such putatively objective analyses as pointless-because-impossible, which to a large degree defines what a modern liberal is, as opposed to a conservative or a libertarian.

From the modern liberal point of view, if you don’t feel it, there is no point in discussing it.

And that unfortunately is why it is impossible to communicate regarding the “objective value” of this or that end. One party, the modern liberal party, simply does not believe in, or have any interest in, supposedly natural and objectively mandated moral (social) ends or purposes.

Here is what Xena Warrior Princess looks like now
click here. jk

I too hate “nested” commenting, and I’m so grateful that you don’t use Dreadful Disqus. I flatly refuse to comment on Disqus sites. And mostly don’t bother reading them./’

I love the cleanness of neoneocon.com. It’s easy to read, it’s uncluttered, and it doesn’t eat bandwidth like some of the “webloids.” (Web tabloids — I just made that up, do you like it? *g*)

It’s great to have the Preview, too. The only other site I know of that uses that function is Samizdata.net.

And the quality of your postings, Neo, and of the conversations here, is very good.

So, thank you very much. :>)

Thanks for being you, Neo.