We’re All Mad Here
Firstly, let me just say that I think it was wholly unfair of Freddie to extrapolate the very last line of Mark’s post in order to conveniently conjure up one of his favourite axes to grind. That’s precisely the kind of rhetorical voodoo for which Freddie has regularly criticised his more dishonest nemeses, and rightly so. As Mark has subsequently gone out of his way to point out, his criticism about the incoherence and subsequent lack ineffectiveness of protesting was leveled equally at participants from both the left and the right. I personally would have thought that his extremely funny “Pardon Scooter” line made that fact abundantly clear.
That said, I think Mark analyzes the function of protesting from a distressingly one-dimensional perspective that misses an entire component of its value. Ironically, such an analysis is of precisely the same kind for which Freddie called me out some time back at The Politics of Scrabble (sorry, no link – I really should have migrated the content before letting to site go dark), so I’m somewhat surprised that he failed to offer the analysis here, especially insofar as I think it’s compelling and has re-shifted my own perspective on the subject.
Much, much more after the jump. [Read more →]
April 15, 2009 10 Comments
