My comment has more to do with the personal bits of ugliness, deception, character assasination, and attempts to ostracization that caused me to leave the FAB and have so disappointed me on the forum in general.
If your wives don't mind, perhaps you, KC and I could get things rolling early come October with a discussion of whether or not circumstances or intent change the essential nature of an action or idea. I don't believe so.
I think if you're going to claim the high road, you've got to walk it. I believe any victory won in the least bit underhanded fashion ultimately is doomed to be Pyrrhic in n nature.
Maybe it's different for those, like me, who must remain vigilant the rest of their lives against the temptation to succumb once again to certain mindsets and/or tactics essential to the left.
You know how former smokers can be. I guess you could consider me a former smoker of leftist ideology. I would never have described myself as a leftist and I was by no means a Green or a Democrat or a Libertarian. But at heart I did share their disdain for human beings ... knew full well that most humans were long pigs who could be manipulated -- with repetition, slogans, fear, intimidation, terror -- like the base, selfish, passionate animals they were at heart.
I agree. You can, however, use some of tactics that the other side uses and still walk the high road.
One that I would agree to use is attack, attack, attack. Not smear, defame, sling mud, etc but if you have to go on the defensive you have lost much of your momentum.
The left does this ALONG with smearing, etc.
I want to get my licks in too.
Do you really think the people reading this thread are too dim to see that even as you moan about being abused and victimized, you continue to attack and attack and attack?
There is a saying in anthropology: Action precedes thought. It applies nicely in neuroscience as well (watch a child learning to speak). Does it apply to politics?
Consider slavery as an example. Slavery became a moral outrage, worldwide, when it became impractical.
But pragmatism is slippery as mercury. If we view change as process, then catastrophe often results when the process is rushed along too fast. Communism is an example. Socialism moves slowly, and hearts and minds adjust.
Now I see that, all along, I was assuming a posterity
Of gentle hearts. Someone, however distant in the depths of time,
Who could pick up our signal, who could understand a story.
There won't be.
So scratching out the good fight allows the gradual construction of the "barrier across which no voice can ever carry".
It's not how well you play the game, it's what game you play.