RE: RE: The shadow of the torturer

Steve, I take it by your explanation that you have some specific problems with the column?

None whatever. The column is good, as most of Vox's are and I agree with the bulk of it. I'm just doubtful of his motivation and his approach.

He writes from such a narrow perspective, people who are unfamiliar with him might find comfort or pain where there is none. For example, a rabid, Bush-hating liberal might think Vox in agreement with his or her own agenda across the board. I assure you, nothing could be further from the truth. Let said liberal belabor Vox with his or her feminist leanings and the experience will be unpleasant and short. At the same time, I can just hear the mouth-breathing bushbot Kool-aid-drinkers wheezing about Vox being a pinko, liberal, weenie faggot. Let one of them accost Vox on the subject of their aversion to all things socialist, and they will think they have fallen into an intellectual right-winger's utopia.

As well, with regard to Vox's charging Hell with a squirt-gun, he tends to wax bombastic on a fine point. A few weeks ago, it was over the misuse of the term Fascist. The useful part of that whole episode was that he discussed, in detail, the dishonest way in which public education attempts to associate Nazism and Fascism ideologically. Other than that, it was an academic split hair.

The tone of his argument is overly elitist. He openly disdains those who succumb to the fear salad being sold by the Bush Administration, but he offers no alternative. He does nothing substantial to expose the red pill as a fraud. His argument is simply that fear is dangerous, especially when it causes us to abandon principle. He is completely correct, but offers nothing in the way of relief. I suspect he believes exposure to be the cure, but in that he vastly under and over estimates his audience. This is assuming he writes to offer something useful to humanity. If he writes just to see his words in print, then shame on him and shame on us for reading him.