Is it possible to be unconsciously in bad faith?
A well-known conservative writer posted on the recent White House request for information about internet rumours on the healthcare reform plan. His post was profoundly unsubtle, amounting to a reprint of the famous illustration to George Orwell's 1984, "Big Brother is watching you." Now, I could have mocked this or responded in kind - after all, a message of this kind is not calling for subtlety or fair-mindedness. It is a brutal appeal to fear and party allegiance. Instead of which, I chose to respond in the following terms:
I am not quite sure that you (and practically every conservative commentator in the USA) are right. What I read that message to be is a request to be kept up to date with rumours, rather than with people - to try and respond to every novel interpretation of the bill before it goes viral and becomes the received truth for millions. Tony Blair had a very successful operation along those lines in the 1997 election, called a "rapid response unit". The way that internet rumours become accepted facts in modern politics makes this kind of response virtually inevitable. But if you want to feel terrorized by a demonic enemy, of course you will interpret anything your opponent does in that light.
By way of thanks, the response was deleted before another poster had even had the time to answer it.
His excuse for it - whether he was excusing it to himself or to others - was that the closing sentence was an ad hominem attack on him. That is nonsense. It is a statement of universal fact, which in the present struggle applies to both sides (see Nancy Pelosi's grotesque statements about swastikas) and which people ought very much to bear in mind before they take any position. But if he felt that it applied to him particularly - that is what ad hominem means - then I can only say that there is something in it that he felt spoke to his own condition, and that he did not want to listen to.
I am not quite sure that you (and practically every conservative commentator in the USA) are right. What I read that message to be is a request to be kept up to date with rumours, rather than with people - to try and respond to every novel interpretation of the bill before it goes viral and becomes the received truth for millions. Tony Blair had a very successful operation along those lines in the 1997 election, called a "rapid response unit". The way that internet rumours become accepted facts in modern politics makes this kind of response virtually inevitable. But if you want to feel terrorized by a demonic enemy, of course you will interpret anything your opponent does in that light.
By way of thanks, the response was deleted before another poster had even had the time to answer it.
His excuse for it - whether he was excusing it to himself or to others - was that the closing sentence was an ad hominem attack on him. That is nonsense. It is a statement of universal fact, which in the present struggle applies to both sides (see Nancy Pelosi's grotesque statements about swastikas) and which people ought very much to bear in mind before they take any position. But if he felt that it applied to him particularly - that is what ad hominem means - then I can only say that there is something in it that he felt spoke to his own condition, and that he did not want to listen to.