Does that make you two feel better? Opening a thread to tweak Republicans and then accusing a dissenter of trying to tweak you? Posting about jerky knees just to get a rise out of a fellow member, and then calling him a troll? All you need now is EddyFreddyBlockOfSpaghetti to begin a pile-on in earnest, and God knows that’ll teach me how I should act.
The only difference between Luntz and his Democratic counterpart is that Luntz is honest about what he does.
All politicial parties have people like Luntz. They all engage in the same thing. Luntz just admits it.
Have you read posts 2 and 3, Sam Stone?
What am I, chopped liver?
That said 
, I agree with you and Sam Stone. Luntz’s tortured use of the term “Orwellian” is merely a perfect example of what political spinmeisters of all stripes attempt to do.
Those are good and genuinely Orwellian examples. Don’t know if Luntz is to blame for them, though.
And you’re an old dog with no new tricks. Could we stay on topic?
Re the use of precision–that’s his (Luntz’s) term–not mine! I also don’t find his terms all that accurate. Horza is correct. Luntz is kinda freaky to me. The fact that the Dems have their own “Luntz” is hardly news, but this thread is about Luntz and Terry Gross’ interview of him.
Or is it? Perhaps I need Luntz to tell me how to think and express myself…
Republicans certainly are. I don’t know whether Luntz himself is directly responsbile for those exact phrases but it’s the kind of thing he teaches.
Yeah, and you’re so different now. :rolleyes:
I don’t know, could you? Apparently not.
I sure have missed threads that weren’t all about Liberal. That’s what I come to these boards for–finding out stuff about Liberal, and the libertairan promised land that he will one day lead us all to.
I caught the last bit of the interview, wherein Luntz decried passionately the unfairness of current political discourse in the land – how honest, hard-working businessmen can be called all sorts of dreadful names by mean nasty leftists, and no one will say boo, but how useless fruitcakes like environmentalists can’t ever, ever be chastised in any way without calling down wrath upon the denigrator’s head.
And what popped into my head was “tree-hugger”, followed by “Ozone-Man”. But perhaps those are terms the worthy Mr. Luntz has never encountered?
Ahem. May I ask that folks who find his contributions interesting or productive by all means continue to discuss them–but that if you find them to be deceptive or unproductive, just ignore them? In my threads, anyway; I open few enough up.
Certainly other folks do it, but just as certainly there’s one person in the country’s political machines who’s worse about it than anyone else. Given that interview, I think Luntz deserves a nomination for being the worst; I’ve not seen evidence of anyone else in either party who’s quite as shameless about it as he is.
I mean, really–the man claimed that Orwellian language is just precise language? That wasn’t even an attempt to score political points–it’s as if he were being obfuscatory by habit!
Daniel
I wonder what Luntz actually said. Daniel said that what he’s relating here was a paraphrase from his memory. Meanwhile, a note on Wiki says he said, “it means clearly and unsubjectively written, such as the style of writing promoted by Orwell himself”. And in any case, why should Luntz be any more ashamed than any other Madison Avenue hack? And as far as logging being “healthy forestation” or whatever, responsible loggers can contribute to the health of forests through careful management. The notion that logging companies are out to destroy forests is infantile in its conception, since forests are their very livelihood.
Luntz is just the most egregious example of the abuse of language du jour. This abuse is completely superficial: the abuser chooses his words carefully such that his speech is strictly true but goes against the grain of common understanding. While it is strictly true that Orwell polemicized against obfuscation and imprecise writing, it is equally true that “Orwellian” writing has come to mean Newspeak.
It is also equally infantile to suppose that forest conservation is the most important priority of logging companies, unless you mean conservation within the constraints of their margins. That is why this choice of words is abusive: the bill’s name evades the binding constraint on profit in order to emphasize a strictly true but clearly secondary priority of the loggers.
I doubt that you’ll find many people who believe that logging companies are “out to destroy forests”. That’s a strawman. They’re out to make money, end of story. To them any negative effect on the forest is secondary to that goal. As far as them needing to protect forests in order to protect their livelihood, loggers require trees not necessarily healthy forests. Monoculture tree farms would be just as good in their eyes, if such things could be grown fast enough. Since they can’t be, they log old growth. Obviously we need logging, but the type of logging promoted by the “Healthy Forests Initiative” does not contribute to the health of the forests. It doesn’t even really contribute to the stated fire prevention goals.
http://www.wildcalifornia.org/publications/article-57
I agree with all that. We’re all guilty of wordsmithing and spinning to our own advantage. We all do it even here on the boards. Members will frame each other’s contributions using all sorts of phrases that evoke the worst (or best, depending if it’s someone you like) possible spin, usually short of being an outright lie.
I think this is a different phenomenon. We use rhetoric to persuade. Sometimes it is tasteful, othertimes it is mendacious. Only in the worst cases do we try to maintain the strict truth of what we say if it does violence to conventional use of language. GD is concerned with the exchange of ideas, not mental programming.
GD is (in theory at least) yes, but I was talking about the Pit. Here, words are used as weapons quite often. Spin is just a tactic in the strategy of destruction. Same as politics, pretty much.