Sunday, June 19, 2005
COMMENTING IN THIS BLOG
Since the blog is mine, I get to set the rules. Differences of opinion are optional. "Blowing up Muslims" ( :-) Hi Joseph) is not. Neither is Saul Alinsky-style debate.
Stephanie Block, in an article at the Catholic Culture website that discusses some CTA activities, describes the Alinsky method in a segment of the article titled "The Industrial Areas Foundation" where she says:
Ed Chambers, national IAF executive director and a former Catholic seminarian, has a similar idea. He is quoted as saying, "I'd had a little training in philosophy. And I started forcing myself to look at what our kind of organizing meant to people. We worked with people in the churches, and their language was the language of the gospel. Their language was nothing like Alinsky's language [Alinsky, recall, was the IAF founder]. His language was power talk. Tough, abrasive, confrontational, full of ridicule. And those are really all non-Christian concepts.
Some posters in here have used this style. It resembles a machine gun, and has a similar effect emotionally that a machine gun has physically. The object is to annihilate your oponent, not to propose a different viewpoint. It is a power trip. It is mean-spirited. It is communistic. It comes from the mindset that the end justifies the means. It is not charitable. It is not humble. It is not Catholic. And it is not acceptable in my blog.
I will not respond to such debate, and I ask the majority of posters here who do not use this style of debate to refrain from responding to it as well.
There are only a couple of posters who use it, and I suspect they know very well who they are.
