{"id":8598,"date":"2010-02-11T07:08:28","date_gmt":"2010-02-11T12:08:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=8598"},"modified":"2010-02-11T07:08:28","modified_gmt":"2010-02-11T12:08:28","slug":"drag","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=8598","title":{"rendered":"Drag"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>James Joyner has an excellent piece on the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.outsidethebeltway.com\/archives\/defining_anti-semitism_down\/\">defining-down of slurs<\/a> in our current discourse:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Views held by pluralities of Americans are now routinely dubbed Fascist, Communist, treason, unpatriotic, or un-American.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Let&#8217;s not forget &#8220;neocon&#8221; &#8211; a slur that&#8217;s fairly unique, since almost nobody who uses it can define it in any sense &#8211; and, most recently, &#8220;teabagger&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Which I bring up for a reason:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It\u2019s an effective tool, at first, just as Saul Alinsky predicted: \u201cPick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.\u201d But, as he also warned, \u201cA tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I think &#8220;teabagger&#8221; &#8211; the favorite of a lot of dimwitted leftyblog shrieking-point recyclers and MSM party hacks &#8211; has upped the curve.\u00a0 I can&#8217;t put my finger on it, but I think the slur was starting to backfire on the left.<\/p>\n<p>This next nine months will be interesting; the left&#8217;s been hitting the Alinsky playbook so hard it&#8217;s starting to get stale.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>James Joyner has an excellent piece on the defining-down of slurs in our current discourse: Views held by pluralities of Americans are now routinely dubbed Fascist, Communist, treason, unpatriotic, or un-American. Let&#8217;s not forget &#8220;neocon&#8221; &#8211; a slur that&#8217;s fairly unique, since almost nobody who uses it can define it in any sense &#8211; and, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-10","category-culture-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8598"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8611,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8598\/revisions\/8611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}