Visionaries,
I am afraid that Jon was distressed at my humorous response and thought it showed a lack of propriety on my part. A humorous response to grotesque slander is indicative of a lack of decency on the part of the recipient of the slander? But I am afraid I will not play that game. One of the reasons why slanderers do their thing is that too often the recipient furrows his brow and starts denying the charges in a way that makes them seem plausible. What slanderers need to hear more often is an exuberant raspberry.
Suppose someone were to accuse me (in an ALL CAPS spittle flecked kind of way) of cannibalizing people in my basement. Suppose further that they signed their post with something like Oscar P. Tugmutton. And suppose that someone who will believe anything bad about me bought it, and comes out foursquare against cannibalism. And then let’s say a number of other folks pointed out to him that Tugmutton was not a real name. Would it be an appropriate response to retract that gullible reaction by saying that Oscar’s yahoo signature should have been the tipoff? Leaving the impression that you think the charge itself was plausible, but that the source was not?
For the rest of you visionaries, you need to mark that I will not defend myself against anything that emerges from the Johnsonesque quadrant of the forum. But you also need to note that there are a growing number of bystanders who do not see the inherent incoherence of the charges, and they are starting to bite.
Counting the dead rats floating on the pond of Moscow civil discourse,
Douglas Wilson
Apologetics in the Void” are repostings from an on-going electronic discussion and debate I had some time ago with members of our local community, whose names I have changed. The list serve is called Vision 20/20, and hence the name “visionaries.” Reading just these posts probably feels like listening to one half of a phone conversation, but I don’t feel at liberty to publish what others have written. But I have been editing these posts (lightly) with intelligibility in mind.