[MD] Love

[david buchanan]

Matt, John, Steve and anyone interested:

John said to dmb:
You display your intelligence, coolness and so forth by producing something new on the scene, in the academic world.  But here in the heartland, we just want to raise our babies and find some hope for our lives and those of our children.   So hooking into hallmark platitudes might not be cool in the circles you move in, but here in the real world, it's what we need.



dmb says:

Steve recently asked me why the conversation always seems to "devolve" into a debate about the conversation itself. Well, this response of yours is a fairly typical example of the reasons why. There has been a shift or transformation from one context to another so that the meaning of my comments has been wildly distorted. I was talking to Steve about Pirsig's "failure" to talk about love in his attempt to be taken seriously by academic philosophers and you've responded as if I said people in the heartland shouldn't talk about love. And of course, it would be completely ridiculous to suggest that one ought not talk about love at a wedding ceremony. 

See, by taking my comments out of the context in which they were made, which was about Pirsig's MOQ, and putting them into the context of heartland dads who love their babies, the meaning is rather dramatically altered and the meaning of my comments is thereby construed as something very different from what was actually being said. This sort of distortion is not only intellectually bogus because the context changes the meaning, it also relies almost entirely on cheap sentimentality and it fabricates a rather silly straw man, as if anyone would be opposed to hope or babies. 

Criticizing moves like this is NOT the cause of conversational devolution. Moves like that have already spoiled the conversation and complaining about it could, if taken seriously, put the conversation back on track.