The Words We Say

>>Is it because they're angry? Should we ban anger from the discourse? I'm all for that, but it would wipe out a lot of liberal equivalents too.<<

I wouldn't ban anger, but I would strongly discourage irrationality and violent languages. It's too easy to whip people into a frenzy, and then somebody gets hurt. Extremists tend to aim for that; I don't think it's a desirable way to run a society.

Good decisions most often derive from good data, careful consideration, and well-balanced arguments. Poor data, logical fallacies, and hateful dialog tend to result in bad decisions with ineffective or destructive results. You have to balance what you feel with what you know, because your own emotions can get in the way of your goals if you let them run away with you. If people are just screaming at each other, they are unlikely to get any good out of it. I think they miss a lot of common ground that way.

My main beef with the Tea Party is its heavy use of logical fallacies such as ad hominem attacks and distraction techniques. The result is that people have a very poor idea what's actually going on. For example, there was the TP protester who claimed to be against "socialized medicine" but then said "don't you touch my Medicare." That program IS provided by the government, but the protester -- after listening to TP presentations on the topic of health care -- apparently didn't know that.

I don't have a problem with people disagreeing over what is wrong or what should be done to fix it. That can be frustrating when they don't agree with me and I think their plan would be bad for me -- but it doesn't generally make me feel like nobody's driving this bus. What makes me frantic is when I see people, and especially the public en masse, making decisions based on emotion or religion without regard to facts, or handling facts carelessly enough to introduce major misconceptions. That way lies disaster. If you've got your facts straight and your arguments are rational, then if the solution goes wrong, at least you can troubleshoot it and find out why. If the facts and arguments aren't reliable -- and especially if there's an expectation that people shouldn't criticize authority -- then it's difficult or impossible to back up, analyze what went wrong, and fix it.