[Uncle Billy]

Originally Posted by MTT TL:

"You are attacking the arguer and not the argument. I think we have made that pretty apparent."

Where?

For what I wrote to be an "ad hominem" fallacy, I would have had to attack her on issues and in language unconnected with what her "argument" is. My point is that she used oversimplified generalizations and distortions of liberal ideology which are common among those members of the right that have made similar assumptions. That is the flaw in her argument, not who she is as a person.

She wrote "But, I am rethinking absolutely everything. There is not a single thing that I believed, that I held absolute and holy, that is not up for grabs. My brain is in a tizzy 24/7 and I don't know if up is down, or if east is west " and "As I continue on the path to independence and personal responsibility, perhaps looking to myself for protection is another step on my journey." If there is a Robin who had the experiences written of and who as a result finds it accurate to write these descriptions of herself, it's clear she's in a mid-point in sorting out how to relate to what happened to her and as a consequence how to relate to the world around her. If she progresses no further than to hold those oversimplified stereotypes, generalities and suppositions of the right as her perspective on the world, she won't be very effective as a psychotherapist, especially in Berkeley, and she will remain a victim of the crime against her.

As I wrote, her essay has the aura of a journal entry. "Journaling" is a technique used to help people who have conflicts and confusion to deal with as the result of a very significant event in their lives which destroyed their confidence in themselves and their understanding of the world around them.

They thought they had it figured out, they thought they understood the world and their place in it, most of all they thought they could trust what they knew and their understanding of the people around them. Then something comes along that seems to knock all of that down to zero, leaving them without a core, a center they can have confidence in and trust, and a credible link that they understand between that center and the world outside themselves.

There's anger that all they believed seems to have been wrong, there's fear that they don't know what the truths are since the ones they held seem to have been wrong, there's insecurity that they are lost and don't understand how to not be lost.

The first step is to quell the anger because it clouds reason and objectivity. I think that's where Robin is, if she's real, and that's why I think her attack on the left comes from a strong sense of betrayal and the anger that produces. If she manages to progress in her quest not to "be in a tizzy 24/7" and that state subsides, she'll eschew some or all of the gross oversimplifications and accusing suppositions of leftist ideology she spewed forth in her essay. If she stays with the ideology her essay attributes to her, she's pretty much done with being an effective, objective psychotherapist since they can't operate when they're capable of using such angry, accusatory generalities and name-calling oversimplified suppositions.

Of course they are oversimplified. Same as how the left paints the right. Check out the Doonesbury cartoons of the Starbucks open carriers. At least as a cartoon it is a "honest" lampoon.

Right, and Robin's disparagement, derision, demeaning name-calling and oversimplified suppositions she attributes to the "Left" as a whole, aren't honest (i.e. certainly representative of what she believes, she said everything she believes is "up for grabs" and she "doesn't know if up is down, etc"), they are a temper tantrum. Here you and I agree. I think she might have written in that manner as a catharsis, a purge of negativity and anger, a strike back at what she thinks to be her attacker- the ideology of the left. Further, if this is the case, she will eventually return to some more careful, thoughtful, reasoned attitudes and not be so virulently hateful of all of liberal ideology and be able to objectively assess the causes of such actions to find what might be done to remediate them instead of her unreasoned and emotional rejection of causation as a worthwhile thing to know- that's what a psychotherapist does.

But the garbage spilled forth by the political hacks and media spokesmen are not [an honest lampoon].

Oh, you mean Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, Coulter, about all of the Fox network? Again, we agree.