{"id":385,"date":"2007-05-22T08:33:07","date_gmt":"2007-05-22T12:33:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=385"},"modified":"2007-05-22T08:33:07","modified_gmt":"2007-05-22T12:33:07","slug":"misuse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=385","title":{"rendered":"Misuse"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2007\/05\/21\/AR2007052101437.html\">E.J.Dionne<\/a> writes an interview piece on Gore in today&#8217;s Post.  Gore says:<\/p>\n<p>>&#8221;A lot of people were afraid of being accused of being unpatriotic,&#8221; he says. &#8220;One of the symptoms of this problem &#8212; the diminishing role for reason, fact and logic &#8212; is that <strong>what rushes in to fill the vacuum are extreme partisanship, ideology, fundamentalism and extreme nationalism<\/strong>.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>One can&#8217;t help but have some sympathy for this sentiment.  What worries me, however, is not the absence of reason (facts and logic), but rather its misuse.  In a sense, that&#8217;s unreason, but that might be stating the matter in a way that&#8217;s only going to alienate your opponent.  What they have&#8211;and they have them indeed&#8211;are bad arguments.  But even bad arguments take the form of arguments.  That&#8217;s more that can usually be said for Dionne.  I think the rest of Gore&#8217;s interview, in fact, does a remarkable job of impugning <a href=\"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?cat=45\">Dionne&#8217;s annoying failure<\/a> to engage his opponent on sure and equal footing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>E.J.Dionne writes an interview piece on Gore in today&#8217;s Post. Gore says: >&#8221;A lot of people were afraid of being accused of being unpatriotic,&#8221; he says. &#8220;One of the symptoms of this problem &#8212; the diminishing role for reason, fact and logic &#8212; is that what rushes in to fill the vacuum are extreme partisanship, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=385\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Misuse<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}