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Subject:RE: This is a test From:"James Barrow" <vrfour -at- verizon -dot- net> To:"'TECHWR-L'" <TECHWR-L -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Tue, 05 Dec 2006 18:54:13 -0800
Ned's my attorney! I called it first! Ha!
>>>Al Geist wrote:
>>Combs, Richard wrote:
>Ned Bedinger said:
>
>>>With that said, I'm done with this thread.
>>
>>But the thread isn't officially over until it fulfills Godwin's Law!
[]
In this case, I think the thread was already thwarted by the invocation
of the more general rule of _Devil's Advocacy Defense_, which is well
known in anonymous public discussion communities as an insubstantial
excuse of last resort when used as an explanation for untenable
positions held in a contentious discussion. A typical invocation of this
defense would be made by a contender attempting to disclaim or distance
him/herself from an unsubstantiated claim s/he made earlier in the
discussion. The most common form of this defense, when made to disclaim
a racial slur, is of the form "I don't believe the Elbonians have a
shoddy methodology myself, I was just throwing it out there to stir
things up."
In the notorious Friday Funnies case that gave rise to this thread, the
claim, that the cause of humor precludes any reasonable interpretation
of the joke as racially demeaning, is in effect the invocation of
Devil's Advocacy, with humor taking the role of "stirring things up" in
the above example. The invoker loses three points (the second for
implying that California is a funny state, and the third for implying
that casinos are not funny).
A more substantial defense would have been to invoke the rule of
_Plausible Deniability_ by asserting that any perceived pejorative
content in the joke resided in the head of the recipient of the joke,
and was not implied or made explicit in the joke itself. Indeed, this
defense has roots in cognitive and humor theory, and is much tougher to
debunk. With Plausible Deniability, the joke's meaning is cast as the
reader or listener's responsibility--they have to "get it" as humor, by
considering and rejecting any contending "not funny" meanings. In the
context of humor, it is plausible to claim that any "not funny" message
was not intended and need not be considered. But this excuse is not
funny, and has a dampening effect that ultimately runs the risk of
terminating the contentious discussion in a stalemated draw, unless one
of the contenders has failed to make a substantial case, in which case
that contender loses the point.
Obligatory disclaimer: This message is 100% free of authoritative
citations. I know it, but am a compulsive arbiter. I should have pointed
this out earlier, but in any case you should have known it already.
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