One of my blog entries that is most often commented upon is The Pieing of William Kristol, about the incident in March where Earlham Student Josh Medlin hit conservative commentator Kristol with some sort of pie. As the paper reported yesterday, Medl...

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keep throwing those pies people. maybe it wont change the a-holes minds being hit with pies but it make them think alot more how people are fed up with their crap. they will also have to start ducking more too

Still, I don't think people like Kristol provide a useful or interesting perspective. They are liars and thieves. You can't have constructive debates with liars. If you let them phrase the terms of the debate you've already lost. When someone does not provide an honest or genuine perspective, you do a diservice to give them any time or attention at all (except perhaps the cynical attention when determining counter-strategies).

The idea that all opinions are valid or true, or that some golden mean exists, is false. It lets the extremists shift the center too easily, it lets the liars redirect the discussion too often.

You may not be able to have constructive debates with liars, but you can have constructive debates about them, or because of them. I suspect that Earlham might find an address by someone like Kristol useful in this regard: it allows students to see up close what the right wing intelligentsia look like and how they do frame the debate. So I guess it's one thing to read the works of Lakoff and others about re-framing the way these exchanges go, but it's another to have an opportunity to practice it with someone like Kristol. Ian, I suppose this is what you meant by determining counter-strategies. Given how things actually turned out, I can't help but agree that in this case, at least some at Earlham were apparently not ready, and thus the College as a whole was not well-served by inviting Kristol in the first place.

And really the only bad part about this incident is that it's embarrassing for the school. Kristol's feelings don't matter -- he doesn't deserve that kind of respect -- and no one is suddenly turned to the Right Wing because they were in the audience. If it's only embarrassing, it shouldn't be that big a deal. If you're humble embarrassment doesn't sting that much.

And personally, I'm a little disturbed that Earlham would invite these people. I mean, Ann Coulter? They pay these people to come, it isn't like they are doing this out of the goodness of their heart either. And I agree, there's a reason to think about right Right and the Neocons, and what they want to achieve. It's not useful to dehumanize them. But you don't watch the puppet to decypher the beliefs of the puppeteer.

I don't know... I don't feel a desire to make a big deal of this, it's not an event worthy of wide dissemination... and I guess that's why I'm posting all this here. It frustrates me... all the more so when my sister -- who is just trying to do the right thing, and isn't willing to settle for the weak liberal compromise -- is feeling attacked and isolated from a school which I thought, at least, would be nuturing. There's too many people who are more troubled by an awkward moment than they are by the gravest injustices.