An interesting rhetorical tactic. I suggest you’re being simplistic, and you respond not by showing that you weren’t being, nor by admitting that you were being, but by … well, I’m not sure, actually. I suppose you’re making fun of the idea that anyone might think your earlier comments were simplistic. That’s certainly easier than showing that they weren’t or that they were right to be, and easier on the ego than admitting they were.
Are you familiar with Popehat?
Yup. And with the pony trope more generally, which I think Ken got from someone at Crooked Timber, who of course got it from Calvin and Hobbes. But laughing at something is not actually the same thing as demonstrating that it deserves only laughing at.
where no one has much in the way of coercive powers
Gosh, if only there were non-market mechanisms other than coercion. … I’m getting a funny sense of deja vu here; how about you?
I may be misremembering. I thought that was where I first saw the C&H pony cartoon being used in the way we’re talking about, but I could very well be wrong—or of course I could be right about that but wrong to think that was its first influential emergence. Here is a 2004 example, not from CT itself, but from one of its leading contributors.
An interesting rhetorical tactic. I suggest you’re being simplistic, and you respond not by showing that you weren’t being, nor by admitting that you were being, but by … well, I’m not sure, actually. I suppose you’re making fun of the idea that anyone might think your earlier comments were simplistic. That’s certainly easier than showing that they weren’t or that they were right to be, and easier on the ego than admitting they were.
Yup. And with the pony trope more generally, which I think Ken got from someone at Crooked Timber, who of course got it from Calvin and Hobbes. But laughing at something is not actually the same thing as demonstrating that it deserves only laughing at.
Gosh, if only there were non-market mechanisms other than coercion. … I’m getting a funny sense of deja vu here; how about you?
Mea culpa, I do that :-)
You do realize this is casual discussion on the ’net, not an academic text intended to be used as a reference with all the Is dotted and Ts crossed?
Did he? I don’t read Crooked Timber regularly, but I don’t remember them being excited about ponies.
Oh, I just see a mulberry bush :-P
I may be misremembering. I thought that was where I first saw the C&H pony cartoon being used in the way we’re talking about, but I could very well be wrong—or of course I could be right about that but wrong to think that was its first influential emergence. Here is a 2004 example, not from CT itself, but from one of its leading contributors.