Thursday, August 16, 2012

With sterling rhetoric, Sterling T Perkins calls for an END to rhetoric on Climate Change ...

Bombast Central
With friends like Mr Perkins, the case for Climate Change need hardly fear enemies.

We do need more action to reduce disastrous climate changes, but which actions to choose out of a cornucopia of choices ?

 Is it precisely here where more , not less  - and sharper, not softer - rhetoric is needed : to make the differences between those various choices more apparent for all of us to better decide.

Truly nothing is windier, nothing more cliched,  than newspaper opinion pages and opinion page writers getting up on their tiny hind legs to decry rhetoric --- in highly rhetorical language.

Rhetoric is the lifeblood of social, co-operating, beings


I am one who holds that even truly private diaries intended only for the eyes of the writer are filled with rhetoric (a subtle form of whistling your way past a graveyard ?) - as are most business accounting records.

Most students of rhetoric feel the same way - to judge by current research articles.

Humans are highly rhetorical beings - social, co-operating, beings -and it is time that both The Montreal Gazette and my fellow political science enthusiast Sterling Perkins accepted that fact.....

No comments:

Post a Comment