Tag: reeducation

If the word ‘reeducate’ unironically shows up in your gaming post, just delete the entire post.

Seriously. If at any point in an essay or argument you find yourself saying how players of video games (or any other amusement) need to be ‘reeducated,’ I am afraid that you have pretty much hosed your position, and you should definitely abandon it on the spot.  Don’t throw good money after bad on this one, folks: you won’t be able to salvage whatever you’ve already invested anyway.  Instead, you have to show some moral courage and cut your losses.

Why?  Because when you’re at the point of discussing the best way to make people change their minds on something, whether they want to or not, then you are at least flirting with the idea that people are things.  …That attitude rarely ends well. It certainly won’t end in ‘reeducation.’

Moe Lane

PS: If I was gonna link to the article that spawned this thought, I would have.

Sebelius counsels… ‘Reeducation’ for Obamacare.

The young boy’s desperately silent scream for rescue will haunt your dreams.

“Reeducation.”

Reeducation.

Yeah, sure, using that term will save at-risk Democrats in swing seats and states.

Now, it’s important to note here that HHS Secretary Sebelius was being inarticulate and stupidly insensitive here, not threatening. She didn’t mean to evoke the Cold War era specter of Communist concentration camps where enemies of the State were systematically tortured into reflexively supporting whatever Dear Leader was in power that year, or Soviet-era ‘mental hospitals’ where dissidence was ‘treated’ as a medical disease. The Democrats aren’t setting up detention centers for everybody who opposes Obamacare: for one thing, you can’t actually lock up a majority of a country. But the Democrats are nonetheless tired and angry about how Obamacare continues to be rejected by the voting populace – particularly the voting populace who will be at the polls in November – and sometimes people like Sebelius slip up. Use of a term like ‘reeducation’ indicates that the user of it has decided that there’s nothing wrong with his or her argument; the flaw lies in whoever is not being persuaded by it. So there’s no need to fix the argument itself, obviously. Continue reading Sebelius counsels… ‘Reeducation’ for Obamacare.