Quote:
Originally Posted by markbarbera
I must giive credit to RePinion for the amount of time and effort he put in his earlier post. His vocabulary and verbose prosaic style is enough to make even the venerable Conrad Black blush. It is unfortunate that so much energy went into arguing an inarguable point.
RePinion betrays his own personal bias throughout his flowery diatribe. By using the third person narrative, he attempts to place himself above the forum participants he is critiquing. He is careful when selecting forumer's comments as examples of what he calls a prejudice of 'us/them dichotomy' to single out those who speak in defence of the inner city. Yet he chooses to ignore compelling examples of those who argue with equally fanatical bias towards the suburban lifestyle. For example, labelling the criticism of the proposal to rezone industrial land for big-box development as "Walmart-bashing" is at least as powerful an example of "lifestyle identity allegiance". RePinion's pointed selectiveness in example citation hobbles his arguement and diminishes the credibility of his thesis. Indeed, it exposes his own bias and lack of objectivity on the subject.
I will quite easily admit my pride and support for my neighbourhood without any shame or guilt. Nor will I veil it in heavily worded prose. When my neighbourhood is being unfairly represented in this forum, I will not let that misrepresentation go unchallenged.
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Wow. I'm honestly quite shocked to see the responses (both positive and negative) which my critique elicited. I can't say I'm disappointed though ...
My response was to fastcarsfreedom's complaint about the lack of progressive thinking on this board. I certainly did not target any users' posts out of personal spite or animus. I simply think the posts I chose best illustrated the point I was trying to make. I think both markbarbera and RTH make valuable contributions to the board. I was not trying to invalidate their presence here at all, merely trying to show the inherent bias which I detected in those particular posts.
That being said, I think markbarbera's response to me was clearly motivated out of personal animus. No worries. His analysis is extremely shallow and, all in all, really doesn't make a lot of sense, so I'm not much offended by it. I certainly have never promoted suburban interests over downtown ones and I have no interest in maintaining the suburban lifestyle, which I personally believe to be unsustainable and anti-social (no offence to those who love it). If someone had made grossly biased statements promoting suburbia in this thread, I might very well have called them out on that too. However, the statements which struck me as betraying an egregiously one-sided view on the matter were all from the other perspective - in fact, on this board, they are consistently from that perspective. Despite my own personal convictions, I dislike whenever any discussion is unduly dominated by one particular agenda, which seems to be the case here.
On a side note, I hope you don't all think I'm spending hours writing these posts. Although I try to be thoughtful as much as possible, I am just naturally verbose (both a gift and a curse). Often I wish my posts were better thought out than they actually are ...
Sorry I wasn't on earlier to take part in the obviously lively discussion.