Comments Elsewhere

Constant: My description was adequate to my own purpose, which was to explain what it was about Randall’s statement that made it slippery. If you take “law and order type” one way, then you can conclude that a law and order type would tend to side with the school guard. But at the same time, the membership of the “law and order type” would be very, very small. If you took “law and order type” another way, then the membership would be quite a bit larger, but then you could not conclude that a law and order type would tend to side with the school guard.

Yes, and I gave some specific reasons why this “another way” in which “law and order type” might be understood failed to do the argumentative work that you would like it to do. These reasons specifically had to do with its being underspecified in such a way that it either (a) misrepresented what self-described “law and order types” mean by the phrase “law and order type,” by redefining the term so as to lump in many people with diametrically opposed views; or else (b) failed to demonstrate any equivocation by Randall and failed to give any reasons to doubt Randall’s conclusions as stated by him.

You are, of course, free to engage with or not to engage with any given criticism of your argument. However, it seems to me that if you want to introduce a distinction for the purpose of analysis and criticism, then it is your responsibility to actually make sure that the terms you distinguish are at least precise enough to do the work you want them to do. Since you have resolutely evaded rather than engaged with a set of reasons given to think that you have failed to do this, even when directly asked to clarify the intended meaning of terms that you set out to introduce, it severely undermines your attempt to use this delineation in order to make any kind of point against Randall.

Incidentally, I can find no textual support for your claim here that Randall would “conclude that a law and order type would tend to side with the school guard.” What he said is that “many conservatives” (apparently because they are “law and order types,” as he, not you, understands that term) “might not want to break a poor black kid’s wrist themselves but who can look the other way if it happens once in a while,” “wish we would stop making a fuss,” and express an attitude that “gets you the Gestapo.” Lots of people, including self-identified “law and order types,” may wring their hands about obvious abuses of police power. But if they still support the attitudes and practices that make those abuses well-nigh inevitable, then so what?