March 1st, 2005
Because I’m a jerk, I’ve neglected R. Scott Rogers’s excellent blog Rhubarb Preserve for the past month. He doesn’t post frequently, but what he does post is valuable. For instance, in his last post he criticizes me, fairly, for confusing pluralism with multiculturalism.
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He also, interestingly, comments that it is those “on the left” who tend to confuse pluralism with multiculturalism. Switching sides, Mr. Last?
REPLY
Bizarro Jack March 2, 2005 at 11:10 pm
to anonymous: Mr. Last has made it clear on numerous occasions that he is not a brain-dead partisan, and I think it’s insulting to suggest that, not because it is a bad status to be liberal (duh, it’s better) but because he indicates that he isn’t.to anyone so kind as to continue reading: I could only speculate as to why the author suggests that this vocabulary problem is unique to the left. I’m always skeptical when someone tries to drive a big wedge between two very similar terms, like this. It sounds too much like “When people on the right talk about respecting each other’s ideas and heritage, we say it is “pluralism” because pluralism is when it works. When people on the left talk about respecting each other’s ideas and heritage, they call it “multiculturalism” because “multiculturalism” is when it fails.”Yeah, I read it, and it’s not exactly like that, but there’s a lot of that in what he is saying.