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anecdote:
there was a cnn online poll yesterday that asked whether the invasion of iraq was a mistake or not, given what is now known about the adminsitrations "case" for war: when i checked it last night, the results were: 2/3 of respondents think it was a mistake, 1/3 that it was not.
i do not think the right's information circle-jerk is holding in the wider world.
maybe that is why ustwo compulsively posts fragments of it for collective delectation here.
maybe he understands these fragments as the "truth of the matter" buried within the "liberal media"
i see it as a the workings of a kind of boundary maintenance, indices of the mechanisms used to seperate how the right sees things from how everyone else sees things.
you can see the same gap exposed, in a bizarre manner, if you juxtapose the bush speech before the un yesterday with what kofi annan said just before bush did his thing. annan argued for the rule of law--bush the voluntarist line that is his specialty these days--when all else fails, you argue in the register of will.
[[you also get a fair index of the sycophantic relation of the american press to whomever is in power in the relative nonreporting of annan's speech--if you see the two side by side, it is as if bush is from a strange alternate universe.]]
information limitation, distortion--the accumulation of "sources" who are already in the pocket of the right--wild, unfounded claims to representativeness made on behalf of these sources--in a context in which it can be assumed that no-one in agrreement with the desires expressed will make any effort to research the matter--some of the keys to conservative media culture....
and you can see in threads like this the function of the rights revisionist line on vietnam:
no war carried out by the american state could possibly not be legitimate.
critique can be replaced with therapeutic narratives which are reinforced/given content by crap like the article that began the thread.
the only way such acts of intellectual self-immolation are possible is within a context that provides not only no recognition of the act, but every reason to misrecognize it as support for the (necessarily legitimate, a priori legitimate) actions by the american state.
dont worry, be happy.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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