roachboy

what i was trying to say would not require any prior agreement about either the nature of "empirical evidence"---which is always subject ot methodological considerations that embed political assumptions within them--or how to evaluate that evidence--because both operations presuppose the availability of criteria for evaluating arguments, evaluating evidence---what is really remarkable about bushworld is that the abundant information about, say iraq and the fiasco the war is (at the level of its origin, at the level of its unfolding) was at once obvious to anyone who looked and somehow irrelevant in the face of the different kind of arguments elaborated within bushworld about their boy etc.

this is only possible if there has been either a demolition or radical refiguring of the standards for evaluating arguments.

this can have happened and not itself be a porblem internally for the right because at one level, the right relies on "differends" as lyotard put it---on a mode of argumentation with the outside that more or less assures the parties will talk past each other. that way nothing logically central to conservative positions gets introduced on grounds they do not control. it works really well. try talking to some of these folk and you'll see it straight away.

on the other, the cheap, facile relativism to wedge their arguments into a space of debate.
which they would then work to disable.

passivity can take any number of shapes. it can result from busy busy busy talking in totally irrelevant areas.

btw--this is not a position that requires you assume anything about individuals who operate within the space of this politics--rather it is a series of statements that you can derive from the nature of the discourse itself. it simply turns out that almost everyone who adopts the discourse performs these features.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite