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moon: i should maybe make paragraph seperations when i change referents--my way of writing is curious-looking enough that it creates confusion sometimes...that part of the paragraph wasnt directed particularly at you. an i understood from the outset that a position like what i take yours to be would result in a different narrative--what i was asking was for you (or anyone who has roughly the same position) to explain the premises, subject the argument to scrutiny like any argument can and should be.
as for the comments about american pseudo-democracy:
several contextual points first
1. i have enjoyed, in a perverse way, reading and hearing conservative pundits making a big big point about how the states is a republic, not a democracy, and then move from there to an association of democracy and socialism.
2. at the more important, structural level, it has been pretty clear for some time that the right's strategy for dealing with unpleasant critiques of their position has been to flood the information arena with pseudo-information in order to make meaingful debate nearly impossible. you see it around environmental conflicts, with corporations hiring pet scientists to generate studies that counter accusations from environmentalists about pollution levels for example. these studies are meant to neutralize debate. same kind of thing in any number of quadrants. it seems that this constitutes an underpinning of conservative media strategy in general.
3. couple this with a style of argument that results in claims like your own: that politics is a matter of belief/conviction as if these categories superceded interacting with a wider world and/or data about that world.
4. you might argue that "democracy" in america still operates at the local level--well fine--but it is a funny claim in a way in that it links directly to the above patterns of attempting to neutralize large-scale public debate by undercutting correlations between political premises and data about the world, reducing politics to questions of belief/convictions--both of which are rendered arbitrary--and thereby non-falsifiable. maybe this converges on the conservative suspicion of the notion of the public--which should be atomized and focussed on small/local issues--the result is that any conception of the whole disappears--and with that the political check(s) on the actions of firms/governmental forms that operate at a larger scale. taken to the limit, this is a recipe for a new feudalism. and sometimes i think what the conservatives in america really object to it the legacy of the magna carta, the centralization of power in any form.
except when they control it of course.
then everything is hunky dory.
given the above, you will perhaps understand what i am saying in the post you reacted to. the position i argue is not a simple function of cynicism--a tendency i try to fight because it is in many ways too easy---but rather a mapping of what i take to be the larger-scale conditions that obtain onto micro-developments like the deterioration/mutation of this thread (we'll see how it goes, i guess, before deciding on the adjective)
sadly, there is little hyperbole in the post. were that things were otherwise.
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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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