roachboy

yakk: on the non-use of caps
i dont like them aesthetically--i dont like how they look--they dont do anything (like change pronunciation)--so i don't use them when i don't have to.
that and i think i use no caps to split one type of voice off from another--so if i post here in this mode, i do it in a particular style--if i use more formal conventions, i find it all too easy to slip into a more formal/academic voice. in which i am much more careful--which means that things take even longer to set up and argue.


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as for the question of definitions in general that has been circulating through here of late:
if you read the review i posted earlier--which refers to a book by a linguist (lakoff) about the nature and effects of conservative strategies at the level of frame of reference/discourse control, you should be able to see why i come at the question of definitions the way i do here:

if you control the categories, you control how people can organize their thoughts about the worls around them
because you control the general terms that folk use to organize information
so if you drain all content from the term democracy
or if you insist that democratic socialism=stalinism=fascism=evil
you are working to undermine informed, coherent debate
or at least to make the terms of debate track along a particular ideological logic

with the result that debates tend to turn in little, self-immolating circles within the general fram of right ideology without being able to step outside that ideology

there is nothing that runs more counter to any illusion of democracy than a concerted campaign to monopoloize the frame of reference within which it can function.
this is not about debate: it is about population management, opinion management
as a political actor under this scenario, you do not have any power: you are a problem to be managed
whence the suggestions that bushworld can be characterized as a soft totalitarian system: totalitarian in its aspirations to control meanings and thereby to control political life: soft in its reliance on manipulation of discourse rather than on direct physical coercion. at least so far.

it is curious still to see debates about types of political systems get caught in the strange loops provided by right ideology.
the chaos in this thread follows in part from this--and as an index of how things go when a challenge is presented to the definitions that shape these loops.

conservatives here are true to form: they shift straight into ad hominem rather than actually defend their arguments and the terms that underpin them.

such is the dominant mode of non-debate in bushland: when challenged, try to act as though nothing has happened and ridicule the message. as if that can be passed off as logic.

well, in the narrow confines of bushworld, maybe that is what passes for logic.

but what it does not, and cannot, pass for is anything like democratic process.

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

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite