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all this business about compromise makes sense in the abstract.
but in this thread, compromise requires a prior agreement about the terms of debate.
if you feel that you cannot enter into a space shaped by these terms of debate
then compromise becomes nearly impossible.
and the thread has been operating de facto to censor/marginalize attempts to raise questions about these terms of debate.
so in this case difficulty encountered at the threshold of the compromise/common ground game has no relation to stagnation whatever.
in fact, you could easily argue the opposite:
debate oriented toward finding commonalities in a context shaped by terms that remain unexamined, unquestioned serves to work those terms into a naturalized space by moving these terms from problems to assumptions.
once you make that shift, then no amount of debate shaped by them provides the chance to revisit problems that might persist at the level of assumptions--it is the old question of proofs--you cannot examine axioms from within a proof shaped by them.
if the above is the case, then debate (movement, consensus-building) in a space structured by false and/or damaging and/or poorly framed assumptions provides nothing like a counter to stagnation--rather this kind of debate sets stagnation into motion, and by doing that enables folk to pretend that they are moving and growing and so forth while in fact they turn in little circles that prevent them from being able to push at the problems analytically that they claim to be addressing.
this is not a conversation about the value of compromise as such--it is a debate within a very particular space that involves a very particular set of problems. because there is no external coercion involved with shaping that space, there is no requirement that anyone accept the frame of reference within which the it unfolds.
to claim the opposite is simply arrogant.
it assumes that only those who have allowed the shift in terms of debate from problems to axioms have put any intellectual work into the game.
that assumption is simply false.
think of it as a prior cost/benefit thing: the cost of accepting the frame of reference imposed on us by the conservative apparatus is so high, the results so debilitating (if actually trying to understand what is going on around you can be taken as the goal of the political) that the cost of any pseudo-compromise in this or any other space far far outweighs any benefits that you might be able to derive.
but maybe this matter is itself a symptom of the present degenerate state of affairs: you render yourself intellectually abject by accepting the current terms of debate and then get to congratulate yourself for having done so.
yes this is quite a democracy we have in the states.
and quite a fine microcosm we have here.
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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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