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i imagine that it must be frustrating for folk who see the world through the fiction of the Heroic Individual to run up against social limitations, even at the level of word usage.
it must be frustrating for those who view the world through the lens of the Heroic Individual to find situations where the focus of the Individual Will changes nothing about a social situation, even at the level of word usage.
frustrating because the framework within which the construct of the Heroic or Rugged Individual operates cannot account for social questions except to see in the distortions of what they have to understand as normative--the world as an abstract field across which the unlimited extension of will can be played out. american conservatives have regressed behind john stuart mill--they have not even caught up with liberal philosophy of the 1860s.
one way of thinking about this problem for the Heroic Individual might be that the Heroic Individual is itself incoherent, conceptually, analytically and politically.
so the question that began the thread is really why cant a white person use whatever words he or she wants in whatever situation he or she wants because what is important is the absolute extension of unconditioned will. the entire position is simply crazy.
another element that surfaces in reading through the thread so far is the matter of projection:
for example, lebell talks about "victimization" as a trope of "the left" even as conservatives make use of the same trope all the time.
the difference between the story of victimization on the right and other versions of it is that for the right it operates as reinforcement of a project of aimed at total political domination, a narrowing of the ideological situation to one within which questions of social inequity will be addressed by ignoring them--the right uses its claims to victimization as a device to argue for a narrowing of the purivew of the state, for example, and by doing that also argues for the elimination of mechanisms that previously had functioned to redirect resources toward those excluded from the benefits of capitalism.
and why should the right worry about structural inequality, about the barbaric effects of capitalism as a system, left to itself? they also decided that the effects of capitalism can be "understood" by blaming those most heavily effected by it....
so here: the fact of the matter is that the history of particular words is sedimeneted around them, and you can't just wish it away. obviously the problem is history and its persistence.
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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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