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lebell:
i have in the main stayed out of this thread but i have been reading it--and i have to say that i cannot understand how you could derive a rationale for american actions from the material presented above.
i really dont--unless for you politics in general, and support for american actions vis-a-vis iraq in particular, are simple functions of prior disposition, not related to any evidences---politics in this case is deductive, in that you have a prior set of sommitments that you use to filter out dissonant information, as opposed to a more inductive relation that would test and retest general positions on the basis of evidence/data.
a deductive politics is not really a political position at all. rather it is a variant of faith, of belief in the protestant sense, masquerading as politics.
if you want to speak about rational debate, perhaps it would make sense to establish ground rules--like you need to route arguments through evidence--otherwise it might have the external form of rational debate, but is not rational. it is not deliberative. it is not about the exercize of power. it is not about anything.
it is good to practice this kind of debate, even here, because were the united states a democracy such debate would be central to its functioning. if the united states were to become a democracy--perhaps after the implosion of the current order--it would be central.
you could take from the simple fact that folk can elaborate political positions without any reference to evidence at all a good indication of the distance that seperates the american situation from a democracy....
it is pretty clear that the american system is best understood as a type of oligarchy
that legitimates itself through the disourse of democracy. this discourse is central to its modes of opinion management---the public is dominated by setting them against each other across sometimes meaningful but more often trivial matters, deploying types of strategies in debates that are not the result of any prior agreement about rules, which devolve quickly and often into trivial pissing matches that operate to distract--the people who find themselves so dividewd confuse this with being free, with operating inside a democratic polity, because they get to use the words freedom and democracy alot. worrying about whether they refer to anything is nowhere near as much fun as using them alot. these words, in the united states, are like any other toy.
meanwhile, of course, the folk in power do and say what they like---with impunity--because they know that even arguments presented with considerable evidence will not persuade anyone to even consider their politics, which are routed through disposition, are not falsifiable, etc.
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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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