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roachboy · 04-28-2005, 09:55 AM

the general part

can i ask who on "the left" or on the "extreme left" (whatever they hell these are) seriously would BAN any form of religious expression at the personal level? could you provide links?

my experience from many years "on the left" is that this entity is a simple fantasy, a kind of structural feature of the politics of the extreme right--engage in a offensive action? posit a counter-image of your actions, its mirror image, blame them for the same thing and on that basis justify what you want to do.

what i do see--and all the time--is deep concern about the **political mobilization** of the extreme right of the american evanglical movement. because--as i have said repeatedly above--the shift in registers from personal belief to political action entails radical changes in what would otherwise be personal beliefs--in terms of implications--because the extreme right woudl prefer to remake not only laws but the whole judiciary system (and the balance of powers that is articulated through it) in order to impose--and i mean impose--laws rooted in their particular beliefs on everyone, and to disable (to the extent possble) processes of judicial review.

this is a logic of dictatorship.

that most defenders of the christian right use their inability to make basic logical distinctions between levels of activity to shriek about how persecuted they are when they encounter opposition to what i understand as their beliefs as the basis for political proposals/arguments--that is that they refuse (for entirely instrumental reasons) to recognize that they are acting politically---is a real problem.

=====

lebell:

thanks for the last post. it is an interesting perspective on what you are doing in this space. i wonder about the extent to which your idea of a new paradigm involves shutting out folk like myself, who operate from political viewpoints that you appear to disagree with. top be clear: it is not a new paradigm that i wonder about--but who gets to influence it, to shape it--where the dialogue about this new paradigm you talk about unfolds--what is sure is that such dialogue rarely happens here. which is maybe a limitation of the form (message boards) rather than of the folk who interact within it.

04-28-2005, 09:55 AM	#37 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	the general part can i ask who on "the left" or on the "extreme left" (whatever they hell these are) seriously would BAN any form of religious expression at the personal level? could you provide links? my experience from many years "on the left" is that this entity is a simple fantasy, a kind of structural feature of the politics of the extreme right--engage in a offensive action? posit a counter-image of your actions, its mirror image, blame them for the same thing and on that basis justify what you want to do. what i do see--and all the time--is deep concern about the political mobilization of the extreme right of the american evanglical movement. because--as i have said repeatedly above--the shift in registers from personal belief to political action entails radical changes in what would otherwise be personal beliefs--in terms of implications--because the extreme right woudl prefer to remake not only laws but the whole judiciary system (and the balance of powers that is articulated through it) in order to impose--and i mean impose--laws rooted in their particular beliefs on everyone, and to disable (to the extent possble) processes of judicial review. this is a logic of dictatorship. that most defenders of the christian right use their inability to make basic logical distinctions between levels of activity to shriek about how persecuted they are when they encounter opposition to what i understand as their beliefs as the basis for political proposals/arguments--that is that they refuse (for entirely instrumental reasons) to recognize that they are acting politically---is a real problem. ===== lebell: thanks for the last post. it is an interesting perspective on what you are doing in this space. i wonder about the extent to which your idea of a new paradigm involves shutting out folk like myself, who operate from political viewpoints that you appear to disagree with. top be clear: it is not a new paradigm that i wonder about--but who gets to influence it, to shape it--where the dialogue about this new paradigm you talk about unfolds--what is sure is that such dialogue rarely happens here. which is maybe a limitation of the form (message boards) rather than of the folk who interact within it. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite Last edited by roachboy; 04-28-2005 at 10:00 AM..