roachboy

before anything else, i have to doff my excessively large hat to powerclown--very funny, totally misguided post.

there is a curious trend here--the one that involves people complaining about having to read too much--the complaints--always from conservative or conservative-leaning folk, about information overload: it seems to come to this:

i am inundated 24/7 and so when i come to a politics forum, i expect to not to be bothered with too much...keep it short, keep it more or less punchy and for gods sake dont give too many options for interpretation. lead me around, do it in a punchy manner.

i am really not sure that i see the motive in this type of complaining about post form.

whatever problem you folk might have with too much information should be mitigated if you actually think about the conservative know-nothing inverse of it---ustwo is the shining spokesman for this position:

so let me understand this Important Insight:
people like ustwo benefit materially from the existing order.
these folk only think beyond their immediate social and economic context because they can imagine that everywhere, always, is a legion of ustwos--you duplicate ustwo enough times and the result is america...the "real" america, no less.

this could provide a kind of interesting psychological insight, i think. were ustwo to be a 3-d friend of and i were to find myself trying to work out how his beliefs concerning the world are possible.

this is a general "understanding" of capitalism. it gets tiresome trying to debate conservatives about the nature of capitalism because too often they see their world in ways that are not far from the ustwo model. its all good--its me millions of times.

but if i follow the argument about post length correctly, this kind of nonsense would be a more compelling position than what, say, host or myself might post simply because it is shorter. punchier. less demanding of the reader because--well, figure it out.

folk like this probably live in areas that exemplify to perfection the way american class stratification works--spatial separation. because folk like ustwo have no interest in thinking beyond the limitations imposed by their presuambly plush surroundings, it follows that there can be no problems with class stratification in the states--the wealthy have more opportunities culturally, educationally, etc. because their inward superiority makes it thus. the lives of their children should be worth more than the lives of the children of the poor (as a function of access to health insurance) because god wills it thus. and i am sure that when you look around your immediate environment (you know, the world) you see no class stratification. and they dont mention it on tv. so it must not exist. qed.

on we go thorugh his thicket of empty assertions---on to "we have the education"--which would have been, had powerclown not intervened, the funniest thing on this thread. the absolute height of petit bourgeois arrogance--so i do not look at the world, at the system within which i live, at anything, really, beyond the limits of my nuclear family and the house that enframes them, say, i do not look too hard at problems generated by that system, i do not think about alternatives, i do not think about history----i am nonetheless persuaded that this position reflects a kind of thoughtful relation to my surroundings, which i demonstrate by pointing to formal educational qualifications--so it follows that whatever i do, as possessor of educational qualification, is necessarily the best possible use of that education--the best you can hope for, it seems, in the land of ustwo, is a kind of self-enclosed, self-affirming sumgness---

and then you get the threat section--"we have the will"---which comes down to threaten my shit and we'll take to the streets, myself and my golf-shirted shotgun-toting petit bourgeois replicants, thousands of them, all wearing virile teddy roosevelts masks. "we" will never allow "you" to threaten our shit.

that's all there is to it.
but it *is* short.

so i dont know what is preferable: longer posts that try to make arguments and situate them in the context of data about how things operate that fall outside of the american tv paradigm--which requires some length because it has to present data, argument and context together--and which might require looking at nonenglish news sources (sorry powerclown, but its about that, not "you stupid americans") or this short, punchy flintstone nonsense that may be empty, may be dangerous if taken seriously, but does not demand much attention to write, to read, or to dismiss.

as for thinking about alternatives, maybe i am thinking about this, but more in terms of messageboard to participate in at the moment than about alternatives to the present form of capitalist barbarism that folk like ustwo will inevitably support, no matter what the costs, because those costs are always bourne by other people (but note in other threads how representatives of this same kind of politics will whine about being taxed)

i do not see how the worldview outlined by ustwo--who really is the best expression of everything i find horrific about contemporary conservative ideology available in tfp-land--is defensable at any level--but what i am not sure about is the relation between complaints about length and density of posts and the defense of this kind of know-nothing politics.

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

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite