Originally Posted by roachboy

i am increasingly unclear about this sort of statement, what you imagine it is doing when you make it into your part in a dialogue, cyn--
first: not everything is reducable to simple sound-byte form.
second: if you work in opposition to an ideology, you find that one disadvantage you have to work around is that you have to explain what you are doing, lay out your arguments, provide information--you cannot rely on, say, television to fill in the gaps for you. if i were to take your position seriously as a political and not a personal one, i would conclude that you are arguing for a particular political position not so much because you agree with it, but because it prechews information for you and so lets you feel connected to politics in the context of a busy life.
but it seems to me that you give up alot if you really operate along these lines.
like you disable your own ability to pose questions.
you make it much more difficult for yourself to step outside the dominant opinion management of the moment.
i wonder if this position you have of late taken to outlining here is worth holding, really...it seems to me that the costs outweigh the benefits.

for example: in the responses from ustwo above, you get an interesting idea of how difficult conservatives in the main find it to historicize their own position--they can't seem to get their heads around the idea that christianity has a history, that this history is very particular and quite important for understanding the particulrities of that belief system, etc. because they seem to have trouble imagining that the present was not always more or less thus. they even go so far as to claim their own innovations are simply righting a historical wrong--history then comes up as transient, while their own views are transcendent, ahistorical, true. this must be the happy result of thinking that god likes you better than he or she does others.

this is followed by an attempt--a disengenuous one, but i would expect nothing less--to further rationalize the court decision that prompted this thread by calling the term wicca into question on the one hand, and to insinuate that "we do not know the whole story"----while of course not providing anything like the whole story himself, and so on.
but his sentences are short.
does that in itself make his arguments more compelling for you?
he does not have to lay out the basis for his argument--sometimes it seems like a tv is going the whole time he writes and that to get arguments he simply has to turn and watch for a while--never any logic outlined, never any real information given, just the mirror of conservative media, apologies for the bush administration, for conservative organizations, for conservative legal decisions in ways that do not make any sense unless you watch these same tv outlets, listen to the same talk radio, read the same washington times-style press. but than again, maybe this is all just my problem.


on another note
i am well to the left of pan, but i have to say i find something really endearing about his tendency to yell "TO THE BARRICADES COMRADES"