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stevo: thanks for the response--i dont buy some of it, but it is an interesting position you outline.
one thing that i have been interested in doing here, in this board, with varying degrees of clarity i'm afraid, is to try to work out a general logic for how conservatives in the new mode argue--what the logic is, how the various positions that folk hold fit together. desipte the occaisional flashes of irritation that i let pass when i write these things, i am really interested in trying to understand this logic--mostly because i see it running through the posts and conversations of many folk i encounter.
what i mean by this is that i think there are patterns that let the arguments you characterize as straightforward function. i try to outline, from time to time, what i think those patterns are. because i think it most strange that it is so difficult to get folk from the right to explain why they hold certain views, how these views fit with others, and how they fit with data about the world. this partly as a reaction to the difficulty i mentioned before, and partly because i think the patterns i noted are new and frankly are dangerous if you value anything like a democratic process that necessarily involves debate, conflict between positions--and the possibility of real dialogue within that and possibly, on that basis, something like shifting positions.
i am afraid i'm being vague here: i did something a few days ago somewhere--not sure where right now---that ran out a theory about the basic structure, the basic pattern that holds these positions together as being a transposed racism--i tried to be quite clear about what i meant--which was not that conservatives are racist--but rather that there are similarities at the level of pattern between ways of pitching claims in both areas. that conservative politics seems to me to be about a particular personal belief that is defined as much be reating against the outside as it is about anything positive from the inside, and that this belilef leans pretty heavily on a kind of religious committment as its model.
i do not write stuff like that--and this really---out of much motive except trying to understand what i see as a strange kind of politics--a strange and relatively new kind of politics in the american context.
so that's why i use the terminology that i use.
well that and i actually think like this.
just to explain.
as for the claim concerning "terrorism" suffice it to say here, because i am not interested in arguing about it, that i do not buy your assumptions.
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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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