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seaver:
did you actually read through the thread?
if you did and you could not distinguish types of argument, then i dont know what to say to you.
in earlier versions of the post i had specifically noted that you were not among those i was talking about--i deleted it for some reason--mea culpa.
on the other hand:
you think reading my responses to this rightwing idiocy is tedious?
try reading posts like ustwo's or bear's over and over and over, seeing these positions demolished over and over only to find them back again and being tucked into threads where they are irrelevant over and over. there is no learning curve. there is no movement.
repetition is not an argument for or against a given position.
it is not even argument.
it is more an index of a kind of quirk shared by those few people who still inhabit the worldview of the american right---and it seems to follow similar patterns no matter who plugs into it so long as they stay at a level that might charitably be called generality---so i assume that this quirk follows from how the discourse works and not from how individuals take it on.
whence the ability to paint with a broad brush as you say.
the same logic repeats, the same bizarre relation to the world other people know about.
take the repeated assertion above that the state introduces irrationality into otherwise rational markets.
this position relies on a whole series of false assumptions--that markets are a kind of nature, that they are seperate not only from the state (but how can that be true if market activity is wholly circumscribed by law?) but constitutes a special zone of social activity in which actors can be assumed to be rational because money--the lifeblood of all metabolisms in conservativeland--is involved....that the state is more irrational than corporations--an argument that ususally reverts to bureacracy as the support for this arbitrary claim---but corporations are also bureaucracies--so that cant be the problem--rather, the problem is that the state is public and is in a position to regulate economic activity and those features are the real issues for these conservatives, not bureaucracy.
the real problem is that these premises are matters of faith--they are not either confirmed or falsified by data about the world--they require no knowledge of either the history of any of the terms (the state, its role, the nature of bureaucracy, etc etc etc) or of the actual object that is purportedly being discussed---in fact they work best in a kind of informational never-neverland where data is prechewed and no critiques of how that prechewing works are admitted---which puts these folk in a child-lilke relation to information---which leaves them no choice but to trust certain sources a priori and to dismiss others a priori. so limbaugh is more serious than the new york times.
there is no space for debate.
no debate is desired.
ustwo, for example, seems to believe that his usage of the phrase "piss poor health care" constitutes a type of empirical data--and it does if the object of discussion is his psychological state--but with reference to the world beyond the confines of his skull, it doesnt. the curious thing is that no matter how often this is pointed out, it doesnt register--another thread, another topic, mention of canada, and off we go again into this tedious little vortex.
and here we are again.
obviously the problem is that i posted something critical of these positions.
yes, that is the problem.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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