roachboy

nice latin match:
reading it was like watching ping pong on tv.
almost made me wish i was drinking a beer as i read, since ping pong on tv seems to require one.


to go back to the issues raised by my style of posting for a moment


the strange thing about running the kind of arguments that i tend to post here is that they work up to a point but havent really triggered what i had hoped they would: a reflexive response from the folk on the right--you know, a step out of the framework and a moment of wondering about/thinking about or even arguing about the frame itself. it seems that the mode of interacting with the discourse is to assume it to be a kind of natural horizon and run everything through it--which amounts to watching combination and recombination of the same moves with some variation as to inputs--and that's about it.

this is not the kind of relation to politics that you see from every position: it is in fact quite peculiar. that a feature of right discourse is projection (the claim that the characteristics of that political field are reactive comes up often enough) changes nothing. folk from the right tend to act as though everyone interacts with their political views as they do, that is immediately, as a matter of (apparently) semi-religious committment--two thread in this forum have been generated in the past days that address this, not by making it a problem, but instead by using arguments (the value of which is impossible to determine from the truncated accounts presented) that politics is by its nature irrational.

well, folks, if that is true we are all fucked.

anyway, given this, politicophile's response--to get offended rather than think about what is being said--follows. it is a sad state of affairs, really: this kind of relation to one's own views runs wholly counter to how one would expect folk who participate in a democratic polity to act. it is only possible if democracy is nearly meaningless operationally, if the polity has no real power, no real posssibility of exercizing power. it reflects an assumption particular to contemporary conservative discourse itself: that public opinion is a management issue and nothing more.
suffice it to say that there really is nothing personal about the way in whcih i go at political questions here (well, i like to think so anyway--obviously no-one is totally consistent and sometimes i do step outof this detached view--it usually doesnt work out so well, so i dont do it often)

the only criticism of how i have been operating in here that i took seriously was from host, who noted at one point or another that i appeared to be treating the forum as a kind of laboratory and threads as experiments. he was right. he was right about quite a few things beyond that as well: it is a shame tht he seems to have been driven out by what were--to my mind--really ridiculous arguments about how much reading his posts required.

i have to say that debating with most of the conservative folk here gets really tedious for me because they simply will not or cannot step outside of their immediate responses and think about why they are as they are. maybe they think there is no need: i cant really tell. but i think the framework through which conservative folk tend to operate--what i call conservative discourse--is weak descriptively--it uses a very strange mode of presenting claims, which would pass them off as transcendent. it seems to me that the whole project--which has been developing since the 1970s--is predicated on a kind of wish fulfillment in that the discourse seems geared at erasing the political, social and cultural problems that were raised by the civil rights movement, vietnam, etc., all of which functioned to blow apart the idea that the surface of reality is adequate, that you can sever the present configuration from its history, from structural factors, etc. the one lasting result of this period is that politics could drift back toward its origin in philosophy. i think this an important thing. this is more or less the space from which i operate, both in and in general. it means that you have to think both through and about particular frames of reference--to think about what these frames do, how they do it, what they enable you to get at, what they exclude. i do not see this as a bad thing. i does mean that being certain about things is a problem--but that's fine...any philosophical project worth developing has this feature as well. it makes it harder to be in the world maybe--but it seems to me to be worth it. this is as close as i have come here to a direct statement of my own politics, which tend to disappear a bit behind the style i usually adopt.

in some sense, the conservative project seems to be not so far from that of edmund burke---it is rooted in the same type of reaction to the 60s as burke had to the french revolution--but unlike burke, folk who either make or use this discourse seem to imagine that going back to a simpler time is possible. it isnt. and that fact alone seems to drive folk crazy. the discourse, with its penchant for transcendent propositions, offers the illusion of a response. this response might work to an extent if you inhabit that political space--but not everyone does, and so there will always be limits, always folk who point out the problems with all of this: with these people, for folk on the right, it seems that the operative assumption is that there is no possibility of meaningful discussion. but sometimes the people behind the combinations of conservative elements peer around the edges, and when they do conversation can actually happen. such is the situation i find myself in here relative to most of the folk from the right. mr. pollyanna broadcasting to you from his livingroom in philadelphia dixit.



as for ustwo: i find your hit-and-run style of posting to be patronizing in the extreme.
you can choose to see in this a personal attack, but it is not meant as such: again, it is about your posts. i do not know you. i do not imagine that i can get to know you through this board, or any such board. i see what you write and i react to it--often on the basis of what i take to be a patronizing relation to this whole space. you write short, often goofy things. what that indicates is that you think your readers stupid. most of your shorter "witty" posts are kind of offensive personally to me at this level. if you are really concerned about the quality of debate in this space, try raising the content level of your interactions with it. you reap what you sow, as the cliche goes.

mr pollyanna now ends his broadcast day.
In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni.

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

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite