roachboy

thanks for posting that, fta: at least at this point i think we could talk about something.

1. basic stuff: this is a messageboard. i do not understand it as transparent, so i do not (or try not to) specualte about what individual folk may or may not think until i see something from them.

2. even in situations where information about individual viewpoints is shared, there are problems (because the writing voice of the board personae does not reflect the complexity of beliefs of the puppeteer)---i usually deal with this by moving in theother direction, away from speculating about what the puppeteer thinks and toward the ideological clusters that i see being reproduced in/shaping their positions. my usual move is to try to isolate that cluster and talk about that. that this entails a mvoe away from the particularlities of individual uses of these clusters is self-evident. but you would have to make an argument that individual political positions are somehow unconditioned by broader ideological constructions for that criticism to hold any water. you do not, and your critique therefore does not either.

3. for someone who would go after me after he imputed a confusion of necessary and sufficient cause (categories i did not use and which are irrelevant in any case--maybe i deleted a qualifier--maybe i deleted the word OFTEN--and one or another sentence should have read "one OFTEN finds"--mea culpa for an unfortunate edit---all your basic critique of my position comes down to is the absence of qualifiers at points where, for your own reasons, you feel them to have been required) you seem quite unable to distinguish major from minor arguments.

you are going after a point that is in no way central ether to my posts or to my positions---you assume--arbitrarily--that the reason i oppose the antichoice positions on abortion follows from some cartoon of those who do. that is quite beside the point. i am surprised that you did not see that.

but whatever: the major argument was the following (i am breaking my rule here, but whatever--like william blake said--"the man who never changes his opinion is like stagnant water, breeding reptiles of the mind")--that the question of when life starts is theological---its tactical functions are obvious--among them is that it shifts the focus away from women and their choice onto another topic/topos---one that assume an entirely different scale of evaluation. no part of the anti-choice position (regardless of the trajectry that leads to it, regardless of the way it is framed) more wholly justifies the "antichoice" label than this, which functions to erase the question of the mother---because the frame of reference is fundamentally theological (structurally speaking), it sets up a differend, a space where opposing views cannot but talk past each other---because positions operate on different premises---which means that there is and will be an irreducible plurality of views on the matter--which means that, in my view (qualifier--notice it) the antichoice position should remain where it presently is--a conversation about whether one should or should not avail oneself of a procedure that is itself safe and legal---because the safety and legality of abortion changes nothing--nothing at all---about the complexity of the decisions individual women undertake about whether to have one or not. the assumption from those who oppose abortion, more often than not (qualifier) is that the availability of the procedure evacuates any and all problems that might be raised about whether someone should have one. i think that is wrong, and much of my position on the question follows from that, not what you imagined it did.

as for my position in the context of that kind of debate over the ethics of the procedure itself, you know nothing about it. i havent said anything on the matter.

4. as for possible consistency of belief that travels along a logic other than that which i ran out--in shorthand, in the context of a messageboard--that informs antichoice positions: fine. your arguments rest on all kinds of assumptions that you do not specify or clarify for example: i do not know who is talking when you use the quotation marks. i do not know what point you are trying to make in your defense of killing people. but putting aside the riot of unexplained assumptions behind your logic above, i could concede your points and it would change nothing. because it seems to me that your entire position is rooted in a misinterpretation of cause/effect relations within the position that i outlined earlier, that you have been attacking.


i have to say that i do not see how the various aspects of what i take to be your more general politics hang together in this context.
i have an idea of why you dislilke certain caricatures of the antichoice crowd, but none about how you manage to yourself oppose abortion if you are, in many other contexts it seems, a fan of killing. what is the basis for your opposition (if indeed you do oppose abortion)?

ok that's enough for now.

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

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite