first off, thanks for an interesting thread stevo.
i read through the op a few times---i decided to take it seriously, and once i did that began to have trouble with the logic of it.
it seems that tone is important here---i dont know how to qualify the tone in what follows---dont take it as an attack, rather as questions.
there are a number of points that seem to me crushed into each other in the op.
first, there is the gap that seperates the specific and the general.
this runs in two directions: the anecdotal experiences of stevo's comrade, with all its detail (and without any obvious criteria for generalization) is juxtaposed to its inverse, which would be general narratives of events----that do not and cannot match the density of detail in an individual experience.
from this you can derive a problem that is much more general than what stevo would make of it---that general narratives that link and maybe try to interpret "events" do not and cannot account for the complexity of experiences that unfold at the individual level. seen from another angle, general accounts of events do not really account for them--the create schematics and link them to other data organized in the same way in order to provide a reading of the general drift that links them.
this seems self-evident, a problem of logical or descriptive registers, if you like.
but if the problem is a difference of register--that is a logical problem (difference between types of claims) or a genre problem (how the conventions that shape different types of narrative work to carve up/organize information)----then i dont see how it can be grafted onto a critique of one political style of narrative as over against another.
so while i can see how this might lead one to be suspicious of general narratives as such, i dont see how it provides much of any justification for choices within general narratives--in other words, i do not see how this criticism can be bent around to justify a preference for conservative general narratives and the rejection of others (however you view them politically).
but say you end up in a position of being suspicious of all generalizing narratives--- what can you do?
well, the obvious move is to check and cross check information provided through these narratives and know from the outset what "general" means. this point is developed below, from another viewpoint.
second, i really do not see how you would go about generalizing from your friend's anecdotal experience, stevo, if your main problem is with generalization itself. what it seems that your friend's experience in turkey etc. demonstrated is that these places,like all other places, are complex, that the populations are complex, that there is a great diversity of views within each of them---and that cartoons that substitute for an understanding of this diversity are necessarily limited and are problematic because they are limited.
well obviously....
but if that is a standard you want to apply, it seems to me that the correlate of that would be to push you to thinking about types of ideolgical filters that reduce complexity--in which case i would think that this position would lead you to be really really suspicious of conservative ideology in general--that because the one feature shared by almost all positions articulated within its purview is simplification.
you could counter that in non-conservative filters, nods to compelxity are simple rhetoric, and you'd be right. but the same would hold for conservative filtered information and so you generate an undecibable problem that is resolved by recouse to predispositions. in which case, the entire cirtique you outline of the dominant media gets reduced to a defense of arbitrary committments. no move within generalizing narratives gets you to the specific--all that therefore bullshit--so choosing between them is a matter of chosing which bullshit you like better. i dont know if you wanted to land there, but it seems to me that this is where you land, at one level.
that your friend would find support for the ousting of saddam hussein is not a surprise. that you would repeat this support without providing any account of the motivations behind it seems limited. in other words, it seems that your friend encountered a diversity of positions within largely muslim populations, took from it the elements that brought him a degree of political comfort and thought that was enough. for you, stevo, these anecdotes take on a second-order function as the basis for a demonstration of some "media biais"---a jump that i dont follow.
on the other hand, by not wondering about the diversity of positions that shape such support as he encountered for american actions in iraq (for example), he seems to have simply repeated in his way what you criticize the nyt/ap for doing--treating superficially the diverse experiences of others.
so you do not get out of the problem you set up by relying on your friend's anecdotes of travel in the middle east--you repeat them at another level.
besides, do you really think that tourism provides you with any deep insight into the complexity of thinking in the populations through whcih you, as a tourist, pass?
do you really think that other countries are that transparent, that you or your friend can know them and have a meaningful handle of the whole range of politics. not to speak of political motivations--in the course of tourism? even slow tourism? i dont see how you could possibly believe that.
i am not saying that i doubt your friend's experience, btw, stevo--but i am saying that it does not and cannot function as justification for the moves that you use it for in the op.
the japan story seems to me unrelated logically. i see how you link the two, given that they come from the same source--but logically they are seperate.
but what i really dont get is the conclusion that you draw from the two stories--that there is universal support for bushwar in the world and that only american "liberals" are to blame for the many many problems bushpolicies have encountered---this seems so simplistic as to obviate everything of interest in the op.
secondly, i dont know anyone who positions themselves on the left who accepts uncritically anything from the ny times, the ap wire or other media sources. you may prefer to think otherwise, but that is a political judgement you are making that--again--runs directly counter to the logic of your own post. why is the reduction of complexity ok when it comes to characterizing the positions and experiences of people with whom you disagree politically and not when it comes to instances that function to confirm your political positions?
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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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