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Originally Posted by shakran
Invading Iraq did not protect our national interets.
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I say it did, you say it didn't, what's next? All I know is that Congress agreed with Bush before the invasion.
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In fact, it endangered them terribly, because that REALLY pissed off the middle east. Invading Viet Nam did not protect our national interests. The Bay of Pigs did not protect our national interest. Mogadishu did not protect our national interests. Cambodia did not protect our national interests. All of these actions worsened our national interests because they angered the world.
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Here is were it gets foggy. I say America is not an agressive nation, that we are not an empire builder? I am not clear on what you think, and you give examples that don't relate to the issue and say we made some people mad. I think we have made mistakes, but our intensions have been honorable, in terms of doing what we thought was right in terms of protecting our interest.
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If you're so gung ho on protecting our national interestes, then why don't we fix the economy, fix education, and fix hunger - it's pathetic that the most powerful and richest nation on the planet still has people going hungry every night. It's high time we stop thinking our national interests can be addressed by killing people from other countries, and started realizing that our national interests must be addressed by improving the lives of our own people.
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How does a person go hungry every night in this country? Please explain how that happens and how frequently? I did some volunteer work in a kitchen feeding homless people, the irony is that almost all of them were able bodied men.
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Originally Posted by roachboy
i cant think of a more naive claim than "my viewpoint is grounded in reality."
what does that mean?
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Read it in context of what has been written.
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it seems to me of a piece with something that i see quite alot from conservative comrades--the use of claims/categories in totally superficial ways that functions to (a) exclude certain questions by (b) claiming that conservative ideology has resolved them in advance. if you push at these claims conceptually, you find that they really mean nothing--but if you link them to the way in which the various straw men of the Other get constructed--you know, the "liberal" the "leftist" the "socialist" you get a better idea of how this little machine works.
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I have given some specific examples and have explained what I mean by my words. there is no hidden agenda or menaing. The simplicity has gotten lost in your analysis.
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"liberal" (lefist, socialist, terrorist, dissenter, bad person) is an empty category. its contents are projections. these projections are often little more than inversions of qualities that conservatives apparently find to be aesthetically appealing--so if you want to define yourself as manly, you do so by positing wimpy liberals; if you want to define yourself as a "realist" you do so by positing abstracted liberals; if you want to be a "patriot" you can posit "anti-american" liberals--it goes on and one, one great heap of tedious repetitions.
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It also makes discussion more efficient.
Why not give a few of the opposite, i.e. comapsionate v. cold hearted conservative.
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what is strange about this is that all these claims/projections are about the persona who speaks rather than about the content of the arguments.
it is as if the content of the arguments follows necessarily from the identity assumed by the speaker.
so you can claim that you "speak from reality" without having the faintest idea what that entails as a claim because what matters is not that you have thought particularly about the claim, but because you, as conservative, are not liberal, and liberals, by definition, do not speak "from reality" so in conservativeland q.e.d.
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You are correct. I should state that I speak from my reality. If I lived at Disney Land my reality would be very different from living where I acutally live.
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from within this, you can explain some of the more curious features of ace's posts above, for example: that he can simultaneously claim that "liberal arguments are grounded in emotion" and relay instance after instance wherein it is obvious that his positions are grounded in emotions follows from the definition of the identity of a conservative speaker, and not from the content of what that speakers may say. so for ace (or his functional equivalent) to claim to "speak from reality" is axoimatic--it is redundant---it is like saying conservative twice.
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I do repeat myself. But it is usually a function of necessity, at least from my point of view. I also have been guilty of making the same point using different words. Ooops, did it again.
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i wonder sometimes how general this is---there is a variety within the folk here who post conservative positions, not all do exactly what ace is wont to--but i nonetheless wonder the extent to which more attention is devoted to defining the position from which a conservative speaks than to what a conservative might argue, as if definitions and logic take care of themselves once you have the positioning work done.
if this is true, then it would follow that one explanation for the talking-past-each-other that characterizes much of the "heat" in heate debates comes from there being different assumptions about the game of thinking the political itself--one that is about identity and that functions through projection, another that transfers questions of identity onto the arguments themselves.
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Not sure how you would seperate one's view point from one's arguments while being intelectually honest, do you?