elphaba: thanks for the kind words about the writing....
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I believe you have extended the argument to other world cultures and circumstances, wherein the individual is making a rational response to an irrational environment.
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yeah see therein lies what i take to be the central ambiguity about all this, the thing that makes folk uneasiest, the thing they want to see made to go away. in this case, i am inclined to think that without seeing the clips, there is a way in which an answer this question would become impossible as the matter would be undecidable. what you make of this at a certain level turns on how lucis you imagine cho to have been--the more lucid, the more a reaction to a pathological environment it can become. the less lucid he is understood to have been, the more problematic this move becomes.
emile durkheim wrote a book called "suicide" in the late 19th century--a sociologist--he posed an interesting question: given that we as humans are geared aroudn adaptation or accomodation of our context, how would we know if that context had become pathological? the implication is that we really wouldnt because our frame of reference would move along with the wider social context, to a significant extent. he points to spikes in suicide rates as an index--he posits a notion of anomie or sense of drift and displacement as a cause. this argument works best if the information you look at is aggregated, a simple numerical index because it implies that suicide can be seen as a reasonable response to an pathological environment.
can you say that an environment--a culture--is a single entity and so can be or not be pathological as a whole?
wouldn't it more or less always be the case that what this environment is is a function of the position you occupy within it, that from a position of being-dominated things would look one way while from a positin of domination it would look another? particularly if you think about the simple fact that not all positions shaped by domination explicitly involve the acts of domination--you might think about significant aspects of globalizing capitalism--from an american viewpoint, a middle class relatively stable american viewpoint, the system looks ok, while from that of someone working some shit job in one of these "free zones" it really is not ok. the midle-class viewpoint is contingent on all kinds of factors that amount to domination, but most folk do not participate in it or even see it...
so anyway, one result of thinking across aggregates like durkheim does is that it generates a sense of lucidity of motive behind the numbers of suicides. like these folk are the canaries in the mineshaft. it seems to me that this could easily get mapped onto a political framework IF the view of those who committ suicide are left as those which you construct across numerical indices.
things look otherwise if you go into the details.
that's another way of saying the same thing about why i think it was not a bad decision to show the footage.
this leaves aside network commercial considerations, not because i think the networks great guys, but because in this case i think it fine to make a separation between general interests and those which shaped this particular decision to air this stuff. but that could go either way, and i agree with what you said about it.
ps: no, i wouldnt be concerned...
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phil: where do i come from?
saturn.