wait: i am bewildered by no. 14.
what are you saying, kevpdx? that the use of racist categories is just dandy as a way for presumably inarticulate people to lash out and someone they do not like, someone "that weird," someone so "not like 'us'"?
uh...what do you think racist categories do in general?
how is your post not a de facto justification not only of the categories, but of the logic behind these categories?
unless you mean that the logic of racism is ok when you agree that individual or group x should be targetted in that way, using that kind of speech...but that's no better: how is this not simply a repetition of the logic that any racist would use? even the most vicious anti-semites that i have known, for example, make exceptions for the "good jews" that they know personally; even the most avowed racists i have encountered will react to being accused of racism by ticking of elements of a list of "good" individuals as a way of attempting to deny that they are racist.
another way: not all social deviance results in a murder-suicide. but this particular guy's pathologies were such that he did end up committing murder-suicide. how do you parse this? from no. 14 it seems that you must imagine there is some objective measure of relative "deviance" that authorizes you to in some cases endorse racist remarks (or their equivalent) in order to enforce consequences to the violation of exceeding the "limits" of "acceptable deviance"---but what is that standard, what are these limits and who decides on them?
this standard cannot possibly be based on something as stupid as taking the fact that cho snapped and did what he did as a general pattern and moving from there to backwrite it into any "deviant" pattern that you feel like....
but if you push at such logic as there is in no. 14, this is more or less where you'd land.
well, to my mind it would be a pretty fucked up result of this horrific massacre/suicide were "normal" folk--you know, regular people who live in a context of more-or-less continually manufactured fear---to decide to become militant against any behaviours that they see as "socially deviant" because there is some tiny probablility that Bad Things Will Happen...
but hey, maybe this will result in delightful spectator sport on the order of the christian persecution of witches, which worked so well: it gave "normal folk" an easy peasy way to isolate the "socially deviant" or marginal..once these folk were turned over the the Inquisition, it was a simple application of a tautological argument to concoct series of Bad Things that Might Happen as a function of that person's "deviance" or marginality (read intercourse with Natas)---once that was in place, then the "secular arm" could rush in to "save the day" by executing them, proactively stomping out "evil" that may or may not have existed even as potential in the first place.
that worked out really well.
we know this because nothing bad has happened since, what, 1720, when Victory was Declared and the persecution of witches was finally abandoned.
qed.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
Last edited by roachboy; 04-21-2007 at 09:58 AM..
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