roachboy

ok so let me see if i can sort this out so far.
i'm going to try to keep this neutral, put it out as an assessment of the thread so far. please tweak what you think needs tweaking.

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what it seems is happening is basically a strange plea from some of the more conservative types for agreement about how to approach political questions that would come from their side of things.

this is the only way i can interpret the business above complaining about "political bias" in threads or posts---"political bias" appears in the context of this thread to apply only to the views/positions of people who are not deep in conservativeland---so then it appears that both ustwo and otto, each in a different way, posits themselves as the non-bias point and judge everything relative to themselves, and so everyone but each of them appears with a warp or bias.

interesting trick.

then we have a second complaint about style of argument.

what ustwo in particular seems to be asking for, in a roundabout kinda way--or fantasizing about at the least--is a politics area in which the community had agreed that information from outside sources was not to be allowed.
but this is to my mind just another way of saying the first point.

what we have is a curious little view of how larger ideological patterns operate.

here i abandon summary-boy for a moment:
i find the mode of argument adopted by ustwo and others to be unproductive at a number of levels:
at the individual level
1. that ustwo fro example will post---repeatedly---that he hasn't read the material relevant for a debate, but will participate in that debate anyway.
"my scroll wheel..." is not an argument.

but moving to a more collective level:
2. there is a basic difference between the way some of the conservative folk here argue and the ways that others do. there is also a difference in the ways of handling information.
a. arguments operate within a frame of reference that individual conservative posters refuse to acknowledge and/or cannot defend.

---->from the start of my engagement here, my operating assumption about contemporary conservative ideology has been simple: it is primarily an identity politics. so the central feature that orients at least some conservatives is the fact that they identify as conservative---this functions as a sorting mechanism. it seems that particular political contents are presented within the conservative ideological apparatus as simply following from "being-conservative" and so can be taken over without accompanying argument.

this seems to me ustwo's basic mo. there are a few others who operate in the same basic way. the characteristics of their posts fall coincide with the above.

but when i started here, i would tend to assume that this WAS conservative politics--and in this i was wrong, at least insofar as the microcosm of tfp was concerned.

there are--or were---or sometimes are, it's hard to say--a number of other folk who identify on the right (at one level or another) who tend to be foreign policy "realists" in more or less a neocon sense. this group of folk works from entirely different premises and it is possible to have often quite interesting debates across political divisions with these folk, once the sparring that seems to characterise the beginning of any debate settles down.

and there are yet other folk who post and who seem to be relatively conservative==on the order of loquitor--who i have trouble pinning down but whose contributions are often, to my mind, quite interesting and varied.

so we are not talking here about a conservative bloc, and we are not talking about one type of posting style--what we are talking about in this thread is the objections of folk who have adopted a PARTICULAR type of persona which is linked to the PARTICULAR TYPE of conservative each is.

so what we have so far in the thread that hasn't been touched on but which lay at the bottom of ustwo's posts (and to a lesser extent otto's posts, because of the qualifications added since i last looked in on this) is the claim that they ARE the conservatives in the tfp-ishbowl. and a symmetrical claim, regarding "the left"...

because we are also talking here about a highly reductive understanding of the politics of this fiction called "the left" here.

it appears that when ustwo or otto (it's harder to say in otto's case because the persona varies with the issue--on climate change, there is one set of premises, for example, while on other issues, he appears differentially, with less information presented, for example) look at the politics forum, all they see is their word "the left" or, in ustwo's delightful terms "communists"....

which is curious.
1. i dont see anything like the identity assumptions that support the construction of political positions from the range of folk who comprise "the left" in this fishbowl....so i dont really have a sense of how much agreement there really is amongst us. it seems that if you look at what "the left" contains here, there are folk who are progressive democrats, quite a few who would probably be social demcrats in the context of an actually pluralistic political context (which the americans do not have, fundamentally)....and a few who one might position further to the left than that, myself included.

2. speaking for myself, i operate here mostly in critique mode. my own politics are caught up in a theoretical project which is informed by the assumption that the older forms of left politics have collapsed and that there should be a new type/new types of oppositional politics...so much of what i am do links to that. here, what that entails is a suspension of belief in most operative political alternatives and an attempt to sort out how they function. so my politics are fashioned as a kind of experimental project.
there are assumptions that i think important, and i have positions on particular issues, but not on all, and they are not necessarily consistent one to another.

host for example works in a very different way----and his political views seems shaped by assumptions that i understand but no not necessarily share--but i appreciate the work he puts into his posts. they could be edited in a tighter manner, but as a messageboard phenomenon, host can be forgiven that, i think. his posts require critical reading. i think being awake requires critical reading, and i dont see the point of constructing oppositional political viewpoints that disable critical reading.

this last sentence loops around to my primary objection to the populist conservative mode of "debate"--the refusal to enter into a self-reflexive mode of writing, the refusal to examine their own premises, the preference for towing the party line. that is how i see it. what obscures matters is that the populist conservatives here also project this onto those who oppose them politically, so in their imaginations the conflict is symmetrical, with two clear, easy sides engaging in mutually exclusive forms of empty interaction.

but i dont see the projection as legitimate.
i suppose here the question would devolve onto perceptions and the relation between perception and political committments, which is complicated....but i don't see the problem in the terms outlined just above.

no the problem seems to me that debates always engage in the same way, that there are mutually exclusive styles, but they are not symmetrical one with the other. i think that the populist conservative emphasis on identity as the central organizing feature of political committment simply provides no prompt to trawl widely for information--rather the opposite--identity-as-conservative seems to come with filters that prompt one to look mostly at friendly press sources, when information from "outside" is required to make a point or refute another's.

so there is a differend concerning what constitutes legitimate information, how to use it, when to use it---a differend concerning the basic rules of the game.

debates themselves unfold in a more or less static fashion as well.

contextual factors play a role in all this as well, i think.
speaking for myself, there is a kind of exasperation with the populist right. i look around and i see an ash-heap left in the trail of neoliberalism in general, and by the bush administration in particular. i see a broken administration floating like debris after a shipwreck, held in place SOLELY because the machinery of governance itself has no mechanism for dealing with political implosion in the context of a very closely divided congress--the system is designed to simply repeat this. the persistence of the bush administration is a function of this repetition.

i see an entirely delegitimated administration floating atop a debris field of its own making and nothing to be done about it because we're free that way in america. the situation is also structured so that none of us can actually say or do anything to change the present pathetic state of affairs--so some of the exasperation plays out across debates in the microcosm.

there seems to me little doubt that this is the case and this perhaps explains something of the tone that conservatives are greeted with from time to time.


it seems clear that while some of this we can do something about, some of it we cant, we should consider what we can do and implement it.

so what do we do?

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

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite