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Old 04-17-2008, 05:59 AM   #427 (permalink)
roachboy
 
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the premise on which this thead continues--somehow--to operate has not diminished in terms of its absurdity now that we are on page 11.

rather than repeat the arguments against it, i'll ask a question which is implicit throughout, and which surfaced in the transcript of that idiot hannity talking about what television would have you imagine liberation theology to be.

what it looks like to me is happening here is that conservatives are attempting to suppress politicized speech when its source understands himself as amongst the oppressed, when the politics connect that oppression to structural features of the existing order, and when that connection enables **political** claims (which i emphasize because they are NOT analytic claims--and there is a fundamental difference between the two--a political claim in the context of a liberation politics is about mobilization--it rests on information but does not necessarily encompass all its complexity. this is not to say that therefore anything goes: some claims are more effective and more congruent with reality than others--but on this, conservatives are sure as fuck in no position to complain given the fundamentally dissociative nature of many of the descriptive statements their politics rest upon...)

so what i think it happening here has little to do with "racism" as the right would prefer to cast it, and everything to do with associating obama with a type of political speech--oppositional speech that departs from the premise that it is ENTIRELY possible that fundamental problems result from STRUCTURAL features of the existing order and CANNOT be remedied within that order and so lead to a basic challenge to it. what i think is happening, then, is a form of old-school red-baiting. what the right is basically claiming is not that wright's particular memes are disallowed, but that EVERYTHING about his politics are disallowed because they represent a challenge to the order that conservatives feel, for whatever reason, they need to defend.

so red-baiting, comrades.
the new version of accusing X or Y of being a pinko.

how is this any different?

there is nothing of substance to this beyond an action of political suppression--not censorship because the right imagines that allowing selected elements to circulate serves their cause--marginalization of the position wright is constructed as occupying as a way of generating associations around obama with something Scary Scary Bad for conservatives--the acknowledgment of structure at all, of structural problems, of politics about structural problems.
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