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for the record, i have never accepted that the war in afghanistan was either necessary or "just"---but the current situation has outstripped that---even as in principle this remains a problem that nags at me. what prompted the thread was the beginning of american incursions into pakistan, coupled with new twitching on the part of the corpse of the bush administration to shift troops from iraq to afghanistan. this led me to wonder why things are as they are, which in turn led me to root about, only to find another beautiful example of neo-conservative incompetence opening onto yet another downward spiral.
the options are: either one can see in this incompetence a kind of justice---false premises opening onto disaster--but that bypasses the questions of how anything happens and retreats to a theological view of the world, nothing different from the "invisible hand" idea or, worse, some kind of royalist thinking (bad things happen to the pretender)---or one can bracket ambivalences as to cause and simply look at what's been happening. i chose b in this thread. i think it's ultimately a more interesting way to go.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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