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cyn--in this, the politics forum simply repeats the larger characteristics of us political life--the right has framed itself as an identity politics for a very long time, complete with a private language and a cast of persecuting phantoms--and this has nothing to do with individual conservatives, which elements they take from the rack of options, which ones they leave aside---one effect of identity politics in this mode is to encourage and even to set up talking-past as a substitute for debate.
when you react to it by saying that premise x or y is fucked up, or bizarre, or simply inadequate, the response is rarely if ever to defend the premise--instead, because this is a matter of identity and not one of framework that lets you group information about the world, what you get is this trending toward being-insulted or being-pissy---or , more often, tiresome exercises in passive-aggressive nonsense like happened here. and it happens all the time in this place because it happens all the time in the wider context becauses it is an expression of the contempt for democratic debate on the part of the folk who organize and build conservative political discourse.
because conservative discourse lumps together everything that it not itself as the Same, as an Enemy, there is little hope that most folk who operate within that language game will expend the effort to try to figure out what one might be saying or from what position they might work---but if you say as much, then you "aren't taking conservatives seriously" or your "litigating" or you're doing something else---it's all kinda weak and sad and more than a little pathetic. i would prefer that things were otherwise, because i have nothing personally against individuals who happen to be conservative, except that they cannot defend their politics. and this would be a lot more interesting and open a place if there was more symmtery in the kinds of arguments that the various political positions folk occupy allowed. and i mean it that way--it's not a strange sentence.
but such is the state of things.
this forum doesn't invent it--it's just a little fishbowl in which the bigger problems repeat themselves.
but if you want to understand something of why the collapse of the derivatives market has become the kind of crisis that it is, you might think about the rigidity of neoliberalism, particularly in its conservative american variant--the total inability to think outside a particular frame of reference because, again, it is not a frame but an identity that's at stake.
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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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