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a political discussion can be any number of things.
for the most part, i treat political questions as information assemblage and interpretation first--so there are procedures (like the source, the relation of information to context in terms of the way bits are framed, how they stage this relation) and logic (interpretative moves, linkages to context that you or i bring into the game, background knowledge) which are informed by one's committments but are not the same as one's committments.
at that level, i see no problem with playing hardball sometimes, even as the format of a messageboard comes with constraints. information can be better or worse, interpretations legitimate/coherent or not.
then there are discussions about one's committments, which are different in kind.
in other words, i do not think politics is simply a matter of one's opinion, man.
and it's because i do not think politics is simply a matter of opinion--and more that it *cannot* be simply that or it is not politics but more an illusion of politics, a symptom of an authoritarian information system---that it is possible to treat statements or arguments as simply wrong *if* you can demonstrate that they're wrong.
debate is healthy, i think. so what if it gets a bit rough and tumble.
where this comes from, really, is my committment to the idea of direct democracy as at least a normative standard. if we lived in a democratic regime--which we really really do not---information would matter, it's interpretation would matter, debate would matter and would be serious because we, collectively, would be in the position of having to make decisions that *would be* the direction in which our collective would move, and that movement *would be* an element in the history of the collective and that history, and our relation to it, would re-define who were *are.*
so i see debate as an aspect of taking power, even if that taking power operates in the context of discussions in a teacup, which can (depending on what you do in 3-d) bleed over into counter-discourses that operate politically in a wider sphere of the world.
and debate--informed, vigorous debate--should be fundamental to *any* democratic polity, even in a less-than-democratic context.
so there has to be dimensions of it that are not simply arbitrary assertions about how one feels---because if that's all there is, then the game is up. we give away our capacity to deliberate. we reduce ourselves to shopping rather than thinking. we do what we are encouraged to do when we conflate politics and consumer choice, views of the world with aesthetic preferences. we disempower ourselves, in a small but telling way, when we give away our ability to engage in this manner.
i have understood conservative identity politics to be the antithesis of democratic process and debate, and adopting that position tantamount to giving yourself a lobotomy. i am glad to see that it's period of being the dominant political discourse in the united states is at an end. i look forward to its disappearance---NOT of people who think differently, NOT of people who are conservative---but of the style of argument that exempts positions from critique because they're all just my opinion, man.
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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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