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it is strange---conservatives like to talk about meritocracy and in the process pretend to themselves that such a (one-dimensional) social arrangment is possible without anything being done to alter the class system. when people in the public sphere (you know) have the audacity to actually reference the inequities of that class system, conservatives set them up as objects of the usual Grouphate.
so it appears that conservatives oppose the class order at the level of fantasy, but in fact they kinda like it--if this were not the case, they'd abandon this fantasy of equality and turn their attention to the actually existing class order, how it operates how it reproduces itself, it's effects--and would advocate a politics that would go after that order, change it, and change it radically.
it's like there's some political circuit that one assimilates as one drifts into being conservative and that circuit determines associations and those associations determine outcomes. so even folk whose underlying sentiments might be quite close to one another's end up not being able to communicate really because the interior of arguments--and so of viewpoints---differ enough that even when we might try to talk about the same thing, we can't quite manage it.
the problem then is the way shifts happen from a sense of something being wrong or fucked up or whatever into the set of arguments and associations that let us articulate that sense and come away from the process with the sense that we'd said something. the only way to have a discussion across divergent arguments/associations is at a remove from them--ok what is the problem here; how to describe it so that we know we have at least some hope of referring to the same thing; what kinds of argument best fit with this image of the world that is produced through description; how do we evaluate this sense of fit?
i can see some common ground at the level of sentiment with quite a few of the folk above whose arguments run counter to mine---not all of them---but quite a few.
but we can't ever seem to get anywhere in terms of doing more than simply rehearsing the grids we start with.
maybe it's a messageboard thing---i dunno.
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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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