why is it that you think you have political opinions and I have political prejudices, host?

I guess because you post "stuff" like this:

There are great, great differences....all you have to do is take a "head count" of who wins and who loses, compared to before. 1933 Germany, vs. 1950 Germany, 1958 Cuba, vs. post 1991 Cuba, for example.

....you give me the impression that you are more incurious than I am, compared to me, nothing shocks you, and you have a more black or white approach to things like, socialist leaning economic and political systems, for instance.

Who benefits, loquitur....in pre and post Nazi Germany, inside and outside Germany? Who exhibits respect for other governments, for the rule of law?

Who benefits in Cuba, loquitur?

Forgive me for using a "collage" to help male my point:

Were you familiar with this family?

Do you think it's a coincidence that Alfred, son of Betha Krupp, met with Hitler in 1933 to help map out the reich rearmament strategy and profited handsomely thereafter. He quickly managed to get his company back after his Nuremberg conviction.

....and from wiki...(edit/change anything that you object to and can document....)

Host, I arrived at my opinions from doing a lot of reading. I have changed views on a number of issues as a result of new information and real life experience. You need to accept that intelligent well-read people can arrive at conclusions different from yours and still be intelligent well-read people.

I tend to have very liberal (in the classic sense) views about most issues, though not all. I also believe in stepping back and taking the long view in assessing events. Finally, I think partisanship is poison. Not only does it interfere with interpersonal relationships, it makes people unscrupulous. It is the mode of thought most conducive to making smart people act stupidly that I have yet to encounter.

That's why you have no doubt found that I'm not in a constant state of outrage, and my views generally aren't partisanly predictable. You might want to ask yourself whether you're doing yourself any favors by not stepping back once in a while to ask yourself whether you are really thinking things all the way through. I have found in life that you never know where you might find wisdom, so everyone's views are worth considering and evaluating - some more than others, true - but it's important not to have your filters pre-set to block information that might be a bit uncomfortable. The world doesn't adjust itself to your comfort levels, though you can certainly adjust your information inputs to maximize your own comfort. It's much more useful to step back and ask whether there isn't something you're missing. It also might combat the apparent hubris of the supposition that those who disagree with your views are stupid or brainwashed or indoctrinated. Remember, those who disagree with you could say the same thing about you, it's just an issue of who is doing the brainwashing and with what tools. [The "you" in the preceding few sentences is a generic "you," not a reference necessarily to you, host.]

See, to me one expansionist totalitarian mass murdering ideology isn't all that different from another, no matter what platitudes the dictator invoked to justify his bloodlust. If you think Stalin and Hitler aren't roughly mirror images of each other, I do'nt know what to tell you.

well, comrade, if you want to put that last bit of yours into something like perspective, you might take a look at actually existing capitalism and its glorious history and start thinking in terms of the destruction that particular expansionist mass-murdering ideology has wrought as well--after all, unless you are totally disengenuous about it, you have to factor in the entire history if colonialism from the 19th century, the development of modern warfare, world war i directly--it ain't pretty.

it is ludicrous to defend a liberal ideological position of capitalism as if it is somehow benign and only the ideologies that you designate as problematic are to blame for untoward human suffering. but i suppose there's suffering and then there's suffering. you know, the suffering that happens as a result of an economic ideology you endorse is less real than is the suffering engendered by political ideologies you do not. i understand, comrade: multiple weights, multiple measures.

to head off the obvious snippy response--it is not interesting to play the relative barbarism game. this is only to say that you do not speak from a clean position yourself.

Depends how you define capitalism, my friend. Doesn't it?

My thesis simply is that the instinctual response to most issues should be toward liberty (personal and economic), with restrictions being imposed only after serious examination. Glorification of the state/party/race/bureaucracy instead of safeguarding rights of individuals has not tended to have a happy ending. Right?

that really isn't a definition of capitalism--that's an aesthetic predisposition.
i'm way too much of a historian to find that adequate.
to wax marxian for a minute (and to show just how far apart we probably are aesthetically)--capitalism refers to the entire mode of production shaped by the particular relations of ownership to wage labor and the internal organizational tendencies toward standardization and fragmentation. ideology is but a part of this picture. liberal ideology is an even smaller part.

nothing's at stake in this sort of debate, really, so we have the option of whether we choose to talk past each other or not--at least as time goes on i'm getting a better idea of why we have talked past each other in the past, though--which is interesting in itself...just saying (and there's not sarcasm in that..sometimes i wonder if everything i write comes off so)

What does this say about our "system". The woman described in the quote box below is the grand daughter of the wife of Joseph Goebbels. Her grandmother participated in 1945, the injecting of morphine and administering of cyanide ampules in the murder of her and Goebbels six young children, in the fuhrerbunker, on May 1, 1945.

This woman, as a direct result of her father and grandfather's collaboration with the Nazis...her grandfather is known to have operated businesses that employed slave labor resulting in much suffering and in hundreds of deaths. inherited a fortune from her father. Her grandfather, after WWII, avoided Nuremberg prosecution for his war crimes, and, thanks to cooperative American occupation authorities, was handed back his vast portfolio of Nazi era business holdings.

What kind of a system and process results in this woman being tolerated as "one of the wealthiest"? After a media expose of her family's activities in WWII, this woman joined with other family members in a commitment to "investigate the wartime activities of the family".

Call me a cynic, loquitur, but I sincerely cannot see that "our system" is superior to any other...it feeds on wars and coups to sustain itself, makes partners with the devil, is content to permit wretched living conditions for the majority, in way too many countires, including in our own hemisphere, and is possessed by and radiates a sickeningly sweet air of it's own superiority, righteousness, and accomplishment.

So the daughter of Goebbel's adopted son, Harald, and granddaughter of Goebbel's wife and a wealthy Nazi industrialist collaborator who used slave laborers in his Nazi era factories, is "one of the wealthiest", today, and gets to "investigate" her family's profitable wartime activities, herself.

What is the downside from descending from a Nazi predigreed family? Apparently, in our "system", there isn't any....no shame, no stigma, no penalty.

Host, I know it's important to vent sometimes, but that last post is so irrelevant to what we were discussing that I'm scratching my head trying to figure out what my last post has to do with it. You're making some kind of connection in your mind that is not readily apparent. I think you are starting from a logical presumption that is just not accurate and certainly not shared with me.

loquitur, who benefited from the activities and policies of the reich? It seems as if it was the German class called the Junkers.

Who benefited from Castro's revolution? Probably 2/3 of Cubans benefited, and untolled numbers since, from Cuban medical aid outreach.

I asked what kind of a system would permit the next generation of the Quandt family, and as yet unknown families in Germany, Italy, and Japan to retain their wealth and go unpunished for the crimes they committed in WWII?

What kind of system permits a practitioner of pre-emptive, war....Mr. Bush, to continue as it's political leader?

The whole point, loquitur, is that you've written your own prescription for the rose colored glasses that you wear. You defend the indefensible, and you think those who disagree with you are denouncing the system. It won't improve if you remain so satisfied with it loquitur.

......and that has to do with my classic liberalism how? My political views have precisely zero to do with the Junkers and even less to do with the kleptocracy that now runs Cuba.

Host, you obviously don't understand the difference between Hayek and early 20th century European oligarchy, and until you do, your posts will continue to massively miss the point. You are assuming that you can just lump all ideas different from yours into one mass, and that's just not the case. You assume an awful lot, which is why I'm scratching my head on what you write because it has pretty close to zero to do with me. Please get it through your head that classical liberals like me are much further away politically from the authoritarians you claim to hate than you are.

loquitor: assuming that one accepts the distinction you make between the features of "classical liberalism" and the actually existing capitalist mode of production that it does and does not speak about.

if i may, host--

there's a way in which you can link the stuff about goebbels to the problems that fascism created for american-style nationalist ideology by way of the (simple historical reality) of operation paperclip--you know, the americans controlled the master list of all german pows after ww2 and used this bureaucratic advantage to shelter a large number of german war criminals from prosecution--but most of this followed from a sense of wanting war reparations rather than from any elective affinity--and from a sense of wanting to get stuff like german intel about the soviets, as the cold war was already taking shape (war economies need war like a junky needs heroin, dontcha know)....but that is and is not a direct connection. and making it is problematic--there's some radio guy who i think is an old trotskyite who tries this one a routine basis--and it's a shame because he digs up alot of good information and then smashes it all down with simplistic interpretations.


the other problem--fascism as radicalized nationalism as ideological problem for the americans--you can kinda see playing out in more diffuse ways in the post-war period: one vector is visible via local german elections directly after the war, during which american occupation forces were willing t prevent kpd party members from winning elections by rigging them and/or allowing former nazis to stand...another via the erasure of the content of fascist ideology from the popular historical imagination concerning world war 2 by way of the blizzard to stupid war films that make nazis into a collection of fashion quirks, funny accents and the capacity to die in great anonymous number at the hands of the grizzled gi....and in the erasure of the magnitude of pre-war support for fascism amongst americans--but that's hard to say much about empirically (like in terms of numbers)...


i think that there *is* a problem---> fascism is primarily radicalized nationalism----both are a type of collective mental disorder orchestrated via ideology.

i don't imagine that a classic liberal would venture to speak to that, as notions of "individual freedom/liberty" are wholly abstract, not tied to anything at all, anywhere at all, just as "classical liberalism" has nothing to say about anyplace at all. so it seems to be applicable everywhere, should the motivation to apply it happen to take shape--such is the temptation of any metaphysics.

but that said, i kinda understand why loquitor would be perplexed--you keep skipping the middle steps of your arguments, comrade. someone reading your posts in the last section of this thread who is inclined to can insert those middle steps--but they aren't in the posts--and (for example) my attempt to fill them in creates problems because i don't have exactly the same linkages that you have in mind.

Sure, and socialism necessarily restricts liberty everywhere it's been tried. You might LIKE the restrictions, but that is a different question. Just beware of empowering the govt too much because one day the people in charge might not be the ones you like. You might be happy giving FDR a lot of power, but if you do that you end up with GWB.

uh---you know, loquitor, not only is that statement arbitrary, but it's not even any fun to think about.

there are social and economic classes. your liberty-carrying economic order produces and reproduces a brutally stratified class system. it has been like this for 150 years--blah blah blah liberty while in the real world, there's only liberty for a few and the rest are just debris--extra people--but hierarchy is "natural"---so in the end, who gives a shit.

and so long as there is liberty for a few, there will always be an even smaller set willing to defend that liberty-for-some and to repeat in that defense the wholesale erasure of the social reality that ideology has wrought.

so you think about "liberty" for a few and i'll think about what capitalism does as a social formation: you can have fun, i'll do what i do and there we have it.

i'm not even going to get started on the characterization of socialism.
it's a waste of my time.

c'mon roachboy, that's not even remotely accurate. the amount of social mobility people achieve even within their own lifetimes is astounding in this country, and virtually unique. The notion of lumping this system where people can start over as many times as they want, with a system of hereditary nobility is batty.

Just as an example: my grandfather arrived in this country in 1914 with zero to his name. He worked in a sweatshop for a few years and eventually found a location where he could open up a store, and did. That little store supported his family and, after he died and my father took it over, my family. It put their three kids through school. And this story of coming up into the middle class is not even remotely unique: as you know, millions of people are clamoring to get into this country - not, I will note, into places like Cuba and Venezuela. There's a good reason why: they have the liberty to make their own fortune here, more than in most other places.

Only someone complacent from prosperity and with the luxury to contemplate injustices (real or imagined) could come up with the sort of stuff you guys are coming up with.

i don't know how much further there is to go on this one, comrade.
i am not feeling inclined to fight through the dissociative twaddle of that last post--the anecdote about your grandfather aside, of course.

i have some anecdotes about my grandfather somewhere too...

but i did enjoy the final rhetorical flourish--if i were more one with das volk, i'd think as you do.
funny stuff.

My mother in law started working at 18, no college degree, for a large corporation as a secretary.

My father in law did have a college degree from a 'lower level' college, and worked for a major corporation followed by only barely solvent small personal businesses.

They lived simply, saved money, never went out of their means, and I have recently discovered they are in fact multi-millionaires. They are the quintessential millionaire next door.

Perhaps they needed to read more books by unsuccessful men on how they were brutally stratified, unable to succeed, and held down by the system, but instead they worked hard, invested wisely, saved their pennies, and now are set to live a very nice long wealthy retirement. Needless to say I turn to my father in law for investment advice.

I really wish I knew what Amerika some people here live in, because I've never seen it.

Perhaps my father was right when he told me the problem with people who read all the time is they never do anything.

I see, so if your in-laws can do it anyone can: the quintessential American fallacy.

"If you work hard, you'll be a millionaire". Hehe....

You got a hell of a lot better chance than not working hard and reading about how horrible it is while sitting on your ass.

Personally I think its damn impressive for a secretary and a guy barely making it in small business.

When I first started to date my wife, I was annoyed with how cheap they seemed when she was growing up, now I see why that was.

that's fascinating ustwo.
more anecdotes. how nice.
the world must be exactly that way.

your anecdotes give you access to all of reality--the consequences of structural adjustment programs in the southern hemisphere, the consequences of the american war economy, the consequences of the radically uneven distribution of educational resources across the board in the united states, the consequences of all aspects of the current economic rationality in all sphere of social being--clearly all facets of the american system of socio-economic class stratification and reproduction are all jammed in to your anecdotes. clearly those people are EveryPerson, and your anecdotes Edifying Tales that all of us should contemplate and learn from.

from your olympian vantagepoint, armed with Telling Anecdotes and Important Analytic Major Premises on the order of "i dont like taxes" and Vastly Informed Minor Premises like "it does not matter what socialism actually is i hate it anyway", no phenomenon on earth---no matter how small---can escape you. ever.

and from such olympian heights, what good are mere books, what value has mere information, mere data, when you commune with the Nature of Things Immanently--why you do not need to even expend the energy to open your eyes----without even opening your eyes, you can peer directly into the bodies of human beings and see that genetics determines the outcomes of behaviors, you can look around and see that any social hierarchy that enables you to imagine yourself atop it must necessarily be without ANY problems because, hey, you're atop it and that is as it should be and so all is necessarily right with the world. through you Science and Reason obviously speak.

but it must be a mixed blessing to have such awesome powers that you know so much about the world without bothering to acquire any actual information about it.

but i for one am every bit as grateful as you imagine me to be that you take time out from your vastly burdened internal world to interact with mere mortals like myself who have to struggle through the odious process of assembling an understanding of the world by way of information, who are not graced with the Powerful Insight that you are that makes Understanding of the World something that requires no information.

and you have demonstrated the validity of your position with such persuasive power, and the extraneousness of information to your arguments at the same time, that i simply bow in your general direction.

Yep, the complacency and luxury of having one's most basic needs satisfied sure does lead to some amazing narcissistic convolutions.

When the immigrant flows start heading out of the US and toward one of the workers' paradises, come back and we'll talk. Until then, I'm pretty confident my anecdotes can be aggregated into statistics quite nicely.

Am I a fluke, then? Don't forget that you're talking to a liberal socialist who, a little over 1 year ago at the age of 23, was making more than the average dentist. And I read a lot.

Making a lot of money comes down to a few simple things:
1) Family - if you've got either family money or family connections to business
2) Intelligence - unless you've got #1, you're going to need to be smart, and this often means education
3) Luck - yeah, luck
4) Ruthlessness

That's the whole thing.

Actually, I'd agree on #3, not on the others, and I'd add "insight" - seeing something other people don't see - as well as hard work. Family money can help but is hardly indispensable. Ruthlessness is a short term strategy at best.

Will, I bet you had some good insights. Right? And some lucky breaks that let you act on them the way you wanted, I bet.

None of this has anything to do with fascism, though.

You wouldn't include insight as intelligence?

But seriously, the family thing is really where the easy millions are.

it's a subset, a very specific kind. There are lots of brilliant people who wouldn't have the particular type of insight we're talking about.

Rockefeller never let up from his ruthlessness...not until he was an old man...

Host, if you operate in an industry where you deal with other people, as a general rule you need reasonable relations in order to do business. People will get burned and then refuse to deal with you unless they have no choice. That's why ruthlessness only works short term in most instances.

Of course, "ruthlessness" is open to interpretation.

Ruthlessness and evidence that the corporatism that enables the tax incentives described in the first article, calls into question the notion that "our capitalist system" is as beneficial to "our great nation", as many assume:

circular reasoning.

I debated where to post this "stuff". If you think "the media" has a "liberal" bias, consider where you must be positioned in the political spectrum, if that is the way you view the general tone of the attitude and presentation of "the media. What would CNN, for example, need to change, from your POV, to appear to be neutral, or conservative leaning, if you regard CNN as "too liberal", at present?

What is this? Wouldn't a former white house correspondent for a major US news media publication, be expected to be a li'l less of a fascist than Politico's Mike Allen is acting as...and wouldn't it be a surprise that "liberal leaning" GE/NBC would hire Mike Gallagher, and allow him to continue to broadcast, after this?:
(<a href="http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/05/30/allen/index.html">Politico reporter Mike Allen, formerly of The Washington Post and Time</a>)
If "the media" seems "too liberal", considering all of the evidence that it is dominated and controlled by a corporate agenda aligned in close cooperation with a repressive, war mongering, obsessively partisan right administration, might you be a corporatist, and not have considered it as such? Why not?

long ago and seeingly far away there was an e-list called red rock eater that i subscribed to--the guy who ran it was consistently interesting (i can't remember his name) and was the first person i know of to note the centrality of projection to the conservative ideological worldview--in this case, the myth of the "liberal media" is a screen the primary function of which has nothing to do with an accurate description of the current media environment and everything to do with situating the conservative-specific blurring of ideological statements and information about the world in their own media apparatus as a corrective to perceived "bais" from without.

the effects of this projection are obvious.

this information about explicit directives coming from "above" that infotainment about the iraq debacle be shaped to accord with the pronouncements of the bush people is different--this is collusion of a different order and poses a quite fundamental problem concerning the nature of the american "free press"--and since the press is the principal relay of the information required for the functioning of the american "democratic" polity, of the political system more generally.

what is obvious: we are living in an ideological context that is not terribly different from the relation of the french communist party and the confederation generale du travail (pcf-cgt) of the 1950s, in which formally independent organizations tightly co-ordinated the nature and release timing of information in order to co-ordinate opinion in order to either enable or block actions, shape dispositions--to organize consent. in that case, the "transmission belt" functioned in a larger, pluralist context, so in principle was an open space in the sense that folk could, if they chose, move into and out of that informational universe--but the fact is that this system was largely self-enclosed and self-enclosing.

in the states, what it looks like is a pattern of co-ordination has been set up that operates on a much larger scale and effects the central elements within the media system or apparatus itself.

this explains alot. what it explains is **really** not good--the centrality of denial in american political life, the inability to adapt to change, the inability to think strategically because the information required to do so simply is not present--information is conditioned by the desire of the dominant social class to remain dominant--and so is ideological in the classic marxist sense of the term.

you also can read off an interesting indication of the relative weight of types of media in shaping the information processing of alot of the population--information hierarchies if you like--it seems that television, despite every fucking thing about it--is seen as providing a more "direct" access to "the world" presumably because of the role played by action footage, which provides an illusion of unmediated access to real-time or close-to-real-time phenomena or events. but anyone who has thought about it at all knows that television is a talk medium more than it is a visual medium--but the relation which i think obtains for alot of folk is inverted. print media in paper form seems to carry more weight than information available in electronic form--so it follows that the relative openness of the information context available on the web is not of the same status as the more self-enclosed media environments of television infotainment supplemented with slightly more depth-oriented glosses provided by newspapers. wedged in there somewhere is the natterings of the chattering classes, who provide simplistic and therapeutic mobile narratives for the unsettling aspects of live footage that escapes the confines of the immediate voice-overs provided by the manicured actors who read teleprompters but who are confused with Authorities or Information Sources.

whether this is fascist or not is a function of the ideological contents that dominate consensus narratives.
that this environment is a type of soft authoritarian rule is evident, however: this is what american soft authoritarian rule looks like, this is how it works. this is what it is: you are in it, you are of it.

Follow the shift in power....there was a time when a television journalist, employed by a major news network was powerful enough to call it ON THE AIR, as he saw it. In some quarters, there is no recogntion that this was not a partisan condition. It was the way I percieved as the American way.... a free press, challenging power, speaking truth to it.....

We had a thread where some posted that it was not the job of the press to find the secrets of the powerful and to publicly report them.

How do they square that belief with it's effect on their own potential to "know what they know"? Do they think their ability to be informed will be there, anyway....how could that be.....?

....In other threads, we noted a purely partisan reaction to Cronkite's power to overcome corporate control.....

http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...ar#post2347256

http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...on#post2448731
I cannot accept how far we have descended, from the country I experienced as a high school student. I don't think it is a mystery why we are so divided and how we got to where we currently are..... a shift so far to the right, with so little recognition or protest of the shift.... as a matter of fact, it is welcomed where power and wealth are concentrated, and feeds that concentration trend.

Roachboy, I had sort of forgotten about this thread, but I came back across it and read that line and thought to myself "YES!!!!" that's precisely it - I have an aesthetic predisposition and not an ideology. Political ideology is too much like religion for my taste, and it tends to make people partisan and thus (if I might be so bold as to say so) stupid. Whereas simply having a set of preferences permits case by case evaluation of a problem and a good deal of flexibility in approach to it.

Or did you mean something else by "aesthetic predisposition?"

folk seem to have been persuaded that "control" is to be understood as a matter of whether the state is explicitly involved or not--so control is a function of direct state involvement. in a "free" context, dominated by private interests, the "logic" goes, there cannot be domination. so folk treat information either as given, in which case problems of co-ordination disappear, or as entirely suspect, in which case they can simply fall back on a priori attitudes and "feelings" as if they occupied the same space in a political deliberation and positions informed by data concerning the world.

personally, i don't think walter cronkite represents much of anything.
i think that the problems of ideological co-ordination in the context of mass media did not just start--try to imagine fascism in the 20s and 30s without radio as a political co-ordination device. you can't do it.

this is not new. this is a structural problem.

one of the reason that the transmission belt relation occurred to me as an analogy is that there is a variability in the connectedness between formally independent organizations implied by it--sometimes seeming more loose, other times tighter--so the problem is not periods of relative looseness (vietnam, say, at the level of network coverage of the war) but the relation itself, the whole transmission belt arrangement.

roachboy, you may not think Cronkite an important example, but, can you think of another one that more obviously portrays the shift in what is permissible today, vs. in 1968? Do you think it is even possible for any TV anchor today to embark on an unembedded fact finding trip to Iraq or Afghanistan and then come back and make the kind of qualified opinion that Cronkite made, and have it broadcast, without editorial interference....?

<a href="http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=132321&highlight=secrets">Is the Primary Role of the US Press to Uncover and Report "Secrets of the Powerful"? </a>
Post #20
Is the question any clearer, now? Isn't the power...the inclination to investigate....go whereever the circumstances lead....and report, no matter who in power has his toes stepped on...... either in the hands of the journalist, or in the hands of the corporate executive, aligned with the regime?

Roachboy, isn't just an issue of characterization? Cultural milieus can explain a lot. But at some point, following your logic, what you end up with is a variant of "false consciousness" as an explanation for a lot of people's views, and I tend to resist that because it denies agency to individuals while simultaneously recognizing some select priesthood that through some alchemy is able to see through what the rabble can't. It's not Marxian exactly but has a lot of the same overtones.

loquitor: i don't see the leap you make between recognition of systemic problems and the positing of some "priesthood"--i would say that anyone who takes a systematic view of the ways in which opinion is managed in the current media-space will come to similar conclusions. the problem is that folk do not seem to take such a view typically--personally, i think that follows from shortcomings in education--which is geared around structuring the politics of kids toward consent rather than predisposing them to take a critical distance. at stake here really is the question of whether americans have or are a democratic polity--and i am not at all sure they have one or are one. i emphasize the democratic polity because it seems to me that critical distance cannot and should not be a prerogative of some elite--and if it is, then the consequence is that we, collectively, have internalized the worldview particular to this form of soft authoritarian rule.

which i think most have. but that last bit is conjecture. i remain--somehow--vaguely optimistic and hope that i'm wrong. but i don't see it around me--i just hope i'm wrong.


host---the conservative revisions of the history of vietnam, the conservative explanation for the explosion of opposition to the war in vietnam, has little if anything to do with the political conditions that explain it historically. for the right, the problems seem to have been at least 3-fold: the draft, the left, and inadequate control of information. you see the consequences of this today.

cronkite was a talking head who operated as a talking head in a context wherein the power of footage and the illusion of immediacy it provides had not yet been taken into account in the process of building consensus for political actions like a war, and particularly not for building consent for another illegitimate war. getting around this last point can be seen as an explanation for why it is that sad old george bush wanders about these days continuing to try to equate iraq and world war 2--in an adequately uninformed historical view, ww2 is the last war that enjoyed widepsread consensus as to its legitimacy. so the references have (self-evidently) fuck all to do with the iraq debacle and everything to do with conservative mythologies concerning war and how to sell it.

within all this, cronkite is just a functionary who operated in a particular context.

it sort of depends on what results from the critical thinking in your view, doesn't it? A person like me who has concluded that collectivism is generally a bad idea - does that meet the standard you're positing?

I had an interesting insight the other day. I was walking in the alley between the federal and state courthouses in downtown Manhattan, and I passed by the back entrance to the state courthouse. There is a pair of classical-looking statues flanking the entrance, both female. One of them, maybe both, was holding a book, a sword and....... the fasces. I did a double take. But then I remembered the Lincoln Memorial. His seat has fasces, too. The US dime used to have fasces on it, too, starting in 1916 (before Mussolini started using it).

So does that make the courthouse or US coinage or Lincoln fascist? Of course not. It simply means that the symbol of the Roman polity has been used for diverse purposes, which are not necessarily related to each other. Labels are misleading.

not really, loquitor---if you think about what democracy would entail--the polity has to be in a position to make informed judgments. without adequate information, such judgments are impossible--i mean, you can go through the procedures and arrive at a conclusion, but whether that conclusion would be anything other than a kind of agitation of preconceptions or not isn't clear. if we are to talk about ANYTHING to do with a democracy, the question of information and its reliability is central to it. the ability to critically assess information is an assumption. arguments that happen between positions that folk arrive at about that information--and by extension about the situation to which that information refers and what action should or should not be taken--is what deliberation is. and deliberation is the center of the process.

americans like to talk about democracy, which is strange given the extent to which they are willing to allow its main preconditions to slide away. kinda make you wonder what american foreign policy is exporting under the word, doesn't it?

so in a situation where adequate information is at hand and we can assume that something like rational judgments are possible because we know how to fashion them, you and i could debate the meaning of "collectivism" and whether it is or is not a good process.

but even in a tiny space like tfpolitics, there's no particular agreement about what constitutes information and what role it ought to play in debates.

on the other statues---i understand your point, but am unclear about why you make it beyond relaying an anecdote, which is interesting enough in itself, but seems pitched toward being some kind of allegory. are you wanting to talk about the status of the notion of fascism by way of it?

i generally use the term in a kind of technical sense when i use it. i understand that it is also a problematic term in that it's been used and abused alot and so may or may not signify. do you want to go through this again?

here's a parallel little story: plato was an enemy of democracy--he opposed it at every level--the republic is a little allegory written by an opponent of democracy, rooted in the assumption--which i know you share--that there are natural hierarchies which distinguish folk and that democracy--somehow--presupposes that folk are all equal---plato's counter is that hierarchies of ability undercut the idea of equality at the level of form. i don't buy that. but anyway, when folk talk about the republic, they tend not to want so much to talk about "the laws" which comes after the republic and which is a text about authoritarian rule, a society governed by secret committees which meet at night and take decisions with no transparency. i think that the american system has followed plato's trajectory from the republic to the laws, in a general way. as i keep saying, i see the american system as a form of soft authoritarian rule, which has the quirk of a dominant political discourse that throws around the language of democracy. i also see that the american system is doing to the language of democracy what the past 50 years have done to the discourse of fascism--draining it of any meaning, making it a replacement for living under a particular form of political domination. the other quirk is that this soft authortarian rule happens in the context of abundant consumer goods, so you can like your life surrounded by plush things, be powerless and manipulated and not really even notice that you are politically disenfranchised and your formal freedom is no more than that.

if this was not the case, the way in which information is presently manipulated would be unacceptable.
my other little bit of optimism is that once the extent of this manipulation--particularly obvious as it now is in the context of the last 5 odious years--once this becomes obvious, it will also become unacceptable.

we'll see

Actually, if you go through the Federalist Papers you'll see that the US system was set up to deal with the fact that most people aren't especially politically engaged nor especially well-informed. Strictly speaking, it's not a democratic system - it relies on having appointed and/or insulated institutions checking the frequently elected ones. But that's a discussion for another day. I don't think there is any way to force people to pay more attention to the Senate than to NASCAR, nor do I think it desirable to do so, because politics by its nature creates conflict.

What on earth led you to think I believe in natural hierarchies? All I have ever said is that different people are good at different things, that their circumstances change over the course of their lives, and that children need not be prisoners of their upbringing. How does that equate to a belief in natural hierarchies? Heck, given that my ancestors were pretty damn downtrodden for centuries, based on who they were, it would be extremely curious for me to have any such view.

loquitor:

interesting relation to politics you have--did i not know better, i'd take you for an anarchist.
i read the federalist papers--they're kinda depressing in their patronising attitude toward the polity.
but my point stands.

as for the natural hierarchy thing--you've defended the position any number of times here, comrade. and it was the hierarchy of abilities--differences arranged as hierarchy. btw--i don't dispute that different folk are good are different things--the trick is in the linkages you make between that and a conception of political order. from what i remember, you argued an aristotelian line on this question.

the question of whether one should be bound by one's class origin is entirely different--a natural hierarchy need not entail it, all the more if you predicate it on a notion of some distribution of abilities. not the same thing, then.